Content Catnip

Federico Babina: Famous fairytales reimagined as buildings

Insanely creative Italian architect and illustrator Federico Babina has immortalised artists, musicians, films and even countries as mid-century buildings, but he has turned his hand towards fairytales in this collection. The fairytale universe is reinvented to incorporate elements of timeless 50’s and 60’s building design so that it imparts personality and new dimension to the endlessly retold tales.

Through his illustrations, Babina imagines 17 structures that dance between reality and fantasy, with each architectural detail revealing information about the characters and story of the respective fairytale.

“My first steps as an architect were visiting the homes and castles of fairy tales that as a child made me travel with fantasy,” says Babina. “The lighted windows in the dark night that hide secrets and surprises, the objects that have been transformed and come to life, were for me a prelude to the universe of architecture and design.”

“The idea is to use architecture and its shapes to take part in the relate of stories, transforming the buildings into ‘narrative objects.’”

Enjoy all of the beautiful illustrations at Federico Babina’s site

Travel: Mudlarking for treasures on the River Thames

A Mudlark while being a species of Australian bird’, is also a curious river-side rambler. Over several millennia of habitation, London’s River Thames has collected many layers of mud-addled refuse of varying degrees of value. Although one man’s trash is another’s treasure and the shores of the Thames are still a magnet to curious folk who have made a hobby out of retrieving the miscellany of yore. In the Victorian era, many poverty-stricken children and women foraged on the Thames to make their livelihoods. Everything from shit to shiny pennies, dead bodies to cars ended up in there and generally stayed there. The muddy deoxygenated conditions keeping many objects from decay.

18th/19th Century iridescent glass found on the Thames

The London Mudlarking Facebook page has a plethora of wonderful finds, including 16th Century pottery shards, glass beads, carved ivory pipes and old wigs – all resurrected from the mud for a new life in the modern world. Here are some of the more notable recent finds:

Glass shards

1789 Druid Halfpenny

St Anthony and baby jesus statue made of porcelain -17th Century

Tiny glass bottle

Rivets found on the Thames estuary

Ivory pipe with the initials JB

Every Picture Tells a Story: If we build it they will come

Franz Kafka on reading booksFranz Kafka on reading books

Found on Reddit

Music Review: Jaakko Eino Kalevi – Jaakko Eino Kalevi (Full Album) 2015

Jaako Eino Kalevi is a Finnish dream pop and electro musician. He lives in the same indie realm as previously reviewed artists Cate Le Bon and Pat Moon. This is Kalevli’s first full length album and it’s brimming of lush aural delights and lunar daydreams.

Kalevi’s distinctively long blonde tresses make him look like an ideal pop album model. However he still maintains a down-to-earth day-job as a tram driver in Helsinki.

The two worlds may not be so incongruous. There is a sense of spacey expansiveness and a cruisy up-beat driving music vibe to his sound that could have been influenced by Kalevi’s day job.

Like many other Finnish musicians, Kalevi grew up listening to metal and was particularly influenced by the band Dream Theatre along with some hip-hop sounds. There is a French electro musical influence here, with shadings of (late 90’s era) Daft Punk and Dimitri of Paris and Cassius but with a more glacial and spacey Scandivanian jazzy, dream pop sound over the top – reminiscent of múm or Peter, Bjorn and John, with soft and fuzzy edges.

Jaako Eino Kalevi’s self-titled album sounds a lot like a downtempo and dreamy album by Bryan Ferry from the early 80’s. There’s a sense of time-travelling into the album’s swirling synth and guitars and Kalevi’s quavering smoky voice would sit comfortably in a basement bar at 3 am. An easy elegance and a playful romantic vibe comes to mind like in Don’t Stop the Dance by Bryan Ferry or Rikki Don’t Lose that Number by Steely Dan.

Buy the album on iTunes

Every Picture Tells a Story: Soaking away calamity

Found on Reddit

Nothing passes from rest to motion – unless you move it in hidden ways

You glide between the heart and its casing
as tears glide from the eyelid.
You dwell in my inwardness, in the depths of my heart,
as souls dwell in bodies.
Nothing passes from rest to motion unless
you move it in hidden ways,
O new moon.
~ Mansur al-Hallaj (Persia, 9th century)

The sacred feminine: The art of Chie Yoshii

Chie Yoshii’s oil paintings explore timeless psychological themes and the inner landscape of women’s experiences. There’s a hint of luminosity to her panels that’s reminiscent of traditional Flemish paintings, although also a pagan symbolism and a dark sensuality to them as well.

Born in Kochi, Japan, Chie Yoshii moved to the US to complete a BFA at Massachusetts College of Art in 2000 and studied with a realist painter Adrian Gottlieb from 2002 to 2008.

Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries worldwide, including Dorothy Circus Gallery in Italy, Urban Nation in Germany, Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, Thinkspace in Los Angeles, and William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampton, MA. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Much of her work is inspired by the relationship between human psychology and goddess archetypes and other archaic symbolism.

The art of Chie Yoshii http://www.chieyoshii.com

The enduring themes are woven into surrealities filled with symbols and visual narratives.

There’s an inherent dichotomy within the images, between novelty and nostalgia, innocence and sensuality, and strength and fragility, mirroring the complexity of our psyche.

Discover more and purchase her work here, and then follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s some

Every Picture Tells A Story: Trans-human magical clocks

Every Picture Tells A Story: Magical Clocks

Tilda Swinton recites Rumi’s 12th Century Poem: ‘Like This’

The beautiful and transcendental love poems of Sufi mystic Rumi meets the modern day artist Tilda Swinton in this evocative reading of the poem ‘Like this’.

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,
or what “God’s fragrance” means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,” point
here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.

Like this.

When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?
How did Jacob’s sight return?

A little wind cleans the eyes.

Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he’ll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us

Like this.

A piano reverberates over collapsing glaciers

Earlier this year, renowned Italian composer Ludovico Eindaudi performed his ‘Elegy for the Arctic’ on a small floating platform in Wahlenbergbreen glacier in Svalbard, Norway. Around him glaciers crumbled and collapsed into the pearlescent water and the pristine quiet was pierced with the deafening sound of a fragile environment on the verge of implosion.

His powerful message on behalf of Greenpeace was for everyone on the internet to realise the severity of the issue and to be mobilised into action for climate change because of it.

“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
…To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle.
Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace.
Wilderness lives by this same grace.
Wild mercy is in our hands.”
-Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Join the campaign to save the last great wilderness

I had the pleasure of seeing him play live and he was wonderful, here’s one of my favourite albums by him.