Regulating your own work schedule is an incredibly important part of being active and productive. Knowing what you need to do and doing them is just as important as knowing when to take a break so you can function at the best of your abilities.

I found an interesting post with a quote from Ernest Hemingway on the topic of writing:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

This is applicable to most tasks and work in general. And it brings to mind something I’ve heard from a Yoga instructor years ago. She told me that you have to have a reason to go back to the mat and do Yoga again.

If you over-exert yourself too much you’ll end up hating the practice of Yoga and will dread the thought of returning to the mat. It’ll become a chore and that’s the worst way to make sure that you develop a regular Yoga practice.

So people, know when to stop. Stop near the top. Give yourself some a reason to come back again.

Massive sculptures are fascinating and Robert Smithson‘s Spiral Jetty walks the fine line between nature and the artificial. In 1970, he built a 1500-foot long, 15 foot-wide counterclockwise coil out of mud, salt crystals and rocks at the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Like most land art, the Spiral Jetty is a part of its landscape and its affected by the elements: It exists to eventually erode under natural conditions. Since its creation, the jetty has been completely covered and uncovered by water several times, being dependent on fluctuating water levels.

When Smithson set out to build ”Spiral Jetty” in 1970, he hired a contractor and another worker who used two dump trucks, a tractor and a large front-loader to move 6,650 tons of rock and earth from the shore into the water. At 1,500 feet long, the giant spiral is large enough to be seen in photographs taken from space.

Smithson had a precise vision for the project and supervised every step, making sure individual rocks fell in the right spots. ”He would raise each rock up and roll it around, then he would move this one, change that one until it looked exactly right..He wanted it to look like it was a growing, living thing, coming out of the center of the earth.”

The Tate ETC has a great article chronicling a visit to the Spiral Jetty and feelings that it evokes:

Whenever the water of the lake recedes, it leaves salt in its wake. After the recent long drought, it now encrusts almost every inch of the work and a salt bed has risen and hardened within its 1,500ft-long spiral. It appears inevitable that after a few more cycles of high water and drought – probably a matter of decades – the Jetty will disappear completely within a matrix of impacted salt: an art conservation problem for the ages.

 

We visitors could see the process underway. The deep water lay far out in the lake bed, a roseate sea rippling away for miles, its surface torn into whitecaps by the wind. Between the Jetty and the water’s edge were scudding, tumbleweed-like plumes and quivering masses of salt foam, the latter in various stages of coalescence into the hard white ground, still tinged with rosy algae, on which we walked and stood.

Despite the facts, I kept imagining the lake bed and the work as being ice-bound rather than salt-bound, so white has the setting become. Spiral Jetty was not even 35 years old when I saw it, yet the mind could easily accept the thought of it as 3,500 or 35,000 years old. Only a nearby derelict oil rig, the ruins of a speculator’s failed scheme, provides some anchorage in time for the disorientated visitor. That, and the presence of other visitors.

Seeing the work from the nearby ridge, dotted with 30 or 40 people, created a slightly sickening sense both of humankind’s unstoppable dispersal across the planet and of the planet’s, and the larger universe’s, utter obliviousness.

In writings and conversation, its creator emphasised the difficulty of getting a fix on the scale of the Jetty. Now I knew how literally he meant it. From up on the ridge, the sculpture looks gargantuan in its prehensile hold on the lake bed. But set foot on it, and it turns almost intimate, a mere filigree of earth-moving within a desert immensity that lacks all familiar cues to the sizes and distances of things…

Smithson himself did a film on the Spiral Jetty, which you can view on his website (quicktime). A voice-over by Smithson reveals the evolution of the Spiral Jetty and sequences filmed in a natural history museum are integrated into the film featuring prehistoric relics that illustrate themes central to Smithson’s work. Here’s a short Youtube sample:

If you’re planning on visiting it, here are directions to the jetty.

The Guardian has a post on the 50 greatest arts videos on Youtube. It’s a great list with many gems. I particularly enjoyed the Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs and Hendrix videos. Happy viewing!:

YouTube is best known for its offbeat videos that become viral sensations. But among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans. Ajesh Patalay selects 50 of the best – Joy Division’s TV debut, readings by Jack Kerouac, a Marlene Dietrich screen test, Madonna’s first performance… and much more.

You know when you fall in love, you sometimes get that literal feeling of melting into the other person. Dissolving, you fuse into into this bliss-out moment of forever. Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss illustrates this perfectly. I used to have this on a postcard, a pretty remnant of the idealized past.

The 36 Views of Mount Fuji is a series of woodblock prints created between 1826 and 1833 by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Popular in the West, it’s one of the most well known Japanese art works due the widespread pop-culture reproduction of The Great Wave of Kanagawa (the first picture in the series) into posters, t-shirts and postcards.

On Ukiyo-e – Japanese Woodblock Prints

The term Ukiyo-e refers to ‘pictures of the floating world‘, a blossoming urban culture embodied by the lifestyles of the cultural bourgeoisie. The novelist Asai Ryoi provided a definition of the ‘floating life’ in his 1661 novel Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo-monogatari):

“Living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves, singing songs, loving sake, women and poetry, letting oneself drift, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current.”

Woodblock prints became popular in the Edo period during the second half of the 17th century. Mass produced for townsmen and common folk, its subject matter originally began with city life and culture before evolving into the topic of landscapes. Like almost all mediums, ukiyo-e was also used to produce sexually explicit images (shunga) and satire.

While the production process may vary, Katsushika Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji was developed by first drawing an image on paper, which was than used as a guide to carve a wooden block. The block was then inked and applied to sheets of paper to create an image. Hokusai used a wide range of colors, thus requiring the use of multiple blocks for each image.

