It’s pretty easy to disconnect from the impact our plastic habit has on the environment. But when you find yourself swimming in floating bits of garbage (as I did last summer in Far Rockaway), or you see an image like the one above, the impact is immediate and unavoidable. To learn more and bring awareness to this global problem, an international team of scientists, artists, an educator and a film crew will set sail this June in Alaska to explore the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (a marine-based deposit of trash estimated to be the size of Mexico). The crew will observe, document and collect marine debris that will be used in Gyre, an exhibition—including sculpture, paintings, photography, multimedia installations, and science and educational interpretation—at The Anchorage Museum in 2014. Keep up with the project or donate here.
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Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Come Hell or High Water
Trailer for the new body surf movie by Keith Malloy released through Woodshed Films. Like the man in the video says: It’s definitely different than board surfing.
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New Year’s Resolutions (for surfers)
Good advice! From a post last year by Zach Weisberg of Inertia.com.
1. Surf at sunrise whenever possible. There’s no better way to start a day. Period.
2. Give someone a wave. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all looking out for number one in the water, but on rare occasions when a stranger gifts a wave to another stranger, it’s disarming and impactful. Make someone’s day. Give ‘em a wave.
3. Try something new. Whether you choose an alaia, a SUP, a hand plane, or a piece of unshaped foam, introducing a new element to sometimes-repetitive surf schedules always seems to rekindle the fire.
4. Keep the conversations going. If you’re passionate about something surf-related, say so. These conversations ensure that the sport evolves in the right direction, and can be especially effective when stated reasonably.
5. Turn off your computer. I might be talking to myself more than to anyone else (and offering advice that runs counter to my interests), but staring at my MacBook’s glowing LCD has taken a significant toll on my circadian rhythm – among other things. The Internet is cool, but playing outside is (and always will be) cooler.
Bigert & Bergström, The Last Calendar
The perfect gift for your favorite prophet! From Cabinet: When the current cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar concludes on 21 December 2012, the world will end. Of course, this is hardly the first time the planet’s demise has been prophesied. And so Cabinet offers you, doomed reader, a guide to the brief time that remains. This oversized wall calendar, featuring artworks by Bigert & Bergström (such as the one above) illustrating twelve methods of divination, ignores the familiar holidays in favor of more than sixty significant dates in the history of apocalyptic prophecy. Starring comets, aliens, floods, returning messiahs, and more, The Last Calendar will be with you for all the days of the coming year, and ends—as will you—on 21 December 2012.
Voguing
It takes one a few days to feel Nosaran. One either watches the surfers or is the one surfing, as was described to us when we first started to shuffle our feet along the bottom of the ocean floor to pop-up ourselves as well as the stingrays. Both activities occupy time, and at the end of one’s time in Nosara one lopes both from the watching or from the surfing.
El Mar, Mi Alma
This is a preview for a film about surfing in Chile. It makes me really want to go there and I love the music!
-“You have to respect the sea.”
Anicka Yi, Fins
Anicka Yi, Fins, 2011
I am interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism, smuggling, stomachs as biological metaphor, molecular gastronomy, scent, the fragrance industry as memory machine, commodification of creativity, public relations as medium, and post-humanist theory with it’s sociopolitical implications for the body, and by extension, the senses.Â
Image from her recent show at 47 Canal.
Free, Beautiful, Biodegradable Toys!
As part of my quest to incorporate more DIY, reused or found toys into my children’s lives, we’ve made it a point to show up at the beach without pails, shovels, etc and then see what we can find. My kids often find their own treasures, but sometimes (especially early on) I have found it’s helpful to introduce an idea to them. Above is a dried coconut filled with shells. I find it beautiful, but will the kids go for it? (more…)
