obliterated
she just wanted to blend in: 02/01/2002 - 03/01/2002
she just wanted to blend in
the use of hands as a form of meditation
2/24/2002
in the eyes of the beholder
Beauty is back. "Beauty is not marginal and unimportant, not merely subjective, not an effect of something else such as social power or libido, and not idiosyncratic to the individual," writes Frederick Turner, the founders professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, in his manifesto "Beauty: The Value of Values."
He says: "It is central to all meaningful human life and achievement, it gives access to the objective reality of the universe, it is an independent and powerful experience in its own right, and it is culturally universal. . . . Its absence in the family, in schools, and in public life is a direct cause of the worst of our social problems."
The belief that theories of nature at its most fundamental level must be beautiful has none the less proved to be a valuable guide to theoreticians. To Einstein, especially, beauty was the prime requirement of any theory if it was to be taken seriously.....Steven Weinberg shares with Einstein a belief that beauty is a lodestar for fundamental theorists. Einstein's eldest son Hans once said that his father's character was more like that of an artist than a scientist as one usually thinks of them: "[For Einstein], the highest praise for a good theory was not that it was correct nor that it was exact but that it was beautiful." Weinberg's aesthetic sensibilities are equally strong, although he is careful to stress that the beauty of scientific theories is not a synonym for mere attractiveness but a special kind of beauty shared by some great works of art.
Reliability Theory Applied To Aging And Longevity...Our bodies’ backup systems don’t prevent aging, they make it more certain...Interestingly, the relative differences in mortality rates across nations and gender decrease with age: Although people living in the U.S. have longer life spans on average than people living in countries with poor health and high mortality, those who achieve the oldest-old age in those countries die at rates roughly similar to the oldest-old in the U.S. ...humans are built from the ground up, starting off with a few cells that differentiate and multiply to form the systems that keep us operating. But even at birth, the cells that make up our systems are full of faults that would kill primitive organisms lacking the redundancies that we have built in.
“It’s as if we were born with our bodies already full of garbage,"
Mark Turner Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism
In this book, Mark Turner shows that the languages of literature and everyday life are different expressions of the same universal mechanisms of the mind. Drawing on the languages and metaphors of kinship and causation, and on myriad examples in English literature from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens, he argues convincingly that all our thinking with language depends on a restricted range of deep metaphors and inference patterns
wallflowers
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.... Charlie is a wallflower-shy, introspective, intelligent, and not very social savvy. His personality emerges through letters written to an unknown friend. Like any other freshman, Charlie is struggling to find his identity and a place to fit in. Charlie manages to survive his first year of high school, with the help of a teacher and his two friends, seniors Samantha and Patrick
T h e W a l l f l o w e r G a l l e r y.... ...no matter how great you pretend to be, it is not as great as you truly are; so peer behind the curtain of time, part the thin veil of illusion, travel to the kingdom beyond good and evil, the journey of no distance; be centered and know eternal flow, not to save your life, but to savor it...
Wallflower.... Cheiranthus allionii (Brassicaceae) A bushy biennial or perennial variety native to the Canary Islands, but has naturalized throughout much of northern North America. A charming species with an abundance of vivid orange flowers occurring on short, compact plants. The leaves are narrow 2-4 inches in length. Can withstand dry or moist conditions once established. Prefers partial shade or full sun in well-drained soils.
The Wallflower That Blossomed... Eleanor Roosevelt 1884 - 1962-- What started out as a shy, awkward child starving for love and recognition, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt blossomed over the years to become one of the world’s most admired women.
William Bayer's WALLFLOWER.... New York Police Lieutenant Frank Janek, hero of William Bayer's million-copy bestseller Switch, returns to solve his strongest, most obsessive, most dangerous case- Wallflower. Riveting psychological suspense, psychosexual intrigue and terror, a labyrinthine journey into a murderer's twisted, tormented past-all the hallmarks of William Bayer's extraordinary crime fiction are here. But with a new dimension. This time the case is personal. This time Janek is out for blood.
WALLFLOWER by bob dylan Wallflower, wallflower
Won't you dance with me?
I'm sad and lonely too.
Wallflower, wallflower
Won't you dance with me?
I'm fallin' in love with you.
Just like you I'm wondrin' what I'm doin' here.
Just like you I'm wondrin' what's goin' on.
Wallflower, wallflower
Won't you dance with me?
The night will soon be gone.
I have seen you standing in the smoky haze
And I know that you're gonna be mine one of these days,
Mine alone.
Wallflower, wallflower
Take a chance on me.
