Montreal, Canada

INDIGO’s Mother Tongue project has been drawing in some excellent contributions from the far corners of the planet (of which a small sampling are shown above).

(Sorry… links are broken).

On the U.S.-Canada border (just south of Vancouver)

“A provocative new sculpture has opened at the U.S.-Canada border crossing near Vancouver, BC. It’s a billboard advertising… well, nothing.

So instead of your usual glimpse of cheeseburgers and red-faced car salesmen, you’ve got a snarl of stainless steel rods vaguely reminiscent of TV static, but surrounding only the clean air of Blaine, Washington.

Clearly it’s some kind of pinko Canadian stunt, right? A passive-aggressive commentary on Americans’ conspicuous consumption? Wrong! Non-Sign II is the brainchild of the Seattle art and architecture firm Lead Pencil Studio. Even crazier: It was commissioned by the U.S. federal government, which usually regards high art the way one would a dead rat.

Lead Pencil Studio’s Daniel Mihalyo sheds light on the concept:

Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape… this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.

Which sounds nice and poetic and non-threatening, but clearly, this thing is a monument to everything America’s not. Hey, Tea Partiers: The commie conspiracy has arrived at last, and it looks like a big ol’ pile of hair clippings!

How the installation came about: Lead Pencil Studio was shortlisted for a project to design public art at a new northern-border control station through the GSA’s Design Excellence program. The concept had to go through two rounds of approval, and Mihalyo insists the jury was “excited about the proposal from the start and the second round involved only small refinements and pragmatic issues.”

Well, we think it is awesome, and we’re elated that the government’s supporting Lead Pencil Studio. Headed by Mihalyo and Annie Han, they’ve built a career on blurring the divide between architecture and art; questioning the idea of consumer culture has been a recurring theme. They’ve produced a raft of evocative installations: outdoor scaffolding in the middle of the Oregon grasslands, full-scale shops (without any merch) in an old shop, and so on. Think of them as a sort of Christo in the age of Christine O’Donnell.”

Images by Ian Gill courtesy of Lead Pencil Studio. (Re-blogged from an original post here)… with thanks to friend ‘Segun Olude for the link.

The mountains of Piemonte, Italy

“The ibex of Northern Italy don’t need to worry about equipment malfunctions, difficult-to-obtain life insurance, or their peers calling them foolhardy. They just do what they do, without ropes or inhibitions…” (from a link in today’s Alpine Club of Canada e-letter).

I’ve long marveled at the genetically hard-wired abilities of sheep and goats when it comes to rock climbing (and I’ve posted on this before, e.g. here and here). Don’t underestimate the sure-footedness, balance, and sheer gumption of the mystical Ibex either (stambecco in Italian, Steinbock in German). These pictures speak for themselves (yes, the tiny specs in the lower photo are what you think)…

Origins unknown—if you find out, let me know?

(Thanks to a tip by “Jay,” this may the source)?

All across the Excited States of America…

Let me start by saying… I love you guys (and gals, goes without saying), I hate you guys, and I’m increasingly ambivalent about all you good-ole guys and gals and your overly-polarized, ever-narrowing worldview…

As an animated fraction(!) of the USA’s three-hundred-and-ten million citizens head out to vote today, please be aware that the “rest of the world” watches your amnesic roll to the right and political shenanigans with equal measures of concern, disbelief, and revulsion. It seems that crass, opportunist partisanship has trumped the very basic premise of engaged citizenship and shared civility that your great (OK, formerly great) nation was based and built upon… sad, very sad indeed. I’m sure I’m not alone in remembering an America of the past that seemed worth celebrating in aspirational song...

Images: an assortment of placards, signs, and shirts shown out and about the U.S. in recent days… 

New York, New York

Joy Garnett is a painter whose work is based variously on news photographs, scientific imagery, and military documents she gathers from the Internet,“examining the apocalyptic-sublime at the intersections of media, politics, and culture.” As such, she has become well-known for her appropriation of journalistic images in her paintings (upper image).

Susan Meiselas is a well-known freelance photographer who joined the standard-setting Magnum Photos co-operative in 1976. She has published several books of her photographs, among them, Nicaragua, which tells the story of the Sandinista revolution by means of extraordinary documentary photography—including what has become the iconic image of “Molotov Man” (lower image).

It seems a confrontation over authorship and rights was inevitable. Read an excellent article here (co-written by Joy and Susan, laying out their opposing viewpoints) that appeared in Harper’s.

“Who owns the rights to this man’s struggle?”

Thanks to Rene Wanner for the source/link.

Johannesburg, South Africa

South African low-fare airline Kulula Air has been gaining worldwide exposure of late thanks to its creative, humorous livery. One of their Boeing 737-86Ns, named “Flying 101” is covered nose to tail with details and funny remarks about the plane. The captain’s window is marked with the big cheese (”captain, my captain!”), the co-pilot’s window with co-captain (the other pilot on the PA system) and the jump seat is for wannabe pilots.

