(SL) DISTIN 15

The Distin 15 is an all-purpose runabout with a beautiful steering wheel of translucent plastic and solid aluminum—it looks like the steering wheel you would find on an airplane. In the event that we take to the air, and we might, we will be prepared. But in the event that we sink, and we might, you can swim, right?

[winkbooks]

Beautiful Birds – Fly from A to Z with dozens of feathered friends

Beautiful Birds by Jean Roussen (author) and Emmanuel Walker (illustrator) Flying Eye Books 2015, 56 pages, 8.9 x 12.2 x 0.4 inches $17 Buy a copy on Amazon

In Beautiful Birds, author Jean Roussen and illustrator Emmanuel Walker fly through the alphabet with dozens of feathered friends. It begins, of course, with “A is for albatross, the admiral of the skies,” and progresses all the way to “Z is for zos-ter-o-pi-dae…” with details about all kinds of avians in between. The writing brims with clever rhymes and colorful words (ogling orbs, polychrome quills) making it delightful to read out loud. If I had to guess, I’d say Roussen is a fan of E.B. White’s idea that “children are game for anything… They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.”

Walker’s vibrant illustrations give kids all the context they need. His graphic, full-bleed drawings feel like those of mid-century masters Saul Bass and Charlie Harper. As an added bonus, the book’s design is also gorgeous. It’s bound in a neon salmon linen, with patterned endpapers to match. The neon color can be found on almost every page in varying doses, giving the optical effect of spying a ruffle of feathers in the wild. – Sara Distin at Tinybob

May 31, 2016

[winkbooks]

Enormous Smallness – Work hard and you can become a poet (not a message kids often hear)

Enormous Smallness: The Story of E.E. Cummings by Matthew Burgess Enchanted Lion Books 2015, 64 pages, 8.4 x 11.5 x 0.7 inches $12 Buy a copy on Amazon

Enormous Smallness, written by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo, details the life of poet E.E. Cummings for fans of all ages. From Cummings’s fairly ordinary childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to his adventures in Europe and New York City, the book spans the decades of writing, working, and experiencing the world that made Cummings an extraordinary artist.

The story that emerges is one of a boy who loved observing the world as much as he did participating in it — a boy who said “yes” to everything. As Burgess writes, “Yes to the heart and the roundness of the moon, to birds, elephants, trees, and everything he loved.” But the story doesn’t shy away from the good or the bad, including both the praise and support young Cummings got from his parents and teachers, as well as the negative criticism his first book of poems received.

The message to kids is twofold and clear: one, making art is hard work that requires the same dedication and persistence that any other job does for success. And two, so long as you put in the work, you can be a poet or an artist, too. It’s not a message kids hear often but it’s important. As Cummings said in his Harvard graduation speech, we need artists to challenge the way we see and think. And those artists have to start somewhere. This book is a brilliant beginning. – Sara Distin at Tinybop

May 23, 2016

[sldistin]

"But geology, in spite of all the rocks in its pockets, provides a lofty vantage point, one that forces us to acknowledge the ephemerality of the present moment while also empowering us to travel freely across time, glimpsing geographies and ecosystems that are simultaneously foreign and familiar, one dissolving into the next, an unbroken narrative leading to the present. And, increasingly, the geologic world view is our best lens through which to envision the future." — Marcia Bjornerud on Meike Nixdorf's new series "Your Earth Transforms"

[sldistin]

John Berger on Cy Twombly: "A writer continually struggles for clarity against the language he's using or, more accurately, against the common usage of that language. He doesn't see language with the readability and clarity of something printed out. He sees it, rather as a terrain full of illegibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises, and obscurities. Its maps is not a dictionary but the whole of literature and perhaps everything ever said. Its obscurities, its lost senses, its self-effacement come about for many reasons - because of the way words modify each other, write themselves over each other, cancel one another out, because the unsaid always counts for as much, or more, than the said, and because language can never cover what it signifies. Language is always an abbreviation." Read it all here. More from me about Cy Twombly here.

[sldistin]

But [Mary Cain] is also part of an expanding pack of very fast American girls. In 2001, only two high-school girls ran the 1,600 meters in under 4:50, and only one ran faster than 4:45. Last year, 46 girls ran faster than 4:50; eight broke 4:45. This increased speed is an inevitable result of girls’ growing up not just after the passage of Title IX, in 1972, when schools first started rushing to put together girls’ sports programs to comply with the law, but several decades later, after those programs matured. Coaches no longer tend to baby female runners, assuming that they can’t handle as much training as boys. Gone, too, is the outdated idea that the best way to make a girl run faster is to make her skinnier, so that she carries fewer pounds around the track. The dominant philosophy now is that girls, like all other runners, should train to become very strong by lifting heavy weights.

Mary Kain Is Growing Up Fast HELL YES.

[sldistin]

The stunning secret lives of expired photo paper: Alison Rossiter on view at Yossi Milo.

