In honor of Earth Day—which was founded in 1970 by Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson—the Daily Beast ranked the greenest cities in the U.S. Can you guess who won? A hint: there are lots of surfers there.
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America’s Greenest Cities
River of Doubt
Join the Harmony Blog at a studio visit with artist Alexander White as he discusses how Teddy Roosevelt’s journey inspired the drawings in his first solo show.
Images by Alexander White, reprinted with permission of the artist.
Harmony: You have a lot of different pieces here. Tell us about the unifying idea for the show.
White: The show is loosely based on the expedition Teddy Roosevelt took in the Amazon in the early 1900s. He made an agreement with the Brazilian government that if he managed to go down this river, he got to put his name on it. So he managed to convince a team to redirect the trip “to do something a little more extreme than they had originally planned” to go down this river that had never been explored. They were completely unprepared, but they just kept on powering through. By the end of the trip they all had malaria and tropical fever and Roosevelt had a blood infection from an accident. A few of the porters had shot each other, one of them got hurled over a cliff and died in some rapids and another ran off. (more…)
THE END IS THERE
The short film THE END IS THERE began as a personal return on investment analysis of weekend summer surf in Montauk. Shot entirely on an iPhone, the footage catalogs the weekend waves at Ditch Plains Beach from Memorial Day to Labor Day, 2010. Within the course of the summer the project evolved into a video back-drop for a dialogue between NYC transplant, Moose Huerta and Montauk local, Grant Monahan. The two were introduced through the recent passing of their mutual friend Andy Kessler. During the film they discuss and theorize the right and wrong ways to assimilate into a tight knit coastal community.
Stacked
A short documentary on the 2011 Quiksilver Pro New York and local surf star, Balaram Stack. Coming soon! Interview with the filmmakers here.
Nikky Finney
It’s National Poetry Month. If you haven’t taken time to read a poem this month, here’s a lovely piece by 2011 National Book Award winner, Nikky Finney, reading a from her book Head Off & Split.
Surf Resorts?
Pro surfer Kelly Slater and Greg Webber, an Australian engineer and board shaper, are battling one another to be the first to create a surfable man-made wave. Though there have been several failed attempts at making a shreddable artificial break, Kelly Slater Wave Company in LA and Webber Wave Pool in Australia both hope to be the first to succeed. “Within five years, there will be 50 of these,” Webber told Outside magazine in Faking Waves, a great article on the topic.
A Sontag Sampler
From the New York Times:
Susan Sontag, 1972. Photograph: Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
Art Is Boring
Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain†as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves — it’s a question of affluence.)
People say “it’s boring†— as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us. But most of the interesting art of our time is boring.
Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc. (more…)
Tantra Song by Franck Andre Jamme
Saganur, 2001, 9 1/4
From a recent interview with Franck Andre Jamme for the Paris Review‘s blog:
It could be a cult classic: the debut edition of Siglio Press’s Tantra Song one of the only books to survey the elusive tradition of abstract Tantric painting from Rajasthan, India sold out in a swift six weeks. Rendered by hand on found pieces of paper and used primarily for meditation, the works depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear departure from Tantric art’s better-known figurative styles. They also resonate uncannily with lineages of twentieth-century art—from the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism to Minimalism”as well as with much painting today. Rarely have the ancient and the modern come together so fluidly.
