Sunday Dance.

No facepalm today. No eyerolls. No head shaking, no crying, no despair, no sense of hopelessness. I need healing, and it’s days away until the camps and wacipi. So, just for today, I’m going to pretend that all people are good, and all people are as connected to all as they should be. Way back when these photos were just taken, I uploaded some to a photo forum I used to frequent. I had a person take me to task over the 7th photo, because the dancer “ruined the moment and atmosphere completely” by wearing NBA socks. I never noticed until that moment, being captivated by the young man’s dancing, which was beautiful. Public perception, it really, really has to change. Clickety for full size.

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© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Books.

Ethno

A while back, I posted about this book. At that time, I didn’t have the book yet. I have it now, and it is a wonderful read, filled with great information. Some of it made me very homesick, like the entry for Hairy Manzanita (Arctostaphylos columbiana). The manzanita that grew in Idyllwild, Ca., is a different Arctostaphylos, but those differences are minor, and manzanita has always been used by Indigenous peoples in various ways. I love every single thing about manzanitas, and it makes me ache a little, just thinking about them. Patricia’s book includes a whole lot of plants I was not familiar with, and was not at all familiar with Indigenous uses of them. I learned a lot, and was delighted over and over again, like when I was viewing a photo of an older Indian woman wearing a pine nut apron.

The writing flows like water, and this isn’t just a story told, this is a text which provides learning, and a reference to all the wonders around us. You can order the book here, and I highly recommend it.

A Crocheted Statement.

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Artist Olek reveals an entire two-story house covered roof to floorboards in pink crochet. This new yarn-bombed installation currently stands in Kerava, Finland where Olek worked with a team of assistants to stitch together huge panels of crochet that envelop every inch of this 100-year-old house. Olek shares:

Originally, this building, built in the early 1900s, was the home of Karl Jacob Svensk (1883-1968). During the Winter War 1939-1940, the family fled to evade bombs falling into the yard, but they didn’t have to move out permanently. In 2015, more than 21 million people were forced to leave their homes in order to flee from conflicts. The pink house, our pink house is a symbol of a bright future filled with hope; is a symbol us coming together as a community.

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Isn’t that grand! I love this. I love the statement, the vibrancy, the life, the love, and the community of it. From Olek’s site:

A loop after a loop. Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet. Life and art are inseparable. The movies I watch while crocheting influence my work, and my work dictates the films I select. I crochet everything that enters my space. Sometimes it’s a text message, a medical report, found objects. There is the unraveling, the ephemeral part of my work that never lets me forget about the limited life of the art object and art concept. What do I intend to reveal? You have to pull the end of the yarn and unravel the story behind the crochet.

My work changes from place to place. I studied the science of culture. With a miner’s work ethic, I long to delve deeper and deeper into my investigations. My art was a development that took me away from industrial, close-minded Silesia, Poland. It has always sought to bring color and life, energy, and surprise to the living space. My goal is to produce new work and share it with the public. I intend to take advantage of living in NYC with various neighborhoods and, with my actions, create a feedback to the economic and social reality in our community.

Via Colossal Art. –  Olek’s site.

And Now For Something Completely Different…

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Turnip Fries! Bet you weren’t expecting that. Courtesy of Wozupi Tribal Gardens:

Ingredients

  • Turnip wedges
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
  • 1 teaspoon onion powder

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Line a baking sheet with a piece of aluminum foil and lightly grease. Peel the turnips, and cut into French fry-sized sticks, about 1/3 by 4 inches. Place into a large bowl, and toss with the vegetable oil to coat. Place the Parmesan cheese, garlic salt, paprika, onion powder in a resealable plastic bag, and shake to mix. Place the oiled turnips into the bag, and shake until evenly coated with the spices. Spread out onto the prepared baking sheet.Bake in preheated oven until the outside is crispy, and the inside is tender, about 20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Cool Stuff Friday.

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A chain of koi fish float through an exhibit space, illuminating their immediate surroundings with a self-contained, warm orange glow. The works come from a familiar yet unexpected name: Frank Gehry. Early in his artistic career, Gehry created several visual installations and furniture designs, many in the late-20th century, that would influence his later accomplishments in architecture. Fish Lamps draws upon the flowing and undulating movement of the water species, an aesthetic that often made an appearance in Gehry’s singular building designs.

I have very few lamps, but I’d be happy to give some of these a home. Full Story at the Creators Project.

What should you wear to keep cool on a hot day? One word: plastics.

A form of polyethylene — the common plastic that makes up ClingWrap — is a promising candidate for a textile that prevents us from overheating, researchers say. Hopefully, it won’t look like those PVC bodysuits that pop up every Halloween.