Additional captions on other parts of the plane include:

•  galley (cuppa anyone?)

•  avionics (fancy navigation stuff)

•  windows (best view in the world)

•  wing #1 and #2

•  engine #1 and #2 (26 000 pounds of thrust)

•  emergency exit = throne zone (more leg room baby!)

•  seats (better than taxi seats)

•  some windows = kulula fans (the coolest peeps in the world)

•  black box (which is actually orange)

•  landing gear (comes standard with supa-fly mags)

•  back door (no bribery/corruption here)

•  tail (featuring an awesome logo)

•  loo (or mile-high club initiation chamber)

•  rudder (the steering thingy)

•  stabiliser (the other steering thingy)

•  a.p.u. (extra power when you need it most)

•  galley (food, food, food, food…)

•  boot space

•  ZS-ZWP (OK-PIK) = secret agent code (aka plane’s registration)

•  overhead cabins (VIP seating for your hand luggage)

•  fuel tanks (the go-go juice)

•  cargo door

•  aircon ducts (not that kulula needs it… they’re already cool)

•  front door (our door is always open… unless we’re at 41 000 feet)

•  cockpit window = sun roof

•  nose cone (radar, antenna, and a really big dish inside)

Thanks to Christina Weese (a GDC Listserv colleague) for the link. Congratulations to the in-house design team at Kulula Air for their clever, well-crafted design scheme…

Steinbach, Manitoba

My aunt, Helen Reimer Eidse, passed on last week… I was among hundreds who attended her funeral here in Manitoba (while thousands more attended simultaneous commemorative services in various cities and communities in Congo, apparently). Having grown up on another continent, I do not, admittedly, know many of my relatives well (in no small part due to their sheer numbers)—Helen was one of my long-since-departed mother’s ten[!] siblings [eight sisters, two brothers])—though in retrospect, I do wish I had had the opportunity to know this fine woman better.

Helen Reimer graduated as a Registered Nurse in 1952, the same year she married Ben Eidse, a talented linguist (who would go on to learn nine languages and ultimately translate the Bible into Chokwe, a Bantu language spoken by nearly 1 million in central Africa, and today the lingua franca of eastern Angola). Fueled by faith-inspired passion to make a positive difference where it was most needed, she gave her heart and a lifetime of service to the people of Congo, where for decades she ran a dispensary, a tuberculosis ward, and a leprosarium (where she administered groundbreaking cures for leprosy in the 1970s), while also bearing and raising four daughters: Hope, Faith, Charity, and Grace (yes it’s true… my cousins).

Among accomplishments far too numerous to list here, she ended up directing a total of 24 clinics, solicited medicinal donations from major pharmaceutical companies for her African charges, delivered over 100 babies per year, and introduced a nutritious strain of multi-colored beans (initially as a single handful to help the lepers in her colony at Kamayala as a simple, practical means for them to grow a nutritious cash crop—and today reportedly selling by the tonnes and one of the most popular offerings in the produce markets of Kinshasha, sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest city [with a population of over 10 million], about 600km from the location of the legumes’ first introduction near the Angolan border)—these are now known across the western Congo as “Mama Eidse beans.” Small wonder then that she is known in that long-embattled country as “Congo’s Mother Theresa.”

After Helen and Ben returned to Steinbach “to retire,” her home became a haven for the elderly, the homeless, and numerous foster children. It’s said that Helen read the newspaper differently from other people, with an eye for those with hurting hearts and broken lives—she called and visited parents whose children had been arrested, driving them to court and sitting with them during trials, and becoming an advocate for “juvenile delinquents” who had no one else to support them. Frugal to the nth degree, this fine woman would reportedly put even the most dedicated of today’s dumpster-divers to shame when it comes to active recycling, re-using, and re-purposing for the benefit of have-nots.

In 1995, Helen suffered a major stroke that confined her to a wheelchair for the ensuing 15 years—though this could not stop her from the prolonged and attentive listening to, singing with, laughing with, and prayer with (and for) all she would encounter. (At the funeral, my aunt Grace Warkentin, Helen’s younger sister, confided that Helen had recently expressed that “she was good and ready to leave this ‘cage of a body’ at any time”)… to which I can only reply: May you fly free and high, with the wings of the angel you seemingly have always been!

Two days after the funeral, I was very pleased to finally spend several hours in heart-felt face-to-face conversation with my cousin Faith Eidse, who had come up from Florida for her mother’s funeral. I’ve posted about Faith previously here—(she’s an award-winning writer, among other accomplishments)—I thought it appropriate to share a short piece that Faith wrote for Rhubarb Magazine here that sets a suitable context for remembering her amazing mother Helen…

Stay good, Menno homies near and far…

(see more biting war & peace cartoons by Mr. Fish here)