By Neale Van Fleet on July 5th, 2023
One from the archives. I took this photo at the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona back in 2018. It’s a fountain by sculptor Alexander Calder that uses Mercury instead of water. It’s kept safely behind glass for fairly obvious reasons.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 5th, 2023
For the second day in a row I’m posting an old favourite by NFB legend Evelyn Lambart. This time it’s The Impossible Map, one of my favourite explanations of how map projections work using fruit and vegetables. Simple but effective.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 4th, 2023
Found this nice little piece in an alley in Montréal’s Mile End.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 4th, 2023
Canada’s National Film Board has helped create many wonderful films over its long history. In 2020 I hosted an event in collaboration with the NFB to show films and host a discussion about legendary animator Norman McLaren. I want to talk about one of his frequent collaborators, Evelyn Lambart. Specifically, I want to highlight her tremendous title cards and wonderful lettering.
The bulk of her films were created using stop motion of paper cut outs, laid out on a black table and filmed from the top. Her title cards were absolutely gorgeous—colourful, playful. Each title links to the films, which are mostly beautifully rendered versions of simple folk songs or fairy tales.
Lambart was born in Ottawa in 1914, and was active making films with the NFB from 1943 until 1977. Each of these title cards links to versions of the films you can watch for free.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 3rd, 2023
A macro photo of some Marasmiaceae mushrooms.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 3rd, 2023
Much like her previous book, How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell seems to have a knack of picking topics that are incredibly timely (forgive the pun). Seeing as we’ve all collectively gone through the time dilation of the Covid-19 pandemic, this topic feels perfect for the current moment.
Like How to do Nothing, this book reads as a patchwork of loosely-connected ideas and references based around the central theme. To be honest, it reads almost more like a blog—jumping between historical events, philosophers, magazine articles, and even at one point going so far as to recount a comedy sketch from I Think You Should Leave which was loosely related to the chapter at hand. The book manages to build up these scattered and nonlinear thoughts and observations into something bigger, though I think some readers may not be as forgiving of the lack of structure.
The subject of how people experience and interpret time is a topic not unfamiliar to this blog. In the early pages Odell discusses Ancient Greek views of time:
In Ancient Greek, there are two different words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos, which appears as part of words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like “crisis,” but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or “seizing the time.” At the climate event, Salami described kairos as qualitative rather than quantitative time, given that, in kairos, all moments are different and that “the right thing happens at the right point.” Because of what it suggests about action and possibility, I too have found the distinction between chronos and kairos to be crucial when it comes to thinking about the future.
And finally, Odell touched on this again in an excerpt she included from the book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, which feels very much at home with with this previous post:
Explaining Aboriginal notions of time is an exercise in futility as you can only describe it as “nonlinear” in English, which immediately slams a big line right across your synapses. You don’t register the “non” only the “linear”: that is the way you process that word, the shape it takes in your mind. Worst of all, it’s only describing the concept by saying what it is not, rather than what it is. We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.
Odell’s book is about much more than this, though these parts resonate with recent themes here. The book also covers capitalist views of time based from the early days of the Industrial Revolution, time zones, biological time, aging, and a lot more strands woven into one (somewhat messy) tapestry.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 2nd, 2023
By Neale Van Fleet on July 1st, 2023
I love this kinetic sculpture, by Anthony Howe, installed in downtown Montréal near Concordia University.
Here is another version of the sculpture in motion:
By Neale Van Fleet on June 30th, 2023
To follow up with the Japanese theme from this morning, here are two great pics my 10 year old son took this winter during his trip to Japan. This piece is called “Moss Garden of Resonating Microcosms” at TeamLabs Planets in Tokyo.
By Neale Van Fleet on June 30th, 2023
Photo by Taras Grescoe
From author Taras Grescoe comes a nice little meditation on what make Japanese streets particularly great. Since my partner and son went to Japan a few months ago, I’ve heard many times about how wonderfully human-scale Japan is, and how its multiple modes of transportation absolutely blow away all of the lauded European cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen in terms of livability and transport.
Grescoe writes:
There are no cars. Sure, drivers might pass through, but they don’t stick around: that’s because there’s no on-street parking. A simple reality, which explains why the streets in so many neighborhoods of Tokyo and other Japanese cities are a paradise for kids (and cats).