bookofjoe

Picasso at 9

[Dove and Dog (c. 1890). Paper cuttings. 2" x 3.3" and 2.4" x 3.6". Museo Picasso, Barcelona.]

Wrote Julius Purcell in the Financial Times:

These two small pieces show the skill of a child who was capable of cutting out any shape that he fancied for his own amusement and that of his cousins and sisters, using paper and scissors.

Analysts of his work see in these examples a precedent of the collages and paper sculptures pertaining to his Cubist Period as well as of the later models and sculptures in metal plate.

In any case, there is no doubt that many years later he recalled this technique when he created similar figures for his children to play with.

The two works were displayed in Malaga's Museo Picasso show, "Picasso's Late Sculpture: Woman."

Lola and Conchita would request an animal.

"Start with the claw this time," they might say, then they'd crowd around their brother.

The scissors would snick the blank paper, from which would fall an effortless Newfoundland, a hen, or a dove.

Little Pablo never drew an outline before turning out his precocious découpages for his sisters.

The tale (whose source is little Pablo himself) offers a useful foreshadowing of the later showman attended by admiring females, but it would just be another piece of folksy Picassiana were it not for the proof offered at Malaga's Picasso Museum show.

Dated 1890, somewhat yellowed now, the nine-year-old's tiny paper dog can be seen with spiky fur under the chin, while the dove's wing is suggested by an artful cut.

It's hard to tell which is more miraculous, the survival of these frail party pieces or the miniaturist bravura of their child creator.

Original IBM ThinkPad

"This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s /early 90s

inspired an IBM researcher to name the company’s new mobile computer the ThinkPad."

"To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have."

"At least that was the case until I went full time Apple and the Chinese got a hold of the brand."

"At any rate, it is interesting to see the little promotional giveaway that inspired a massive brand."

[via A Continuous Lean]

Leica LUX Grip: World's Most Expensive iPhone Stand

From the website:

The LUX Grip creates the perfect symbiosis between Leica and iPhone.

With legendary ergonomics, high-quality materials, and intuitive design, it brings real photographic character to the smartphone.

The mechanical two-stage shutter release, a precise setting dial, and two individually assignable FN buttons open up endless possibilities for creative image composition.

Its modular design makes the LUX Grip a durable companion for several iPhone generations.

2-hour USB-C full charge delivers 1,000 images.

It offers a secure connection at all times with magnetic MagSafe technology and Bluetooth.

The Leica LUX app completes the system with iconic Leica Looks and by simulating legendary lenses, such as the Summilux-M or the Noctilux-M.

The one-year PRO version of this app is included free of charge with every Grip product registration.

A finely handcrafted cognac-colored leather pouch is available as the perfect accessory for the Leica LUX Grip.

NOTE: The Leica LUX Grip only works in conjunction with the Leica LUX app. The pre-installed iPhone camera app cannot be operated with the Leica LUX Grip.

$329.

'The road we know is always shorter...' — Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Familiar Place

Recently, I've been thinking about the geography of familiarity. By that I mean something like a map of my habitat, the paths I travel most often, the places I feel most comfortable, the routines embedded in the rural and urban landscapes I know best. Most days, familiarity seems inherent in the world right around me, but every now and then I remember that it's really an artifact of consciousness, a form of perception that can be lost, say, in someone with Alzheimer's. It's disorienting to grasp that the world itself is neutral and that all the familiarity and unfamiliarity I feel is being carried around in my head.

A few weeks ago, I went to dinner at a restaurant in a part of northern Dutchess County that was utterly unknown to me. Afterward, I asked my GPS to guide me home. It did so, as always, with an eerie sang-froid, an unflappable inability to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar. I wound northward over the hills with no idea where I really was. And as I drove, I admired not only the beauty of the night but also the pleasurable sense of being comfortably lost. At last I came to an unfamiliar intersection and made a right. The moment I did so, I knew exactly where I was, and I could feel my sense of being displaced in the night slip away. It was like looking into an unknown sky and seeing the stars suddenly whirl about until they formed the age-old, long-familiar constellations of my childhood.

The surprise wasn't just being reoriented so abruptly. It was also discovering that an unfamiliar world lay a few dozen yards off a road I drive all the time. In a way, the unfamiliarity of that world has been eroded now by driving through it once.

The more I think about that seam between the familiar and the unfamiliar — and how it feels to pass from one to the other — the clearer it becomes that humans instinctively generate a sense of familiarity. You can sense it for yourself the next time you drive someplace you've never been before. Somehow, it always feels as though it takes longer to get there than it does to get back home again. It’s as if there's a principle of relativity, a bending of time, in the very concept of familiarity. The road we know is always shorter than the road we don't know — even if the distances are the same.

How these matters feel to other species, I can't even begin to guess. But what they mean for us is that home is ultimately a portable concept, something we've nearly all discovered for ourselves in our mobile lives. The trick, of course — and it is a hard one to master — is to think of home not as a place we go to or come from, not as something inherent in the world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

 

[This essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg originally appeared in the Editorial Notebook feature in the New York Times on June 3, 2009.]

Roz Chast's Forever Stamps

Skewed Thoughts Notebook

From the website:

We wanted to view a notebook from a different angle, so we created this one with a parallelogram shape.

• Black or Gold coil

• 21cm x 13cm

$15.

'Only a single figure is visible...'

"Only a single figure is visible: a man apparently having his boots shined. He is standing still while all of the pedestrian and street traffic moving around him fails to register on the plate because of the lengthy exposure time." — Robert Silberman, from the opening paragraph of his essay "Between Heaven and Earth: The Impact Photographs of Stan Gaz" in Gaz's extraordinary book, "Sites of Impact: Meteorite Craters Around the World."

As I thought about the sentence above — a description of one of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre's (1787–1851) earliest extant photographs (top), showing a Parisian boulevard as viewed from an elevated vantage point, it struck me that other people are in the photo — but they're invisible.

If sufficient computer power were brought to bear on this photograph, along with software capable of "rewinding" what's there, it seems to me it should be possible to extract from this picture a movie that, in real time, would last as long as the exposure did.

Watching that film, "... all of the pedestrian and street traffic moving around him..." would as if by magic appear as it was seen through the lens a century and a half ago.

The past can — and will — be recaptured, not just in words but in sight and sound, once the static recorded scenes of the past submit to the algorithms and subroutines of the future.

The 1838 photograph up top is Daguerre's "Boulevard du Temple, Paris," featuring possibly the first person ever photographed

(detail above).

bookofjoe on MySpace

Over fifteen years ago — on July 1, 2009 — I featured my MySpace page on boj.

You could look it up.

Up top, a screenshot from my boj post about it.

Create your own Myspace page here.

If you click on the link to my MySpace page, you get this.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Color Changing Umbrella Displays Bright Colors When It Gets Wet

From the website:

Our color changing umbrella comes printed with special ink: white when dry, multicolored when wet.

Why would you buy a normal umbrella again?

At best you will look cool, at worst you will confuse a generation of children into thinking rainbows are leaking color from the sky.

Simple white raindrop pattern transforms into a rainbow burst of color when the umbrella gets wet.

Features and Details:

• Lightweight, portable, super-tough, and durable

• High-quality mechanisms and soft-grip handle

• Carbon fiber struts defy the windiest weather

• Telescopic with matching slip-on carry case

• 40" diameter open

$28.99.

'What's in your head — throw it away!' — 10th-century Persian spiritual master Abu Said ibn Abil-Khair

More: "What's in your hand — give it up! Whatever happens — don't turn away from it."

A thousand years later, still good advice.

BehindTheMedspeak: How much would you pay for a used defibrillator?

I raise the question because of an interesting discussion on allnurses.com centering on the attempted resale of five defibrillators stolen from Columbus, Ohio hospitals.

The devices were valued at $10,000-$15,000 apiece, and were on sale for $4,000 each.

Among the comments from nurses on the website:

"But srsly, who would buy a defibrillator unit at a secondhand store?"

"Would it be noticeable via autopsy if you killed someone intentionally by defibrillation? Maybe they were sold for more sinister reasons? Why the heck else would you want one? If you are in vfib you won't be able to defib yourself...."

"They were probably stolen simply to make money. Someone who has a family member with a heart condition whose insurance won't pay for a defibrillator would quite possibly — if desperate enough — be willing to buy one. But, at any rate — it's completely bizarre"

Would it be noticeable via autopsy if you killed someone intentionally by defibrillation? "That's a really interesting question. I tried to do a search if that was a possibility, but couldn't find anything, but did find an interesting article where an EMT as a joke used the paddles on a co-worker, and killed her. It was determined that it does/could kill if used on a person with a beating heart. If a killer could use them to kill without detection would make a great story point for a show like 'The Sopranos.'"

"I remember that story. You would have thought they would have known better. One of my friends was at a party many years ago, and a girl there decided to use her stun gun on herself to see if it really worked. Um, yes, it did."

"CPR classes need them for demonstrations. Maybe to be sold in different countries"

"Umm, duh! Obviously there would be huge burns where you defib someone... plus probable increase in potassium as well as creatine."

Writer's Block Erasers

kawaii

From the website:

There's a new eraser on the block!

This idea started from a sketch and we made it concrete.

These erasers take the form of miniature cinder blocks so that you can both build & play.

• 33mm x 17mm x 18mm

4-pack: $8.

20 Years Ago Today — On April 23, 2005 — This Was The First Video Ever Uploaded To YouTube

It was uploaded by Jawed Karim, its subject.

He was one of the founders of YouTube.

His video has had 342 million views since its 2005 premiere.

[via Virginia Heffernan and the New York Times]

Experts' Experts: The best way to store sliced onions

From Cook's Illustrated comes the following.

What is the best way to store sliced onions?

Old wives' tales claim that storing sliced or chopped onions in water will help keep their pungency from intensifying, but we found the exact opposite to be the case.

We stored sliced onions for two days submerged in water as well as placed directly in zipper-lock bags, and then compared their odor and flavor to freshly sliced onions.

The onions submerged in water were unanimously deemed to be most odorous with the sharpest flavor.

It turns out that over time, water facilitates the distribution of enzymes known as alliinases across the cut surfaces of the onion, which in turn leads to an increase in the creation of thiosulfinates that produce an onion's pungent odor and flavor.

Your best bet is to simply slice or chop onions as you need them, but if you find yourself with an excess, store them in the fridge in a zipper-lock bag and give them a quick rinse to remove any thiosulfinates on their surface right before using.

Solar Powered Rainbow Maker

From websites:

This innovative device harnesses solar power to create mesmerizing rainbow effects in any room.

It rotates like a disco ball, refracting sunlight to produce captivating, ever-changing rainbow patterns dancing around a room.

$37.50.

On the fence?

Watch

the video.