Camila Leon
See more of her work here: http://www.booooooom.com/2012/01/17/artist-camila-leon/
And while you’re about it, browse around a little, good stuff.
Christmas
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What can you build?
just say no to plastic
An article from the Plastic Pollution Coalition website:
Collecting plastics at curbside fosters the belief that, like aluminum and glass, these will be converted into new similar objects. From one glass bottle we can make another glass bottle of similar quality, in an economic manner. However this is not the case with plastic. The best we can hope for plastics is that these will be turned into other products such as doormats, textiles, plastic lumber, etc.. These products will still end at some point in the landfill – and do NOT stem the need for more virgin petroleum product. This is NOT recycling, but down-cycling.
But not even this down-cycling is happening.
For instance, in the US 93% of plastics are NOT recovered (put in plastic “recycling” bins). These go straight to landfills. PET bottles that have a redemption value (cash value) fare a bit better: 62% are NOT recovered. (EPA data 2008)
How big is the problem? How much waste is generated by single use plastics? Artist Chris Jordan offers the following visualizations. Imagine 8 football fields covered thickly with plastic bottles: this is the equivalent to the number of plastic beverage bottles discarded in the US every five minutes (data: 2009)
Now imagine a line of plastic bottles going around the planet five times. This would be equivalent to the number of plastic bottles discarded every week in the US.. just for water! (data 2009)
Now imagine the waste created by all types of single use plastics put together, by all the countries in the world (the US is only 5% of the worlds population)… This includes plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic utensils, cups, containers and more.
It is hard to imagine… We simply need to stop this insane stream of non-recyclable, non-biodegradable, toxic waste.
In most parts of the world people struggle to build basic infrastructures such as schools and hospitals, and advanced waste management systems are beyond their reach. As a result, most of the developing nations in Asia, Latin America and Africa and literally drowning in plastic waste.
Plastic pollution will not be solved by encouraging “recycling”. Perpetuating the myth of plastic recycling creates a smoke curtain that delays the adoption of effective and sustainable solutions, such as producer responsibility and the phasing out of single-use plastics.
I spent two days on the island of Taquile in Titicaca. Quite possibly one of the most peaceful and beautiful places I have ever been – I sat on a cliff and watched weather for hours, and at nearly 4000m these boiling, electric weathers seem closer and more impressive than in most places. I spent the day on a perfectly undisturbed little curve of beach, me and a couple of sheep. Plenty of people told me that the lake has some kind of healing properties. So I swam in it. It was clear and blue and mirroring those nearby hanging clouds, and I swam out towards Bolivia chased by a sweep of ripples.Magnificent.
Mines and hotels around the lake are dumping approximately 12 million cubic tons of pollution into the lake annually.
Time it takes for garbage to decompose in the environment:
Glass Bottle…………………….. 1 million years
Monofilament Fishing Line… 600 years
Plastic Beverage Bottles…… 450 years
Disposable Diapers………… 450 years
Aluminum Can………………… 80-200 years
Foamed Plastic Buoy……… 80 years
Foamed Plastic Cups……… 50 years
Rubber-Boot Sole…………… 50-80 years
Tin Cans……………………. 50 years
Leather…………………………… 50 years
Nylon Fabric…………………… 30-40 years
Plastic Film Container…….. 20-30 years
Plastic Bag…………………….. 10-20 years
Cigarette Butt…………………. 1-5 years
Wool Sock………………………. 1-5 years
Plywood…………………….. 1-3 years
Waxed Milk Carton………… 3 months
Apple Core…………………. 2 months
Newspaper………………….. 6 weeks
Orange or Banana Peel…… 2-5 weeks
Paper Towel……………….. 2-4 weeks
Speaking on trash in the ocean in this article, Charles Moore, a sailor and specialist in anthropogenic marine contamination says:
The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5 x 1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen first hand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.
Quadrillion…?
set aside 1 hour 11 minutes and 35 seconds of your day
for this.
I climbed a little hill the other day
eggs!
Insect eggs under an electron microscope. Genius. Thank you NG.
Word of the day: hyperparasitoid.
There came a day that caught the summer
Wrung its neck
Plucked it
And ate it.
-Ted Hughes
Haven’t yet gone through all the content on this site, but so far, colour me impressed with the work from this Peruvian photography collective – Supay Photos. Spend some time, get a glimpse into their Peru, a few really great photos, all interesting stories.
And just because, here is apparently the best lasagne recipe in the world… Still to try it – weekend project maybe. I reckon if I marry it with my mum’s recipe, which is the best I have ever tasted, something beautiful may just happen.
look at these
Public art from SA:
Strijdom van der Merwe – spend some time in the photo gallery of his work
He installs work in public spaces around SA and then leaves them to their fate.. “..he also leaves us a reminder of the capacity, however feeble, of an individual to alter the universe by embracing the ceaseless changing of nature..”
