This gallery contains 4 photos.
There is a sweet group on flickr called THE SOUL OF THINGS FOR PEPA. Today the image (above) was invited – I accepted and headed over to take a look. The images are exceptionally curated by Pepa Cometa – and … Continue reading
I was thinking about Sofia Coppla’s movie, Marie Antionette. I was staying in the Mohave Desert where everything was rocks and sand, no trees for miles – just some sagebrush. And because it was 105 degrees (and still only May) things were looking a bit brittle. I was remembering the pinkness of this movie. Similar to the pinkness of all the blossoming trees that cover my neighborhood now that I am back home on the Great Lakes.
Today – metrosexuals and gender bending is unlocking this color divide. Males are thinking pink again … but will it ever be the new black? For more, look here:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-start-wearing-pink-1370097/?no-ist
Pinkish. Pink grapefruit. Deep pink. Pretty in pink. Pinking shears. Pink ribbons, the color pink is associated with fashion and femininity; today does any other color have as much social significance and gender association. Pink sherbert. Pink quartz. Pastel pink. Pink lace. Pepto Bismol pink. Pink Ruddy pink. Salmon pink. Pink tea roses. In the pink. Pink poppies. Pink poodles.
Pink flamingo. Pink taffy. Pink ballet slippers. Pink peonies. Shocking pink. Pearl pink. Pink geraniums. Powder-puff pink. Pink lemonade. Champagne pink. Pink ribbon. Pink blossoms. Baby pink. Pink daisy. Watermelon pink. Pink bunny slippers. Fucshia pink. Piggy pink. Light pink. Pink frosting. Hot pink. Pink eye. Cameo pink. Lipstick pink. Pink cotton candy. Bubblegum pink. Bright pink. Pink orchids. Cerise pink. Pink Rose. Tickle me pink. Pink posies. Spanish pink. Pink pedal pushers. Persian pink. Neon pink. Pink carnation. Pink panties. Garden Pink.
Some of MY pink things……
/artilleri/ Plant – Swell sansevieria *pink pot* antie mae
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Starfield 6- Pleiades – 2005, Barbara Cervenka
(Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of four new giant exoplanets orbiting stars much bigger than our sun. The newly detected alien worlds are enormous, with masses from 2.4 to 5.5 the mass of Jupiter and have very long orbital periods ranging from nearly two to slightly more than four Earth years. The findings were published on Mar. 11 in a research paper available online at arXiv.org.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-giant-planets-stars.html#jCp
This constellation of us…can’t focus on your ex your partner your kids your job whatever it is …don’t care where or how you spend your time – well I do – but I am not going to focus on it. I will never ever feel your flesh your lips your cock but I definitely feel something so intensely that it makes my heart stop when you say certain words or when you are looking out at the horizon you like best and the edges of your mouth are curled in a hint of a smile.
He says: meet me on the moon sweetheart
She says: stars are lovely
He says: i think you should have more stars up here… i’ll fix that for you
She says: thank you love
In a virtual world you can give your lover the moon and the stars. And if there aren’t enough stars, you can add more – or brighten them. If the moon isn’t blue enough – you can change that too.
Ex Machina – Kopernikus Grand Orrery v 1.21 hatris panacek
An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system that illustrates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons, usually according to the heliocentric model. (wikipedia). This one has a realistic rotation of the planets around the sun and with the menu you can select each planet and this will briefly highlight it and give you some info about the place…you can set the speed of the rotation and set it to the current date. Marketplace link.
“And we came forth to contemplate the stars.”
― Dante Alighieri
Even a chair can give, not always
posture us tall, forgive us our trespasses,daily as they are and all,
and hallowed……
I remember these chairs – Danish – although I don’t remember them ever being called that. They were big in the post WWII era – and are now often re-surging as vintage hipster.
Chairs have history, yes they do – and symbolize the life and times of both designers, makers and consumers.
Like any work of art, we learn about the culture they’re from by looking at how they were made, who made them, and their style. What was important at the time? Who were they made for? What space did they live in?
Art and Design move through time. Chair design included. Their reason for being stays the same; people need a place to sit.
Chairs are form and function in a way that is easy for us to understand – but not so easy for designers to perfect. For designers, chairs contain
many of the challenges of design-—engineering, choice of materials, production method, style, and functionality—in one small package.
A designer’s entire philosophy can be summed up by their chair.
Designer George Nelson put it nicely, saying, “Every truly original idea—every innovation in design, every new application of materials, every technical invention for furniture—seems to find its most important expression in a chair.”
George Nelson, Marshmallow Sofa 1956, produced 1956 – 1965 and reintroduced in 2000.
what next – preloved lawn chairs
“We made love like two folding lawn chairs. We were both motionless, but the possibility of movement permeated the moment.”
