All posts by keith

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Monday Musings –8JAN24

Bringing together recent videos with a new body of photographs and prints that sets written words aside in favor of mark-making outside of text, Unsewn Time asks us to consider our relationships to unpredictable change and ruptures in time.

Source: Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Unsewn Time | The Art Institute of Chicago

For Unsewn Time, Rasheed worked with mark making, rubbing, folding, chemical reactions, and other material explorations to consider how meaning is conveyed in forms that are created through intimate rituals and improvisational processes. Rasheed painted and collaged directly on light-sensitive photographic paper to create two large-scale works for the exhibition. She played with the quantity, order, and duration of applying photographic developer and fixer, as well as the introduction of slivers of light. She also worked with materials such as vaseline, ink, and rubbing alcohol, consciously ceding control and letting chance effects guide her working process. In addition to these material interactions, she considered her full body as an important tool in this process. In her home studio, she used the weight of her walking or rolling over the paper with her body to create marks, impressions, and varying distribution of chemicals.

And here’s how to make yourself a little alcohol heater, in case you lose power. This is a small one but you can make them bigger.

That’s it for today. Nothing profound here.

Health

Why you should grow and keep big muscles · Today Purpose

 

Source: Why you should grow and keep big muscles · Today Purpose

Life isn’t just about how long we live; it’s about how well we live it. We often hear about increasing our lifespan, but is a longer life worth it if we can’t move and become dependent on others? What’s equally, or even more important, is enhancing our healthspan—the period during which we enjoy a good quality of life. From what I’ve observed when talking to older people, they care more about “improving the quality of their life” than “living a longer life”

Imagine being unable to engage in activities you love, like traveling, playing with kids, hiking, or even just gardening. The loss of functional ability can lead to a diminished the enjoyment we have in life.

What can you do to maintain your independence, relationships, and dignity? I believe the answer lies in working out, especially resistance training that helps keeping our strength

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The Cooperative That Could – The American Prospect

How S Group became Finland’s most dominant retailer

Source: The Cooperative That Could – The American Prospect

 

S Group’s quiet efficiency is instructive for American leftists as well. Perhaps thanks to the heavy influence of academics on the American left, we have a habit of producing analysis from 30,000 feet, or based on highly abstract metaphysical theories. S Group reminds us of the value of practical expertise and concrete benefits for the broader population. For any institution of serious size to benefit people, careful attention must be paid to the dull details of management and logistics.

S Group might not be the most sizzling, eye-catching subject in the world. But sometimes, it turns out, great successes are like that.

Monday Musings

Monday Musings — 1 JAN2024

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Happy New Year!

Don’t Make a “New” New Year’s Resolution

You don’t have to wait until the New Year to make a resolution. And you also don’t have to make a new resolution because it’s a new year. You can choose to have less stress and more success anytime by updating the meaning behind old goals, picking a quick win to cross off your list, and by helping someone achieve something that matters to them.

That’s my advice for you all (and Psychology Today’s).

I’m hoping this will be a better year than 2023. Spent a lot of time in the hospital. Don’t like that. My energy levels have sucked, especially towards the end of the year. Got to figure that out. Part of the problem is chemo drugs, part is that food doesn’t always taste good to me. Even trying to choke down a scrambled egg is hard sometimes. No resolution will fix that, but I’ll figure something out.

I am starting a new thing though. 30 days of drawing for 10 minutes, each morning. I belong to a group that’s doing this so hopefully we can keep each other on it. I may post the drawings here also.

Art

Monet’s Poplars

Source: Monet’s Poplars

 

Monet’s Poplars series 


Apparently, Monet was at work on three different groups of the same trees (in the end, there were 23 paintings in all) each group with its own compositional format, when he learned the trees were going to be cut down. So, he did what any self-respecting art god would do – he bought them.


Monet made most of the Poplars paintings in the summer and fall of 1891. He saw them while rowing toward the “floating studio” he kept moored further up river. They stood single file along an “s-curve” in the river, and you just have to look at the paintings to see why he fell hard for them. 

The trees, which belonged to the commune of Limetz, were indeed auctioned off for lumber. Monet therefore was forced into buying the trees to keep them standing long enough to finish painting them. Once he’d completed the series, he sold the trees back to the lumber merchant who wanted them.


Thus the world still has that graceful, elliptical geometry of light, leaf, breeze and branch, and we have one very focused and very successful never-say-die painter to thank for it.