Many researchers are trying to create cooling fabrics, from cloth inspired by squid skin to electroactive textiles. But the team led by Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford University, was inspired by materials that we don’t usually consider for clothing. In a study published today in Science, the team turned a battery component into a textile that lets our body’s natural heat escape better than cotton. The team hasn’t worn the fabric themselves yet, but Cui insists it feels “very much like normal fabric” and hopes it will be commercialized within two years.

Full story at The Verge.

Supergirl creator developing a Black Lightning TV series.

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Supergirl and Arrow co-creator Greg Berlanti is reportedly developing a series following Black Lightning, one of DC Comics’ first major black superheroes. According to Deadline, Berlanti is working with The Game creator Mara Brock Akil and her husband to get the drama off the ground, and the trio are currently shopping the project to multiple networks.

Black Lightning has the chance to be DC’s highest profile black superhero series to date. Created in 1977 by writer Tony Isabella and artist Trevor Von Eeden, Black Lightning, otherwise known as Jefferson Pierce, is an educator and eventual member of the Justice League with the power to control electrical energy. In the proposed TV series, Pierce will have retired from superheroics, but after his daughter’s life is endangered by his city’s underworld, he willingly steps back into his old alter ego.

Full story here.

Native Cartography.

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I have long coveted this map, but like many coveted things, it’s out of my budgetary reach. Aaron Carapella (Cherokee) is still making Indigenous based maps, the latest a pre-contact map of South America’s Indigenous peoples.

A new pre-contact map by Aaron Carapella promises to be the most comprehensive snapshot of South America’s Indigenous Peoples.

Carapella, the 36-year-old architect behind a growing collection of Tribal Nations maps, in October released a map depicting 720 tribes of South America in their original locations and identified by their traditional names. Where possible, the rising cartographer also included historic photos of people or places.

“I focused on traditional homelands, or where the tribes were when the Portuguese or English or French came and took over,” Carapella said. “I tried to put the tribes where they were before they were shifted around and merged with other tribes, and I used their traditional names—the names they called themselves before European contact.”

The latest installment marks completion of Carapella’s plan to map the entire western hemisphere, a project that started about two decades ago. Carapella, who is of Cherokee descent, was a teenager exploring his own heritage in Oklahoma and wanted a map of tribes that he could hang on his bedroom wall.

When he couldn’t find anything comprehensive, he decided to make his own. He spent 14 years and visited 250 tribal communities as he researched and created his first Tribal Nations map. Released in 2012, the map depicts traditional names and locations of 590 tribes in the United States.

From there, Carapella expanded beyond the “artificial borders” and mapped Canada, Alaska, Mexico and Central America. He also offers a map of the entire North American continent identifying more than 1,000 tribes and absent any lines drawn between states or countries.

His map of South America also shows tribal nations without political borders. From the Wayuu on the northern tip of the continent to the Manek’enk on the bottom of Cape Horn, Carapella mapped as many tribes as he could in their original locations.

That, in itself, proved more difficult than Carapella imagined. Some tribes have lived on the same land since time immemorial while others were relocated, confined to reservations or combined with other tribes.

“It’s hard to find a map or anything that pinpoints where these people were actually from,” Carapella said. “The Europeans didn’t stop to make maps of where people were. That wasn’t their goal.”

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You can read and see more here. You can read about Aaron’s first map, the 1490 Turtle Island, here. Aaron’s website: http://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/.

Angela Sterritt.

Gitxan artist and CBC journalist Angela Sterritt spent five days in China creating this mural. (Angela Sterritt).

Gitxan artist and CBC journalist Angela Sterritt spent five days in China creating this mural. (Angela Sterritt).

A Gitxsan artist from British Columbia is among several artists from around the world chosen to create murals at a mountain village resort in China.

“To be able to put Gitxsan people on the map and shed light on the reality and history of Indigenous people in Canada is something I am very grateful for,” Sterritt said.

Angela Sterritt, who is also an award-winning journalist, spent five days painting her mural on a 10-seven-foot wall in a resort on Mount Longhu in Jiangxi, a province in southeast China.

She travelled to China at the invitation of Karl Schutz, a German-born Vancouver man known for establishing an acclaimed series of murals in Chemainus, B.C., in the 1980s.

Schutz, in turn, was invited to organize the mural project by Steven Liu, a well-known Chinese entertainer, who “wanted to create a global mural attraction in his artisan village,” according to Schutz.

“I found Angela’s website on line and was amazed about her powerful art … her painting is awe inspiring,” said Schutz.

Sterritt made the journey with her young son, Namawan, who also helped with the project.

The mural Sterritt painted is a re-creation of one of her existing works, called First Contact, which she says is about the resilience and strength of Indigenous women. It is a striking image is of an Indigenous woman facing the viewer, while helicopters hover behind.

“It depicts a woman whose connection and love for her community, family, the land and her culture eclipse fear instilled in us at the time of first contact,” Sterritt said.

