Friday, 30 September 2011

Ray: A Life Underwater

'Everybody wants gold and a mermaid'
Ray.is.the MAN!

Found via 2or3things

director: Amanda Bluglass
filmmaker: Danny Cooke

Make sure to watch this on full screen to get a good peek into Ray's world.

Thursday, 29 September 2011

One day I want to go to Crown Point Press...and maybe make a print! The collaborations are always so beautiful. Go and have a look.
crownpoint

1) Andersson/Nordström: Hunter, 2010. Color spit bite and sugar lift aquatints with aquatint and soft ground etching
2) Darren Almond. Fullmoon@Bujuku: Mountains of the Moon, 2010. Color photogravure
3) Anne Appleby. Verona Variation #3, 2003, Color aquatint with burnishing
4) John Chiara 23rd at Carolina, 2006. Photogravure printed on gampi paper chine collé
5) Susan Middleton Requiem, 2008. Color photogravure.
6) Kiki Smith Still, 2006. Color spit bite aquatint with flat bite and soft ground and hard ground etching printed on gampi paper chine collé

Yoga won't help me walk again. But it has allowed me to 'feel' my legs for the first time in years

The mention of this ancient exercise system may conjure images incense-filled rooms, but its principles can offer practical benefits to the disabled

- Tim Rushby-Smith
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 September 2011 21.00 BST

Matthew Sanford, right, with Tim Rushby-Smith. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

I have never tried yoga, so I arrived for a class at Triyoga in Chelsea feeling pretty intimidated. My inner cynic expected sinewy people standing on their heads in a fug of incense, but instead I find a large white room scattered with purple mats, foam bricks, blankets and other participants. I choose a space and sit on a mat on the floor.

When our teacher, Matthew Sanford, arrives he lays a calming hand on my shoulder and in a soft American voice describes me as sporty and determined to the point of bloodymindedness. He recognises this, because I am on the floor with my wheelchair parked next to me – and we are both paraplegic.

Sanford was just 13 when his family's car hit a patch of ice and slid down an embankment. His mother and brother survived, but his father and sister were both killed. Asleep at the time of the accident, he suffered a broken neck and back, among other injuries. He was in a coma for three days.

"I was a very athletic kid, and I loved feeling my whole body," he tells me. "After the accident, doctors told me I didn't have sensation and I believed them. They called the tingling and burning in my legs phantom feeling, in case I took it to mean I would walk again." Actually, as I know myself, the constant "noise" in my legs, which can be anything from an almost pleasant, warm tingling to excruciating pain, may not be functional, but it is certainly real.

Sanford duly followed the traditional approach to rehabilitation: "I learned to make my upper torso really strong to overcome my body. That's a metaphor for everything, because you can't overcome your body."

Then, 12 years after the accident, Sanford was in graduate school studying philosophy when he met a yoga teacher. "We explored what the principles of yoga meant for a mind-body relationship such as mine. I started to feel that [phantom] sensation again, and I thought: 'I belong here. I can't do the poses like everyone else but I can feel the wholeness that is at the core of the poses.' That's the true heart of yoga."

To read more click here

Wednesday, 28 September 2011

Sol Calero

Doing this always makes me happy!
Found here.

1) Love padlocks via here
2 & 3) Chewing gum stuck on stuff. via here

Monday, 26 September 2011

Money Trees

Human beings do such strange and wonderful things! I came across these wondrous things on thisiscolossal. I'm going to reference what is written there as it is put so well...

"...Apparently in several wooded areas around the UK, passersby have been stopping for decades (if not centuries), meticulously hammering small denomination coins intro trees. Most of the trees seem to be in and around Cumbria and Portmeirion, and I didn’t find a single example of a tree like this located outside the UK. According to this recent article by the BBC, the practice might date back to the early 1700s in Scotland where ill people stuck florins into trees with the idea that the tree would take away their sickness. The practice seems akin to love padlocks or Americans collaborative effort of sticking their nasty ass gum all over everything. (photos courtesy shaun whiteman, drew, ken werwerka, rachel bibby, paul moriss, ministry, donald mcdougal, heartbeeps, via lustik and hrtbps)"

Starting in 1935, Russell Vernon Hunter & Chapman of the Library of Anthropology in Santa Fe set out to develop a portfolio of Navajo blankets spanning 1840-1910- several of their selections can be seen here
I found this lovely collection via anambitiousprojectcollapsing. I do love a good collection!

Sunday Tune

Friday, 23 September 2011

1) Flannery O'Connor and her peacocks. via evencleveland
2) Peacock, Kiki Smith. Etching. 1997. via moma
3) white Peacock via here.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

John Berger