Destino

A collaboration between Dali and Disney, which I find incredibly beautiful.

The original collaboration was completed in 2003, after Disney's nephew found the storyboards and 17-second clip and saw the project through to completion. It received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film.

Postmodern Hymn: Free Will

I love it when a song I've heard before suddenly leaps out as a revelation. That's what happened with the chorus to "Free Will" by Rush:

"You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. 

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. 

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; 

I will choose a path that's clear- 

I will choose Free Will."

I don't so much feel like I don't have free will, but I don't particularly live with the agency that free will promises. I have so many cases of indecisiveness in any given day that it's ridiculous; I think this song may become my new mantra!

Food for the Soul: Bibimbap

via Mrs. Ryeong

Bibimbap (빕임밥; "mixed rice") is a beautiful dish to look at, with colorful vegetables arranged in a wheel around an egg in the middle. It also happens to be really healthy, and good comfort food.

You can use whatever vegetables you have on hand, over white rice, cooked a little drier than the usual Asian-style rice. I like to use carrots, spinach, zucchini, bean sprouts, cucumber, and, if I can find it, fernbracken (고사리).

The key to beautiful, tasty bibimbab is cooking each vegetable separately. Carrots get cut into matchsticks and are seasoned lightly. Other vegetables can get paired with garlic and some green onion. Add sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds to the vegetables, or to the dish as a whole for a lovely warm flavor. (Don't skimp on the sesame; it is truly divine.)

Add some Korean pepper paste (고추장), mixed with water and more sesame oil until it's a nice saucy consistency, plus a fried egg.

Then, destroy your beautiful arrangement by mixing. Eat with a large spoon. Life is good.

Messy, Alchemical Art

Sugar Bowl, by Adele Shaw
via Inclusions Gallery

I met Adele Shaw at a museum I visited in San Francisco years ago. I remember thinking how amazing it was to talk to an artist about her work and how important it was to not say anything stupid. I remember her smiling.

At the time, she was working on a project called "oology." Luckily I've saved my postcard, because I can't find images online anywhere. I thought it was beautiful work; I still love how embodied and playful it is, and how delicate it is, too.

Scanned postcard from Adele Shaw's "oology" exhibit

Now it seems she works mainly on canvas, but still with beeswax. In her own words:

"My painting is a influenced by the power of nature and inspired by the chaos of people’s chronic search for order, space, and story. 

I paint first with water colors, then with encaustic paint, layers of hot beeswax, pigment and resin. I coerce it onto paintings as a hot, drippy, excitable mess. . . . 

Encaustic painting is an alchemical process of extreme versatility. It is both additive and subtractive. It can be painted, sculpted, or moulded. Between the layers the process is quite unpredictable."

Robertson Davies' Magian World View

Love, Desire, and Death, by Georges Barbier
via Orbs of Zenith

"[The Magian World View] was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of the ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder."

    —World of Wonder, by Robertson Davies

Have you read any of Robertson Davies' books? Or seen any of his plays? I just finished the Deptford Trilogy, and I really love his orientation toward the world. I have tried to find good quotations to share, but I find his ideas surprisingly difficult to whittle down into a simple excerpt; the one above just doesn't do him justice. So, you must read some of his works for yourselves!

Postmodern Hymn: Simple Life

Life moves so quickly it's frightening sometimes, and that's when you've got to pause and sing a song like this, breathe, and smile.

Admiring: Creators with Thread

When so many women have produced such beautiful works of art, it's hard to focus on a particular craftswoman. But here are two women whose work inspires me. The hours they must have worked astounds me. Here I sit, cutting and pasting images—quite a different task than the quiet, patient work they did!

Erica Wilson, with her PBS show and books, rejuvenated the art of needlepoint in the years after the Second World War.

Erica Wilson 

Queen Mary created this rug over eight years, sometimes working seven hours a day. It has a million stitches in it.

Queen Mary's needlepoint rug