Say it in a Shade of Succint: Cell Poems

You can buck the system and resist the un-filtered verbal onslaught of a new and frighteningly social world, or you can embrace the fascinating and fantastic possibilities it may create.

Take for example a site I heard mentioned in a recent Poetry.com podcast: Cellpoems.org

I love the idea of super-condensed poetic license  where the poet is constrained by but flourishes within 160 characters.  Also adding to the appeal is the amusing addition of poem notes and author bios that far, far exceed the length of any of the works themselves.

Below are the two most recent submissions to the site:

DIY FML Daymare Mnemonic

Dora Malech

I do it the old-fashioned way tie string around the finger except instead try rope-to-throat though the last word’s still “remember.”

 

And the moon

Erika Meitner

shut in cold blue light, in blown snow, my son’s breath a forgiveness a road- side x a windshield a tunnel a handful of pebbles.

 

Sign up for the poems as an RSS feed or to of course receive via your cell phone…

 

Don’t Have Time for a Movie? Watch a Short!

So, I love movies in that I can take in a complete story line in the period of 1 1/2 – 2 hours. I’m a woman on the go and I have a hard time sitting myself down long enough to take in a show every week with regularity.  But, squeeze that gratification in under 20 minutes? We have a winner!

Futureshorts, a website that hosts international short films, bears an extensive collection to choose from. Check out their hoard of short clips on youtube.

They boast gems like “Tell it to the Fishes” a ten-minute(ish) short featuring the talents of Dylan More, of snarky Bristish Comedy “Black Books” fame.

Short film makers learn to distill down the action, the striking moments of a film so they fit into the shortest of time frames.  Check out this short film coming in at under three minutes:

Hope you enjoy!

Make it Count

So someone just posted this incredible proposal on reddit:

I managed to track it down to the blog it was originally posted on: http://www.angelaandithyle.com/blog/2010/07/26/me-and-you-and-you-and-me/ which appears to belong to the wonderfully artistic couple pictured above. Just a little browsing has left me intrigued and addicted which I suppose is a reasonable state. I mean, check out their bio:

the inevitable bio

angela likes to paint.

ithyle likes to sing.

angela likes #6699CC.

ithyle likes #FF9900.

angela is an over gifter.

ithyle is a good package wrapper.

angela paints her toenails pink.

ithyle paints his toenails black.

angela startles easily.

ithyle relishes the fact that angela startles easily.

angela likes road trips.

ithyle likes bicycle trips.

angela likes what ithyle orders at dinner.

ithyle eats whats left of angela’s dinner.

angela likes to eat more than her fair share of tofutti cuties.

ithyle laments this.

Photos of Iceland’s Volcanic Eruption

These are a few photos of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption posted to Boston.com’s website, often the source for evocative and beautiful photography. See the entire series here.

Insects Covered with Dew

Saw these at least a couple times a whiles back and kept meaning to post them because of how absolutely incredible they are. The photos were snapped by physiotherapist Miroslaw Swietek, an amateur photographer who took up the hobby a mere 2 and a half years ago (You can see more of his striking work here). The insects are photographed skillfully at close range so that one can see the minute hairs and extremities on the little beasties and the drops of dew serve only to magnify these details. I love the geodesic quality magnified by the dew drops glistening on the dragonflies eyes. Hope you enjoy the photos, and keep watching for more from this photographer!

Reposted From Wired.com: “Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA”

The below posted is content copied directly from this recent and fasincating post on wired.com that was too fascinating not to share:

By Bryan Gardiner March 22, 2010  |12:00 pm  |Wired April 2010

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply
Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem
After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA
Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish.

Cyborg Taxidermy

Artist Lisa Black has an affinity for dead animals (not to be confused with this Lisa Black, a watercolor/acrylic painter). She likes to mount them (in the taxidermilogical sense) and create thought-provoking (if not a little disturbing) creations. A recent post on treehugger.com, has an interesting take on her work:

“She titles each modified creature with the word ‘fixed’, as if to imply that they were somehow broken in their original state. Perhaps, in our technologically hypercharged day and age, it is somehow easier to regard animals as having cold, mechanical innards rather than organic ones–almost as if that would alleviate mankind of some moral responsibility in our present relationship with them.

In the end, we’re reminded of how much more complex the animal’s organic machinery is to the most complex human constructions–and that there’s no clock to wind when their time is up.”

More of Lisa’s work with this bent can be seen in a gallery here. Below are some more pictures of her machinery-ied/ mechanical concoctions:

She’s also responsible for the site www.guildedbutterflies.com, a site that sells necklaces and broaches created from sustainably harvested butterfly wings. I have a necklace I purchased from an Audubon shop with an inset of a butterfly wing also harvested sustainably, so I find Lisa Black’s shop intriguing. Her pins and necklaces have the wings shellacked onto bamboo with a hinge in the middle so the pendant can be worn open or closed. They’re quite pretty:

Nature Can Make A Little Music

So I know I’ve been negligent in posting. Life gets a little busy sometimes and I’ll be starting a new job up in Booth Bay, Maine so posting may be a bit sporadic until I’m settled into my normal routine. So enough whining, onto the post:

I saw this some time ago but never got around to posting it.  French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has installed an exhibit at the London Barbican, the largest performing arts center in Europe. The Curve is the center’s visual arts space, where Boursier-Mougnet has mounted eight Les Paul style guitars and populated the area with 40 squat little zebra finches. The instruments have all been carefully chosen (I have a personal affinity for Les Paul electric guitars as did Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton) tuned and  The birds scrabble over the strings and produce what surprisingly sounds like the crunchy guitar anthem of some experimenting rock star. According to Curve curator Lydia Yee as recorded in a BBC interview, “With the finches he started thinking about the relationship between sound and space. He wanted to create situations that would enable sound to happen but not in an enforced way, or a very composed way.” The installation requires some significant maintenance from which ranges from the delicate tuning of the instruments to clean-up after the birds themselves. The exhibition runs until May 23rd and can accommodate up to 25 visitors at a time.

An delightfully informative article on the exhibit, complete with a humorous bent can be found here. One of the more interesting products of the work has been you-tube clips showing the birds nonchalantly making rock history:

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when life is imitating art

This is especially true when looking at the real-life models artist Alexa Meade turns into living paintings:

She uses acrylics to turn 3 dimensional life into the flat, textured subjects of discrete works of art. In most of the pictures of her work that can be found on her flickr stream as well as her professional website, a few details give the secret away – hair that is too real to the eye, and  distinctly  flesh-colored fingers and toes:

Weight-Lifting Ant Wins Photo Contest

So, I have a sick delight in writing an incorrectly modified sentenced. The ant did not win the contest per se; Dr Thomas Endlein did for taking a picture of said ant. (Susan, if you’re reading this, I’m kinda sorry; but not entirely. I also don’t know if I just punctuated that sentence correctly. I fear you may be squirming a little right now…)

According to the BBC article:

The image shows an Asian weaver ant hanging upside down on a glass-like surface and holding a 500mg (0.02oz) weight in its jaws.

It was taken by zoology specialist Dr Thomas Endlein of Cambridge University as he researched insects’ sticky feet.

Dr Endlein won £700 in photographic vouchers from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The research shows how ants change the size and shape of the pads on their feet to enable them to carry heavier loads.

He hopes it could help scientists develop better glues.

“The pads on ants’ feet are self-cleaning and can stick to almost any type of surface,” he said.

“No man-made glue or adhesive system can match this. Understanding how animals can control their adhesive systems should help us come up with clever adhesives in the future.”