Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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  • Tag: pensieve

    • In My Pensieve: A Link Round Up

      Posted at 2:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on July 18, 2016

      As I browse the internet, I collect up interesting videos, articles, and things to think about. Some of them become blog posts of their own, but mostly my thoughts are too brief for that, so once in a while I round up the excess and remove it to my pensieve. Here’s a little look at what’s been swirling around my mind over the past few weeks. There’s a loose theme here around art, expression, joy, authenticity, and nostalgia.

      1) This inspiring celebration of slow art and authenticity:

       

      2) This send up of that very celebration that made me laugh forever:

      3) This next video is over a year old, but recently I’ve been relistening to J. Walker McSpadden’s Robin Hood on Librivox on walks and it has inspired me to revisit Lars Anderson’s incredible archery techniques, learned from studying the past:

      4) Speaking of the past, Nintendo is releasing a miniature version of its classic console, preloaded with its most popular games – Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, and the like. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this because it’ll just make it harder for me to buy one before it completely sells out, but it is too awesome to keep to myself. Even though these aren’t the first video games, they’re definitely nostalgic classics.

      5) One of the greatest joys in my life is social dancing. This Vimeo mini-documentary captures perfectly the quality of wordless expression and joy found in Lindy Hop (my particular favorite), and likely all social dance:

       

      6) And speaking of Swing, if that previous video captured you at all, check out this tribute to Frankie Manning, the creator and legendary ambassador of Lindy Hop:

      7) Speaking of Swing, part two, check out this effort to honor the legendary Chick Webb by transcribing a large portion of his catalog for modern big band live performance. You should always do your own due diligence before contributing money, of course – though it looks like they’ve reached their goal (and then some!) already. To hear Frankie Manning and Norma Miller talk about the brilliance and prowess of Chick Webb, look no further than this short video:

      I wish I had something poignant and interesting to say about authenticity, origin, nostalgia, and joy, but for now these thoughts will have to remain unformed. There’s nothing I can’t say that isn’t already said much better in the videos and links above.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 5 Comments | Tagged archery, authenticity, Chick Webb, Frankie Manning, jazz, Lindy Hop, links, list, Nintendo, nostalgia, pensieve, photography
    • In My Pensieve

      Posted at 12:30 pm by Michelle Joelle, on May 17, 2016

      Here are a few things I’ve encountered online recently that I’ve enjoyed.

      1. 3D Renderings of bicycles based on people’s attempts to draw them from memory. It’s a bit random, but it’s surprisingly delightful.

      2. This video made me cry, it is so beautiful. As written on the Adafruit Blog, “This music video for Jane Bordeaux’s ‘Ma’agalim’ beautifully imagines the journey of a wooden doll inside an old penny arcade machine, including some of the mechanisms that make the arcade spin and operate.”

      3. Also found on the Adafruit Blog, this Rube-Goldberg machine made of marbles and magnets. It’s mesmerizing.

      4. Do you have some random ingredients you want to use up, but don’t know a recipe that incorporates all of them? Never fear, Chef Watson is here! IBM has partnered with Bon Appetite to give us cognitive cooking, and I am pretty much obsessed with it. It’s pretty intuitive, so go and try it out. Today, I made a Freekeh pilaf that was delightful.

      5. And finally, MENACE 2, an artificial intelligence machine made of wooden drawers and coloured beads. It took me a while to wrap my mind around how exactly this worked, but it’s extremely cool. Based on the 1961 design by Donald Mitchie, British WWII codebreaker and friend of Alan Turing, this model was recreated just a few years ago by artist Julian Previeux. It’s an extremely cool way to make artificial intelligence more accessible.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 6 Comments | Tagged links, list, pensieve
    • In My Pensieve

      Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on December 10, 2014

      One of the reasons I blog is take what’s bubbling at the top of my mind and put it out into the world. Sometimes it’s just to free my mind of its clutter, and sometimes it’s so I can take a more objective look at an idea by putting it into words I can examine. Always, it’s to externalize my thoughts so I can see them in a more concrete way, talk about them in comments, and share them with others. In other words, this blog is my pensieve.

      Every once in a while, it gets a little clogged up in here, and I end up with thoughts that aren’t ready to be turned into anything just yet. That’s when it’s time to skim off the top.

      Here are a few things floating around on the surface, asking me to look a little more closely at them:

      1) The Birth of a Tool:

      I love watching blacksmiths, woodworkers, glassblowers, whittlers, and other makers and craftspeople as they work, and this video combines that with my dream cabin-space. I want to write a story about this person, or this setting. I also want to learn how to make things, and not just paint them or write them.

      2) All of the Christmas music, especially:

      –> The Lower Lights Christmas Albums. If you like country and folk music, and you like hymns, Sing Noel and Come Let Us Adore Him are your perfect Christmas folk hymnals.

       

      –> And in a very different mood, there’s a Bessie Smith Holiday channel on Pandora. It’s amazing, and it’s full of songs like this:

      3) Innovations that use kids’ iPad obsessions for good are also on my mind, as children seem to be given devices as often as books and toys these days. While it seems strange to those of us who grew up without even cell phones (and my only gameboy was an incredibly rudimentary Paper Boy game that I still play – even though I’ve never changed the battery), I think kids who have smart phones and tablets from birth see them no differently than any other kind of media. While I’ll wax rhapsodic about the sensory pleasures of holding a physical book and turning the pages, kids growing up now might eventually romanticize the iPad when some new technology replaces the screen. Perhaps the hologram just won’t feel right or seem as legitimate.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 4 Comments | Tagged bessie smith, birth of a tool, blacksmith, christmas music, john neeman, pensieve, the lower lights
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