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And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

An extract from Part V of East Coker (1940), T.S. Eliot's second of his Four Quartets. Photo taken by his wife Valerie—this and other photos from Eliot’s estate available to view here.

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Still thinking about Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once: a strong anti-FOMO, anti-deconstructive-nihilist remonstrance. Through Yeoh’s character, Evelyn, we learn that to apprehend the absurd smallness of ourselves and the immeasurable granularity of the noisy infinite is not an equalizer or a devaluation of it all; but a high ceiling under which we can all continue to love, to play, and to seek the joyful specks of sense adhered to the mundane. ⦿⦿

During my personal geeking out about the film, I was happy to find these five promotional ‘verse posters shared by production company A24.

Keeping true to the stylistic influences of each ‘verse—from the Wong Kar-Waymond step-printing, to Kechiche with a side of ketchup—these posters, like the film, really take you [to preposterous, wonderfully-earnest] places. Mend your clay, and be kind out there.

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In the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is coloured by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just.

From Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (Chapter 9: Hidden Cities 5).

The painting, Spiral Transit, by Remedios Varo.

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The mortal, intricate work of Edinburgh 3D illustrator, digital artist, & art director Billelis is truly something. Again and again, symbolism of the spiritual sublime collides with the blunt, austere archetypes of death and deterioration in his work, yet the intensity between never dilutes.

With each piece that drifts between the sacred and the irreverent, Billelis creates scenes of such elegant detail, that to myopically dismiss his work as simply macabre or dark or metal seems to permit so very much to be missed, if only in the masterly digital craftsmanship of these devils, saints, and scarabs. Every golden mandala and nimbus-fitted skull provides a new icon beckoning to some deep, existential awareness within each of us: that the beautiful Wholeness of human existence must inevitably include the inescapable deliquescence of the self. With corporeal decay knitted so tightly to such etherial beauty and ornament, Billelis' works succeed as mementos both mori and vivere.

To witness and absorb this work is to live—and live we must, right now, for there is no doing nor reckoning nor knowledge nor wisdom [nor witnessing of art] in Sheol where you are going.

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Sanctuary, photographed at the Grand Canyon circa 1910 by American poet, voyager, and photo-secessionist, Anne Brigman. As seen in her 1948 book, Songs of a Pagan, p. 28.

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“Life is fantastic. I like life, man. Oh my god, people are complaining about it? First of all, you're lucky enough to be alive, when you think about it. Your mother had to have sex with your father. Your grandparents had to have sex. Great-grandparents had to have sex. It's lucky you're alive, my god! And I'm so happy every day that I'm alive, because it's just a fluke! There's so many more people that never got to be alive, you know? And when people talk about it, I'm like, man, it's the greatest gig in the world, being alive. You get to eat at Denny's. Wear a hat. Whatever you want to do!”

Norm Macdonald during a 2006 interview on Last Call with Carson Daly. RIP.

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“Our problem is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology, and it is terrifically dangerous. It is now approaching a point of crisis overall, and until we understand ourselves—until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned…we are running a very dangerous course.”

E.O. Wilson, biologist and “father” of Sociobiology, regarding the real problem of humanity; as quoted during Looking Back Looking Forward, an event hosted on September 9, 2009 at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, which included an on-stage conversation between former academic rivals Wilson and Nobel-Prize-winning pioneer of the double-helix, molecular biologist James Watson.

Photo of Wilson in Puerto Rico by NOVA production manager, Jason Hendriksen during filming of the 2008 E.O. Wilson documentary, Lord of The Ants.

via Harvard Magazine

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As COVID-19 and its ensuing lockdowns began to spread across North America last spring, Canadian potter and ceramics teacher Isabelle Bisnaire found wheel throwing to be a source of calm and focus. During this period of self-isolation, she created A Stone’s Throw, a series of work that appears to be a meditation on relationships and one's seclusion from them. The series seems to contemplate fractures and emptiness absorbed in quarantine life and the healing and strength we find within our lonely selves, right when we might need it most, and the anticipated reunification with our loved ones.

