What’s tree-fitty?

Loch Ness Monster: $3.50

Global Climate Crisis: 350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

Where are we now? About 385. Learn more, connect with others and take action at the newly relaunched 350.org founded by Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy (one of the most compelling and inspiring books I am reading right now.)

I had noted I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley as a book I would probably enjoy reading, but without a sense of urgency. Then comes this short film and these diorama diaries. Sloane creates elaborate multi-media dioramas in lucite boxes for a bunch of her stories and brings them to life in these videos. Ha! I am falling in love. And ordering your book. Thanks for making me laugh!

“Like most people I imagine do, I have three sets of magnetic poetry. I don’t know why you wouldn’t. One of them is cat themed, which is in no way pathetic.” (from Diary of a Diorama: Smell This)

• IE Best Buy Polo Shirts at Improv Everywhere
  I’ll always have a soft spot for the corporate polo, since it was the required uniform in my family’s business growing up. The best ones, of course, are subversive. This is based on Improv Everywhere’s indelible Best Buy mission that had over 60 agents dress in the distinctive store uniform and swarm a 23rd St. Best Buy (but “just happened to dress this way today”). Get one before they get a cease and desist.
  (tags: improveverywhere improv subversive uniform retail)

Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you.

Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.)

Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:

• A pull out “Map of the United States” by Kalman’s beautiful mother, Sara Berman, with instructions to: “Either put it on the wall or put it back in the book. If you put it back in the book, it may one day fall out when someone browses through the book and it will become a thing that falls out of the book.”



• An appendix filled with “things that fall out of books” and a fabulous collection of numbers in the wild. (Kalman would love the Numbers fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)
• Luscious liner page images of mosses of Long Island.
• An index that’s amusing on its own, featuring laughter, love (as a guarantee of sanity), finding self, forgetting, forgiveness, hairdos, dreams (bad, fragment of, good, malaise after bad, no answer to), and even happiness. One thing you won’t find in the index is “inner peace” (p. 245-6), a phrase that seems to trigger its opposite for Kalman. (What is that about?)

Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?”

I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.

• The Principles of Uncertainty book on Amazon
• The Principles of Uncertainty blog on NYT
• NYT’s video highlights of the celebration at the NYPL

According to “Is That a Lama Behind the Camera,” Anupama Chopra’s great article in the New York Times on Bhutan’s budding film industry, last year a record 24 films were produced in the tiny Himalayan kingdom, population 700,000; in 2003 the total was only six. Even though there were only ten films produced in the country in 2005, delightful movie posters announced screenings in the theaters or public halls of every town I traveled through. The article describes a trend towards song-and-dance fantasy, but the movies that caught my eye had taglines that sounded far more realistic: “Muensel — True love comes… and goes,” “Ratho Namgay — bungling along a lifetime achievement of failure,” and “Kikhor — the drama of life begins at home, within the family.” It’s clear that while the dialogue is in Dzongkha and the costumes are traditionally Bhutanese, the themes are universal.

• I highly recommend Kyentse Norbu’s wonderful movie, “Travellers & Magicians .”
• Keep your eyes open for “Journey with Robert Thurman in Bhutan” coming soon. (You can enjoy a taste now at the Bob Thurman Podcast – the latest post, Part II of his George Lucas interview is fascinating.)
• Interesting related journal article (where I found numbers for 2005): “Roar of the Thunder Dragon: The Bhutanese Audio-visual Industry and the Shaping and Representation of Contemporary Culture” by Tshewang Dendup in the Journal of Bhutan Studies, Volume 14, Summer 2006.

ROFLOL from Hanna Gersen’s “Sigh,” a hilarious mad-libbed urban feminist reframing of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.“

Flowers are cliched, and often not allowed in the hospital.

Food’s tricky under the circumstances.

Laughter is the best medicine of all, and it’s a guaranteed response to the homeopathic humor of giant microbes.

Here are a few i’ve been intimate with over the years (mouseover for identification):

Remember: YMMV! (Your Microbes May Vary)

It can also be a helpful healing visualization tool. Just envision all those white blood cells (leukocytes) growing stronger every day and building up your immune system.