START ME UP

Beautiful image from (lfarm) taken near Mile 9. on Bedford Ave.

(more from Lauren Farmer @ flickr)

There is such an amazing energy on marathon day…each year I have lived here I have become more awed and excited by the stream of colors and people of every shape and size, flowing through the streets. I also find it so interesting the interaction between the spectator and the runner and the runner with himself.  It is quite beautiful to see how something as simple as a clap or cheer can really motivate someone to keep pushing forward, or run faster. Each runner taking part has different motivations and individual goals they are competing with as they run, but they come together and share this experience with the whole city and as we encourage them, they inspire those of us standing on the sidelines even more.

Sunna & Laila, from the series Sámi, the people

I have seen the Arctic as a place where the extremes play out in the daily lives of the people that inhabit this land. It is a place where man has learned to adapt to the environment that surrounds him rather than adapting the environment to him. Here I found the Sámi, which translates to ‘The People.’ They are the indigenous people living in the Arctic Circle region of northern Scandinavia and it is the largest area in the world with an ancestral way of life based on the seasonal migrations of the animals. The Sámi are by tradition reindeer herders and live a nomadic lifestyle based on the reindeer migration.

Erika Larsen, photographer (spaceships:findout)

One of my great friends from college is currently studying Architecture at the AA in London. I had the pleasure to see the incredible work she and her team (who are all wonderful and talented as well!) have been working on this past year when they made a visit to New York. Every now and again I check back in to see what progress they have been making in their research. Take a look for yourself at the Probotics blog. They are for sure doing some innovative studies in the future of architecture and I can’t wait to see what is to come.

“British artist Stephen Wiltshire is currently attempting to draw the Manhattan skyline from memory. since Monday October 26th. Wiltshire began filling in an 18 foot canvas at the Pratt institute, Brooklyn. The drawing is expected to be complete by Friday. You can follow his progress through the live webcam here.

Wiltshire diagnosed with autism at the age of three displays an unusually powerful
photographic memory that he has applied to rendering city scapes. He can look at the subject of his drawing once and reproduce it accurately with photographic detail, down to the exact number of columns or windows on a building. He memorizes their shapes, locations and the architecture.” - Design Boom (via scottnot, quelowat, gregenemy, theamazon, & maybeitsallok, amyyy:peterwknox:)

Yes, he is incredible! If you get the chance, you can also come by and see him working at the Pratt Campus, Juliana Curran Terian Design Center from 10-5pm all week!

The NYTimes came by while Stephen was working. Read the article here.

Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities has been an absolute pleasure. It’s one of those books were I’ve read and re-read a page just to make sure I hadn’t missed any of the little joys and discoveries held within its words. Here is a beautiful excerpt:

“All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Marco enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past; dead branches.” (chpt 2, pg 27…)

Prairie Pioneer Seeks To Reinvent The Way We Farm (npr)

NPR interviewed fellow Kansan, and founder of the Land Institute, Wes Jackson, whom they describe as “a good-ol’-boy farmer from the Plains.” Jackson is working on “ways to fix what climate change and population increases have done to our food supply.”

Listen to this All Things Considered story from NPR, to hear more about what Jackson is doing to combat the “problems created by large-scale farming and mass-production” by “creating a resilient food system through cross-breeding perennial native grasses (grasses that come up every year) with wheat, to see if they can develop a plant that needs only be planted once.” (renest)

I would love to try and attend next years “Annual Prairie Festival” especially after hearing Jackson inciting sales pitch, “We have music, the barn dance. It’s sort of an intellectual hootenanny!”…There’s no place like home…I’m there!

Beautiful Solar System Quilts by Jimmy McBride!!!

Thomas Eakins
Portrait of Walt Whitman

(scout)