Using a dark granite clay mix for that handsome color and grain, Bisnaire creates a striking, monotonal faux-repair effect similar to kintsugi for several of the pieces, where the wounds accumulated give the impression of being mended and closed, with grace not just intact but reinforced. The few lighter pieces in the series contrast with the dark granite wonderfully, and seem to bear weight of Bisnaire's sculpted stones and pebbles with poise and hardiness—there is beauty found in the burden.

Despite the rough go our dear planet has had this past year, Bisnaire continues to run her Hamilton, Ontario pottery studio, Play With Clay; currently providing take-home pottery & clay kits for order and pickup while public health restrictions remain active in her area. She mentioned, in the Imgur post where I found her work, that she was considering opening an Etsy shop to sell her pieces, but as of writing this, no such shop yet exists.

A Stone's Throw is a nudge for us all to continue to pull strength from within, and to wear our scars with all the aesthetic knack of Bisnaire's beautiful ceramics.

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Combining the romance of a candle with the utility of a flashlight, Wick is a lovely portable table light created by Graypants, a design firm straddling oceans with studios in both Seattle and Amsterdam.

The skill of Wick's design is seen in how elegantly it makes the new-tech-in-antiquated-clothes leap without enkindling (haha) any impostor-averse gimmick cynicism in the brain. As a design piece that provides honest, useful function, it's quite a successful leap, in my opinion. No sharks jumped. Wick maintains a classy, unobtrusive appearance—landing square on the sweet Schrödinger spot, where it isn't a statement piece until you look—that allows for all the ambiance and mood yielded by candlelight, without the worry of any Miss Havisham mishaps.

Wick has three steady brightness levels—adjusted by touch controls at the neck—and a pulse mode, which creates a soft candle-like flicker. The lithium battery is rechargeable via the discreet USB-C port below the handle, and is said to last up to 115 hours (in pulse mode) on one charge.

With a body of plated aluminum and an acrylic enclosure for the 1W LED light source, Wick is offered in the original Brass seen above, as well as a Graphite model.

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Belgium-based French artist Valentin Pavageau creates digital illustrations terrifically suffused with elements that appear plucked from 70s–80s-era publications and collaged with surreal environments and saccade-coaxing geometries.

His Instagram account looks to be a consistent way to follow his work as he builds it.

via Reddit

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“I almost never agree to doing interviews live or even on the phone anymore, I've learned something strange: even with the best of intentions, just about every live interview I've ever done has come out with at least one sentence in the transcript that's the exact opposite of what was said.

“If I said, ‘the cat is black,’ it would be printed as, ‘the cat is not black.’ and that gets really old after so many years, but what I think is more interesting from this, and maybe even a bit alarming and sort of sad, is how often everyone must misunderstand each other all the time in everyday conversation, misheard sentences and opposite interpretations regularly going unnoticed and unchecked. How messy our brains are.”

Don Hertzfeldt, Oscar-nominated animator, from his online journal, March 3, 2015. The image above comes from the recently-released Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime of Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow series.

In this time of incendiary appeals to emotion peddled as valuable contributions to premises, social armchair-turned-drumhead trials, and the extramundane state of being too online provoking toxic behavior from even the very best of us, Hertzfeldt's observation reminds me to pay attention to how information and intent, once perceived, can distort once I inescapably stain it with the history and slant of my own neurology.

If his mild example of kitty color is so relatable, just imagine what our warped inner filters might be misinterpreting as we engage allies and enemies alike on topics infinitely-more sensitive—in the old wounds we are still nursing, in the chafing conversations and hearsay we encounter today, and in the delicate experiences that find us tomorrow. It is remarkable how much we can get in our own way licking down to the tender, truthy centers of things; when we have good reason for raised hackles, yes, but even on the occasions when all involved mean well.

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American illustrator, Jenna Barton, in her words, likes to draw strange animals and places. Her shop has a wide collection of her beasts, prowling all realms liminal, available as prints and apparel.

Barton has a Tumblr worth following as well.

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“I believe an important element in any creation of art is that you have to have an external impulse that is out of your control, and randomness is one of those elements that has been used in art a lot. I really like including this element in my work, because I believe if I'm only sourcing everything from inside of me, I can't get to really new places, so it needs an external factor.”