The pivotal point in the art of ukiyo-e came with Katsushika Hokusai, “the one obsessed with painting”. He conclusively shifted the emphasis from personal portraiture to a depiction of nature. Hokusai began by creating landscapes in the spirit of ancient Japanese art; he went on to attain a new vision of nature.

 

He was fascinated with European copperplate engraving, a technique which he had encountered in his studies. Through color shading and depth perspective, he strove for a new spatial reality. The results were strange, surrealistic creations of the imagination, which he soon surpassed. (source)

On Katsushika Hokusai: Legendary Artist of the Edo Period

Katsushika Hokusai is an interesting character. One of Japan’s leading experts on Chinese painting during the Edo period, he began painting by the age of 6 and was known by at least 30 names during his lifetime. He was keen on experimental displays of art: once at the competition held by the Shogun, he painted a blue curve on paper while chasing a chicken with red paint on its feet across it. He described it as a landscape showing a river with red maple leaves floating on it. He won.

He was also instrumental in the creation of the modern manga comics you see, having created the Hokusai Manga (random illustrations of animals, religious figures, and everyday people) in 1811 as a way to make money and attract students.

What I liked most about Hokusai was his view that painting was a way to develop a complete understanding of reality, a result of his belief in Nichiren Buddhism. A postscript from his work One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji reads:

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.

 

If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

Hokusai died in 1849 at 89 years old. On his deathbed, he said, “If only Heaven will give me just another ten years… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.” Over the span of his career, his most popular and influential work in Japan and the West was the 36 Views of Mouth Fuji, the full set of which you can view below.

You’ll notice that there are 46 prints below. The first 36 were included in the original publication, and later on 10 more prints were included, due to the popularity of the series. Fortunately, all of the images are now in the public domain because their copyright has expired.

1. The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Published in 1832 (Edo Period) as the first in Hokusai’s series, this is his most famous work. It depicts an enormous wave threatening boats near the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa; Mount Fuji can be seen in the background. The wave is probably not intended to be a tsunami, but a normal ocean wave created by the wind.

2. Mount Fuji in Clear Weather (also known as Red Fuji)

3. A Shower Below The Summit

4. Fuji seen through the Mannen bridge at Fukagawa, Edo

5. The Fuji seen from the Surugadai hill, Edo

6. The coast of seven leagues in Kamakura

7. Senju in the Musashi Province

8. Tama River in the Musashi Province

9. Inume pass in the Kai Province

10. Fujimi Fuji view field in the Owari Province

11. Asakusa Honganji temple in the Eastern capital (Edo)

12. Tsukada Island in the Musashi Province

13. Shichiri beach in Sagami Province

14. Umegawa in Sagami Province

15. Kajikazawa in Kai Province

16. Mishima pass in Kai Province

17. Lake Suwa in the Shinano Province

18. Ejiri in the Suruga Province

19. The Fuji from the mountains of T?t?mi

20. Ushibori in the Hitachi Province

21. A sketch of the Mitsui shop in Suruga street in Edo

22. Sunset across the Ry?goku bridge from the bank of the Sumida River at Onmayagashi

23. Sazai hall – 500 Rakanji temple

24. Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall

25. Shimomeguro

26. Watermill at Onden

27. Enoshima in the Sagami Province

28. Shore of Tago Bay, Ejiri at Tokaido

29. Yoshida at Tokaido

30. The Kazusa Province sea route

31. Nihonbashi bridge in Edo

32. Village of Sekiya at Sumida River

33. Bay of Noboto

34. The lake of Hakone in the Sagami Province

35. The Fuji reflects in Lake Kawaguchi, seen from the Misaka pass in the Kai Province

36. Hodogaya on the Tokaido

37. Honjo Tatekawa, the timberyard at Honjo

38. Pleasure District at Senju

39. Goten-yama-hill, Shinagawa on the Tokaido

40. Nakahara in the Sagami Province

41. Dawn at Isawa in the Kai Province

42. The back of the Fuji from the Minobu river

43. Ono Shinden in the Suruga Province

44. The Tea plantation of Katakura in the Suruga Province

45. The Fuji from Kanaya on the Tokaido

46. Climbing on Fuji

One main benefit of technological evolution: we have more tools to rediscover our cultural roots.

In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth available to all on the Internet.

The scrolls’ contemporary history has been something of a tortured one because they are among the most important sources of information on Jewish and early Christian life. After their initial discovery they were tightly held by a small circle of scholars. In the last 20 years access has improved significantly, and in 2001 they were published in their entirety.

Israel to Display the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet

SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver which shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. Yep, when your computer is idle you’ll get to see a live feed of what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s quite fascinating because of the voyeuristic element involved but also surreal because it compresses time-space.

Something is happening right at the moment elsewhere and you are a witness to it. It is real but since it’s only an image, you tend to question its verity a little more than what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look away from the screen because I’m always expecting something to happen just that moment, maybe a car accident or a cute girl would enter into the frame.

It’s these thoughts that make this screensaver (and surveillance) quite an intriguing process.

Download Links

1. OS X version

2. Windows Version

Since I’m running a Windows setup, I installed the screensaver for a test. Ran a check and there weren’t any spyware or viruses. Everytime the screensaver runs, it shows a different image. It cycles through the cameras so you can actually sit down at your desk and look at multiple cities/locations at once.

I really like that fact that city, location and longitude/latitude is included in the bottom of the screensaver. The images aren’t very clear and some of them are difficult to see in the night but most of them are rather interesting. You’ll get to see traffic stops, shopping malls, residences, playgrounds, pools, churches and backyards.

It’s definitely a lot more interesting than the usual screensavers, especially when you get to see people walking around and doing stuff.