yayoi kusama

Yayoi Kusama: Self Obliteration on Nowness.com

top quality yayoi kusama film for the fanboy. it's maybe just me getting older but i'm finding that i'm increasingly interested in these people like kusama, or louise bourgeois, among many others, who are still making well into advanced age

100!

it's a special day but that doesn't mean eurosport isn't on for the start of the 100th edition of the tour. neither of us can muster much enthusiasm after the past year and certainly after the dauphine etc it appears that for at least some of the top riders 'preparation' goes on as normal. eurosport set out their stall with an intro absent of the parade of drug monkeys but it only served to expose that era more. still it's the tour and once t's mum appears doubtless we'll be glued.

results? really, i'm not that bothered for the reasons of above, so rather than that chapeau for mike hall who's nailed the tour divide despite fires which have stopped him claimed the record. great tweet as well when he realised his main competitor had scratched. top quality performance and should the tour chat become a bit old worth going back to the tour divide site for those who've yet to finish.

bike stop motion

An Unlikely Ride: Binary Bike Stop Motion Video from Binary Bike on Vimeo.

what you can do if you've got a lot of pen and a lot of time. it's true that recent domestic plans have blown a big hole in my june cycling miles but I think I've got a half decent excuse. unless this was made in winter these boys would've been better out on their bikes!

pump up the jam

get your eighties on...



and for an 'older' version



the lost fingers aren't new on here but brighter lights, thicker glasses are well worth checking out a bit more

bubbles

what's not to like about tomoya matsuura's pictures. follow the link, click on the sounds, kick back and immerse yourself!

simon winston

i've been fiddling around with a text based project for a while now that's main duration has lots to do with my poor image manipulation skills. it's one of those winter night things and once I sit down to it I know what it'll look like.

but of course then there's that moment when you find someone who got there before you, did it better and everything changes! I love it when this happens as you can feel the step change in your mid and suddenly you're off somewhere entirely different.

so i'm loving simon Winston. how great it would be if more writers didn't just accept their work as a block of text on a page. or maybe that's just me...!

flowers

 

All my life,
so far,
I have loved
more than one thing,

including the mossy hooves
of dreams, including'
the spongy litter
under the tall trees.

 

In spring
the moccasin flowers
reach for the crackling
lick of the sun

and burn down. Sometimes,
in the shadows,
I see the hazy eyes,
the lamb-lips

of oblivion,
its deep drowse,
and I can imagine a new nothing
in the universe,

the matted leaves splitting
open, revealing
the black planks
of the stairs.

 

But all my life--so far--
I have loved best
how the flowers rise
and open, how

the pink lungs of their bodies
enter the fore of the world
and stand there shining
and willing--the one

 

thing they can do before
they shuffle forward
into the floor of darkness, they
become the trees.

 

 

moccasin flowers by mary oliver

tour divide

it's that time of year for the madness that is the tour divide. true there is some localish interest this year but it's an event i'm tending to become more aware of, esp in very stark contrast to the bloated creation that is the tour. be warned if you do look at the all important leader board it's all too easy to get sucked in.

where is mike in relation to colin? have they really not stopped yet? who is that on the detour? you can, if you want do the call in thing and all those variations but if you're doing that you've got it bad and, inevitably you'll find yourself thinking, maybe....?

i'd love to do it but the simple fact of the 40 degree plus temperatures the leaders have been riding thru would rule me out. I am just too pallid and northern - anything over twenty just cooks my brains! I got asked if I fancied a race in Italy a couple fo years back but declined citing the evidence of someone a tad more into it than me who'd overheated, started seeing things, and cycled into a tree!

but i'd love to do it. maybe over a couple of months or three, more of an amble down the divide. certainly I wouldn't be beasting any 250 miles a day! but there are precedents. this guy was regularly doing more miles than me up until very recently.  i first heard of him a few years back, when he was in his early nineties. I'd just done a strenuous 90 miler only to finds he'd done more or less the same route, stayed overnight in a hostel, then cycled back! I'd just missed him but he was in buying a new bike at the lbs. they were trying to persuade him it was maybe time to slow down but, rightly, he predicted he had a few more years in him.

neil sinclair - a total legend!

spomenik

if I have the time I want to be spending a whole lot more time in the former Yugoslavia. the latest of a long line of things to see are the spomeniks (what a brilliant word!) - ar memorials form tito's time. see more on trendland.

cosmography of the local universe

Cosmography of the Local Universe (FullHD version) from Daniel Pomarède on Vimeo.

sit down and relax. you just can't not like this....

iain banks

back in the day i used to have a mate of mine who loved the books of iain banks in both m and non-m incarnations. myself, i was never drawn to them, especially the culture novels, but, my mate being my mate, i read all the other books just so that i had substance to my continuing non-fussiness towards them.

eventually, what with the arrival of the internet, fanboy had been in touch with banks and was meeting him for a pint just down the road. i was well up for it but i was told, in no uncertain terms,  that seeing as i didn't even like his books i couldn't be trusted to go and meet him, my mate confusing, as it seems lots of readers do, the books with the person who wrote them.

which was a shame as i'd been anticipating a decent banter. tho in the end i never ended up meeting banks i know plenty other people who did and none of them have a bad word to sat about him. he seems to have been very approachable with respect to his fans and retained a genuine enthusiasm for his work.

it's curious to me to see a lot of what's been written about the 'loss' of the books he might have written as opposed to all that he left behind for when he wasn't there. from my own perspective where i have letters, pictures etc made by people no longer here it's a bittersweet comfort but a comfort nonetheless.

so it may be that i didn't like his books and it may be i wasn't the best fit for that scottish male, whisky drinker of a certain age who appear to hold him in a great deal of affection but i do have the sense of the loss of yet another of life's good guys. if anything banks' early demise is a reminder to treasure the people around us as there is never certainty as to just how long they'll be with us.

so fare well iain banks and all the other good guys who have departed. maybe keep a glass in the next world...

a delicate battle

years ago, when i was wee, i saw rudolf nureyev dancing on the tv, a black and white sequence, just him. i'd never seen anything like it, never seen anyone shaped like him , could move like him. wow, i thought, i wish i could grow up to be that. need less to say in the scotland of those days with a father like mine it was never going to happen. and that was before i realised i was too short and most likely, too unbendy.

i never lost that moment when it came to dancers. it's a bittersweet thing -  i'm still too short, certainly way too unbendy but now i'm too old as well! but when i watch something like the above i get swept up in all the possibility of human movement.

it's a half hour. get a cup of tea, sit down and immerse yourself....