Emily Davidow
Poems On Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn
Posted on 03.12.08 by Emily

Just returned from a delightful talk with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara Legendre at the Rubin Museum of Art (filmed for her series on LinkTV, so surely you can see it soon too). It was too dark in there to take notes, but he read a couple of poems I love, so I’m sharing them here with you.

Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, Full Catastrophe Living, and Arriving at Your Own Door, opened the conversation with a gorgeous poem from which the title of his latest book came:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

— Derek Wolcott

The second poem Kabat-Zinn used was by a poet from whom the name of yours truly was inspired. (Thanks Mom and Dad):

Me from Myself — to banish –
Had I Art –
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart –

But since Myself — assault Me –
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication –
Me — of Me?

— Emily Dickinson

During the discussion, he defined meditation as “attention in service of self-understanding and liberation.” He also used “awarenessing” as a verb in places where you might expect to hear “thinking” instead.

Both he and Bokara somehow started to blame technology for accelerating time, to which I respectfully disagree. Oddly enough, my brother gave me a book on just that topic this week, The Mayan Code, which asserts that time acceleration is a manifestation of the acceleration of consciousness. So perhaps it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara who are responsible for this phenomenon through talks like these! Your thoughts (and awarenesses) welcome, of course.

Filed under: better world and books and consciousness and creativity and culture and emily approved and happiness and health and interconnected and love and people and poetry and senses


links for 2008-03-12: Moko Saves the Whales
Posted on 03.12.08 by Emily

Filed under: animals and better world and interconnected and links and love


links for 2008-03-04: Secrets of Happiness and Hyperbolic Geometry
Posted on 03.04.08 by Emily

links for 2008-02-12: connect the dots la la la la
Posted on 02.12.08 by Emily

Filed under: activism and advertising and animals and better world and creativity and culture and links and love and marketing and photography and science and taste and technology and travel and video and webstuff


GhostGarden and More GPS Games
Posted on 01.29.08 by Emily

Ghost Garden

The surreal romance of aristocratic expat Lucy and castaway Jack enchanted me as I strolled through Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens in early January, following their love story on a handheld HP GPS device preloaded with Anita Fontaine’s spooky sweet Ghost Garden, part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. As I traveled through the gardens, certain locations would trigger animated scenes that revealed the story, set in the 1800s. I could feel the past, present and future all melting into one, and I got excited imagining the day when it be easy to create my own site-specific adventures for people to discover as they’re traveling through a space.

Garmin Colorado400T
That day turned out to be less than a month away! Wherigo is a flexible gaming platform that Garmin is embedding in their new Colorado 400t Handheld GPS unit (Pictured at right. Thanks, Brady!) Wherigo Builder allows anyone to build alternate reality games, tour guides, local reviews, real estate marketing apps, scavenger hunts, pub crawls or Victorian love stories that are site-specific by mapping out zones, creating a story and then sharing it online. (Alternately, you could write it directly in Lua, a programming language whose name means “moon” in Portuguese and is also what World of Warcrafters use to build on top of their platform.) If you have a PocketPC Device, you can download the Wherigo Player and start playing.

Anything similar for the iPhone’s fauxGPS maps or soon to be true GPS?

For now, you can enjoy my Emily Approved Sydney recommendations in Google Maps and in Google Earth.

Filed under: art and consumerism and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and gardening and love and senses and technology and travel and video and webstuff


Loving Words
Posted on 11.06.07 by Emily

Lower Case n
“Lower Case N, Standing on a Hill,” from classic Sesame Street

My day started off with some of the brilliant skits and songs that instilled in me an early and abiding love for letters, letterforms and language: Lower-case N, Standing on a Hill from Sesame Street, Easy Reader and the Adventures of Letterman from Electric Company. I love learning that was Morgan Freeman, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel. I’m feeling the urge to indulge in an extended experience. (Thanks, Panopticist!)

Not long after, I discovered Hyperwords, an excellent FireFox extension that lets you select any word and translate it, look it up in a dictionary or thesaurus, shop it, search it, blog it, slice it through a tin can and still apply many more commands than I have time to explore right now. One especially handy feature is being able to select any currency amount and convert it on the fly. (Despite how painful it is to convert prices in [any currency] to U.S. dollars now.)

Filed under: art and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and happiness and love and typography and video and webstuff


Kenro Izu: Bhutan: The Sacred Within
Posted on 11.05.07 by Emily
Kenro Izu Taktsang Monastery
Kenro Izu, “Druk #131″, Taksang Monastery, Paro, Bhutan 2003

Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within
November 2, 2007–February 18, 2008
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts.

Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.”

Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.


Kenro Izu's Camera
Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily Davidow

Izu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.”

Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.

(more…)

Filed under: art and better world and books and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and flowers and gardening and happiness and interconnected and love and nyc and observations and people and photography


The Principles of Uncertainty with Maira Kalman
Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily
Mairas Mocha Cream Cake
Mocha cream cake from Maira Kalman’s mother’s bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, NY (see p.246-247), served at a celebration for the release of The Principles of Uncertainty at the NYPL.

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.”
  • Sara Berman's map of the united states

  • 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.

Filed under: art and books and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and food and funny and happiness and love and music and nyc and people and product review and typography and women

Comments: 1 Comment


Love Letters from Argentina
Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily

BuenosairesletteringCollage of images of handpainted lettering taken in Buenos Aires by Emily Davidow

On every street in Buenos Aires, I fell in love with the handpainted signs and lettering. Delighted to discover these fonts below by Alejandro Paul that capture the Argentinian style and energy. Paul is one of the founders of Sudtipos project, the first Argentinian type foundry collective, whose site is filled with fonty goodness.

Candy Script

Chicle St font

Pinguino

Regarding the adorable pinguinos, I didn’t see any in Argentina, but here are some pictures of the pinguinos of Patagonia (Chile) and the Galapagos (Ecuador).

Filed under: advertising and animals and art and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and love and typography

Comments: 1 Comment


Deep Thoughts with Claire Nouvian
Posted on 10.21.07 by Emily

Recommended musical accompaniment: Deep Water (iTunes) by Seal

Clairenouvian Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)

Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950’s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.

The Deep, by Claire Nouvian Nouvian’s journey began in 2001 at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where she was blown away by an exhibition of “Mysteries of the Deep.” She couldn’t believe the beautiful creatures she was seeing were real and not some computer generated 3D aliens. She set out to tell the world this stuff exists, making a documentary and book.

Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling.

Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live.

Deep3 500-1

But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.”

Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.

Filed under: activism and animals and art and better world and books and creativity and culture and design and happiness and health and interconnected and love and passions and science and sustainability and technology and travel and women


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