I want to make little alterations to the universe. Maybe take in the hem a little.
And I want to fly like Daniel Gorden – anybody nearby who wants to assist?
a magical semi-transparent chinese man
Ancash
Forgive me my recent overexposed, grainy and generally abused photographs, but they make me happy. Dull, even, well-toned greys; crisp, clear edges and smooth clean skies; the horror.
Ancash, we visited Carhuaz, Yuashau (no, no idea at all how to spell that), Caras and Chavin. The region is truly spectacular, high mountain country (in fact in a 1966 World Contest of Scenic Beauty in Germany, they voted Mt. Alpamayo, 6120m, as the most beautiful mountain in the world) – we were driving well over 3000m at points, the air nibbles and sun drenches and burns so good… Then there are the lakes, the colour of that really shiny turquoise marble you always wanted but that your best friend had; and then there is fried pork for breakfast.
Learn something:
The Chavin culture is one of the best known and influential pre-incan cultures, at it’s peak from 900 – 200 BC, with its sophisticated art, metallurgy and textile work influeincing many later cultures in Peru, and perhaps even as far abroad as the Olmec culture which shares certain artistic tendencies.
The heart of this culture, which seems to have reigned completely peaceably throughout its long 700 years only by spreading its religious and cultural ideas, is at Chavin de Huantar, a remarkably well preserved archeological site in the Huascaran National Park. The temple and surrounding buildings stand between two rivers, a position carefully chosen for it’s supposed mystical energy. The whole site should have been inundated and destroyed, but the builders rerouted one of the rivers and created a complex system of underground water channels, some of which are thoerised to have been used as acoustic tools which, with water flowing through them during the rainy season would, due to vents above ground, roar like a jaguar – likely the principal deity of the Chavin religion / cult.
The most renowned relics of the Chavin culture are the cabesas clavas or tenon heads, large stone heads placed in the walls thought the temple complex. Some rows of these stone heads represent the transformation of human to feline (jaguar – and thus divine), a process brought to life by the Chavin shamans, most likely through the use of the psychotropic cactus, SanPedro which grows in the region.
The other relic of great importance and beauty is the Lanzon, a 4.5m obelisk depicting the main deity, still located in the labyrinthine heart of the main temple, which is exactly where I found it. I have no clear picture of it, only swirls incised precisely into granite; these swirls, the taste of that entire moment, seem branded into my memory – whether actually due to some mythical energy or more simply, highly sharpened senses as my body desperately tried to convince me that it was a bad idea to be standing underground, in a maze, in a 3000 year old building, in stale light and murkier air.
I liked it though.
cetalogy
Good word.
Read this. (in the sidebar)
spend 17 minutes doing this
Firstly: a little platter of photo tasters – some i like, some not so much – from one of those portfolio review things that have become a devastatingly popular way for out of work photographers to make money by lining up and chatting to young photographers who someday hope to also be raking it in by lining up and chatting to young photographers who someday…
And then, from A photography blog, apples by a lady called Jane Alden – because i like apples.
Finally, something quite beautiful by Hiroshi Sugimoto – visit his portfolio here.
an average interview but great quotes by borges. and a parrot.
April 6, 1971
Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight
By ISRAEL SHENKER
n “The Book of Imaginary Beings” by Jorge Luis Borges there are many strange creatures such as the Unicorn, the Hippogriff, the Wulfnik and the Basilisk. But there is no Jorge Luis Borges. What shall he be?
Is Borges–could he be–a Literary Lion? “I hope not,” he says in the tentative voice of a man whose native language is Spanish and whose English is literary and word-perfect. To his sensitive ear a Literary Lion craves fame, riches, success.
“When I began writing in the 1920′s in Buenos Aires, nobody thought of literature in terms of failure or success,” he says. “You might publish an edition of 300 copies and these you gave away to your friends.”
He remembers musing to himself: “People in this country may be idiotic, but they won’t be that idiotic–nobody would think of buying anything I’ve written.”
The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters made him an honorary member on March 25. “My mother will be 95 on May 22,” he says. “I thought it a pity she couldn’t be there–she would have enjoyed it far more than I did. She’s interested in my literary career, I’m not interested in my literary career.”
Columbia University today awards him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He will teach a class of student writers, and a reception will follow. His mother will not be there.
Even after he went blind, in 1955, Borges went on writing–essays, stories, poems–and, together with Samuel Beckett, won the Formentor Prize in 1961. “Suddenly, people in Buenos Aires began to think of my work,” he says. “‘Well, there must be something in it since it’s been taken seriously in Europe.’”
