“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
I requested some images from Buffalo based tattoo/artist Amanda Wachob for a project at work, and she sent some lovely photographs of some of her inked up bodies (Claire pictured below); original painting (left) and tattoo (right).
Corrie, a writely writer, put me onto her younger sister, Amanda, and her work. It only seems fitting to share some of Corrie’s work, here’s an excerpt from Unfortunate Behaviors, her Semi-Finalist entry in Amazon Breakthrough Novel competition:
The night of the fall, my sisters and I mutely hung around the phone in the foyer. The great house held its breath with us. An air of expectancy clung to each of the three floors, stagnated in the six empty bedrooms and suffocated every escapable area until the only livable spaces were the three steps that sat adjacent to the hall telephone; one level for each sister. Occasionally, Casey would sigh out loud and whine under her breath that she was hungry, tired of sitting there or some other such complaint that tried to draw our attention away from our worry. However, Maya and I were immune to her that night and so we stayed resolutely on the stairs.
Jackson, pictured above, recently sent me pictures from his exhibition Design for the Real World in Seoul, Korea; I had recently written about some of the works featured in this show in my essay, The Polemical Chairs of Jackson Hong. Some images from the exhibition:
There is, however, another possible way of stating the relationship between design and culture. Rather than seeing systems of culture from a point of view that imposes a hierarchical relationship in which architecture or design is dominant, we may posit a notion of the “non-designed” built environment — “social texts,” as it were, produced by a given culture.
This distinction between designed (imposed) and non-designed (produced) is the fundamental point at the heart of Thackara’s post; a recognition of the often colonialist mentality that plague designers in their pursuit of solutions. An aside: the discussions at Design Observer often generate more heat than light, and the aforementioned post is no exception.
An epic biopic of post-war author Yukio Mishima, directed by Paul Shrader, produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, soundtrack by Phillip Glass, preformed by Kronos Quartet and production design by Eiko Ishioka…Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a powerful work and has gotten the Criterion Collection overhaul.
All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
I stopped reading and collecting comics soon after Spawn debuted, the so-called comic-boom of the early/mid 90’s. Like many others I was taken with the stylized work of Todd McFarlane and followed him from his reinvigorated Spiderman series to Image Comics and Spawn.
