ANCHORS

From 'Chelsea Smile' by Bring me the Horizon - can't say I'm a big metalcore fan, but a good lyric is a good lyric...

HOT WIND

TYPE[DRAWN]WRITTEN

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Keira Lyn

NOTABLOG

Talkin' loud - sayin' nuthin.

MAELSTROM

One of the earliest uses of the Scandinavian word maelström was by Edgar Allan Poe in his story "A Descent into the Maelström" in 1841, about the Moskstraumen, a powerful tidal current in the Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian coast.

One Spring morning a year or so ago, me and DL went out for a dawny on a dropping tide - there was a new chest high swell building with light cross-offshore breezes at one of our local spots. The usual paddle out was via a small stream in the corner of the beach. So we suited up and got in the water - just the two of us as the sky started to lighten.

Almost instantly I was rushed out the back on a speedy conveyor belt of moving water that dragged me away from the clean waves I had been aiming for. I found myself in a swirling, choppy, ripped up patch of water that was a lot further out than I wanted to be. It was literally a big circle of churning, boiling sea, and I was stuck in the middle of it! I'd surfed this beach many times and thought I knew most of its moods but was taken by surprise at how violent this particular rip was. I tried to focus and paddle across and away from the rip back to the relative calm that seemed only 20 metres away yet I was still going further out to sea in the opposite direction. A change of plan was needed so I steered off toward a bouncy, backwashy impact zone that would not normally be an option, but I wanted to get out of that rip before I ran out of gas. After another 15 minutes of sustained hard paddling I finally got away from the rip and across the dumping sandbank and decided to recoup back on the beach.

Back onshore I waited for DL, a strong paddler, who had also been caught in the same predicament and was making his way back to the beach.

"That was like a fuggin maelstrom out there!" I declared.

Not really understanding how it had been so ugly, because as we looked out on it now from the safety of the beach the rip had disappeared, and while I had been seemingly paddling for dear life the rip had faded away, the waves had cleaned up and a whole crew of surfers had arrived and were out having a whale of a time on the clean lefts.

The combination of a fresh pulse of swell meeting a quickly dropping tide above some particular bathymetry had produced 20 minutes of almost whirlpool-like conditions if you happened to have paddled out at exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

Bad timing? Not really - I can't say I enjoyed it, but I can say I'm glad I experienced it.

TORTOISE

millions now living will never die.

Dug out a couple of Tortoise CDs last night, cranked em up, turned the lights down low and dived deep into the soundwaves.

I'd forgotten just how good they sound.

Got to say thanks to my good friend Meany for turning me onto Tortoise (amongst others) all those years ago. He was a sort of musical mentor to me for a while when our paths first crossed.

TNT.

VIVIAN MAIER

These Vivian Maier images are awesome for so many reasons.

Over 100,000 unpublished and many undeveloped negatives unearthed at a junk sale. Her personal life still a mystery. An archive of candid street photography going all the way back to the 1950s.

Those three sentences alone would be enough to get me interested.

But what really knocks me out is the quality of the work - the composition, the subtle details, the choice of subject, and just what a great eye she had. And don't forget that she was doing this day in and day out such a long time ago and for such a long timespan.

It's somewhat easier nowadays with a digi-camera to capture real life pics from the street, and then broadcast them via the internet, but I haven't come across many collections of images as good as this.

See more here.







Vivian Maier - Photography blog.

VIRTUALITY

Now you can get really close to Vincent's Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art in New York without having to leave your house. Thanks to this.