[990000]

In the taxonomy of travelers, the word “explorer” suggests a morally superior pioneer, a man or woman who braves the battle against nature to discover new terrain, expanding our species’ understanding of the world. “Adventurer,” by contrast, implies a self-indulgent adrenaline junkie, who scares loved ones by courting puerile risk. The former, obviously, is the far better title, but it’s tough to claim these days. The world is Google-mapped. Reaching the actual virgin territory of space or the deep ocean requires resources that few possess. In short, the noble fig leaf of terra incognita has fallen away and laid bare the peripatetic, outsize bravado of Scott’s kindred spirits. The resulting itineraries are pretty strange. We now have guys like Felix Baumgartner sky-diving from a balloon-borne capsule at 128,100 feet. Baumgartner falls squarely — and for more than four minutes, breaking the speed of sound — into the adventurer camp. But then there’s Sarah Marquis, who perhaps should be seen as an explorer like Scott, born in the wrong age. She is 42 and Swiss, and has spent three of the past four years walking about 10,000 miles by herself, from Siberia through the Gobi Desert, China, Laos and Thailand, then taking a cargo boat to Brisbane, Australia, and walking across that continent. Along the way, like Scott, she has starved, she has frozen, she has (wo)man-hauled. She has pushed herself at great physical cost to places she wanted to love but ended up feeling, as Scott wrote of the South Pole in his journal: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Despite planning a ludicrous trip, and dying on it, Scott became beloved and, somewhat improbably, hugely respected. Marquis, meanwhile, can be confounding. “You tell people what you’re doing, and they say, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” Marquis told me. “It’s never: ‘Cool project, Sarah! Go for it.’ ” Perhaps this is because the territory Marquis explores is really internal — the nature of fear, the limits of stamina and self-reliance and the meaning of traveling in nature as a female human animal, alone.

990000:   (via kenyatta)

[sldistin]

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there...We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

Edward Abby, Desert Solitaire In his "wilderness letter", Wallace Stegner wrote: "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." In Desert Solitaire, Abby continues: "the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday as...a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression...history demonstrates that personal liberty is a rare and precious thing..." Personal liberty is a rare and precious thing, indeed.

[nicolefenton]

“Do first, think later; many things can benefit from this method — falling in love, taking your first job, speaking up for what you believe in. Write first, think later. Repeat.”

Liz Danzico (via nicolefenton)

[sldistin]

No Title (Are Your Motives) by Raymond Pettibon

I heart Pettibon's surfers.

[annfriedman]

From the outside, depending on your point of view, Abramson’s firing was either sexist retribution or a gender-blind decision to ax an ineffective boss. But from the inside, incidents like this are never so clear. Women never know whether they’re being met with a hostile reaction because of their performance — something that they can address and change — or because of both male and female colleagues’ internalized notions of how women should behave. I’ve asked these questions about my own career: Am I struggling because I’m not playing the game well enough, or because the game is rigged against me? Like Abramson, I’ve been a top-level editor who’s had trouble getting along with male bosses — so much so that a friend once offered to purchase acting classes for me so I’d be better equipped to “play nice.” If you’d asked me then, I would have said that learning how to get people on board with your ideas is an art, one that requires work to master no matter what your gender. I also would have told you that I was the only woman on a senior leadership team of more than ten people.

Jill Abramson Will Never Know Why She Got Fired - NYmag.com (via annfriedman)

[sldistin]

After arriving in San Francisco, I often heard the word 'Awesome.' A-W-E-some. Awesome. That's the sublime, maybe. Or isn't it? The sublime is...the high mountains (the Alps), the ocean in the storm, or disaster (sometimes), and gigantic animals, like a whale. Too big, or too broad, too dangerous... If you see the world around you, there are beautiful things everywhere...the beautiful is like the small path in the garden, and you have blue sky on charming clouds and flowers. That's the beautiful. But if you stand on the top of the mountain and when you see the very steep peaks of the Alps, it's not beautiful. Modern people will sometimes call that, "Oh, this is beautiful." But historically, it's wrong. And whenever I see those kind of things, all of a sudden, I feel myself totally alone in this world. And I feel I am looking at the end of this world, or the edge of this world. And I'm imagining what there is, just beyond that point. That's not the beautiful. It's awesome. Awesome.

Photographer Naoya Hatakeyama on the sublime for SFMoMA

[sldistin]

I wrote about Robin Maddock's photos for LightBox. You can read it here.

[sldistin]

I wrote about Mark Dorf's photos for LightBox. You can read it here.

[sldistin]

New west obsession: Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument Photo by Philip Hyde for the Sierra Club (reminds me of Meike Nixdorf's In the Orbit of El Teide)

[sldistin]

Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.

George Saunders

[worldssmallesttrampoline]

[printeresting-blog]

museumuesum: Fiona Banner, APRIL 2013, 2013, Sunburnt paper, 101 x 72 cm.