― Jarod Kintz
lanne wise and morton funk talking at High Water
anc hanging iron bench. vintage
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 Black hole. Blue chair. August. screen print . Lanne Wise
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| blue lawn chairs by isla gealach at cheeky pea | |
| “The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.” ― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby |
I went the first time because I had read about it on Ziki Questi’s blog. Morton Funk, the creator, was there and we had a cool conversation about music. He has one of the most intelligent streams playing on the grid – which is so rare – jazz and things I don’t know how to categorize and David Bowie’s new album . (Listen to Maria Schneider’s – Walking By Flashlight at the end of the post.)
And the space is stunning. You need to immerse yourself in it – words don’t do it justice. I came back the second time to take photographs and the third time just to sit and listen and write this post.
High Water panorama
High Water makes me think of Andy Goldsworthy – in more ways than one. Goldsworthy, a British Sculptor has worked outdoors, rejecting traditional studio production. From 1976 until 1984, his ephemeral works in natural environments were not shown as such, but rather as photographs of the works, as they disappeared or disintegrated. Recent works are generally permanent; their construction involves interaction with landowners and builders, providing a foil to the solitary ephemeral creations. Martin Hill is another sculptor who works this way – see the image and the link to his site below.
Things change so fast on SL – ephemeral pixels. How is it that some places are able to raise such powerful connections and memories for us? Light and sound and color – used so deftly here – are signifiers for each of us as we see them through the lens of our own memories and experiences. I am smitten with the way this can happen in the physical world AND the virtual world.
There is a wonderful book called Chambers for a Memory Palace that speaks to this. Especially as it relates to light – which is such an important component of High Water.
Space and form are understood in light. Light can clarify them, as the ancient Greeks knew, or it can extend and enhance mysterious distances, as did light coming through stained glass in Medieval cathedrals. It can move and change continually the spots on which it lavishes its attention …. light can sparkle or dapple or slide across a surface …. we can’t sense space without light and we can’t understand light without shadow and shade, which are different from each other. Shadow is the ghost of an object, shade, the absence of light……
riding @ High Water
riding @ High Water
I work in nature because we are nature….. Martin Hill
Small things worth seeing and then seeing again.
Watching Bowie’s last video Lazarus over and over again.
from Johan Renck, the Swedish director at the helm of Bowie’s stunning visuals in “Lazarus” and “Backstair”……..
One of my favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit, wrote the following in her book, Hope In The Dark: “Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. … We talk about “what we hope for” in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it’s a more powerful and more joyful way to live.”
Some small thing are actually a testament to that hope.
Thread – Standing Rack from Robin Sojourner available at her main store.
frostwoods pop up book – m o c h i (amelie knelstrom) @ vespertine
Finding well constructed pop-up books inworld is a real treat. They are close to my heart – as I am a bookmaker and teach bookarts on this other side of the screen. I suppose that if you wanted to be particular, these are not pop-up books. They are actually book sculptures. One reason for this is that they do not close flat or involve the same kind of paper engineering that pop-ups have.
But I digress. There are two different books in SL – but I am just showing you the one called frostwoods (above) as I was able to find what I think is its physical counterpart (below). In world, They were part of a 50L Friday sale @ Vespertine – so you will have to check and see if she is still selling them.
Here is the RL version of the book by British book artist Su Blackwell.. Take the time to check out her site. She has created incredible book sculptures in addition to her other work. 
Teaching people to make pop-up books involves a variety of skill sets – both aesthetic and technical. Paper engineering isn’t necessarily easy, especially as things become more complicated. Then there are all of the other issues involved with work in this genre – the relationships between pages, covers, text, and the form and content of the object itself. All of those things are in play and talking back and forth to one another.
If you don’t know anything about pop-ups and would like to learn, I highly recommend starting here – at Carol Barton’s site. Carol has published a series of books about pop-ups that are wonderful teaching tools. I use them in the studio – my own, and the other that I teach in. (Aside from the fact that I loaned two of them to a colleague or student a couple of semesters back and they were never returned – sniff, sniff. I now take phone pics of everyone who walks out of my office with a book so I can remember where it is…).
Barton has created a series of her own books as well, both pop-up and another of my personal favorite forms to work with – tunnel books.
https://vine.co/v/h7FYpu5TFgn/embed/simple
Admiring frostwoods at home.
Such a small thing. Such an enormous thing, this gratitude. A friend yesterday described it as not a “thing” at all – but rather an action, a practice.
Being grateful is something that you have to choose to do everyday.
I suspect that is right. Big holiday here in the States this past week and even though it comes from horribly glossed over beginnings — if you cast that aside (although casting aside is not forgetting about it) and just focus on the blessings you have….. well, that is when practicing gratitude is easy. When things are difficult and dark – then it becomes harder to chose to be grateful.
I believe there is something more than US. Whatever it is…. it is huge and deep, a mystery. Grand and wondrous, more-so than any dark despair could ever overtake.
