On the Limits of Memory

"...the new science of memory tells us that remembering is just that: a story. Memories are not stashed away, fully formed, in the vaults of the brain; they are constructed, when needed, according to the demands of the present. And they are soberingly fragile as a result. You can have vivid memories for things that never happened, and you can come away with only the sketchiest recollections of events that actually did." More here.

This is very appealing to me, and probably the basis for a lot of my art. (Some new drawings coming soon, by the way!)

images via square america.

Charles and Ray Eames ad for Polaroid

This is gorgeous.



via TeenAngster


Bonus pic of Ray Eames:

via Door Sixteen.

How to Brood Without Getting Depressed

Apparently, the Russians know how to do this well:

When Russians engaged in brooding self-analysis, they were much more likely to engage in self-distancing, or looking at the past experience from the detached perspective of someone else. Instead of reliving their confused and visceral feelings, they reinterpreted the negative memory , which helped them make sense of it. According to the researchers, this led to significantly less “emotional distress” among the Russian subjects. (It also made them less likely to blame another person for the event.) Furthermore, the habit of self-distancing seemed to explain the striking differences in depressive symptoms between Russian and Americans. Brooding wasn’t the problem. Instead, it was brooding without self-distance.

Read more here.

Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (image via Pour Porter)

Listening to:

Twilight Zone Love

It's a shame this tribute has to be silent (due to copyright kerfuffle), but even so.  Nobody does it better than Rod Serling.



from And Your Little Blog, Too

"Mid-Century Modern" advertising for current technology

These are kind of fun:

(via boingboing)

Billykirk

I really like Billykirk. They make beautiful, useful, well-constructed things. Perhaps a bit expensive, but their work will last for years and years, and not be out of style in 15 minutes. Secret Forts has an post that is filled with pictures of Chris and Kirk Bray's work space in New Jersey here.

Abandoned Amusement Parks

Head over to How To Be a Retronaut for the slideshow. Tom Waits would be an excellent musical accompaniment (I recommend Mule Variations).

TED Talks: 5 dangerous things for kids

This is a great short video from TED Talks (if you don't know about these, you are missing a great resource). Thank God my kids had a father who did 4 out 5 of these things with them while I cowered in the background (not really, I think I hid my hysteria quite well). He even made an atlatl so they could throw spears even farther. They lit fires, had pocket knives, threw spears, and took apart appliances of all kinds.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."

~T.H. White, The Once and Future King

(photo by Nick Brandt via Bliss)

Long (17 pages) but fascinating article about the convoluted world of art authentication and forgery in the New Yorker. (This gets as crazy as any art theft mystery novel.)

La Bella Principessa, artist and date unknown. Some have attributed it to da Vinci, but this is a controversial finding.