“As a Gitxsan woman, I’ve been gifted Sip’ xw hligetdin — the strength to speak out — through my art and as a journalist. This piece speaks to Indigenous women rising from the ashes [using] what has been within her all along — her culture, in this case from the Wolf Clan, an Owl Crest and a Big Raven House.”

The full story is here. Angela Sterritt’s site.

Shaun Tan.

Shaun Tan, photographed at the Illustration Cupboard gallery in London in June with the Fox, one of the characters from his new book

Shaun Tan, photographed at the Illustration Cupboard gallery in London in June with the Fox, one of the characters from his new book.

Shaun Tan, the latest artist to give form to these German folk stories collected in the early 19th ­century, is not one to shy away from difficult subject matter. Even so, the ferocity of the Grimms’ tales did give him pause. Take “Hansel and Gretel”, one of the first that Tan reread four years ago as he considered whether to take on the job of illustrating them.

“It’s pure nightmare fodder,” says the Australian writer, artist and film-maker. “Starvation, abandonment, abduction, cannibalism, psychological torture and subsequent oven-based revenge: sweet dreams, little ones! But it’s also my favourite tale. The leaving of stones and breadcrumbs, the house made of cake and bread and sugar — the imagery is so strange and beautiful.”

You can see why Tan, a master of beauty and strangeness in his own right, decided to go ahead. Over the course of his two-decade career, the 42-year-old from Perth has established himself as one of the world’s most important children’s authors. This status was capped in 2011 when he won the SKr5m (£450,000) Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the richest and most prestigious in the field of children’s and young-adult literature. Yet even the most cursory glance through Tan’s densely wrought, often highly political illustrated books is enough to dispel the notion that they are for children alone. Tan himself insists that he does not have a particular audience in mind as he works, preferring to think of what younger and older readers have in common than what sets them apart.

‘Harbour’, from Tan’s graphic novel ‘The Arrival’, 2006.

‘Harbour’, from Tan’s graphic novel ‘The Arrival’, 2006.

In the book that made his name, The Rabbits (1998), Tan collaborated with the novelist John Marsden to produce a fable of colonisation rich in retro-futuristic imagery and references to Australian history. His first solo project, 2000’s The Lost Thing, was a tale about a boy and a forlorn crab-machine figure that could also be read as a critique of “economic rationalism”. It would later be adapted by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann into a film that won an Oscar for best animated short in 2011. The Red Tree (2001), a powerful and ultimately hopeful meditation on childhood depression, has inspired musical and theatrical productions and even been used as a resource by professional therapists.

But it is for The Arrival (2006), a wordless graphic novel focusing on the struggles of refugees to remake their lives in unfamiliar, confronting ­surroundings, that he is best known. Drawing on research into Ellis Island and mass European immigration to the US, Tan’s hand-drawn sepia frames evoke family photo albums and, at first, locate us in an early-20th-century world that we feel we know. Yet the destination country is also a place of fantastical animals, indecipherable script and flying boats, to which freshly admitted immigrants are delivered in capsules suspended from balloons. The fantasy is disorientating, capturing the texture of the migrant experience in ways that straightforward realism never could.

FT Magazine has a wonderful in-depth article and interview with Shaun Tan: How Shaun Tan transformed children’s literature. I’ll just add that I think Shaun Tan’s books are by no means limited to children, wonderful stuff.

Doing what I hate, with love.

As I mentioned earlier, the tree quilt is resting in the cedar chest for a bit, as I have a few other things I must get done. Things which mean figuring out the math, measuring, cutting, and ironing. All things I hate. Some of that is done for now, and I’m onto a teeny tiny blanket stitch done with quilting thread, and love. Lots of love.

Wopila

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© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Marvel Does Star Wars.

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This was a very steady week for comics, as DC Comics continues to roll out their Rebirth-branded books and Marvel’s midway through Civil War II. Around the edges of both of those events hide great little comics, and though they’re not included on this week’s roundup, readers looking for big action and want to clue into the big tentpole events should check out DC’s Action Comics #962 (that’s a Superman comic) and Marvel’s Captain Marvel #8. This week in the roundup: Star Wars; a New York-centric indie comic; a tech-obsessed reintroduction to a great DC hero; and a wonderfully weird anthology.

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Cover for Star Wars #22. Cover illustrated by Mike Deodato Jr. Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics.

This Star Wars comic series from Marvel attempts to fill in the gaps between the original trilogy and today’s films. At this point, the events of A New Hope have already taken place, and readers get to see Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, and a few new characters continue to stick it to the empire. It’s interesting to read a Star Wars adventure in as short a burst as a comic book, but the pacing is perfect, and the character interactions all feel true to the series. This issue sees the heroes trying to attack an imperial star destroyer, and it feels classically hopeless for the protagonists. This Star Wars series is recommended reading for anyone feeling like they need their SW fix.

Also covered by The Creators Project: Beef With Tomato, Blue Beetle Rebirth #1, and Island 10.