Pages

Monday 30 June 2014

Future Library




Katie Paterson’s century-long Future Library art project contemplates the full scale of the publishing process.

"It will be 100 years before the trees are cut down to provide the paper for an anthology of books—a Future Library for the city of Oslo—read for the first time in 2114 … Every year from 2014 to 2114, a writer will be commissioned to contribute a new text to a growing collection of unpublished, unread manuscripts held in trust in a specially designed room in the new Deichmanske Public Library in Bjørvika until their publication in 2114."

Katrien De Blauwer
"Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”

― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

Recipe: Cardamom Coffee


Adding spices and a pinch of salt to my morning coffee pot is a habit I developed after drinking a delicious spiced Turkish coffee that accompanied a flaky baklava dessert. This recipe makes a delicious cup of joe to enjoy in the early hours, but it also serves as a lovely sip after dinner. I chose to use cardamom for its aroma and slight smokiness, but you can play around with any spice that inspires you. Ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and star anise would also be wonderful.

Tools
Stovetop espresso coffee maker or French press
Ingredients
Ground coffee beans
1 cardamom pod (cracked) per cup of coffee
Salt
Milk
Sugar
Method
In an espresso coffee maker or French press, brew your coffee as usual, adding a cracked cardamom pod and pinch of salt per cup to the ground coffee before brewing. Add milk and sugar to your liking. The end result should be smooth with a floral spiced aroma.

Recipe from A Simple Feast: A Year of Stories & Recipes to Savor & Share by Diana Yen & the Jewels of New York via Kinfolk
"Many like to preach and quote simplicity and its truly an important aspiration, but when movement is concerned, we are who we are because of COMPLEXITY. 
So, paraphrasing Albert Einstein, I suggest this:
"Movement should be made as complex as human and then as simple as possible."

-- Ido Portal



Illustrations by Eleonora Rosio
"Simplicity is complexity resolved."

--Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957, Romanian)

Sunday 29 June 2014

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

"She assured me, “You can’t teach yoga. All we can do as teachers is share our maps.” Yoga might mean knowing what’s happening in your body and then finding an external geometry that rhymes. How can you do that with a stranger standing at the front of the room offering a succession of poses? How can I become my own authority if I keep leaning on experts?"

--  Mike Hoolboom

Saturday 28 June 2014

Saturday Poem

“Confessor. Mother. Father. Ghost. The who
you talk to when you are talking to yourself.
The ocean is one version. Gray green in
sawtooth pearls
all it meets it swallows.” 
 
El Dorado by Peter Campion,

Saturday Cartoon


(watch on silent...the music is a little sickly sweet...)

Friday 27 June 2014


Enjoy your weekend!
Try not to get tangled in worries. It’s ok to move without knowing quite where you’re going.

(gif found here)

Le Weekend!


Enjoy it.
Do something that makes you feel wild and unstoppable.
You don’t have to be humble, you don’t have to be small, you just have to be kind.

(gif found here)



Ceramic diamonds by Michelle Quan.

(Found via The Jealous Curator)

Thursday 26 June 2014

Ukemi, The Art of Receiving


"In my daydreams, the kindergartener is all grown now, and she has a man or a woman she loves, and the two of them have gone on dates to the pool―my daughter’s backstroke is amazing; the lifeguards make comments about it―and to the local Sonic for cheeseburgers. In the afternoons, between class sessions, she and her boyfriend or girlfriend will tell each other their histories while their roommates are out on errands for birth control. They’ll gossip about mutual friends and they’ll compare notes about the sports they played and how strange their parents’ behaviors are. My daughter’s love interest at college or culinary school will ask her about the photo I’ve sent with her, the one where she’s receiving her orange belt from Master Ochiai and looking into the space above the camera.

“What’s that from?”

“I took karate when I was little,” she’ll say. And this is where I hope she’ll continue with “And I stayed with it through high school. I’m a shodan black belt.”

And her significant other will say, “Show me,” and they’ll clear a space in the middle of the dorm room’s floor, kicking over bean bags and Calculus books. They will bow to each other and spar playfully there on the third floor of an expensive room-and-board dormitory, where my daughter will land her friend into a scarf choke on the area rug and will feel the tap-tap-tap of a hand, a matte, a signal to let up. And my daughter will smile because she will feel safe and equal to this person in her life. She will know full well how to cut off circulation to carotids and jugulars, but, more importantly, she’ll know when to release."

From Ukemi, The Art of Receiving By for The Rumpus.
Click HERE to read the piece in full. It's brilliant.

(Image by Estevan Guzman.)
"Don't make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you want to be famous - because you will never feel famous enough. make gifts for people - and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts."

-- John Green

Monday 23 June 2014

"...Patricia White just got back from a hip replacement, which she insists came from her long ago days as a dancer, and not from yoga. On Wednesday mornings, she steps into the room on a cane, a striking image in a yoga studio. Who do we put at the front of the room? An older woman walking on a cane. In her class I am beginning to feel tiny openings in the hip flexors and around the collarbones that I’ve never felt before. I can follow this network of fissures and they lead me to new places where I can say yes. It’s like the life you share with your best friends. As they tell you the story of the past weekend, even though the circumstances are new so much of the telling is familiar, you’ve been hearing variations on this story for thirty years. Those small variations are at the heart of what friendship is. How to love these small differences? What Patricia is teaching me is how to get in touch with and love the small changes...."