Today his short stories–some hardly dawdle past a paragraph–appear in The New Yorker, and they are collected in books. Essences of essences. Labyrinths within mazes within mirrors.
When he comes to this country–he is here on a visit now–he has an utterly respectful audience. How many Latin-American authors are so well translated? He is naturally taken as a candidate for elevation to the Nobel Prize.
Beware! Who knows what this Imaginary Being will say next? On the “Today” show on television he invoked the name of Gustave Flaubert, and actually whispered a book’s title in excellent French. The effect could not have been more startling had he changed into a Hippogriff and pecked at the startled interviewer.
Replying to questions, he draws from the cadences of memory. Borges says, “At my age [71], what can I do but plagiarize what I’ve already said, no?”
What shall a writer be in the glare of glosses on glosses and endless honors? Scholars consecrate volumes to his carefully turned ironies. Is he a Domesticated Industry?
Borges lives on the north side of Buenos Aires. Recently he took a taxi to the National Library on the south side. The taxi driver said, “Are you by any chance Borges?”
Borges said “Well, more or less” or “I think so.”
The taxi driver refused to take any money–and the same thing happened on the way home. “He hadn’t read a line of what I’d written,” says Borges. “Well, maybe I didn’t have to pay because he hadn’t read a line I’d written. He thinks, ‘I’m an ignorant boor, I know nothing whatever. But this man stands for poetry, for culture, for those things that my gods have denied me.’”
“I knew I would go blind, because my father, my paternal grandmother, my great-grandfather, they had all gone blind,” Borges says.” Since the year we got rid of the unspeakable scoundrel Perón, I have been unable to read or write. Consequently, if somebody tells me ‘Well, I’ll have to go and you’ll be by yourself,’ then I can just sit down and think or perhaps not think at all but let myself go on living.”
He has written about the irony of going blind and simultaneously becoming director of the National Library. “I take good care that my books shouldn’t quarrel with each other,” he says. I don’t suppose you should have your Bible and your Voltaire side by side. They wouldn’t be comfortable, no? Voltaire might be poking fun at the Bible, or the Bible might be ignoring him, no?”
“When I lost my sight I was rather worried over it, and in my dreams I was always reading. Then somehow I never could read because a word became twice or thrice as long as it was, or rather instead of one line there would be other lines springing like branches out of it. Now I no longer dream of reading, because I know that’s beyond me.
“Sometimes I see a closed book and then I say, ‘I could read this particular book,’ but at the same time even inside my dream I know I can’t, so I take good care not to open that particular book.”
He dislikes envy, hatred, malice. Not sloth. Borges likes to say that he is lazy:
“If some notion comes into my head, and now and then it does, let’s say a notion about a story or about a poem, I do my best to discourage it. But if it keeps on worrying me then I let it have its way with me and I try to write it down in order to be rid of it.
“I have to dictate. I can’t write. And that’s why I have fallen back on classic forms of verse. I find that sonnets for example are very portable. You can walk all over a city and carry a sonnet inside your head, while you can hardly do that with free verse.
“As a very young man you don’t know who you are. You may be Lincoln for all you know. You may be Walt Whitman. Then you’re looking for yourself, while at my age one is only too keenly aware of one’s limitations. For example, I know the kind of story I can write and the kind of story I may not attempt.
“I’m chiefly thinking in terms of the future, and this means I’m not really an old man. I’m looking forward not to stories I’ve written. After all, let them go their way. I’m rather thinking of what I’m about to write. In fact I think I have some five or six plots for new stories, and when I get back to Buenos Aires in a couple of months I’ll begin working at them. When I come to dictate them they’ll be much clearer than today, and they’re clearer now than a week ago.”
“I’m very fond of my native city, I love Buenos Aires. In fact I love it so much that I dislike other people liking it. Somebody told me the other day he was thinking of going to South America. I said, ‘Well, I think you should go to Colombia. It’s a very fine country.’”
Borges delights in skepticism, certainly about political leaders. Of course in my country most political leaders are really, well, I suppose I think of them in a sense as being, well, not gangsters but more or less the same kind of thing, no? I mean–people who go in for getting elected. What can you expect of a man like that?”
Long ago, he promised his mother to say the Lord’s Prayer every night. “And ever since then I always say it. I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line.
“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”
“Personally I’m not afraid of dying. I think that if somebody told me, ‘You’ll be executed tonight,’ I’d say, ‘Well, that’s that! Of course one never knows. Maybe I would break down.
“I have a sort of fear of not dying, of going on. And I have also a personal fear about the immortality of the soul, because I wouldn’t care to go on and on. I mean if I were sure of immortality and at the same time of utter oblivion then I wouldn’t mind. But in that case what would immortality mean?
Sometimes I think, ‘Why on earth should I die, since I have never done it? Why should I start a new habit at my age?’”
