steven meyers: x-ray vision

Steven Meyers’s work is a perfect example of science as fine art. Using finely attuned x-rays, he exposes beautiful arrangements of plants like this one. His website can be found here. For more beautiful portfolios of science as art, visit Seed Magazine’s portfolios feature.

“breakings” by henry taylor

Long before I first left home, my father
tried to teach me horses, land, and sky,
to show me how his kind of work was done.
I studied how to be my father’s son,
but all I learned was, when the wicked die,
they ride combines through barley forever.

Every summer I hated my father
as I drove hot horses through the dusty grass;
and so I broke with him, and left the farm
for other work, where unfamiliar weather
broke on my head an unexpected storm
and things I had not studied came to pass.

So nothing changes, nothing stays the same,
and I have returned from a broken home
alone, to ask for a job breaking horses.
I watch a colt on a long line making
tracks in dust, and think of the kinds of breakings
there are, and the kinds of restraining forces.

- Henry Taylor

poems on the underground

Reader John Heyderman recently tipped me off to a project I think is one of the coolest I’ve heard of: Poems on the Underground, founded by Judith Chernaik and sponsored by the London Underground, is a program designed to expose wide-ranging audiences to, well, poems. The Underground donates advertising space, and Chernaik, Cicely Herbert, and Gerard Benson select rotating sets of poetry both classic and emergent to be displayed throughout the system. You can view a selection from the project’s archive, from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, here, and head over to the London Transport Museum Shop to buy posters or books of the poems. Again, thanks to John for pointing it out.

oskar kokoschka: tre croci

An early landscape by Oskar Kokoschka, the 20th century Viennese Expressionist best known for his affair with Alma Mahler (Gustav Mahler’s widow) and his tribute to her, The Tempest. He painted many portraits and a number of mythological scenes, but I personally am most fascinated by his landscapes.

“buying rations in kabul” by eliza griswold

The Uzbek boys on Chicken Street
have never had enough to eat.
They stock from shelf to shining shelf
these G.I. meals, which boil themselves
in added water (bottled, please).
In twenty minutes, processed cheese
on jambalaya, followed by
a peanut-butter jamboree.

The boys, polite,
advise on which we might prefer —
beef teriyaki, turkey blight —
and thank us twice for bringing peace
as, meals in hand, we leave the store.
Of course they know that any peace
that must be kept by force
contains another name. It’s war.

- Eliza Griswold

“flying at night” by ted kooser

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

- Ted Kooser

the geostationary banana over texas

There is a group of crazy artists/scientists down in Texas working on a rather unique project: sending a giant banana into space (or, well, near-space altitudes, but shhh). The idea is to create a giant (300 meters long) banana-blimp out of bamboo and synthetic paper, fill it with helium, and float it around 30 to 50 kilometers over Texas for a month or so. They’ve got the design down; now all they need is some funding. Or, you know, 1.5 million dollars of funding.

Check out the GSBOT website here.

remedios varo: the creation of the birds

Remedios Varo was a Spanish-Mexican painter who lived from 1908 to 1963. She was heavily influenced by the surrealist movement, with which she became involved when she fled to Paris during the Spanish Civil War. She subsequently sought temporary refuge in Mexico but ended up living out her days there. Her work blends art and science in a way that has always attracted me. Take the time to take a good look at this painting, The Creation of the Birds — there’s a lot to see.

“this web” by howard levy

You knew how things open,
a flower, a jail, an eye,
and at the very last, a hand.

It is already evening when the hand
opens. The streetlights have come on,
people absorbed into their coats
and scarves hurrying along the street.
No one speaks, not many even
look around them, they spare themselves
the torments of community.

In a small restaurant off the Central Square,
the first diners of the evening have entered.
A waiter who only this morning dreamed
of the exhaustion of his charity rises.
As he stands over them, you write —
their hands poised to eat, his poised
to serve, the cook’s to cook —

this intimate whisper of revelation:
this web of hands.

- Howard Levy

venezuela’s youth orchestra system

If you pay attention to classical music, you’ve probably heard of Gustavo Dudamel. The young Venezuelan conductor has been hailed as the next Leonard Bernstein; he brings tremendous energy and color to his performances and has received glowing reviews from just about every major, well, reviewer in existence.

Even more exciting than Dudamel, though, is his orchestra. While he will in 2009 be taking the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he currently serves as musical director at the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, where he has been since 1999. That’s right, the world’s most up-and-coming conductor runs a youth orchestra.

The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra is part of a network of 125 youth orchestras in Venezuela, all overseen by the Fundación del Estado para el Sistema de Orquesta Juvenil e Infantil de Venezuela, also known as the sistema, which was founded in 1975. The sistema’s training programs currently accommodate 250,000 budding musicians, 90% of them from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, who can enroll in the intensive musical training program at as early an age as two years old. And the program isn’t just remarkable for what it does for kids, taking them off the streets and giving them something to be good at. It also turns out seriously excellent musicians. One sistema alumnus is Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest double bass player ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic. Eight years earlier, he had been working in a supermarket to supplement his mother’s scanty income and becoming ever more drawn to the street gangs in his neighborhood — until he showed up at the sistema’s local music school, saw a double bass, and never looked back.

One of my closest friends is an aspiring professional violist, and having peripherally partaken in her saga over the past few years, I can state with authority that it is extremely difficult in the United States to enter the professional world of classical music without having an obscene amount of money at one’s disposal. Venezuela’s government may have its problems — and I’m not even going to start trying to untangle that mess — but they’re doing something right.