Pages

▼

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Nikon’s Online Photography Classes Are Free Through April.

“I’m not sure why, it’s just something I feel I have to do.  The story has to end….We can never move forward unless we see ourselves for what we are, until we accept that we still live with the vestiges of our most primitive reptilian ancestors.  There’s a crocodile lurking within all of us, just below the placid surface of our civility, ready to lunge at the first hint of threat, or opportunity.  Perhaps, too, I just need some sort of catharsis.  I won’t be able to move on until I’ve told the whole story.” 
– Maya Duran, in opening chapter.  Zulfu Livaneli–SERENADE FOR NADIA

 NEWS YOU CAN USE: Nikon’s Online Photography Classes Are Free Through April


Emergency Aid To Artists (Without Lots Of Paperwork)


The emergency package has an initial pot of $10 million for 2,000 grantees. The funds are culled from the operations budgets of the seven US-based organizations: Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists. With most of the arts programming cancelled, the grants-giving organizations formed a group to design a mechanism that will allow them to give money to artists directly. – Quartz

A New Online Job Market For Artists


HireArtists.org is designed to work similarly to TaskRabbit or Fiverr, websites that link gig workers to employers looking for people to do one-off jobs. It invites photographers, dancers, and website designers, among those in other disciplines, to sell their skills and knowledge to anyone looking for art lessons, or even to buy artworks. It’s free to sign up, and unlike other sites, HireArtists doesn’t collect a fee. – Artnet 


brainpickings – “A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.”

“In this collection of essays on classical literature, Calvino also produces these 14 definitions of a “classic”…



Anne Lamott’s Wondrous Letter to Children About Books as Antidotes to Isolation, Portals to Perspective, and Crucibles of Self-Discovery

“Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits.”


The World’s Great Photographers, Many Stuck Inside, Have Snapped

Stephen Shore, Catherine Opie, Todd Hido and others have turned to Instagram to cure ‘corona claustrophobia’ or show how life has changed. They talk about their quarantine pics. 





'Tiny vestibules of happiness': Street libraries help bind communities ties


Despite public libraries being closed, there's still a place where people can go to satisfy a bookish urge at anytime of the day.

As someone who a) thinks Dr. Dre was an amazing producer, and b) read Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks to his children roughly 1 million times (enough to be able to, eventually, get through the entire book at a comically high rate of speed w/o any tongue twisting slip-ups), I thought Wes Tank’s video of himself rapping Fox in Socks over Dre’s beats was really fun and surprisingly well done.
Tank has also done Green Eggs and Ham (over the beats from Forgot About Dre) and The Lorax. 

the Correspondent – That’s bad news for everyone – 98% of all animal species on Earth have a PR problem - Insects do all the dirty work. They process faeces and decompose corpses. Plus they pollinate flowers. In spite of this, their image sucks. We need to change that. Because a dramatic decline in invertebrates threatens the liveability of this green planet.

        They've announced the longlists for this year's Orwell Prize for Political Writing (twelve titles) and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (thirteen titles). 
       Quite a few big names on the fiction list -- including Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other -- but none of them are under review at the complete review

        I have to admit I am impressed and amused by how quickly some writers adjust to changing circumstances, as described in The Guardian's fun feature on Filth in a time of handwashing: why lockdown erotica is the hottest trend in publishing. 
       I don't think I'll get to any of these, but apparently there is an audience out there for this. 


 This is one of the best DIY mask designs I've seen. Two thin layers of cloth with a pouch to insert a paper towel or tissue. Tested with a single paper towel, the mask achieved "73.7% filtration efficiency at 0.3 micron"
at