WORD: Sniffing Out Inspiration

(screen grab of Synesthesia)

I like subscribing to things that send me on a path of discovery and thinking, inspiring my work and life. Put another way, I like stuff that completely derails what I’m doing and that is preferably not Facebook. So in an effort to put you off the tracks for a bit, check out A Very Short List.

Started in 2006 by Kurt Anderson (of Studio 360), this “delightful e-mail that shares cultural gems from a different curator every day,” now has over 100,000 subscribers.

Here, I’ll get you started by making you read the VSL post from a few days ago and you’ll soon be eating a bag of jelly beans, learning why Scotch smells like Band-Aids, and discovering if you are afflicted with synesthesia!

ART: Urban Cross Training

Bast

Ok. I urban cross train. What? That’s when you take a stroll with your camera and get exercise and visual stimulus all in one clean swoop.

So I set out around the neighborhood and dropped some calories recently. At the end of this post is some of the art that caught my eye.

The streets on the North Side of Brooklyn have gotten very active during the past decade. Many from the street have gone on to gallery representation. Bäst, Faile, Neckface, Swoon, Skewville all got up strong in the neighborhood.

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PERFORMANCE: The Actors' Roundtable: "In Character"

In our new Actors’ Roundtable series, Paden Fallis poses one question each week to a group of professional working actors from a variety of backgrounds. Our goal is not to demystify the work of the actor or explore their careers, but to dig a bit deeper into their artistic working process. ACTOR’S ROUNDTABLE: “IN CHARACTER” In John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, Quisa says to her husband that she fears turning the young hustler Paul, who had entered their lives, into a “punch line you’ll mouth over and over for years to come.” She fears becoming a “human jukebox.”  I think of this when I think of how actors speak of their work. I feel that we “mouth over” things we’ve read, been taught and conditioned to say. It becomes rote. And when it becomes rote, then we become “human jukeboxes.” Specifically, I think of this anytime I hear this phrase… “I was in character.”  In character. In character?

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Coney Island Mermaid Parade Celebrates 30th Anniversary

(2010 Mermaid Parade. Photo: Flickr user any.nyc)

This Saturday, June 23, the Coney Island Mermaid Parade celebrates its 30th anniversary with its annual parade down Surf Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. Led by Queen Mermaid Annabella Sciorra and King Neptune Jackie “The Jokeman” Martling, the parade is self-proclaimed the “nation’s largest art parade and one of New York City’s greatest summer events.” 

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DESIGN: The World's First Living Buildings by International Living Future Institute

This video about “living buildings” reminds me of the lower income apartment building called Hunderwasser Haus that I visited in Vienna. Designed by Austrian artist Hunderwasser, it features sloping floors, undulating walls, and “tree tenants”—trees planted inside the building that grow out through windows and walls.  It was the artist’s intent to design the building in harmony with nature.

The International Living Future Institute is taking a significantly more scientific approach to creating buildings integrated with nature. For their Living Buildings work, they have won the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Institute’s annual “The Buckminster Fuller Challenge,” which awards one winner $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

Says International Living Future Institute board member Dennis J. Wilde, “Much of the change that we now need to navigate is a process of changing our framing stories. One of the most important and one of the powerful ways of changing our framing stories is through demonstrations. Showing people what’s possible and that’s exactly what you’re engaged in with the Living Buildings work.”