Nag on the Lake: March 2016

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Japan’s Beautiful “Flower Rafts”

Japanese poets once described cherry blossoms on the river water as “hanaikada” which means “flower raft” and refers to the clusters of flowers that float along the surface of a body of water after fluttering down from nearby trees.

More here

The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair

A modernist, techno-utopia landed in New York in 1939, rocketing kids from the Depression into 'The World of Tomorrow.'

Rare color film footage of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair:

World Fair from Aeon Video on Vimeo.

Via

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

How Needles Are Made

Via

A Lesson in Table Manners

Here is Patty Duke at the age of 16 in a powerful scene from The Miracle Worker.

The Chawed Rosin

Creepy Film

A woman. An old apartment. Pictures.
PUZZLE is a short film from Vincent Templement

PUZZLE [short film] from Vincent Templement on Vimeo.

Via: Kuriositas

Huge Mural Pays Homage to Cairo’s Garbage Collectors

The French-Tunisian artist eL Seed assembled a team to paint a large mural across ore than 50 buildings in the neighborhood that is home to Cairo’s garbage collectors. The piece references the Mubarak government's decision during the swine flu epidemic in 2009 to kill all of Egypt’s pigs, including thousands kept by the garbage collectors, who used them to consume organic waste. The mural, a circle of orange, white and blue in Arabic calligraphy, quotes a third-century Coptic Christian bishop who said, “If one wants to see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes.”

The viewer's perspective affects what is seen:

From the streets of the neighborhood, the painting appears in fragments: above a courtyard where members of one family carefully search for recycling in bags of trash, or looming over a rooftop occupied by a handful of sheep. The bracing scale of the mural is fully visible only from the Mokattam Hill on the edge of the district, near a famous cathedral carved inside a cave.

Images: David Degner for The New York Times

Read about the obstacles facing the artist as he created the mural: The New York Times

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A Border Billboard Framing The Sky

Seattle-based atelier Lead Pencil Studio installed a billboard entitled ‘Non-Sign II’ on the US-Canada border. Rather than displaying information, the sign draws attention to the surrounding landscape and sky. Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio state, “In the effort to downplay the significance of crossing a border, the work is intentionally non-declarative and open in all respects – materially, perceptually, and thematically.”

Images: Lead Pencil StudioMore: iGNANT.de

Thanks Bruce!

Pay It Forward Poster

FPO (For Print Only), a blog dedicated to the visual stimulus and the detailing of the development and production of printed matter, discovered a beautifully written letter from Benjamin Franklin that shows the pay-it-forward philosophy. They have created a poster based on the letter using modern typography, illustration, and design styles, bringing the final design to life by hot-stamping copper foil on colored papers.

The poster is available for purchase for $25:

Thanks Bruce!

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The Sultan Of Squeezeboxes

88 year old Alex Carozza is New York City's last accordion repairman. He works on these complicated instruments in a cramped studio with his 93-year-old assistant.

The Sultan Of Squeezeboxes: New York City's Last Accordion Repairman from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

Via Colossal

Edible Sound

Musician, artist, producer and writer Matthew Herbert (aka DJ Foodie Food) has created audio recordings of ingredients widely-used in processed food, etching them, via laser-cutting technology, onto various consumable items. The outcome is an assortment of edible records

Link
Via Foodiggity

Watch Peruvian River Change Its Path Over Time

Landsat imagery of the Ucayali river in Peru shows how it changes over the years; an oxbow lake forms, islands grow and fade in the channel, and a smaller river is "eaten" at the top left.

Link

Via Boing Boing

The Graffiti at Pompeii

Ancient graffiti in Pompeii, in the style typical for a political campaign.
(Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Flickr)

The writings on the walls of Pompeii bear a resemblance to graffiti scrawled on walls for millennia. The oldest known graffiti at Pompeii is an ancient "Kilroy was here". Or, more precisely, “Gaius Pumidius Diphilus was here,” along with a time stamp, which historians have dated to October 3, 78 B.C.

"There are declarations of love (“Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze sweetly.”); insults (“Sanius to Cornelius: Go hang yourself!”); and remembrances (“Pyrrhus to his chum Chias: I’m sorry to hear you are dead, and so, goodbye!”). There are also billboard-esque painted inscriptions that included political campaign messages, advertisements for Gladiatorial games, and other public notices—like the equivalent of a giant flyer for a lost horse."

Read more about Pompeii's graffiti and the ancient origins of social media.

Mum Has Fun With Cardboard Cutout Of Son

Twenty-two-year-old Dalton Ross from Tennessee jokingly sent a cutout picture of himself to his mother to keep her company while he studies in London. She's having so much fun with it she hardly notices that he's gone. The cutout Dalton also seems to be having a blast.

Link
Via

Aerial Views of Landscape Design

Walking through a garden is a treat for the senses. You can feel the velvety softness of lamb's ears or be swept away by the intoxicating scent of viburnum but these bird’s-eye views of some of the world's most magnificent gardens delight the eye.

Chenonceaux castle, built on River Cher, France

The Great Garden at the Herrenhaeuser Gardens in Hanover, Germany

André Le Nôtre’s mazelike gardens at Versailles

Botanical Garden in Curitiba, Brazil

The gardens at the Château de la Roche Courbon

These meticulously planned gardens make me ashamed of my tangled mess out back.

