one piece

"November Night"

Listen. .

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

And fall.

By Adelaide Crapsey

Photograph: Gueorgui Pinkhassov

'October 10'

Now constantly there is the sound,

quieter than rain,

of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright

gold, the sycamore limbs

bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers

are beeweed and aster, spray

of their white and lavender

over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds

loud—a landmark—now

that the life of summer falls

silent, and the nights grow.

Wendell Berry, "October 10"

Fall Out

OP-ART

Ed Ruscha

"An overdose of quirk and colors"

Anyone wondering what an overdose of quirk and colors might look like without having to resort to drugs would do well to check out "Pepperminta." The helming debut of Swiss video-art wunderkind Pipilotti Rist rolls some of her favorite themes -- female sexuality, childlike curiosity and happiness, and abundant use of vivid hues -- into one bombastic, heavily chroma-keyed package. This is take it or leave it material for fest auds, with commercial prospects as flat as a stick of Doublemint gum.

via: Variety

Shooting Craters Around the World

Stan Gaz’s big black-and-white aerial photographs of meteor-impact sites in Namibia, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere appear prehistoric; with the exception of a crater in Arizona and its attendant industrial sprawl, there are no signs of human habitation. Or maybe these images anticipate the end of history, a time when the earth returns to moonlike desolation, its skies black and its barren surface gouged. Gaz’s decidedly lunar landscapes may not be sci-fi fantasies — he took them hanging out of a hovering helicopter — but they’re almost unrecognizable as our home planet. Magnificent and frightening, they suggest an abrupt beginning and a shattering end.

Vince Aletti 

 The New Yorker Magazine

Sites of Impact 

Meteorite Craters Around the World.

Naming Names

 

 

Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive. Darwin (who gained fame first as the world’s foremost barnacle taxonomist) might have expected any dinner-party conversation to turn taxonomic, after an afternoon of beetle-hunting or wildflower study. Most of us claim and enjoy no such expertise.

No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. 

Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound.Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.

link: Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World, By Carol Kaesuk Yoon -- The New York Times

"Ichthyo: The Architecture of Fish"

The stark X-ray images of the ichthyological specimens of the Smithsonian Institution, intricate and delicate, offer an unusual combination of art and science. 

The X-rays are first presented in black-and-white splendor, followed by a visual directory with each specimen's Latin and common names, location, order, family, and collection date. Jean-Michel Cousteau provides one of the three brief introductions, but the true focus of the book is the amazing images.

“With foxes we must play the fox.” Thomas Fuller

Foxes are an important part of human culture, being central characters of many myths and folklore. In the past, they were associated with forces of the supernatural. The Achumawi Indians believed that a silver fox assisted the coyote in preparing the world for the coming of the first people.

In Finland, the aurora borealis is known as revontulet ("fox fires") because it was believed that the lights were produced by a fox, painting the sky with its tail as it ran through the sky.

Shape shifting is also commonly associated with foxes. In particular, kitsune, or spirit fox, is part of the Shinto religion. In many of these stories, foxes take the form of humans, particularly women, to ensnare unwary humans. Fox shape shifting has also been explored in contemporary western literature, such as Lady into Fox (1923) and The Fox Woman (2000). It is also a key component of Janáček's opera The cunning little vixen (1922-3).

via: The Fox Website

Gray Fox 

(taxidermy)

designer:

Melissa Dixson

design year:

2008

“I sell architecture better and more directly and more vividly than the architect does” Julius Shulman (1910–2009)

 

Julius Shulman, whose luminous photographs of homes and buildings brought fame to a number of mid-twentieth century Modernist architects and made him a household name in the architectural world, died Wednesday night, reports Claudia Luther for the Los Angeles Times. He was ninety-eight.

Shulman, who had been in declining health, died at his home in Los Angeles, according to gallery owner Craig Krull, who represented him. Starting with Richard Neutra in 1936, Shulman’s roster of clients read like a who’s who of pioneering contemporary architecture: Rudolf M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames, Raphael S. Soriano, John Lautner, Eero Saarinen, Albert Frey, Pierre Koenig, Harwell Harris, and many others. His work was contained in virtually every book published on Modernist architects.

Shulman’s 1960 photograph of Koenig’s Case Study House #22—a glass-walled, cantilevered structure hovering above the lights of Los Angeles—became one of the most famous architectural pictures ever taken in the US. It was, as architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times, “one of those singular images that sum up an entire city at a moment in time.”

via: artforum news

"Sharks' Teeth"

Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark's-tooth

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned,

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of a tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

By Kay Ryan