Elsewhat

By Neale Van Fleet on June 4th, 2023

Kendrick Lamar adds to an already-great Beyoncé track.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 4th, 2023

The excellent podcast Rumble Strip, which tells stories of real people all around Vermont, has done an episode talking to real Vermonters about guns. A tough subject that tends to get oversimplified on both sides, told with some subtlety and consideration.

Find it in your podcast player of choice, or listen here.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 3rd, 2023

Spotted this little paste-up by street artist Labrona.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 3rd, 2023

Here I am in my spiffy new Pink House t-shirt.

What is the pink house? Roughly three years ago, someone took it upon themselves to climb up a long-abandoned malt plant on the outskirts of downtown Montreal, and paint a part of the factory that looked like a little cabin bright pink.

To the best of my knowledge this rogue act of daredevil maintenance is a complete mystery. Nobody knows who did it or why. Later it was decorated for Christmas.

Shirts available here →

By Neale Van Fleet on June 2nd, 2023

From my recent trip to New York City—a glimpse at the very new Gilder Centre at the American Museum of Natural History. Designed by Gang Architects led by Jeanne Gang.

This space was beautiful to be in. Echoes of the similarly chunky Ronchamp Chapel by Le Corbusier.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 2nd, 2023

I do love me a nature book, and Underland is the latest in a long line of personal favourites, with forebears in first person adventuring stories as well as environmental nonfiction. Underland is all about Robert Macfarlane’s many personal journeys into all manner of places which lie beneath the world we usually inhabit—mines, underground vaults, glaciers, and of course caves.

The book reads a little like a series of feature articles, each chapter focusing on a different subterranean place. The catacombs of Paris. Glaciers in Greenland. A mine under England that extends for hundreds of kilometres. Underground rivers. One chapter on fungus reads like a love letter to personal favourites Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life and Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree.

Macfarlane writes vividly from his own experiences. This passage from the first few pages made me stop and literally read the words out loud. They give a taste of the tone to come:

Beneath the ash tree, a labyrinth unfurls.

Down between roots to a passage of stone that deepens steeply into the earth. Colour depletes to greys, browns, black. Cold air pushes past. Above is solid rock, utter matter. The surface is scarcely thinkable.

The passage is taken; the maze builds. Side-rifts curl off. Direction is difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely – and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.

The passage turns, turns again, narrows – and leads into surprising space. A chamber is entered. Sound now booms, resonates. The walls of the chamber appear bare at first, but then something extraordinary happens. Scenes from the underland start to show themselves on the stone, distant from one another in history, but joined by echoes.

The cover is a beautiful work by frequent Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood.

Rating: A

By Neale Van Fleet on June 1st, 2023

Some more pieces from our recent visit to Storm King. This is Adonai by Alexander Liberman, which almost looks like CGI.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 1st, 2023

Visit Julian’s website for lots more great animations. The Walkies are my favourite.

Via Colossal

By Neale Van Fleet on June 1st, 2023

Jenny Odell, author of How to do Nothing, gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation, where she discussed her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. The whole talk is worth a listen (I suggest subscribing to Long Now in your podcast player of your choice, but the above video will do too). One of the last things she says in the interview portion really stuck with me:

Just think about the difference between getting a lot of engagement on a post online, and your friend writing you a letter, and you sit down and read the letter. it’s from one person. It feels so different, because they wrote it for you.

I think this is a good way to think of “engagement”. The ten minutes someone might spend reading a personal letter seems much more impactful than the few seconds of engagement you might get from multiple people on a social media post.

By Neale Van Fleet on May 31st, 2023

This is the first in a short series of abstract videos I’ve been working on for a future project.