Please let me ride you home.
w a l l f l o w e r ... I'm a wallflower. I've recently decided it is my vocation in life. Don't laugh. I know just what you are thinking, mousy hair, 250lbs, 4 foot tall, and a face like the back of a bus. Well you're wrong... I only weigh 210 lbs. But being a wallflower isn't an easy job, no sirreee. You've got to work long and hard at perfecting the art of wallflowering. It takes a lot of hard work and commitment. So for anyone out there who ever wanted to fade into the scenery, or if you just want a few tips on escaping the dreaded 'Baldy Friend', read on.
Nook of A Wallflower.... I've always loved dandelions. They make me think of time that has gone by as they float in the air for a long time before settling down. Just like the past, which lingers on in present day before its impact on the present start to lessen... if ever.
a href="http://www.cuntzilla.org/issue1/wallflower.html">perils of being a queer wallpaper....<
Wallflower in a dream.... For a dream featuring the garden variety, see Flowers, but a dream of being one in the social sense is an omen of contrary and predicts an increase in popularity.
WALLFLOWER (Common) CHEIRANTHUS CHEIRI... It is a singular remedy for gout and aches and pains in the joints and sinews. A well-known garden plant. The cultivated varieties are biennial, whereas in the wild the Wallflower is perennial. The flowers are produced in spikes of yellow and are pleasantly scented. The seeds are small and flat and contained in long, slender, whitish pods. Where to find it: It grows on rocks and walls. Flowering time: Late spring, early summer. Astrology: The Moon rules this herb.
Medicinal virtues: A conserve made of the flowers is used as a remedy both for the apoplexy and palsy. It also cleanses the blood, frees the liver and reins from obstructions, provokes women's courses, expels the secundine and the dead child. It helps the hardness and pains of the mother and of the spleen. It stays inflammations and swellings and comforts and strengthens any weak part or bone out of joint.
A Wallflower's Coming Out... Jakob Dylan cannot recall the first time he saw the movie Don't Look Back or how many time he's seen it. “I just remember always knowing about it – it's the ultimate family photograph,” he says of D.A. Pennebaker's gripping all-access chronicle of the 1965 British concert tour by Jakob's father, Bob Dylan. “On one hand, it's the greatest rock documentary going. On the other hand, that's one of my parents when he was younger than me.” The elder Dylan was just shy of his twenty-fourth birthday when Pennebaker caught him riding the lightning of celebrity. Jakob, now a successful singer-songwriter in his own right with the Wallflowers, turned thirty last year.
Joy Allen, Author and Artist... In addition to depression, I developed multiple sclerosis and was having chronic health problems. Sewing, working with fabric, helped me discover the pleasure and restrative nature of handwork. I felt I was rconnected to a process that humans have been using since the beginning of time -- turning threads into cloth and cloth into craft. I was delighted to find that dolls have been used historically in healing rituals. Dolls also reconnect us to our childhood, when they listened to our secrets and told us of adventures awaiting us in the wide world.
tessellated
Totally Tessallated...In short, a tessellation is any repeating pattern of interlocking shapes. Tessellations are also sometimes known as tilings, but the word "tilings" usually refers to patterns of polygons (i.e., shapes with straight boundaries), which is a more restrictive category of repeating patterns.
What is a space-filling curve? What is the mathematical basis behind cryptography? How does the scanner at your grocery store know when it hasn't scanned a UPC number correctly? Now that Fermat's Last Theorem has been solved, what's the next big challenge for mathematicians? These questions and others are part of the explorations you will take in The Mathematical Explorer.
ornamentation
The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, published in London, 1856.....True beauty results from that repose which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, and the affections are satisfied from the absence of any want....
Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed. ..."That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful."
Ornament Research
The body is the physical link between ourselves, our souls, and the outside world . It is the medium through which we most directly project ourselves in social life;
our use and presentation of it say precise things about the society in which we live, the degree of our integration within that society, and the controls which s ociety
exerts over the inner man. -Victoria Ebin, The Body Decorated List of books on Tattoos and Tattooing
The Function of Body Modification and Ornamentationin Two Polynesian and Two Amazonian Cultures......Body modification and ornamentation plays a role in many cultures the world over. It has been used in rites of passage, in the calling of spirits, and to enhance beauty (Krakow, 17). The adornment of the body takes many forms. It can be as moderat e as body painting, hair styling, tattooing, scarification, and piercing, and as extreme as finger amputation and genital mutilation. The diversity of each culture's customs regarding body modification and the symbolism found therein reveals much about t he people's philosophy and societal standards.
about ornamentation -- The extent to which I dressed, groomed and accessorized my vulva used to be limited exclusively to trimming and removing its fur. For a while I entertained the idea of piercing it in some way. For a few years now I have been letting its beauty shine au naturel. Lately though, I have a new scheme.