This week I am finishing up a new build. Doing a bit of exploring – landscapes more than anything – and being grateful.
Below is an image of the new Bebu Gallery – opening Sunday, the 5th of December, with some of my own images on the walls. We will also have Antonio TooCool spinning at 1pm – slt and maybe someone else. Very low key, just a comfortable spot to kick back and listen to some great house music – vinyl only of course. Walk the grounds – always a work in progress and stick your head in the gallery.
I love that Bryn Oh sells some of her work at her store. When I was over at Immersive the other day to see her new build, The Gathering (maybe more about that later) Titos and I went to look at her wares – I have always loved these birds. There is a sculpture in the town I live in that reminds me work.
Having them in the sea outside of the gallery here is a treat. Got some mayflies as well.
“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
Yesterday I packed up and left my SL home of eight years. It gives me pause to contemplate how in the heck we get attached to virtual places. I did, I was – attached. There has been a lot of research devoted to place attachment, both in world and out. In the physical world, this is helpful to tourism – understanding what kinds of visual stimuli and emotions will be generated by what triggers to draw people to visit a certain place.
Place attachment is a multi-dimensional concept that can be understood as a bond or link that exists between people and places, and is generally understood to form after an individual has experienced a place (Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2001).
One of the aspects that is important here is social bonding. That’s the idea that past, current, and future interactions with a setting lead to meaningful relationships – and supports them. So, yes, lots of attachments were formed in this place over time.
But keeping an open heart to what comes next – I think that is the best way to be. In a virtual world you can choose to be an armless wonder on a lark, or have a tail or two heads (especially around Halloween). But on this side of the screen we aren’t always given the choice. We take what comes and we hope that we make the best of it with grace. In either place though, I notice, the feelings are real (as many have said before me).
So someone said to me today, when I explained I was looking for new land, “Bebu was quite an institution.” Bebu is the name of a small club (and gallery) that I had on the land I just lost. “I will rebuild – just need a bit of time,” I reply. “Hard to find the right place,” he says. As if I don’t know this having flown around the grid for over a week, following leads, tips, invitations – all to no avail. “You need nice, cheap, and secure,” he counsels. “Yes – exactly,” I sigh.
I believe that everyday good fortune comes if you wait with an open heart.
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Remember this book? If you haven’t read it (was a movie also – but to my mind not nearly as good) maybe time to re-read….or read for the first time.
The ‘lightness of being” goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal return.” The idea that our universe and our existence has occurred an infinite number of times in the past, and will continue to occur without end. So here – time is cyclical rather than linear. It’s an ancient idea, but Nietzsche popularized it for modern times. The narrator of Unbearable Lightness refers to it as Nietzsche’s concept.
Sitting on the porch with nonoko noel’s Alice teacup. Not sure where I got this – but you could look here.
The consequences of such eternal return (according to Nietzsche) would be “the heaviest weight.” Is it a terrifying concept to imagine that our lives have been and will continue to be repeated endlessly? Could one embrace this weight, rather than be frightened by it? Nietzsche concluded in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that we need to live and act as though our lives functioned in eternal return, because our own lives are given meaning and weight this way. The concept of amor fati means the love of one’s fate. To be able to accept – and even relish eternal return could be seen as the same as loving one’s fate.
Juliette Westerburg’s Tea and Crumpets. This might have been a part of a Tres Blah gatcha. Check here.
If what Nietzsche said rings true, that eternal return gives our lives a sense of weight, then it would stand to reason that if our lives just occurred once, they are filled with lightness. This is where Kundera’s phrase einmal ist keinmal comes in. He translates this as: “What happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”
Only living once, we can never compare the decisions we make to any alternatives. If we can never compare different outcomes, we can never know if the decisions we made are correct or not, which means we can never judge them properly or take responsibility for them. So to live only once is to live with lightness.
Isla Gealach’s teacup – check for it along with her other offerings at the Cheeky Pea. In the background are these wonderful vases that Agustkov created….find his work at Seven Emporium.
Aside: I love coffee. I mean I REALLY love coffee. But sometimes, when I am settling down with a book, or a intense movie, or a stretch of wandering around SL, I want a small pot of freshly brewed tea – and a lovely teacup to drink it from. My favorite tea of late is Scottish Breakfast Tea – said to be the strongest of all the breakfasts (Irish & English being the other two). Maybe that is why I am always on the lookout for strange and or beautiful teacups in SL. Sometimes simple, sometimes ornate….always satisfying.
Kean Kelly’s simple teacup is a part of her tea for two collection…and you can find it along with the red peonies at her mainstore. The cherry tart is courtesy of Kalia Firelyte – and you might look at her place, JIAN.
 | Little Shiva on chairs |
| Little Shiva on containers |
smallthingsworthseeing 