Summertime

I am taking a break for the rest of the summer so won't be posting for some time, but I will be back in with all manor of inspiring things i've found, heard and made come September.

In the mean time I leave you with some things that caught my attention this week... a poem, a picture and some beautiful music...

thing-searcher

‘I don’t know what you’ve got in mind,’ said Pippi, ‘but I’m not the sort to lie around. I’m a thing-searcher, you see. And that means I never have a moment to spare.’

‘What did you say you were?’ asked Annika.

‘A thing-searcher.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Tommy.

‘Someone who goes searching for things, of course! What else would it be?’ said Pippi as she swept all the flour into a little pile. ‘The whole world is full of things, which means there’s a real need for someone to go searching for them. And that’s exactly what a thing-searcher does.’

‘What kind of things?’ asked Annika.

‘Oh, all kinds,’ said Pippi. ‘Gold nuggets and ostrich feathers and dead mice and tiny little nuts and bolts and things like that.’

--Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking. Recalled to mind thanks to things magazine.

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

It's like living in a light bulb, with the leaves
Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass
Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy
Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass.

From 'Sally's Hair' by John Koethe.

Photo found here.

Still from Yves Klein's La Revolution Bleue,

Seizure

Roger Hiorns explains his blue crystal wonder, Seizure, created in a condemned London flat.
One of the most beautiful pieces of art I've ever seen!

(Source: The Guardian)

Adam Fuss

Works from My Ghost by Adam Fuss.
Daguerreotypes and unique photograms made from smoke and light.

Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour

I highly recommend taking a look at this book by Carol Mavor.

Here's the back of the book blurb... 

"The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space—blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. 

The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book takes the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran. In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue"

"My body is made up of saltwater and wishes, and a thousand star fish that try to mimic the constellations."

-- Megan Madgwick 

1. via seulray
2.  Gil Prates - Rio de Janeiro, 1980 via horsesatelier
3. Star Map found via seulray 

Fracoise Morellet

terrible blue infinities

"In the dark blue sky, a few yards away, the luminous half-moon looked suspiciously precise, as if it had been carefully separated from its missing half along a perforation. A nearby star, twinkling for all it was worth, resembled a flickering dot in a faulty neon sign. I reflected, not for the first time, upon the exaggerated reputation of the trite night sky, so empty of mysteries, so smug and small, in comparison with the terrible blue infinities of a blazing summer noon."

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse.

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Staking

The biggest (native) moth in North America lives for
two weeks. I’ve seen one spend one of its mornings
against a brick wall, preternaturally alive, folding mass
into the same amount of mass, collating. Its wings,
as you might expect, have eyes. It has no digestive
system, as such, no mouth; it thrives on its own stuff, as
acorns do. Consider, if you will, and please, you have
to, that night, clouded. The moth uses the moon, so
some contend. Everything’s dateless, but everything’s
Virginia, that is, original. A Great Horned Owl
intercepts the Cecropia Moth. These are my terms, and
these are my names.

-- Chris Hunt Griggs

Hello Friday

Found here