I have always liked the idea of pictures on skin, but don't much like tattoos on my own personal skin. They don't come off. What I like is to be painted on.
more patterns
Emerging miniature patterns----It is the idea, which transcends a work into the realm of art, yet at the same time, the physical qualities (or restrains) also contribute in shaping an object of art. These include the artist's tools and materials, scale of work and the method of working. All of these, in their different proportions, affect the inside imagery and aesthetics of an artwork -- and perhaps to a greater extent than what appears on the surface.
Why are many women painters turning to pattern-making in their miniatures? The answer probably rests in the method of working.
PATTERN, MATHEMATICS & GAMES Great equations are just as rich a stimulus as poetry to the imagination. Shakespeare could no more have foreseen the multiple meanings that readers have perceived in "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" than Einstein could have predicted the myriad consequences of his equations of relativity.
(Áilleacht, pronounced AWL-lucht, is an Irish (Gaelic) word meaning "beauty.")
other
Palestinian culture and society was severely disrupted by the establishment of the state of Israel in northern, western and parts of southern Palestine in 1948. As a result of these hostilities, over half the rural population became refugees. Many more became refugees after the 1967 war. Costume and textile traditions have been vastly changed by these events. Very little remains from the decades of upheaval from the 1950s and 1960s. Traditional costume began to resurface in much plainer styles shortly after this period. Without access to locally woven goods or imported fabrics, costumes became less ornate, more practical. The distinction between special occasion and everyday wear was lost, and veils and elaborate headdresses became things of the past.
The moving of mass populations into refugee camps broke down traditions of highly evolved regional styles. Costumes became identifiable instead by certain general styles - the ‘6 branch’ and the shawal, designed originally for Western markets, amongst them. Costume also experienced a revival in the late 1980s during the intifada, where it was used as a means of passive protest and as an expression of Nationalist pride. Embroidery, produced in the refugee camps as a means of providing a stable income, now became the most enduring element of Palestinian cultural heritage. For a people stripped of national identity, costume remains the one device through which a fragmented heritage might yet re-establish itself. In the early 21st century Palestinian costume, against all odds, continues to survive and to maintain and renew it’s people’s cultural legacy.
Monet proclaimed that the "true colour of the atmosphere is violet - fresh air is violet", and to show it, he used cobalt and manganese violet pigments devised by chemists in the 1850s and 1860s. He also squeezed cobalt and cerulean blues, synthetic ultramarine, emerald green - French emerald, not the arsenical British wallpaper colourant that poisoned babes in their beds - viridian, chrome yellow and a crimson lake based on an aniline dye, all of which had been confected for the first time within the era of steam power. Only his vermilion red, an alchemical synthesis of sulphur and mercury, would have been familiar to a medieval artist. He did, however, use as a mixer lead white, which the Egyptians manufactured 2,000 years ago, with vinegar for acid and dung for carbon monoxide, rather than the new non-toxic zinc white. This was still expensive, although soon to be produced so cheaply that it replaced lead even for painting picket fences.
Chemists have reproduced the basic process of information transfer central to all life without the catalysts that facilitate it in living cells.1
They show that DNA alone can pass its message on to subsequent generations. Many researchers believe that DNA-like molecules acted thus to get life started about four billion years ago - before catalytic proteins existed to help DNA to replicate.
humankind's recent discovery of the World Wide Web has entailed a concomitant investigation of its fauna, and the birth of a new field, online zoology. SINGLECELL is a monthly bestiary of these newfound species: a collection of online life-forms discovered and reared by a diverse group of computational artists via subterranean
Pink should go with purple "Should" and "shouldn't" - two small words but with such power.
As my daughter was choosing her clothes this morning she came out with the statement "Pink should go with purple" and I found myself thinking how sad it was that even at four she is constrained in her choice of which colours to wear together by this sense of "should".
How much of what we become is a result of all the "should"s and "shouldn't"s we have picked up on our way through life? Indeed, how difficult it is to define ourselves in any other ways. I know I for one find it very difficult to work out what I really think independant of my conditioning.
The Talmud says: "A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter not read." via "If"
The work of Ali Omar Ermes has its roots in the Muslim Arab culture of the Near East and North Africa, and finds its expression in a calligraphic art form that embodies both a specific and etherial significance, alongside the more explicit decorative effects.
Calligraphy has a deeply religious meaning, since it is the tongue of the divine revelation, uttered by the Prophet Mohammed and enshrined in the Arabic Quran. These words have an incomparable holiness, far surpassing, for example, the reverence in the past accorded to the text of the Vulgate (the Latin Bible) in western Christianity. By extension, Arabic word and letter forms in general have inherited such elevated meaning, and it is via this vehicle that Ermes seeks to transcribe his art. The perfect curves, proportions and spacing of letters paint the spoken word. via BOOKNOTES
An Introduction to Neuraesthetics We Are All Neurasthenics! .....The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, an art which one can see has let itself be thrown by the explosions of the last week, which is forever gathering up its limbs after yesterday's crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, holding fast to the intellect of their time, bleeding from hands and hearts.
