I don’t know either.

Sometimes it seems easier to me to begin within a set of parameters. Sometimes limits stimulate creative thinking. This is one of the reasons I’ve been a perpetual student for the last 20 years: because in school I’m forced to push myself and jump-start my thinking by having to generate something that conforms to a specific set of rules.

Now that I’m done with school (for now), I have to find ways to create my own parameters and my own rules. It’s really quite challenging in its own right. I’m not particularly good at rules.

Magnetic poetry provides one such set of parameters. I know, it can be used to make really stupid and pointlessly crude phrases (that is certainly one of its most popular uses), but it can also be used to force a certain kind of flexibility in imagery and word choice. I realized I like it because it’s a sort of verbal collage. In the same way that I cut out images and move them around until they look right, I enjoy taking words and moving them around until they feel right. There is some element of selection, of course, but the options aren’t originally my own. I have to use what I’ve got.

Hmm, that relates to the cooking thing, too. Using leftovers, and all that.

So, what does it mean to be an artist anyway?
Does it really mean “creative problem solver”? That doesn’t sound as glamorous somehow…
Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Too many choices, I can’t even begin to decide.

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Some Poetry That May or May Not Be Good,
But Was Made with Magnetic Poetry

A thousand whispers
Planet balmy like evening wind
What gold-red moon sips my breath?
Strange universe falling

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Tinge my pithy Kafkaesque zeal
With crass delights and sanguine veils
(that was a great philosophy-themed set)

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still roses cry their elaborate symphony
as my bitter honey sleeps,
a languid beauty

shadowed tongues dream easy beneath
the forested light
and sing the mists away

This particular post isn’t really about me anyway, it’s about the world, in all it’s peculiar and wonderful variety.

Have you ever heard of ice hotels? Most are seasonal, I think one up in the Arctic Circle is year-round. They’re one of the coolest things (sorry, that was unintentional) ever (IMHO). Someday, when money is no object, I will stay in one.
Here’s an article (and pictures!) about one where all the guest rooms are done by different designers:
12 Designs From The 2009 IceHotel: Catch Them Before They Melt!

In other mind-blowing news, some teenagers sent a helium balloon into the stratosphere and took pictures of space with a $60 digital camera. No, seriously. For real.
Here’s an article about it in The Daily Telegraph and here’s their Flickr Photostream.
I don’t know what else to say about it but wow. Wow.

In a final totally unrelated news item (from the most wonderful Boing Boing), a growing archive of US Military medical illustrations is available online. Ever wanted to see a beautiful illustration of a skull? I know I have.
There’s some other funky stuff, too. WARNING: page 2 of the overall photostream contains pictures of some weird eye procedure; you may want to skip that page if you find that kind of thing disturbing.
Well, here you go then: otisarchives1′s Photostream. Here’s the post on Boing Boing, too.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our little foray into the realm of the wondrous.

Join me again next week for…well, I’m not really sure. You’ll just have to join me to find out, I guess.

I’ve always felt that going to the woods or the ocean helped to bring me back to center when I’m feeling spun out.

You know how that day-to-day noise and activity gets us all frazzled and stressed? Well, when I feel that way I just want to go off into the woods and commune with the trees, and stuff like that.

I’ve always attributed it to the fact that I’m a hippie, I was raised by a hippie, my parents got married in the woods, and I lived in Guerneville for a year as a child. Obviously, I’m predisposed to like the woods.

That’s still true, of course, but it’s more than that, too.

Apparently, going into nature gives our prefrontal cortices a rest because we are attracted to gentle stimuli that occur in nature, without exerting our brains. When we’re in an urban environment we are both compelled to attend to extreme stimuli and required to force ourselves to attend to minute details in order to get through the day.

What that means is that we can’t ignore the TV-screen billboards and ads on gas pumps and we musn’t ignore people walking down the street or cars driving by, lest we get smooshed.

That’s tiring, you know?

So, when we go into an environment where the stimuli are intriguing but low-key, our brains get a bit of a rest.
(Ahhh, birdsong and butterflies, rainbows and sunsets…)

Don’t take my word for it, you can read more about it from an actual science guy here. (I’m just a science enthusiast.)

So, get out there and take a hike!

Oh, and let’s save those natural places, shall we? That way we’ll always have a way to rest our brains from the ever increasing pace of life.

something to relax your brain

The two galaxies are oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. The left-most galaxy, or the “one” in this image, is relatively undisturbed apart from a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly on edge to our line of sight. The right-most galaxy, resembling a zero, exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.

The blue ring was most probably formed after the galaxy on the left passed through the galaxy on the right. Just as a pebble thrown into a pond creates an outwardly moving circular wave, a propagating density wave was generated at the point of impact and spread outward. As this density wave collided with material in the target galaxy that was moving inward due to the gravitational pull of the two galaxies, shocks and dense gas were produced, stimulating star formation.

The galaxy pair was photographed on October 27-28, 2008. Arp 147 lies in the constellation Cetus, more than 400 million light-years from Earth.

(from NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery)