I honestly think that this is one of the most fascinating, beautiful websites that I've ever seen. It's put together by Jonathan Harris, the same guy who did this super cool interactive about Bhutan's Gross National Happiness.
Basically, I've got a bit of a crush.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Razbliuto?
Here is the link to the list of untranslatable words that I mentioned earlier. There are similar lists floating all over the web, but this one has some of the prettiest words I've seen. The "where to use it" explanations are a little annoying, but it's completely possible to ignore them and just bask in the fascination of the words.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Lazy Projector
A few more gems of lit. inspired songs...
"Doubleplusgood" from the Eurythmics album for a 1984 movie that never came to be:
The rest of the album is equally bizarre and annoying, but this song is especially ear worm-y.
Also, the uploader comments on this particular video are worth a read.
A good song to listen to in preparation for this summer...
I was by the way, referencing the fact that The Hobbit movie comes out this summer. More power to you if you actually intend to have fantastic rambling adventures.
How do you interpret the metaphors in this song? I think it's more than a bit odd to compare a girl to the Ring, which I see as being tacitly done here.
Kate Bush's infamous Wuthering Heights:
At the senior talent show my junior year, three girls dressed up in absurd white dresses and reenacted this for us, cartwheels and all. It was nothing short of fantastic. If this video has convinced you that you are, in fact, madly in love with Kate Bush, I would highly recommend checking out the Babooshka video.
How about you? Any favorite books-turned-movies-turned-songs (or similar constructions)?
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Happy One Year!
Word of the Week:
matutinal
/muh-toot-n-l, muh-tyoot-n-l/
adjective.
pertaining to or occurring in the morning; early in the day
Today was (more or less) the one year anniversary of Aural Aurora! Thank you for tuning in for whatever fraction of that you have. [The preceding sentence should receive a nomination for most awkward syntax ever. Sorry.]
Today, despite not playing the song, we kept things easy like Sunday morning, enjoying a variety of matutinal music. By the way, matutinal derives from Mater Matuta, an Italic goddess of the dawn. While Matuta does not count among the lucky ladies, there are about 5 million dawn goddesses whose names all derive from the word/reconstruction HausÅs, the name given to the dawn goddess in Proto-Indo-European religion.
Not to be overdramatic, but the discovery of Proto-Indo-European religion kind of makes me reconsider my whole imaginarium of the ancient world. It shouldn't (I probably should have realized that something like it existed before), but it does.
Many peoples came from the same source. The same place. Had the same culture. Wild. Revolutionary.
A sculpture of Mater Matuta; I'm not sure if she's holding babies or loaves of bread.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
An Atmospheric Aural Aurora
Word of the Week:
blustery
adjective form of bluster /bluhs-ter/
to roar and be tumultuous
to be loud, noisy, or swaggering; utterly loud empty menaces or protests
How tumultuous!
This is this is the sky above clouds:
This is lightning above clouds:
Both are really cool, but I only have a link for one.
Next week, Aural Aurora goes to the moon! Leave your favorite lunar tunes in the comments, please!
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Object to Be Preserved
"One has a pair of hands and they obey. How are one's order's transmitted to one's hands?
I had made a discovery that horrified me: my hands were numb. My hands were dead. Probably they had been numb a long time and I had not noticed it. The pity was that I had noticed it, had raised the question. That was serious.
Lashed by the wind, the wings of the plane had been dragging and jerking at the cables by which they were controlled from the wheel, and the wheel in my hands had not ceased jerking a single second. I had been gripping the wheel with all my might for forty minutes, fearful lest the strain snap the cables. So desperate had been my grip that now I could not feel my hands.
