Book Review: The Urban Bestiary

...I am a creature of nature, living in a vast human habitat which exists as part of a web with the entire ecosystem. Remembering that I am not apart from nature sometimes requires a little mental judo–and some well chosen bedside reading. Thus my recent reading has included books like Being Animal and What the Robin Knows (reviewed here) and most recently The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of the excellen...

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Urban Beekeeping 101 with Paul Hekimian, Director of HoneyLove

...rban Beekeeping 101 will cover everything you need to know on how to get started! We will cover local bee ordinances, what urban beekeeping is or is not, where to place a hive, what equipment is needed, choosing a type of beehive, where to get bees, how to harvest honey and how to find a mentor. Join this webinar and learn from Paul Hekimian, 2nd generation beekeeper and director of HoneyLove.org, as he walks you through how to become an urban bee...

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The Art and Architecture of C.F.A. Voysey

...e for our living room, I stumbled on the work of C.F.A. Voysey, an English Arts and Crafts architect and designer. He took an obsessive gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) approach to his architectural commissions, insisting on designing not just the building but the furniture and everything down to the pen trays. Very conservative politically, he was an exception to the more progressive bent of the movement. It’s also obvious that he spent every spa...

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Kintsugi: Creating Art out of Loss

...explore, as well as the video I’m embedding here. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold or silver lacquer patching which emphasizes rather than hides the break patterns. The resulting piece is often more beautiful than the original, an embodiment of wabi-sabi, and an invitation for meditation on beauty, loss, transformation, wounding, scars, entropy… The responses, I suspect, would be as individual as the viewer. This a...

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Picture Sunday: Chicken Coop Art Cars

...Artist Benedetto Bufalino re-purposed a vintage police car for his piece, “la voiture de police poulailler.” Back in 1999 Atelier van Lieshout reused an Alfa Romeo for an installation called “Alfa Alfa.” I should note that the art school damaged Mrs. Homegrown gets queasy when livestock end up in art projects. I’ll just ask if these two examples mean we’re witnessing an entire new genre of chicken art?...

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