Entirely

Dansons: Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouadbellah’s...

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 06:20:16 -0400

Dansons: Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouadbellah’s bellydancing comment on the Marseillaise.

Human Terrain Systems and Montgomery McFate

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:20:11 -0400

Human Terrain Systems and Montgomery McFate:

The military uses and abuses of anthropology, from Northern Ireland to Afghanistan.

"CHIANG MAI, Thailand — William Young, a missionary’s son who mixed evangelical zeal with covert..."

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:08:00 -0400

“CHIANG MAI, Thailand — William Young, a missionary’s son who mixed evangelical zeal with covert missions for the C.I.A. in Southeast Asia and who helped organize the “secret war “ in Laos for the United States during the Vietnam War, died on Friday at his home here in northern Thailand. He was 76.”

- William Young, Who Helped U.S. Organize Secret War in Laos, Is Dead at 76 - NYTimes.com

Immaculate Heart College Art Department rules, written by...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:25:00 -0400

Immaculate Heart College Art Department rules, written by graphic artist Sister Corita Kent.

How to steal like an artist

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:11:00 -0400

How to steal like an artist:

All advice is autobiographical.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself.

Austin Kleon

Poles to Dinner: Charles Keeping drawing of Poles in London...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 08:55:00 -0400

Poles to Dinner: Charles Keeping drawing of Poles in London after the war.

Indirect Praise: A memorial to the kind of education British governments now think useless

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:50:26 -0400

Indirect Praise: A memorial to the kind of education British governments now think useless:

Britain is entering a new constitutional period after a gigantic reduction of local government democracy, also the biggest sale of public property since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, the abolition of common land in the 1820s. Even Britain’s public water supply, the greatest…

Who?

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:47:00 -0400

Sofia Kovalevskaya: the first major Russian female mathematician, responsible for important original contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe. She was also a nihilist.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt: an American astronomer. A graduate of Radcliffe College, Leavitt went to work in 1893 at the Harvard College Observatory in a menial capacity as a ‘computer’, assigned to count images on photographic plates. Study of the plates led Leavitt to propound a groundbreaking theory, worked out while she laboured as a $10.50-a-week assistant, that was the basis for the pivotal work of astronomer Edwin Hubble. Leavitt’s discovery of the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables radically changed the theory of modern astronomy, an accomplishment for which she received almost no recognition during her lifetime.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: a British astrophysicist who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars. Her supervisors received the Nobel Prize: she did not.

'Empowering but not consolatory': RIP Diana Wynne Jones

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:59:00 -0400

'Empowering but not consolatory': RIP Diana Wynne Jones:

One of the darkest and funniest of late 20th century children’s writers. Farah Mendlesohn writes:

Diana’s books are empowering but not consolatory: in many, lonely, neglected children such as David, in Eight Days of Luke, Kathleen in Dogsbody, or the sisters in Time of the Ghost, learn to fight back against the adults who control their lives with careless cruelty, but too often learn that they can’t fight back without help, or must wait until they grow older and until then must simply survive. Sometimes, as in The Spellcoats, it is not clear that the children do survive.

From Adrienne Rich's 'Shooting Script'

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:23:00 -0500

Courtesy of the extraordinary Needled:

“Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you
came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.

Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the
web of cracks filtering across the plaster.

To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the
initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the
lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the
glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.

To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map
of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.

To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in
your old neighborhood.”

Kway Chung Factory, a 2001 picture by Red Saunders. This...

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:18:00 -0500

Kway Chung Factory, a 2001 picture by Red Saunders. This postcard came from the now-defunct Scout Gallery: I can’t find another copy of this image anywhere.

It reminds me of a monster version of the sand and gravel works dotted around Tyrone, but I can’t find any details of what the factory produced.

La Marianna, an eighties glamour girl who came wrapped around...

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:13:00 -0500

La Marianna, an eighties glamour girl who came wrapped around some blood oranges. An omen for the girl who arrived three weeks later.

Ladakhi coats

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:40:00 -0500

I saw two extraordinary coats today, in a central Asian textile shop called the Turkmen Gallery near Victoria. Heavy homespun indigo wool, cut like frock coats but wrapping and tying at the front. Bands of faded red madder homespun on the sleeves. Extremely full gored skirt, calf/ankle length. The gores were in the same faded madder, with tie-dyed circles of the ‘evil eye’ variety. Tailoring was rough and ready, but the cut was so austere yet flamboyant that they were two of the most spectacular things in the shop (and this was a shop full of amazing central Asian textiles).

The woman in the shop told me they were from Ladakh. I think they are the Ladakhi national dress, which apparently is called a goncha.

They looked as if they might have been in fashion any time in the last four thousand years, anywhere from western Europe to the Tarim Basin. I can’t find a good picture of one online anywhere - may have to go back and take one.

The shop also had an exquisite Ladakhi monk’s robe of a much straighter and simpler cut, in a deep maroon woollen homespun. The dyeing was irregular enough that it had a very delicate self stripe.

This coat, from Zanskar on the Ladakh/Tibet border, is apparently made from yak wool. It’s a bit more colourful but has the tie-dyed eyes, the stripey sleeves and the indigo/madder colour scheme, although its gores come from under the armpits rather than the waist.