even*cleveland: time lapse

Showing posts with label time lapse. Show all posts

for you, flowers blooming

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Also: how to find stillness with a stone.

spring, recomposed

'Spring,' from Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. Richter says:

As a child, I fell in love with it [The Four Seasons] ... It's beautiful, charming music with a great melody and wonderful colors. Then, later on, as I became more musically aware — literate, studied music and listened to a lot of music — I found it more difficult to love it. We hear it everywhere — when you're on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising; it's everywhere. For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.

In another interview, he describes the process as 'writing through it anew – similarly to how scribes once illuminated manuscripts – and thus rediscovering it for myself.'

Finding this video was a lucky hit, loving as I do time-lapse videos of things blooming and the sun moving across the sky. And given snow on the ground here and more snow to come, I am in the right frame of mind for images of speeded-up spring paired with spikily familiar/unfamiliar music.

the time of daffodils

Originally posted 3/15/2012. Best viewed on mute (and when there is snow on the ground).

growing the great pumpkin

This year, the largest American pumpkin weighed two thousand and fifty-eight pounds, while the world record is held by a 2,323.7-pound pumpkin grown by a Swiss gardener named Beni Meier, who works as an account manager at a software firm for his day job. In photos of Meier and his pumpkin, the victorious gardener raises a puny fist into the air while the monstrous greyish-orange fruit bulges and sags, as far removed from a tidy jack-o’-lantern as Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures are from the everyday objects they represent.

Nicola Twilley, "Growing the Great Pumpkin."

buds

Our valley has its own microclimate, and spring has come very late. It took a long time to spot buds on the branches, but they are finally here.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous quote about the arc of the universe references an 1853 sermon by the minister Theodore Parker, a Transcendentalist and abolitionist:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.

In a week of earthquakes and riots, the buds remind me to be hopeful. Like all growing things, we keep going on. We fail and learn and fail and learn and then we try again. We do our best to help and make things better. Slowly, often much too painfully, things move forward.

Flowers will come.

two months breaking ice

Cassandra Brooks has spent two months on the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a National Science Foundation research icebreaker sailing in the Ross Sea of Antarctica. This is a time lapse film of the view from the prow of the ship.

Icebreakers have been on my mind this week after seeing Guido van der Werve's Nummer acht, everything is going to be alright at MoMA on Monday, which is a ten minute film of a man walking slowly in front of an icebreaker at work.

In Antarctic news: the kingdom of light is about to end — last Sunday was the last sunset. Also: the lost photos of Captain Scott (hat tip to Lily Stockman).