This is a resource to bookmark immediately. . . the “Taxidermy, Cryptozoology & Animal Curiosa Ãœberpost” from Wurzeltod.
I’ve previously posted on Jessica Joslin, Tia Resleure, Ron Pippin, Hajime Emoto, and Colette Calascione. Just look how much more there is to go!
Made in Transit: oyster mushrooms
Agata Jaworska
On Saturday I went to the farmer’s market to snag some nectarines and peaches. Unfortunately, by Tuesday they’d gone bad already, which left me wondering what farmers do with all the peaches and nectarines that become ripe on Monday: they can’t possibly last to Saturday’s market. Are they composted? Juiced? I have no idea.
The short shelf life of fresh produce is incompatible with our centralized, artificial metropolitan structure and shopping habits. That’s why supermarkets have tried everything, including genetic engineering (remember the flavr savr tomato?) to make fruit ripen more slowly, so it can survive transport and remain appetizing long enough to sell. Now here’s a nifty new idea, called “Made in Transit”: grow the food while it’s being shipped!
No, it won’t work for a peach, but mushrooms could keep right on growing in your grocery bag until you get around to using them. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Via culiblog.
Every biologist secretly craves seafood counters labeled “Crustacea” in beautiful art deco lettering. Thank you, Harrods.
Portobello Road, London
This is not what I usually envision when I think of “Chelsea galleries.” But to be fair, their Chelsea did come first.
imaginative/anachronistic illustration of the Bushnell Turtle
unknown artist
Submarine artist/tattoist Duke Riley and compatriots were cited Friday morning in NYC for towing a “strange-looking” replica Revolutionary War sub near the Queen Mary 2. The strange sub is apparently modeled on the Bushnell Turtle. Several Turtle recreations have tested, including one by the students of Old Saybrook High School.
Riley’s version can be seen in action in this flickerset:
And here’s a lovely steampunk version of the Turtle by Rick and Laura Brown (2003):
The Browns’ sub model is prettier, but Duke Riley handily wins the contest for best artist’s statement:
My work addresses the prospect of residual but forgotten unclaimed frontiers on the edge and inside overdeveloped urban areas, and their unsuspected autonomy.
I had to read that one a few times. And it gets weirder. According to Riley’s website,
From 1992 to 1997, I lived and worked in an 8 by 10 foot pigeon coop constructed out of a widow’s walk on the roof of an old dilapidated building in Providence, RI. I shared the space with both domestic and street pigeons.
Wouldn’t it have been great if he took pigeons along in the Turtle?
Bernard Palissy, 1565-1585
As promised, here’s the Palissy snake serving dish from the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s very similar to the one from the British Museum, except that the colors in this piece seem much brighter. I like the duller plate at the BM better, but that’s kind of like preferring the unrestored Sistine Chapel to the brightly colored version Michaelangelo (presumably) intended. We have an irrational attraction to patina in this technological age. The variety of shells and leaves evoke Palissy’s interest in fossils – I wonder if he intended this selection of specimens to represent a certain geographical area, or just combined whatever organisms he thought would look yummiest under some stew?
A long daybreak jog around Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, while listening to Scissors for Lefty: sufficient dopamine for at least 24 hours. Not to mention the serotonin.
Ok, this is just plain bizarre. It’s a row of faux books that, when activated by a motion sensor, move, mutter unintelligibly, and howl with electronic feedback. I laughed at the video. And I love that the book which jumps out at the victim is Silas Marner. I really would be terrified if I had to read that book again. But aren’t there more sensible choices for a haunted book, like The Turn of the Screw, or Rebecca?
via Boing Boing
The Lady of Shalott, 1888
John William Waterhouse
I arrived at the Tate Britain (better known by its former name, the Tate Gallery) Monday morning, only to discover that their entire inventory of pre-Raphaelites had been removed from display a few hours before.
I nearly had an American temper tantrum on the spot. Adoration of the pre-Raphaelite collection (including Millais’ Ophelia, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, etc.) was my entire reason for visiting. I could have easily gone to the Tate last week had I known of the impending change. There was no warning on their website, and the museum’s rep admitted it wasn’t planned until next week. My travel karma is seriously awry!
Luckily, the excursion was salvaged. I saw one Rossetti, his late work Proserpine, and four paintings by Burne-Jones and Waterhouse, who are usually shoehorned in with Rossetti and Millais but in this case were in the next (not emptied) room over. Very lucky for me indeed, since Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott may be my favorite. painting. ever.
I know the last decade’s surfeit of pre-Raphaelite nostalgia has made everyone heartily sick of large-eyed, anguished damsels. But this painting has been part of my psyche for over twenty years, just as long as The Lord of the Rings. As with LOTR, no amount of popular abuse can diminish my affection for it.
Background on the Lady of Shalott/Elaine of Astolat
Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (text and more and more)
Waterhouse depicted this story three times. This painting is his earliest, and I think, the best, although I also love his 1894 version. I prefer Waterhouse’s versions over those of his contemporaries because all three are portraits – his Lady has a personality. She’s the legendary victim of unrequited love, of course, but she’s not passive. She chooses her own destiny (or is willfully self-destructive) when she chooses to look out the window at Lancelot. She’s haunted. She’s despairing. She’s angry. She represents the tension between the cloistered, unreal sphere of art (“I am half-sick of shadows”) and the passionate sphere of the body. And of course, fueling infinite feminist analyses, she represents how women have historically been punished for violating social constraints and embracing their independence or sexuality:
Nevertheless, it is hard to read his, or the other, images as anything but an oblique account of the confined and restricted world of the Victorian woman–accursed and prohibited by virtue of her sex alone–and the dire consequences attendant on rebellion. The rejection of seclusion in the shadowy sphere of prescribed femininity, where the approved activity is weaving or embroidery, leads immediately to ostracism and social death. The enclosed rooms in which these ladies live, looking out on inviting sunlit landscapes, and the tangled threads binding their vigorous limbs, are surely metaphors of woman’s condition, signifying the docile, passive, reflective and domestic role that dominated Victorian ideas of femininity. The lady cannot break from her constraints: her gesture of independence provokes the curse. It is interesting that most artists chose to depict this particular moment, so that their ladies are frozen forever in their decision of defiance (Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women, 1987).
At the Tate, I saw few details that my close (ok, obsessive) examination of this painting in books and posters hadn’t already revealed. But one pleasant surprise was that most of the painting, aside from the face, is almost impressionistic, thick with buttery smudges of paint. The tapestry draped from the boat is especially rough, almost coarse.
To me, the strength of the brushstrokes seemed better suited to the magnitude of the themes involved than the pretty, polished impression one gets from a reproduction. Millions of dorm room posters notwithstanding (and despite Lancelot’s insipid comment “she has a lovely face,”) this is not a pretty painting at all – it’s downright frightening. If you get what I mean by that, then you probably like the painting as much as I do.
one of my favorite xkcds. . .
