Writing about life and arts
The square lines represent a movement.
Sometimes lines appear infinite.
On different occasions, the lines blur.
Lines also run diagonally.
Lines can get squiggly, as in life.
Lines like to find the holes, blurring their objects.
All lines are nonetheless imaginary, even arbitrary, a simulation of code drawn from the head.
PS. ‘The map is not the territory‘ and ‘This is not an apple‘
All photos by Wells Baum
The most successful people are both rational and crazy.
As much as robots and artificial intelligence threaten our creativity, there will be some people who cultivate the randomness of thought to continue innovating.
Wrote Jean-Luc Godard: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”
Patterns beg to be synthesized, broken down and encrusted with ingenuity to make something new.
Humans envision the future and work backward, mostly through the freedom of trial and error. They see holes and fill them in with new opportunities.
Folks may never know where they are going, but that is exactly how they get there.
Seminoles, Braves, Redskins — Indian culture permeates American life from sports teams to table-top advertising.
Upon entering the exhibit, there's a sign titled Indians are everywhere in American life that reads:
“These images are worth a closer look. What if they are not trivial? What if they are instead symbols of great power? What if the stories they tell reveal a buried history — and a country forever fascinated, conflicted, and shaped by its relationship with American Indians?”
Did you know that Native American Ira Hayes was one of the six Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima?
video via Wikimedia Commons
The many variations of Native American flags.
Nowhere to go, a forced patience at the mercy of algorithmic street lights.
No right on red, Big Brother proclaims.
When we're stuck at the corner, there isn't more to do than look at the variations of our surroundings.
The city never stops. Why should its people, albeit looking blankly inscrutable?
“Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.”
The mind fills a silent GIF with sound.
The flags flickering in the wind, the lightbulb dancing at a Mexico City bar, to the whistle of leaves swinging outside your window.
Living in the distraction era, noise is ubiquitous. Standing still, the decibels around turn up to match the horizon.
But the calmer it becomes, the more you hear.
Silence deafens the external stimuli. In nature, it rings with the the highest volume.
TuRn it up!
One day we’re going to miss the powerful silence of the natural world, the way it smells and begs for an inquisition. That’s because “most people are on the world, not in it,” wrote the father of national parks John Muir.
In putting a “fence around nature,” we lock ourselves into a secluded wall of emotional current.
Nature nurtures, it humbles our deepest desires. Because we can’t control the skies, nor the mercurial blob of ourselves, we must give in to nature’s fickleness and beauty.
We’re going to be shocked when we wake up from digital’s second life and realize that becoming also means embracing the evolving whims of those things around us. We are overpowered by the Earth’s forces.
Perhaps naturalist Bernd Heinrich said it best:
“We all want to be associated with something greater and more beautiful than ourselves, and nature is the ultimate. I just think it is the one thing we can all agree on.”
The weathered we address: What kind of weathered is it?
It contains multitudes.
Weathered rock or stone, broken glass, ruptured pavement, blinding headaches, winters wear down New York but its city dwellers weather in, on, and through in flexible shifts.
All photos by Wells Baum