How much meaning can be extracted from just 125 letters? You may ask the same about the tossing of 3 coins, or in the cards pulled from a deck of 78.

The answer is plenty, if you are open to it.

Although I tend not to be the person to see literal divinity in consulting the I Ching or in the three-card spread of the Tarot, there is, to me, profound meaning to gain from how we humans look to the external world for answers to our internal struggles. Artist Mario Klingemann takes this mechanism humankind has inherited—seeking meaningful, timely patterns that can bring order to the entropy—and re-manifests it within an art installation whose tongue is, refreshingly, not quite firmly placed in its cheek.

I see playfulness in Klingemann's Appropriate Response, but no insincerity or ridicule towards our want of cosmic answers. Klingemann provides an opportunity for viewers to tickle the synchronistic pareidolia that we all have within us; to query la tendre indifférence du monde, and to receive a reply through the satisfying clickety-clack of a split-flap display.

The installation, housed at the Espacio SOLO private museum in Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid, works as follows: by a visitor kneeling at the prie-dieu, the GPT-2 neural network kicks into action, writing an original, random message on the display board, letter-by-letter, for the kneeling visitor to, as it were, take personally. The near-limitless wealth of English grammar wielded by an unsupervised language model turns out to be far more than what any dye-soaked icosahedron of a Magic 8-Ball can offer.

“This message is like a seed, and the viewer is the soil onto which it falls; and depending on the situation, the individual, it depends if the seed can flourish or if it just withers away. Without the viewer, it wouldn't be the piece.”

The world, by all measurable accounts, remains indifferent, but with this call and response the viewer has opportunity to walk away changed, as Jung described his patient with the scarab beetle, by a hole punctured in their rationalism, breaking the ice of intellectual resistance. Like other avenues often deemed mystic, the significance that I find in these coincidences, albeit forced a bit here via machine learning, comes from within. When we see the inner [subjective] world as the obverse to the outer [objective] world's reverse, we find the entirety changed, altered fully by the punctured hole of our recast perception. We can kneel before the flap board and knowingly provoke our recognition system with—depending, I suppose, on where one stands between realism and conceptuality—a false positive. This is a Begriff toy, much like the others I mentioned above; and like the best toys or games, Klingemann's Appropriate Response mimics an inescapable aspect of the human experience and allows us to investigate ourselves through it.

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Strong typographic shapes warp and woof in Amy Fang’s 36 Days of Type.

via Grafik.

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“When I moved from Los Angeles, I moved into what I thought was Santa Cruz. Then we had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn't live in Santa Cruz; we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter on the local newspaper told me we didn't live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in an unincorporated area called Live Oak.

“Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola, and Live Oak, we don't get too confused, because we remember: we invented the lines on the map. Quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn't invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all. But when you remember that we invented all the boundaries, borders, and lines, just like the Berlin Wall, then quantum mechanics is no more mysterious than the fact that I live in three places at the same time.”

Robert Anton Wilson, when asked to explain quantum physics simply, always gets a smile out of me; both for his answer and for the apprehensive reaction of the translator(?) (as seen in the video) as Wilson prepares to answer.

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Ended up doing another recent read of Artemy Lebedev’s 2006 trip to North Korea, which is organized into four chapters of photography and candid notes culled from his time there. I was happy to still find it online, unlike some other older gems of the evanescent internet—link rot is real, folks; archive your favorites.

North Korea. Part I. Main Details North Korea. Part II. Defense North Korea. Part III. Visual Culture North Korea. Part IV. Roads and Transportation

If you are a design fogey like myself, you might know Lebedev as founder of Art. Lebedev Studio—creator of stream deck progenitor, the Optimus Maximus Keyboard, among other strong works—but he has an interesting travel journal as well. Lebedev is one of the few people to have visited all 193 member countries of the United Nations, having reached that accomplishment in 2015.

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Flora and fauna collide, unify, and give rise to one another in these pen & ink biological-studies-as-personal-metaphor by New England artist Cein Watson.