Category: arts and letters

The Getty Challenge

A few days ago, the Getty Museum challenged its Twitter followers to:

1. Choose your favorite artwork
2. Find three things lying around your house⠀
3. Recreate the artwork with those items

Then share a tweet on this thread: https://twitter.com/GettyMuseum/status/1242845952974544896

I’ve been following this thing, and it just gets better and better,  and more and more …

An example (Madonna and Child):

BTW: Click through on individual images/Twitter posts to be sure to see the complete display, as you might not be seeing everything in just the stream.

Crania 2.0

Crania has been resurrected.

I remember the excitement in our household when we learned that Crania had been selected, back in 1996, as a daily pick by then-dominant search engine,  Yahoo, as one of the best of the then-emerging Internet (back when it was capitalized).

Crania was the — brainchild, sorry — of brother Dennis and was one of the early literary and poetry “magazine” sites on the nascent World Wide Web. (By the end of 1996, there were less than 300,000 websites — up from 1 in 1991, following the Web’s invention in 1989; now there are about 1.7 billion.) Long dormant, you can now see its new incarnation at crania.com, and get some background here.  Leave Dennis a comment there to let him know what you think.

P.S. Crania is the product of the same Dennis whose daily poetry was featured here on WhileBusy for several months, and is still accessible, of course.

 

eofp (end of familial promotion, by the terrible writer in the family)

The Best Of, 2019 Edition

For a number of years, I developed an end-of-year list of my favorite albums* for my music blog at https://eyeavenue.blogspot.com/. Over the years, particularly since my retirement from computer programming in 2015 and a concurrent much renewed emphasis on photography, time for music has been in short supply. Then, the move to the east side of the Cascade Curtain nearly two years ago with its commitment to a simplification of Life in General and ever-increasing … focus … on photography has compounded the squeeze. Ivi and I had intentions over the recent holidays to compare notes and explore current music, much like we had done in the past, but little opportunity materialized.

Nevertheless, just to mark the passing into 2020, I did work up a short list before breakfast today of a few of my favorite viewed/heard/read experiences of the past year (my past year; not necessarily when published/presented). Herewith, FWIW:

TV/Streaming Series

My Brilliant Friend (HBO, 2018)
Chernobyl (HBO, 2019)
Succession (HBO, 2019)
Sneaky Pete (Amazon Prime, 2015-2019)
__ Explained (Netflix, 2018-2019)
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO, ongoing since 2014)

Movie

Little Women (2019, Greta Gerwig version)

Reads

These Truths (Jill Lepore, 2018)
Trick Mirror (Jia Tolentino, 2019)
The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis, 2018)
How To Change Your Mind (Michael Pollan, 2018)

Music Album

Hollywood Africans (Jon Batiste, 2018)
(And listen to this 2018 interview.)

* Some of the lists from prior years:
https://eyeavenue.blogspot.com/2016/12/five-from-2016.html
https://eyeavenue.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-short-list-for-2015.html
https://eyeavenue.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-tentative-2014-list.html
https://eyeavenue.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-list-for-2013.html
https://eyeavenue.blogspot.com/2012/12/in-keeping-with-family-who-else-would.html

The Impromptu Cloud Project

Clouds have been a big deal for me ever since early childhood, and were the subject of some of my earliest photos. So when the New York Times recently published a photo article on “Nature’s Best Poetry of 2019: Clouds“, a piece recognizing the Cloud Appreciation Society, I asked some of my photographer friends with whom I regularly correspond to show us an example of their own cloud pieces.  And they did, as shown on this HHR page.

Learn more about the Cloud Appreciation Society here and here.

 

Trick Mirror

Turns out that Nik had to take a later departing flight from Seattle, so he picked up a book at an airport bookstore to help him get through a few hours.  He just happened to get Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror”, after browsing the store’s staff picks.  And it just happens that Tolentino is a New Yorker staff writer I happen to follow; I was going to try to get a Kindle version as soon as it became available.  So, Nik finished it off, and I will start reading it as soon as I complete my current reading assignment, the nearly-1000-page “These Truths: A History of the United States.”