Upstream Color (Editor’s note: Can’t wait for this. He’s distributing the movie himself! Primer is one of my favorite movies of all time.)
JT Nimoy calculated that the average color of modern art is the Pantone color #A79F94. This worked out from 26,000 images from MoMA.
There are particular pieces of the world which essentially serve the abstract (dominos, for instance, standing armies, monetary prose), and there are fragments of the mind which nevertheless pretend to be (like men of good will and the data of sense) residents in the realm of things. It is around these coins, twin-headed and treacherous, that the quarrel which concerns us has centered, for there is clearly a similar conflict between the way we customarily experience color and the way we have historically tended to think about it. This unnecessary antagonism is traditional: shall we believe our senses or our reason? And reason is so swift to slander the senses that even Hume did not escape, replacing shadow, mood and music, iris and jay, with a scatter of sense impressions artificial as buttons: each distinct, inert, each intense, each in self-absorbed sufficiency and narrowly circumscribed disorder like a fistfull of jelly beans tossed among orphans or an army of ants in frightened retreat.
The blunt truth is that if the sky’s not blue, the sea, the serge suit, the chicory, the blue goose; if they’re not blue, then, like our ears and nose and tongue and fingers, our eyes have lied, and although on occasion the truth may be beaten from them, they cannot be standard; they have soiled consciousness too continuously; they cannot be trusted. If, on the other hand, we begin with what we’re given, then what about all those advisers who have whispered persuasive nonsense in our ears from the beginning? don’t believe what you hear—the violin, the wind—believe me; others feel differently, in other ages, different climes; even yourself—on grayer days, at greater distances, in sickness, out of madness, during dream—distort—from pique, from spite, from wine; remember the shadows which threatened you like a thief? the friend you greeted like a stranger? the lap dog’s bite? the lips which claimed to be so sweet? so don’t believe the rainbow or the oil, but believe the lines the mind conceives connect the spill and bow to you; believe in the weights of spaces and the rush of quantity through the void. Well? what to do? For their treachery, for the buttered sound of their sophistries, shall we confine them to the tower?
Choose.
“
| — | William Gass — On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (via index-rerum) |
David Doubilet photographed these incredibly awesome toxic nudibranchs, soft, seagoing slugs whose colourful bodies warn potential predators that they are not without considerable defenses:
“The 3,000-plus known nudibranch species, it turns out, are well equipped to defend themselves. Not only can they be tough-skinned, bumpy, and abrasive, but they’ve also traded the family shell for less burdensome weaponry: toxic secretions and stinging cells. A few make their own poisons, but most pilfer from the foods they eat. Species that dine on toxic sponges, for example, alter and store the irritating compounds in their bodies and secrete them from skin cells or glands when disturbed. Other nudibranchs hoard capsules of tightly coiled stingers, called nematocysts, ingested from fire corals, anemones, and hydroids. Immune to the sting, the slugs deploy the stolen artillery along their own extremities.”
From National Geographic - Living Color
[via jtotheizzoe via abluegirl