"Psychiatry knows traumatophile types," wrote Walter Benjamin in his classic interpretation of Baudelaire. This essay means to show that the Berlin dadaists were traumatophiles, too. The 1918 manifesto announces as much, and it does so with a crudeness typical of dada. In what follows, I shall claim that dada's conception of trauma and traumatophilia is more complex than the manifesto's febrile polemic might suggest. Like Baudelaire's, the dadaists' predilection for trauma was bound up in an appreciation of modernity and its problematics, represented in the manifesto's traumatic language as "the explosions of the last week" (die Explosionen der letzten Woche) and "yesterday's crash" (der Stoß des letzten Tages).
Main Entry: neur·as·the·nia Pronunciation: "nur-&s-'thE-nE-&, "nyur- Function: noun Etymology: New Latin Date: 1856
: an emotional and psychic disorder that is characterized especially by easy fatigability and often by lack of motivation, feelings of inadequacy, and psychosomatic symptoms
a stitch in time....
Knitters around the world have pulled together to save thousands of oil-soaked little penguins on Phillip Island, southern Australia.
Ten thousand penguin-sized, pure-wool jumpers have flooded into the offices of the Tasmanian Conservation Trust in response to their call for emergency insulation for a vulnerable population of world's smallest penguins - sometimes known as fairy penguins.
Last year a crude slick from an illegal discharge washed into the bird's shoreline rookeries. The oil threatened the breeding stock, clogging their waterproof insulating feathers, and preventing them making daily mid-ocean forays in search of food.
The Tasmanian Conservation Trust made a local appeal earlier this year for the penguin jerseys after oil spills on the coast of Tasmania, not realizing they would be inundated. "They have come from everywhere, even as far away as Japan....knitters, many old ladies in nursing homes, made jerseys in their favorite football team colors, used scraps of wool to make patchwork tops, and some knitted woolly tuxedos in keeping with a penguin's natural colors.
art aids
Art therapy helps brain-injury survivors....Milton Takara stares at the fragmented mirror, "Mirror XV," and more than 100 Miltons stare back.
He runs nervous fingers through his cropped hair. Then he crosses his arms. He inches backward, then takes a quick step toward the multiple-mirror and fiberglass work of art at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. He fidgets, but his face, his stare, never change. What does he see? What does he want to see?
...Two decades ago, there was little that could be done for survivors who suffered a serious brain injury. They either died or lost their ability to communicate with the outside world. The brain remains a mystery, but much has been learned since then to help survivors lead better lives, Wilson says. She points to Takara and Kalilikane, and some of the other people in her group, all suffering from cognitive, physical or emotional problems. Their improvement is directly coupled to emerging brain research, innovative rehabilitation techniques and, of course, exactly how they were injured....
Complications from brain injury can make daily life a challenge. Survivors may suffer short- or long-term memory loss. Some will be unable to do more than one thing at a time, and will have problems keeping up with simple conversations. Others will find it hard to concentrate or process information. And these are just the cognitive issues. The physical and emotional consequences range from seizures and loss of vision, to anxiety, depression and wild mood swings, among many others.
How does making art help any of this?"It is a cognitive challenge," Wilson says. "Art gives the brain something to work with: color, texture. Making them draw stimulates the brain."
The trouble with aesthetics is that tastes and standards vary so much -- is art about realistic imitation, effective communication, entertaining expression, or simple visual appeal? To analyze with a formalist attitude, we exclude social forces, content, even subject matter, yet the same work may be examined with the Freudian dreaminess of Surrealism. Some art is meant to represent clean functionalism, with its elegance residing in how it fits its purpose, embracing technology and industry.
Portraiture as Therapy...Conventionally, art therapy combines the disparate discipline of art and psychotherapy in treating patients with a range of psychological problems. Whilst disagreement still exists as to its theoretical assumptions, the practical emphasis is usually placed upon the art therapist in facilitating the production of art by the patient. The main aim of this process is to promote catharsis within the patient, that is, to allow the patient to release emotions which otherwise may prove difficult for the patient to discuss.
Using portraiture as a form of art therapy, however, is both unique and innovative. Rather than the emphasis being placed upon the patients producing their own artwork the production of the portraiture was left entirely to the artist, Mark Gilbert. Irrespective of this, a research study devised to examine the nature of any psychological benefits arising from the project produced results which were surprising. The research study used a semi-structured interview in which patients’ responses were taped and transcribed so that they could be coded and later analysed by computer. Questions were derived from previous research which identified the particular types of psychological problems experienced by patients who have had surgery on their faces, whether for facial cancer, as a result of assault or accident or to improve the function of certain regions of the face, particularly the jaw.