Hierarchy of Needs by Wendy MacNaughton

hehe!

permission

“Suffering must be like love — look at that guy!”

The man on the cross leads me to wonder about the front of the room. Who do we put at the front of the room? Is it the one with all the muscles, the very smartest, the one with the smoothest pitch? Yoga teachers are embodied ideals. The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips reminds us that ideals in our culture are often used to punish ourselves. “I’ll never be that smart. I’ll never be that flexible. I’ll never be able to speak those beautiful sentences.” Most of the time, that very traditional view of ideals has been at play in the asana classes I’ve been to. Though there are exceptions. For instance: Christi-an Slomka’s work at Kula Annex. She’s doing something different at the front of the room that allows me to do something different on my mat. She’s modeling her uncertainty and mistakes. It’s become important for her to project those less-than-perfect qualities. Her decision to put something short of ideal at the front of the room is a political decision. “Wait, wait, is that my teacher expressing doubt, inability, even failure? Wow. That gives me permission to fail. That makes my failings ok.” Instead of only giving me permission to succeed, which is just another form of punishment. Because what if you don’t succeed? Oh, then you can play those old self-punishment tapes again, the ones that never sit on the shelf long enough to collect dust.

Only showing our strongest, shiniest face at the front of the room, at the front of a yoga room for instance, seems directly related to over-striving and injury. When I’m given permission to stop practicing right at the edge of my abilities, to stop pushing to the max every instant, to take child’s pose because that supports the whole group, it means that I can respond to patterns of sensation in a new way. I don’t have to push away or push through the pain. I can make a space for softness and inability, and say yes to that. I think this leads to greater embodiment and less injury, but I’m only speaking for myself."

-- Mike Hoolboom from Matthew Remski's ongoing WAWADIA project.

Keep track of this discussion, it's incredibly valuable, thought provoking, interesting stuff!


(found here)

Saturday 21 June 2014

Saturday Poem


The Light at Hinkson Creek
One final fall of sun slips past the ridge
behind my shoulder, coats the upper limbs
of a creek-side sycamore in gold too rich
for February, then settles on a stream
dead still, the clumps of foam scattered across
the water hung like fruit on mirrored trees.
The light seems somehow brighter brought to rest,
entangled in the far bank’s canopy—
the earthbound branches leafless, mottled gray
and silver-white, the rough bark’s loosening curls
inverted in immaculate relief,
and shimmering at my fingertips, so close
I have to reach for it, the twice-bent gleam
that passes in the swirl my reaching makes.

Bob Watts. Art: Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil.

Saturday Cartoon


Duct Tape Surfing from Mark Tipple on Vimeo.

Friday 20 June 2014

Peter Alexander






Resin Sculptures (that remind me of the sea) by Peter Alexander. www.peteralexander.com
"I think of why I left swimming, left Toronto, left Canada.
I know there are two sides, two lives, feel them acutely, not athlete and adult, but the life of the body and the life of the heart. 

I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice and breakup. The heart can suffer more than a few not-quites, have poor timing. We are outtouched by others, can psych ourselves out, we lose, win, become our results, find our place and rank."

-- Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies

Friday!


Have a lovely weekend!

(gif found here)

Thursday 19 June 2014



Images of evening swimmers on the beach in Nice, It was my daily ritual when I lived there.

(by me from forever ago.)
“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”


― Tove Jansson


Images of evening swimmers on the beach in nice by me from forever ago.


Found here

the case for crying



"Salty tears have a communicative power beyond words and reason. But what happens when the waterworks are nothing but crocodile tears, caused by exhaustion, frustration or even a stubborn onion? 

In Roman times, when their husbands went to sea, sailors’ wives used to keep “tear bottles” to capture their watery woe. When the sailors returned, they could literally measure how much their wives had really missed them: It was a pretty, albeit controlling, idea. But what was to stop the women from filling the jar with the seawater their loves had sailed away on? It’s as salty as tears, and it would certainly withstand a taste test.

People don’t have to be sad to cry. If I’d been a Roman sailor’s wife, it would’ve been an easy deceit: When I’m tired, I can cry enough to fill a whole tear bottle without the slightest tinge of sadness. After all, tears can express the whole gamut of human emotion, and most of them don’t deal with despair: They can represent ecstasy and joy right across the spectrum to fear, frustration, shock, powerlessness, anger and empathy. But it’s exhaustion that brings me to tears."

Read the rest of the essay here 
Words by Romy Ash Photograph by Anja Verdugo for Kinfolk.

Pool of Tears 2 (after Lewis Carroll) by Kiki Smith.
Etching, aquatint, and drypoint with watercolor addition.
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean"

 –Alfred Lord Tennyson

Wednesday 18 June 2014




Pools from here

Baadsters by Ruth Van Beek, 2006

On dryland




From Swimming by Robert J. H Kiphuth

Dryland swim sequence! I'd add some foot work, hip and shoulder joint mobility stuff and then dive (or bomb) right in.

Lessons

What I learned from the sea.
I love to be near it. To hear it, see the way light plays of it. I like standing, swimming, running, floating in it.
It teaches you respect, that you're supposed to be on dry land. being in it is a crazy dare. The sea is in charge.

“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Diving Diagrams






Diagrams showing the trajectory of the major dives as performed at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. - See more at: The Public Domain Review