nooks and crannies. alleys and avenues.

This morning I watched eighty-some-odd-year-old Bill Cunningham's fashion segment in the NY Times.  I suppose I was in a  sentimental mode, but it was served as an immediate cue to how amazing living in New York is.

There are pros and cons to city living. It's hot as hell here. Exercise happens in cages instead of fields. But the confluence of so many different elements, people, economies, thoughts, inspirations etc. all meeting together at a central location creates something electric. It's akin to the mouth of a river or an estuary in all its beautiful cliche-ness...

 Building on this, shortly after I posted this this morning I came across this in my Facebook feed from Humans of New York:
 

After I'd taken his photograph, his caretaker offered a formal introduction: "This is Banana George," she said, "the world's oldest barefoot waterskier. He's 97 now. When he was 92, he set the world record for the oldest person to waterski barefoot." 

the spirit of the games.

Props to Nike for celebrating the spirit of sport and the power of one all the while taking a jab at the sacred circles of the Olympic committee. We can't forget that it's still commercially motivated, and the more cynical would say it's still exploiting... but it's good work and it's moving.

 All the while we have other rhythms in the culture to tear at the sacred thread of the Olympic fabric.

Today, I Love the Internet Because...

...it conencts us in ways like this: displaced cultures (yea maybe displaced is a strong word, but it's romantic in a fucked up sense), crafting amazing recipes and now folks working to find a way to share that recipe and its ingredients around the world. simply amazing. kick start them.

give me more. slowly.

we move fast. expect concise[ness], clarity, efficiency...all things quickly and to the point, for us to process, quickly, and move to the next. good, at times, in our time strapped business world. but it's an over used maxim and we've fallen victim to the illusion that anything worth knowing comes in easily processed bytes.

we're at risk of losing the beautiful, comple,x metaphor, the well crafted allegory.
i'm reading melville's 'confidence man.' in a sentence that reads more like a paragraph it takes him well over a hundred words to say 'the ferry is crowded and people keep getting on and off.' he dresses the mundane with the extraordinary, concluding with this 'like Rio Janerio fountain, fed from the Corcovado mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with the same strange particles in every part.' it's fucking beautiful, and anything but concise. you'll of course argue that this language and pace has it's place, just not in the business world. i'll say the business world is no different than any other part of your world. evoke the floral. be long winded and inspire.

finds: free knowledge?

i've never really dug too deep into off campus courses, or the multitude of free classes out there...but i came across this list today and i'm pretty psyched to dig in: FREE CLASS via open OPEN CULTURE. go us.

finds: via retronaut "space oddity" for babies

retronaut is quickly becoming one of my most favoritist places in the digital swamp. i can't get enough. and here's proof. david bowie's "space oddity" as a children's book [i know]. get out of here. i'm off to find this. read the whole thing here.

post: did a little more digging on this - it was a pet project of an amazing [and new favorite] illustrator: andrew kolb check out his stuffs. all super. but sad news is that someone from the bowie house came by and made him remove any association to space oddity. zzzzz. go suits.

col*LAB*orate V: yo yo and lil buck

i may be a little behind on this, but in morning readings this beautiful collaboration between cellist yo yo ma and dancer lil buck popped up. dig.