Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain (Photo: Kindra Clineff) I am out of town until January 2. Slow Muse will return in 2013. Happy New Year to all my friends and readers.
Month: December 2012
What Can Be Seen
Officially known as ACT-CL J0102-4915, the galaxy cluster has been nicknamed El Gordo. “This cluster is the most massive, the hottest, and gives off the most X-rays of any known cluster at this distance or beyond,” said Felipe Menanteau of Rutgers University. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Hughes et al, Optical: ESO/VLT/Pontificia Universidad. Catolica de Chile/L.Infante & SOAR […]
The Pleasures of Spectatorism
On paper, Peter Clothier‘s career looks like that of a successful academic. He was an art school dean at USC, Loyola Marymount and Otis Art Institute. He published numerous books including art criticism, poetry and memoirs. So it was refreshing to read his book of personal essays, Persist, and to find out he wasn’t inclined […]
New Domain for Slow Muse
Golagai 2, the painting source for the new heading above Update for my readers: The URL for Slow Muse has changed from www.slowmuse.wordpress.com to www.slowmuse.com. An automatic redirect has been placed on the old site so it should be seamless for all subscribers. This should make access easier in the long run, and I hope […]
Born Things
Shoji Hamada How easy it is to slip into busy. Busy, and disconnected from the core of things. This morning I found a needed course correction courtesy of Sarah Robinson‘s Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind: Cognitive scientists tell us that it takes time for the conscious mind to extract latent patterns within a diversity of superficially […]
- Aesthetics
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Durienism
Smells like hell but taste like heaven, or as one writer aptly described the dual pleasure and pain of the durian fruit: “It’s like eating the most delicious custard out of a toilet bowl.” It’s something I think about frequently: What if you really dislike an artist—or a thinker—in their real life form but you […]
- Aesthetics
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Knowingly Subjective
All the world as seen through the lens of a crystalline polythene grid of air pockets “Of course one always has the same theme. Everyone has her theme. She should move around in that theme.” So claims Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. Similarly, artist Lucian Freud was reported to have said, “Everything is autobiographical, everything is […]