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Today’s celebration stop is a coastline where words collect like shells after the tide has gone out. The address belongs to Pablo Neruda, though he might tell you it belongs just as much to the sea, a stone, a tomato, or an old pair of socks.
Some poets climb mountains looking for grand ideas. Neruda bent down and found the universe inside an onion. He began with fire. Young enough to believe that love could rearrange the architecture of the stars, he wrote poems that still sound as though someone left the window open and the night wandered into the room. Desire wasn't merely an emotion; it was weather. It rained through his verses. It filled harbors and bedrooms with the same restless tide.
But poets, like continents, drift. The solitary lover became a witness to history. The private voice discovered crowds. Mines, forests, workers, revolutions, dictators, exiles, forgotten villages—all entered the poem without asking permission. Language stopped being only a mirror for the heart and became a shovel, a trumpet, a loaf of bread shared across a crowded table. That transformation has inspired admiration and argument in equal measure. Whenever poetry walks into politics, someone inevitably accuses it of overstaying its welcome. The poem is expected to remain pure, untouched by the dust of governments or the smoke of history. Yet purity is often the favorite invention of people who never had to choose between silence and speech. Neruda chose speech, and history has continued debating the price.
Pablo Neruda collected objects with the appetite of someone convinced that civilization leaves its autobiography in ordinary things. Seashells, bottles, masks, maps, figureheads rescued from forgotten ships—his homes became cabinets of curiosity where every artifact seemed to carry a passport from another century. To him, collecting wasn't ownership. It was conversation. A stone had something to say if you were willing to wait long enough. His poems did the same thing. They granted citizenship to neglected objects. Suddenly a lemon possessed gravity. Salt acquired memory. A pair of worn shoes deserved an ode. It's an audacious proposition: that nothing is too humble to become magnificent once language pays sufficient attention. In an age obsessed with spectacle, that's almost a revolutionary act.
Of course, every generation attempts to simplify its artists. One shelf for the love poet. Another for the political poet. Another for the collector, the diplomat, the Nobel laureate, the controversial public figure. Catalogues are comforting because they promise order. But people rarely fit inside the filing cabinets built for them. Neruda certainly didn't. His contradictions weren't flaws to be corrected; they were part of the current that carried the work forward. Read enough of him and you begin to notice that abundance is his native climate. Rivers overflow. Forests multiply. Seas refuse to end where maps insist they should. Even silence arrives carrying more echoes than expected. His imagination distrusts scarcity. There is always another metaphor waiting behind the first, another horizon beyond the visible one. Perhaps that's why his poems continue to travel so well. They don't ask readers to become someone else. They ask them to look again at what they've already overlooked: a piece of fruit, an old house, a lover's hand, a broken stone, the sound of rain crossing a roof. The ordinary world turns out to have been speaking all along.
So wherever you happen to be this day, if there's a window nearby, open it for a moment. Let a little salt air in, even if the nearest ocean is only memory. Somewhere, Pablo Neruda is still convincing language that the smallest things deserve the longest conversations, and that the distance between a pebble and eternity is no greater than the space between one line of poetry and the next.
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Today we’re celebrating a Belfast boy who sang like he swallowed the whole moon, that’s right -Mr. Van Morrison.
Van the Man. Born George Ivan Morrison in 1945. Grew up in the shipyards of Belfast, where the air was thick with smoke, salt, and Sam Cooke on the radio. His dad brought home American records like they were sacred relics. Fats Domino, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, you could say young Van got baptized in rhythm and blues.
He started out in a band called Them—not ‘them’ as in ‘those guys,’ but Them as in Here Comes Trouble. They had a song called 'Gloria', three chords and the truth, shouted through a whiskey haze. That song’s been covered more times than a diner seat.
But Van didn’t stop there. He hit the road, solo. Took a left at jazz, a right at Celtic mysticism, and ended up somewhere between William Blake and a Baptist preacher.
