One Day Poem Pavilion by Jiyeon Song
As the sun passes over the sky, light filters through strategically placed holes in the "pavilion," casting lines of a poem on the ground. If you watch the time lapse video, you'll notice that the lines of the poem also move, becoming clearer and then fading. The poem, which Gizmodo describes as "cheesy," is a Sijo written by the eighteenth-century Korean poet Kim Ch'on-taek. Song is a student at the Art Center College of Design in California. (via Monster-Munch with thanks to Jennifer13)
Two Portraits: Bia de' Medici and A Child with a Drawing
The first portrait is by the sixteenth century Italian painter Agnolo Bronzino. It was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici after the death of Bia, his illegitimate daughter. Cosimo I never revealed her mother's name but he was very devoted to his daughter and greatly mourned her when she died of a fever at the age of six. This is one of my favorite paintings, and I had the chance to see it at the Uffizi several years ago. The light appears to emanate from her face, a kind of "halo" effect, which is due in part to the fact that Bronzino produced her likeness from her death mask. This portrait became one Bronzino's most celebrated paintings and inspired Joseph Cornell's "Medici Princess."
The second portrait is by the sixteenth-century Italians painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto. The child isn't identified but the stick-figure drawing that the child holds proudly feels timeless. Is the drawing a self-portrait? The child's parent? Or the child's depiction of Caroto? The painting is in the permanent collection of the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona. The museum features the painting on its website and gives its title as "Giovane con disegno di pupazzo." "Disegno di pupazzo" means, I think, "doll design" (in this seventeenth century Italian-English dictionary "púpa" is defined as "a baby or puppet like a girle") but the title may have come later.
Neck Dimples
"If your listener protrudes the tip of the tongue through closed lips, take heed. Humans are like other primates in which this expression has been studied. It's always a negative. Think misunderstanding. Uncertainty. Disagreement." ("Body language in the office speaks louder than words")
*throws hands in the air* In this context, that means "this article has problems." The one problem I'll note is that it rests on the assumptions that body language means the same thing in all work places and that all work places are the same. In this day and age, I think that the one thing that we can assume is that business interactions are likely to be cross-cultural and multilingual, so the author's generalizations of the scholarship cited are unfortunate. I actually know one of the scholars quoted in the article and I can bet that he or she had no idea it was going to be this silly. What made reading this worthwhile was a link to The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & and Body Language Cues.
Recent Comments