What a discovery! My hands were not my own. I looked at them and decided to lift a finger: it obeyed me. I looked away and issued the same order: now I could not feel whether the finger had obeyed or not. No message had reached me. I thought, 'Suppose my hands were to open: how would I know it?' I swung my head round and looked again: my hands were still locked round the wheel. Nevertheless, I was afraid. How can a man tell the difference between the sight of a hand opening and the decision to open that hand, when there is no longer an exchange of sensations between the hand and the brain? How can one tell the difference between an image and an act of will? Better stop thinking the picture of open hands. Hands have a life of their own. Better not offer them this monstrous temptation. And I began to chant a silly litany which went on uninterrupted until this flight was over. A single thought. A single image. A single phrase tirelessly chanted over and over agin: 'I shut my hands. I shut my hands. I shut my hands.' All of me was condensed into that phrase and for me the white sea, the whirling eddies, the sawtoothed range ceased to exist. There was only 'I shut my hands.' There was no danger, no cyclone, no lands unattained. Somewhere there was a pair of rubber hands which, once they let go the wheel, could not possibly come alive in time to recover from the tumbling drop into the sea."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
The passage above is taken from a chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars in which Antoine describes piloting his mail plane through a cyclone over the Andes. I know it's a little bit long, but I think it does a really good job at tackling those strange distinctions between "I," "me," "my mind," and "my body."
Here are two of my favorite Man Ray pieces from the wonderful Man Ray-Lee Miller exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. Unfortunately, it left on December 4th, but the art and the story are definitely still worth looking into.
I had made a discovery that horrified me: my hands were numb. My hands were dead. Probably they had been numb a long time and I had not noticed it. The pity was that I had noticed it, had raised the question. That was serious.
Lashed by the wind, the wings of the plane had been dragging and jerking at the cables by which they were controlled from the wheel, and the wheel in my hands had not ceased jerking a single second. I had been gripping the wheel with all my might for forty minutes, fearful lest the strain snap the cables. So desperate had been my grip that now I could not feel my hands.
What a discovery! My hands were not my own. I looked at them and decided to lift a finger: it obeyed me. I looked away and issued the same order: now I could not feel whether the finger had obeyed or not. No message had reached me. I thought, 'Suppose my hands were to open: how would I know it?' I swung my head round and looked again: my hands were still locked round the wheel. Nevertheless, I was afraid. How can a man tell the difference between the sight of a hand opening and the decision to open that hand, when there is no longer an exchange of sensations between the hand and the brain? How can one tell the difference between an image and an act of will? Better stop thinking the picture of open hands. Hands have a life of their own. Better not offer them this monstrous temptation. And I began to chant a silly litany which went on uninterrupted until this flight was over. A single thought. A single image. A single phrase tirelessly chanted over and over agin: 'I shut my hands. I shut my hands. I shut my hands.' All of me was condensed into that phrase and for me the white sea, the whirling eddies, the sawtoothed range ceased to exist. There was only 'I shut my hands.' There was no danger, no cyclone, no lands unattained. Somewhere there was a pair of rubber hands which, once they let go the wheel, could not possibly come alive in time to recover from the tumbling drop into the sea."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
The passage above is taken from a chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars in which Antoine describes piloting his mail plane through a cyclone over the Andes. I know it's a little bit long, but I think it does a really good job at tackling those strange distinctions between "I," "me," "my mind," and "my body."
Here are two of my favorite Man Ray pieces from the wonderful Man Ray-Lee Miller exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. Unfortunately, it left on December 4th, but the art and the story are definitely still worth looking into.
I wish that this photo could convey the wonderful color that this painting, Lips (Heure de l'Observatoire), has irl. It's so morosely decadent!
On its own, Object to Be Destroyed is, eh, another piece of surrealist sculpture. But the backstory - oh the backstory! - so interesting.
Kind of sounds a knell for anthropocentrism, don't you think?
(Or at least starts to).
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Avian Edition
Word of the Week:
zugunruhe /tsook-uhn-ruh-he/
a migratory drive in animals, especially birds
Is your radio show in need of something cute and thematic? Put a bird on it!
This song isn't about birds at all, but a bird features very nicely in the video:
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