More gardens from above: Architectural Digest

Monday, March 28, 2016

Gaelic Multitasking

Scottish women carrying 30 kilos of peat and knitting at the same time on the Isle of Lewis back in 1916. Multitasking at its finest.

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Bror Anders Wikstrom's Float Designs, 1898 - 1904

Bror Anders Wikstrom (1854–1909) designed the carnival parades of the Krewe of Proteus from 1900 to 1910. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm and later in Paris before setting out to make his fortune in America. In 1883 Wikstrom came to New Orleans. His entree to the world of carnival came when he began to work as assistant to Rex's float and costume designer Charles Briton. When Briton died, Wikstrom succeeded him and continued to design for Rex, and later for Proteus, until his death in 1909.

The Devil's Basket, float design from Krewe of Proteus, 1898

Dragon, float design from Krewe of Proteus, 1904

The Beneficent Frog, float design from Krewe of Proteus, 1900

The bulk of Wikstrom's Proteus designs are housed at Tulane University. Unfortunately, very few of his Rex designs have survived.

More here and here

Thanks Bruce!

Day and Night Timelapse of London

This time-lapse of London by the filmmaker Matel combines day and night views of the city in each frame as a diptych.

London Day and Night from matel on Vimeo.

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A Stained Glass Refuge

Stained-glass artist Neile Cooper is crafting her dream space: a woodland cabin with walls and a ceiling composed completely of her meticulous stained-glass designs. The cabin is nestled in the pine and maple trees behind her home on a quiet residential street in Sparta, New Jersey.

Neile devoted a summer to collecting 45 old windows to salvage. Her mother helped source the majority of the windows from Craigslist and car boot sales. Her boyfriend's father helped her custom-build the frame of the cabin to hold the salvaged windows. Together, they built the entire cabin (which measures 8-feet wide by 12-feet long by 10-feet tall) to be a simple and airy space that lets in the changing light of the day and colours of the seasons.

Read more

More photos

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Sir Vival, the safety car from a future that wasn't

Designed by Walter C. Jerome of Worcester, Mass., Sir Vival was the subject of a feature in the April 1959 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. The magazine billed it as the “Last Word in Safety Cars?” Despite its “startling unorthodox two-section” design and shocking $10,000 price tag (a Cadillac Series 62 started at around $5,000), Mechanix Illustrated chose to play it straight, highlighting the car's numerous safety features.

Here's a photo of a surviving Sir Vival:

Read a high-resolution scan of the Mechanic Illustrated article at Autoweek
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Hilary Roberts' Favourite Shots Of London

Hilary Roberts from the Imperial War Museum chooses her ten favourite shots of London:

Edward Barber: Greenham Common protesters stage a die-in outside the
Stock Exchange during the morning rush hour as US President Reagan arrives in
Britain, City of London, 1982

Cecil Beaton: Bomb damage, Bloomsbury Square, London, 1940

Horace Nicholls: The coffin of the Unknown Warrior, 1920

Londoners Stuck In Traffic In The 1980s

In May 1986 photographer Chris Dorley-Brown, armed with a Rolleifex, Dorley-Brown set off around East London to take pics of the Rolls Royce privatization and the massive gridlock it caused. His series shows the bored and irritated faces of passengers and drivers stuck on the road.

He’s publishing these pictures again in a book titled ‘Drivers in the 1980s’.
Via

Francofonia

This intrigues me: Director Alexander Sokurov applies his uniquely personal vision onto staged re-enactments and archives for this fascinating portrait of real-life characters Jacques Jaujard and Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich and their compulsory collaboration at the Louvre Museum under the Nazi Occupation

Link

The First Probe by Robert Vanderhorst

A primitive emotion probes into the fabric of civilized minds. No matter how benign and secure the environment appears, even cautious exploration can change forever how we see our surroundings.
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid -- Vermeer, c. 1670-1671

The First Probe by Canadian surrealist artist Robert Vanderhorst.
Original music composed and performed by Nash the Slash

Stardust Motels by Anna Carey

In her series Stardust Melbourne visual artist Anna Carey creates cardboard constructions of iconic Stardust motels from across Australia and the Americas. The models are based on iconic architecture which she documents through photography and video to express a psychological sensibility beyond the physical facades.

666 East Foothill Boulevard, Azusa...then 2015, 70 x 105cm Giclee print

517 North Vine Street, Hollywood...then 2015, 70 x 105cm Giclee print

910 Collins Aveue, Miami...then 2015, 70x 105cm Giclee print

Stardust can be viewed at Artereal Gallery in Sydney, Australiat hrough Apr. 2.
More: Faith is Torment

The Trapdoor Spider

This is the cyclosmis (or trapdoor spider). It has a mask-like hardened plate on the posterior (opisthosoma) of its body that resembles an ancient coin! This genus of spider lives in burrows, and it uses the hardened plate to block the entrance when it's threatened by predators such as spider wasps.

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'Sistine Chapel of the Early Middle Ages' Reopens

A part of the interiors of Basilica di Santa Maria Antiqua at Roman Fori
Photo: EPA

The sixth-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum was buried under debris from an earthquake in AD 847. It has reopened to the public after 30 years of painstaking restoration. Its exquisite interior contains some of the world’s earliest Christian art, multi-coloured frescoes of saints, martyrs, angels and emperors.