A List Of Beautiful Things #2
Percussion and time, flowers
I think about this choreographed dance often. The way the dancers move is so hypnotic — I can’t figure out the rhythm of their dance, which sound corresponds to which dancer. Can you figure it out?
This story made me cry. A Red Cross volunteer on a migrant ship off the coast of Italy happens to be a pianist, and decides one day to play the piano for people in the cordoned-off COVID ward. “Taskayali played for half an hour, during which the place vibrated with an invisible current … As we peeled off our hazmat suits, Taskayali turned to me and said, ‘I’ve never experienced anything as beautiful.’ “
A spare performance of Radiohead’s Videotape, with just Thom Yorke, a piano and a microphone. (via Kottke)
After 6 years of prison, my high school friend Jorge — a highly talented artist — is finally free. I’m selling his Prison Recipe Zine to help him buy a lap top and a drawing tablet. Consider buying one.
For the first time in over a decade, Kings of Convenience have released a new song. Sounds just like it could’ve been on Riot on an Empty Street.
In college, I studied in London, and was invited over to my professor’s house for a dinner party. I was so captivated by her charming apartment, which she had shared with her late husband, the artist William Utermolhen, that I drew it immediately in my diary that night to commit the scene to memory. Returning to my drawing 15 years later, I decided to look up the artist to see his work. And I was stunned to find he had made a large painting of that apartment. It was just as captivating to him as it was to me.
I really want to read this book, by the art critic Larissa Pham. It’s an exploration of heartbreak and love through the lens of art and music.
Just really pretty pictures of floral arrangements. I love the ones from Mexico City.
How to arrange flowers, according to WikiHow (I found this very helpful).
“To see reality without the mediating filter of our ideas about it, the world must be made new for the viewer. And to make the world new, it must be made strange.”
P.S. I’m hosting an zine making workshop called I Love Being Asian next Monday with Northwestern University. It’s open to everyone, not just students! Come.