I would like the song, Fantasy, from MS MR's upcoming album, Second Hand Rapture, even if Max Hershenow (MR) had not roomed with my daughter in college. Lizzy Plapinger (MS) is going to give Florence Welch a serious run for her money. Take a listen. Buy the album when it comes out May 14th.
things I love
Extremely Rare Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris /
Although some of these images discovered by Curious Eggs looks like modern photography, all the images were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It's an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis.
All credits go to Albert Kahn museum.
To see more incredible photography visit Paris, 1914 and time travel to a different universe.
The Little Robot That Could /
I wanted to share this gift from Studio360 and their science and creativity series. "When NASA first landed a man on the moon (which we do believe it happened), an estimated 500 million people worldwide watched on TV. Decades later, when the shuttle program was canceled, and manned space flight just about abandoned, a lot of Americans felt that NASA lost its mojo. Space is a great place to park communications satellites, but in an era of fiscal cliffs, budget cuts, and tax battles, the government expense of an interplanetary mission is a hard sell. So when the Mars rover Curiosity went to Mars last year, the journey was a PR opportunity as much as a scientific one. Curiosity had a Twitter feed, @MarsCuriosity, and announced its own entry into the Martian atmosphere. Meanwhile, millions of Americans watched that heart-stopping descent, or at least they believed they did.
NASA has used animation to explain missions since the 1960s, but it outdid itself for Curiosity, hiring an animation studio to produce a Hollywood-grade video of the spacecraft’s journey. The animators, Bohemian Grey, borrowed a few tips from Pixar’s WALL-E to make a robot lovable. Can YouTube mint NASA a new generation of space buffs?
My video of Ann Hamilton's dreamlike billowing sheet installation: The Event of a Thread /
New Year's Day, our national liminal pause between what was and what will be, was the perfect day for my family to immerse in the transportive experience created by Ann Hamilton's The Event of a Thread installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
White sheets made to billow by Lily Tomlinesque oversized swings transformed the basketball court-like drill hall into a whimsical agnostic cathedral. I took the video below while lying on my back beneath the sheets.
Here's an excerpt from Roberta Smith's review in the New York Times. "Anyone who liked swings as a child — and that should include quite a few of us — will probably feel a surprisingly visceral attraction toAnn Hamilton’s installation “the event of a thread” at the Park Avenue Armory.The work is the latest from one of the more self-effacing orchestrators of installation-performance art, and her first new piece in New York in more than a decade. It centers on an immense, diaphanous white curtain strung across the center of the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Dispersed on either side are 42 large wood-plank swings, suspended from the hall’s elaborately trussed ceiling beams by heavy chains that are also tied to the rope-and-pulley system that holds up the curtain.
The swings are there for us, to swing on. “The people formerly known as the audience,” in the memorable wordsof the media critic Jay Rosen, form a crucial ingredient of the work as never before in Ms. Hamilton’s art. The piece has other components, about which more in a minute, but if people are not using the swings, “the event of a thread” does not fully exist. When they are in action, the curtain, made of a lightweight silk twill, rises and dips, and the air is stirred, causing further billowing and fluttering."
Nothing Says Christmas Like A Flashmob Performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony /
Ode to Joy! A local Spanish bank honors its city with a spontaneous performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Over 40 musicians from the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès and a chorus of 60 singers from the Amics de l'Òpera de Sabadell, Coral Belles Arts and Cor Lieder Camera participated.
What A Wonderful World /
Sir David Attenborough, the great English natural history filmmaker, is perhaps best known for his Life collection, a series of nine nature documentaries aired on the BBC between 1979 and 2008. To promote the broadcast of his latest production, Frozen Planet, ad agency RKCR/Y&R produced a video with Attenborough reading lines from Louis Armstrong's classic, "What a Wonderful World." It's a perfect way to get into the holiday spirit.
Shark Tracking /
OCEARCH facilitates unprecedented research by supporting leading researchers and institutions seeking to attain groundbreaking data on the biology and health of sharks, in conjunction with basic research on shark life history and migration. The researchers we support work aboard the M/V OCEARCH, a unique 126’ vessel equipped with a custom 75,000 hydraulic lift and research platform, which serves as both mothership and at-sea laboratory. To see the location in real-time of sharks who've been tagged, click here.
Follow the Frog to Save the Rainforest /
The Rainforest Alliance created the video below for Follow the Frog Week, their annual social media campaign designed to raise awareness of the organization and to encourage people to look for the seal when they shop. By choosing products that feature the seal, consumers can support a healthy environment and help improve conditions for workers, their families and communities. Please share with your friends.
Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities And Stack Them Sideways /
This NPR piece by Robert Krulwich made me think about cities in a whole new way.
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"I don't know if it's fair to do this to a city, but let's start with Berlin. Here's Berlin as you'd see it from above.
Berlin from above.
Here it is again, after an autopsy. The city has been dismembered, dissected block by block, the blocks then categorized, sorted and stacked by shape. Berlin, of course, contains mainly rectangles. It also has trapezoids, triangles and, down in that last row, weirdly shaped squiggles that represent actual city spaces. So, if you are walking through Berlin, the cityscape isn't going to repeat endlessly. There will be surprises. There are some totally irregular nooks and crannies there.
Berlin in parts.
How to Get to Mars /
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) is an ongoing robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the sending of two rovers - MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity - to explore the Martian surface and geology.