From a very nice piece from the New York Timesby Thad Ziolkowski:
When I began surfing in New York in the mid 1990s, it was a seasonal sport, something done from late May until around Thanksgiving. Bowing to the cold each fall was hard, especially since the waves are often best at that time of year, with large, slow-moving storms sending one swell after another and the light taking on a stern, northern beauty. But if you really wanted to surf year-round, you found a way to live in California. This changed about a decade ago, when significantly warmer and more flexible wet suits came on the market. Since then, a growing number of New Yorkers have taken to scampering over snow-encrusted sand in neoprene booties to paddle into an Atlantic Ocean where temperature can dip into the mid-30s. I was skeptical at first, but couldn’t resist buying one of the new and improved wet suits myself. After spending upward of $400, I felt I was ready to join the hard-core year-rounders of New York.
A short and compelling video about the pre-production of the feature film Land.here! “Taha sets out on an epic 600 km journey along the Moroccan Atlantic coast to Europe—on a windsurfboard. More about the film.
Derrida: The concept of structure itself — I say in passing — is no longer satisfactory to describe that game. How to define a structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play;” in the sense in which one speaks of the “jeu dans la machine,” of the “jeu des pieces,” and which receives — and this is what we call history — a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency. So, I think that what I have said can be understood as a criticism of structuralism, certainly.
Last week the Guinness World Records acknowledged a 44-year-old Hawaii pro surfer for catching a 78-foot wave off the coast of Portugal, saying the November run beats a 2008 record by more than 1 foot. Big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara of Haleiwa, on Oahu’s North Shore, told The Associated Press that the ride of his life was a fluke.
He said he originally didn’t want to attempt the waves that day after wiping out numerous times on even bigger swells in the same spot, above an undersea canyon known as one of the biggest wave-generators on the planet. “I was really beat-up that morning,” he said. “This day, I did not want to get out of bed.” (more…)
Installation view of Pure Consciousness at Yusuhara Kindergarden, Yusuhara Town, Japan, in 2006
In Pure Consciousness, a traveling exhibition initiated in 1998, Kawara lent seven Date paintings (January 1 to January 7, 1997) to kindergartens and schools in Madagascar, Australia, Bhutan, Ivory Coast, Columbia, Turkey, Japan, Finland, Iceland, Israel, and the United States. At all schools they hang in classrooms, bearing dates that fall within the lifespans of the children.[15]
Kawara does not give interviews or comment about his work.
Let’s say, hypothetically, one is a wannabe surfer with dreams of doing things like the girl above. But whenever said wannabe surfer tried surfing, issues with core strength (and bruised ego) seemed to get in the way of success. Could the latest gym machine, SurfSet Fitness’s Ripsurfer X, help? This cardio and resistance trainer is designed to mimic the motion surfers use while paddling out and engage the same core and leg muscles they use when popping up to catch a wave. Anyone tried it?
Hyppolite: They [i.e. the natural sciences] are like an image of the problems which we, in turn, put to ourselves. With Einstein, for example, we see the end of a kind of privilege of empiric evidence. And in that connection we see a constant appear, a constant which is a combination of space-time, which does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the experience, but which, in a way, dominates the whole construct, and this constant — is this the center? But natural science has gone much further. It no longer searches for the constant. It considers that there are events, somehow improbable, which bring about for a while a structure and an invariability…
Derrida: Concerning the first part of your question, the Einsteinian constant is not a constant, not a center. It is the very concept of variablility — it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something – of a center from which an observer could master the field — but the very concept of the game which, after all, I was trying to elaborate.
Creating domestic environments from found objects, resin, latex, lights, and her unique expressionistic process of shattering and re-forming glass, artist Hu Bing’s site-specific installation “Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation” is now on display at the Flatiron Prow Art Space on the ground floor of the Flatiron Building. (more…)
Derrida: The concept of structure itself — I say in passing — is no longer satisfactory to describe that game. How to define a structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play;” in the sense in which one speaks of the “jeu dans la machine,” of the “jeu des pieces,” and which receives — and this is what we call history — a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency. So, I think that what I have said can be understood as a criticism of structuralism, certainly.
Let’s say, hypothetically, one is a wannabe surfer with dreams of doing things like the girl above. But whenever said wannabe surfer tried surfing, issues with core strength (and bruised ego) seemed to get in the way of success. Could the latest gym machine, 
Creating domestic environments from found objects, resin, latex, lights, and her unique expressionistic process of shattering and re-forming glass, artist Hu Bing’s site-specific installation “Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation” is now on display at the Flatiron Prow Art Space on the ground floor of the Flatiron Building. 