Astral Weeks, now, there’s a record. Sounds like it was recorded on another planet. No hits, no hooks, no compromises. Just Van mumbling like a man possessed, chasing ghosts through the backstreets of his own memory. He said he wanted to be ‘born again,’ not in the tent-revival sense, but in the way Coltrane was born again shedding skin, breaking form, becoming something else. He sang about Cyprus Avenue, Madame George, Brown-Eyed Girls and cleaning windows. Sometimes he sounded like he was talking in tongues, sometimes he was. And then there’s Moondance. That’s the sound of falling in love in autumn. A jazz waltz with a pocket full of stardust.
He’s a tricky guy, Van. Doesn’t like to explain himself. Shows up to the gig, gives you an hour of transcendence or an hour of snarling silence, depending on the mood of the gods. But you gotta admire that. Some folks build careers, Van built a world. And if you listen close you might just get lost in it.
So put on one of those transmissions from the other side honeybees, like 'Sweet Thing’ where the bass holds your hand to never let go and the record don’t fit no shelf.
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Sarah Burton the UK fashion designer and creative director of fashion label Alexander McQueen has confirmed she was commissioned to design Kate Middleton’s wedding dress on her marriage to Prince William. As the former head of Women’s wear and prior to her elevation to director on the suicide death of the label’s founder, Burton had created designs for many celebrity names including Cate Blanchett, Lady Gaga, and Michelle Obama. Burton’s design for the dress was subsequently created by the Royal School of Needlework. Burton who also designed the Bridesmaid and afterparty dresses, described the process of working with Middleton as an experience of a lifetime. Burton had earlier come to the notice of Middleton when attending the 2005 wedding of Tom Parker Bowles, son of Camila, with Sara Buys a fashion journalist. Inspired by Imogen Fox ow.ly/4KzQn image source TimeInc ow.ly/4KzNO
Will algae farms be the farms of the future? Can washed-up jellyfish be repurposed to make a durable material? Are algae the solution for clean energy harvesting? Through performance and talks, we explored aquatic life in the framework of harvesting. Sound and visual artist Sabina Ahn, designer Charlotte van Alem and researcher Dr. Ben van den Broek contemplated these questions and more.
www.mediamatic.net/en/aquatic-harvesting
Photography by Anisa Xhomaqi
Mechuka, Arunachal Pradesh.
Of the many peaks around the valley, here's a peek at this one through the heavy rain and cloud cover.
PS: It'd be a great favor if any viewers could tell me if the contrast here is too high. I've been editing lately on this laptop which isn't calibrated well, so some light in the right direction, please, thank you.
"Zapata stole my heart" 19cm
Acrylic on cork
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Genevieve Chua, born in 1984 in work Raised As a Pack of Wolves was Residency Programme at the Gyeonggi
Singapore, graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts (Painting) from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore in 2004. Her works span a variety of mediums including drawing, photography and installation. Genevieve’s works possess distinctive aesthetic and recurring motifs of nature and female figures in dim light. Genevieve’s art explores the fear of the unknown.
For a young artist, Genevieve has exhibited extensively. Her solo exhibitions include As Brutal As (La Liberia Gallery, Singapore, 2007), Lost in the City: Full Moon and Foxes (National Museum of Singapore, 2009) and Child and the Beast (Objectifs Centre for Photography and Filmmaking, 2011). Genevieve has also exhibited overseas at ArtHK 2011 (AsiaOne ChanHampe Galleries, Hong Kong, 2011).
Genevieve was also selected to exhibit at the Singapore Biennale 2011 where she showcased Adinandra Belukar at the Old Kallang Airport. In 2009, her digital
commissioned for the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Other group exhibitions in which she has participated include CUT 2009: Figure, New Photography from Southeast Asia (Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2009), Next Wave Time Lapse (Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia, 2010) and Cross-Scape (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul; Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju; Goeun Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea, 2011). Her work, After the Flood (2010), was sold by international auction house Sotheby’s and was exhibited at The Singapore Show: Future Proof (8Q Singapore Art Museum, 2012).
Genevieve constantly seeks to expand her practice and this has led her to participate in numerous residences locally and abroad. In 2010, she was selected for the BMW Young Asian Artist Series at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute and the Late Fall Residency at The Banff Centre in Calgary, Canada. In 2011, she took part in the GCC Creative
Creation Centre in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea and The Art Incubator at the Centre for Creative Communications in Shizuoka, Japan.