This mobile is making me want to revisit my past forays into mobile making.

Amazing photo.

Fantastic kitchen indeed.

“I think you and I are fighting a losing battle, here, but then so is everybody else in his lunatic world, and if you were on my side it might take the pain out of losing.” - Hunter S Thompson’s closing sentence in a letter to Ann Frick.

A first-hand account of what it's like to live in solitary confinement.

Photos of the pigeon flyers of NYC.

Gorgeous photos of the Arctic.

NYTimes: Two Words: Wasteful and Ineffective: "This would be monumentally wasteful under any condition. The fact is that these facilities are disastrously mismanaged, and as many as 80 percent of the young men who serve time end up committing more crimes within a few years of their release."

Hm, a wall desk - an interesting solution to a small space.

‘Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.’ - Lao Tzu (via Zen Habits)

It Was Like This: You Were Happy
by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

(In the movie I recently saw, "Dot," they show her reading an excerpt of this poem at the memorial service of her son. Very powerful.) (Image: source)

Thanks
by W.S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Still amazing.

Tonight my mom and I went to a screening of a documentary film about an Ashland character, Dot. It was a (somewhat unexpectedly to me) inspiring, funny, moving movie about a woman who has devoted her life to activism and peace. It was particularly great to view the movie in the company of so many local radicals, artists, and families. I hope I am blessed enough to live a long life filled with the fight for justice, surrounded by such an amazing community.

Image: "Though 82-year-old Dot Fisher-Smith spent much of her life protesting injustice, probably her most famous moment came in 1996 when she was chained by the neck to a logging truck near the Croman Mill in Ashland." Mail Tribune.

Image: source.

Beautiful underwater photography.

Image: source.

More love for the Nike + GPS app.

Adorable bird alarm clock and bedside light.

Love these unusual work spaces.

"desigNYC’s mission is to amplify the work of extraordinary NYC nonprofits, community groups and city agencies serving the public good by connecting them with the power of good design."

A brilliant little tea lover's cup.

Need a Lawyer? Good Luck: "Across the country, programs that provide legal representation in civil cases to low-income Americans are so cash-strapped that they are turning away numbers of people. Hard-pressed Americans fighting foreclosure or seeking protection from domestic violence or access to medical care or unemployment benefits must often navigate the judicial system on their own or give up."

“Happiness is much, but it isn’t everything. One wants—one hopes for—the full ride during a lifetime, which includes not only happiness but other rich emotions like sorrow, anger, and yes, even grief.” - Michael Cunningham

Image: source.

Starfish

In the sea rocks,
in the stone pockets
under the tide’s lip,
in water dense as blindness

they slid
like sponges,
like too many thumbs.
I knew this, and what I wanted

was to draw my hands back
from the water – what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid.

But I stayed there,
I crouched on the stone wall
while the sea poured its harsh song
through the sluices,

while I waited for the gritty lightning
of their touch, while I stared
down through the tide’s leaving
where sometimes I could see them –

their stubborn flesh
lounging on my knuckles.
What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun

loving what is easy?
It never grew easy,
but at last I grew peaceful:
all summer

my fear diminished
as they bloomed through the water
like flowers, like flecks
of an uncertain dream,

while I lay on the rocks, reaching
into the darkness, learning
little by little to love
our only world.

- Mary Oliver

Image: source

Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985–2010 (h/t commandc)

Cool twist and lock shelving.

Image: source.

Another pretty blog I'm enjoying recently: Lloso, the blog of awesome fabric company Proud Mary - I like the focus on beautiful textiles.

Beautiful. "Princess Boy" "Here’s today’s moment of love. It’s a 10 minute segment from a Seattle TV show about a little boy named Dyson who likes to wear sequins and heels and whose lovely mother and father are totally cool about it." Watch till the end to see his awesome and supportive older brother.

Alan Gomez of USA Today reports on a bitter sign of the times: "Immigrants nervous about stronger enforcement have started drawing up legal documents to spell out what they want to happen to their families and belongings if they are deported." via Immigration Prof Blog.

This underwater sculpture garden is beautiful and, also, totally creepy.

Check out my friend (and favorite scientist) Phoebe's new venture, The Call of Science: how we became scientists, and why.

Image: source.

From Lens Culture: "In 1936, a 16-year-old Dutch girl played a shooting gallery game at the fair: hit the target and a camera takes a photo, which the girl receives as a prize. Almost every year between then and now, Ria van Dijk shot the target and got her prize." via.

And more great photos: Skeletons in the Closet documents the behind the scenes workings of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Great stuff.

Good question: why can't Jimmy Smits hold down a tv show? It's true! He's totally charming, was great on Dexter and NYPD Blue, but his attempts to headlining shows recently have been complete disasters (Outlaw was even worse than Cane).

This is how I make a quick cup of (decaf) coffee every morning - I'm always impressed by how simple it is and how well it works.

"Awakening Now" by Dana Folds, as read by Tara Brach.

Image: source.

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

- Frank O'Hara

Image: source.

Image: source.

Embroidery and Helvetica meet.

Image: source.

A surprisingly beautiful video of fruit and vegetables composting (however, I'd recommend muting the cheesy music and playing your own...)

From ColorLines: "Another LGBT Youth Suicide—and the Love That Can Stop This"

I'm not gonna lie - I didn't understand all of this article (perhaps my liberal arts education failed me, or maybe my brain is just rusty), but I did find it interesting: In Defense of Naive Writing.

We Are the Youth is a photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of queer youth in the United States.

"To try to be better is to be better."

I love good business cards - here are two that combine form and function: bike patch business card & bike tool business card. (OK, and a model airplane card, because that's just fun).

Love this NYTimes slideshow on the foods kids love to eat. Reminds me of being a kid and my mom making plates of different foods - having things cut up in little pieces and arranged seemed to make everything taste better. To be truthful, it's not so different from how I eat now. Picky eaters of the world, unite!

Image: source. Love the light, the bursts of florescent color, the whiteness.

A short film on the desk. (more interesting than it sounds - on workspace, on being nomadic.)

From Salon, "Hate crimes laws aren't the answer." "Until the government grants the LGBT community equality, society will continue to quietly condone such crimes." As someone who does not believe in the efficacy of the current criminal justice system, but is also extremely concerned about hate crimes, I find hate crimes legislation to be a complicated topic. But the bottom line for me is that I do not believe that increased criminalization of hate crimes gets to the root of the problem, just as the suggested criminalization of "bullying" is not, in my opinion, the appropriate response to the recent spate of queer juvenile suicides. As the author of this article writes, until bias is gone from our laws (laws governing family, employment, and all areas of life) and our society, no hate crimes legislation will stop these horrific crimes. "There will always be people who act with extreme violence, for whatever reason. If some of these people are truly motivated by bias alone, the way to fight this violence is to banish the bias from our laws. For how can we expect to confront bias crimes, supposedly predicated on anti-gay sentiment, if the legal framework of our society actually supports their biases?"

Does anyone out there listen to music while swimming? Looking for advice about listening to music while in the pool (also interested in watches that track laps/calories/distance/heart rate). Thanks for any suggestions!

"When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades;

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
I look on time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence.

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver

"I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future . . . When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.

Reading or listening to MLK Jr never ceases to remind me of the power of oration, the presence of courageous and brave people on this earth, and the need to always continue the fight for justice.

Image: source.