Over the past decade its founders Johannes Bonke and
Sven Schumann have met with cultural figures of all kinds.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

Charlotte Rampling on Courage:

I think you have to be brave. I think you have to think of being; I think you have to think of being someone. If you’re an actor, you’re going to incarnate a human being. If you are brave and if you want to actually experience what it is like, really, you have to be a developing actor and a developing human being at the same time, because the two things are always together. You can’t develop as a human being and not develop as an actor and vice-versa.

Denzel Washington on playing the bad guy:

As an actor in the theater you’re taught that you never play a bad guy. You have to love who you are. You can’t say, “Oh, I’m a bad guy.” How do you play that?

Yohji Yamamoto on women and clothing:

When I started making clothes for my line Y’s in 1977, all I wanted was for women to wear men’s clothes. I jumped on the idea of designing coats for women. It meant something to me – the idea of a coat guarding and hiding a woman’s body. For me, a woman who is absorbed in her work, who does not care about gaining one’s favor, strong yet subtle at the same time, is essentially more seductive. The more she hides and abandons her femininity, the more it emerges from the very heart of her existence. A pair of brilliantly cut cotton trousers can be more beautiful than a gorgeous silk gown.

I’ve visited three of James Turrell’s sculptures:  my first mind-blowing was at the Chichu Art Museum on the island of Naoshima in Japan, the second tucked into a classroom at MoMA PS1, and my third light-bending experience was on the Pomona campus.  ”For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell, an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying, considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes, ‘His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light — the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.’

And now Turrell has a radiant website that shares his vision with a wider audience.  I pray I have the chance to visit Roden Crater one day.

James Turrell’s Roden Crater at Sunset

“Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid-1960′s. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-man show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces, in 1967. Mendota Stoppages, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks.

Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. The simple act of witnessing the sky from within a Turrell Skyspace, notably at dawn and dusk, reveals how we internally create the colors we see and thus, our perceived reality.

In 1974 Turrell began a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in northern Arizona. Continuing the practice begun in his Ocean Park studio, Turrell has sculpted the dimensions of the crater bowl and cut a series of chambers, tunnels and apertures within the volcano that heighten our sense of the heavens and earth. While Roden Crater is not yet open to the public, Turrell has installed works in twenty-two countries and in fourteen US states that are open to the public or can be viewed by appointment. Agua de Luz, a series of Skyspaces and pools constructed within a pyramid in the Yucatán, and forthcoming projects around the world, from Ras al-Khaimah to Tasmania, integrate many of the principles and features embedded within Roden Crater.

Turrell’s medium is pure light. He says, “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of worldless thought.”

“If someone were to ask you how happy you are, how would you respond?

University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson has been studying how people answer that question for nearly 40 years, and he’s been looking at that happiness question as it relates to two other questions, both about how people view their time.

The first: ‘Would you say that you always feel rushed, only sometimes feel rushed or almost never feel rushed?’

And the second: ‘How often do you have time on your hands that you don’t know what to do with: most of the time, some of the time, none of the time?’

Putting the happiness question aside for just a second, it’s interesting to note that according to Robinson’s analysis, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “always feeling rushed” actually went down between 2004 and 2010.

‘That was really a surprise to me,’ he says. ‘Particularly with all this new technology that we have, which is very time-demanding. I know I have a hard time dealing with it; it raises my blood pressure!’

Something else that surprised Robinson is what happens when you bring the happiness question in. According to his research, the people who report being the happiest, about 8 to 12 percent of Americans, “say they almost never feel rushed, and they do not have time on their hands they don’t know what to do with,” explains Robinson.

Extra time = less happiness

Robinson isn’t the only happiness researcher intrigued by this finding. Erik Angner, who teaches philosophy, economics and public policy at George Mason University, says he was surprised to find that people who had a lot of excess time on their hands reported being less happy.

“I would have thought that the relationship would go (go to American University Radio to read and hear more…)

Here are a just a few of my favorites:

I’m completely, overwhelmingly stressed out.   Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise.  The Huffington Post says New York is the second most stressful place to live in the country.   After uncovering an old Science section of the New York Times, I’ve now discovered that my stress is probably speeding me along to an earlier death.

Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, a cell biologist and one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” has been studying something called telomeres, which are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes. As Claudia Dreifus of the Times explained it, “Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying.  Telomerase is an enzyme. In cells, it restores the length of the telomeres when they get worn.”

Okay, but what does that have to do with my stress? Dr. Blackburn and a psychologist, Dr. Elissa Epel, designed a study to assess whether psychological stress aged our cells. They studied two groups of women, one with healthy children and one with chronically sick kids. ”With the stressed group, we found that the longer the mothers had been caring for their chronically ill child, the less their telomerase and the shorter their telomeres. This was the first time you could clearly see cause and effect from a nongenetic influence. ”

Blackburn suggests that this is hard proof of the mind-body connection. Epel and she discovered that the women in the study who had bad lipid profiles and obesity — measures that indicate cardiovascular disease — also had reduced telemorase.

So as I was writing this piece I decided to take my current stress into my own hands. I’ve put earplugs in to drown out the hammering, and I’m leaving now to take a long walk far away from the pollution of the machine.

But Blackburn’s research has made it even more clear to me that I need to develop a long-term approach to stress management. I’ve been meaning to start a meditation practice. Tonight I begin.

If you want to control your stress, here a few easy ideas:

• walk outdoors
• get a pet
• practice mindful breathing
• get a good set of earplugs
• put flowers on your desk at work…
• …and smell them

“This week, a whole new generation of college graduates enter the working world — armed with diplomas, a thirst for success, and an alcohol tolerance like no other. We’ll spare you the sappy quotes of graduation speeches past (insert biting, yet humorous observation on the outlook of society and the need for a zest for life, here), but rest assured they’ve heard plenty in the way of warnings and advice.

And, while we have no doubt that each and every one of you breaking into the workforce are more than qualified for your dream jobs (okay, that was a joke), we’re going to be honest: Despite the fact that you are intelligent, hard-working, deserving people, there just aren’t enough jobs to go around — some of you will join the ranks of the unemployed. Plus, there’s that whole life-isn’t-fair thing. While we wish we could use the magical powers of the Internet (or, that new 3-D printer invention) to summon careers for each and every one of you, what we can offer you is a shoulder to lean on, and a little bit of expert advice. After all, we’ve all been there — and by “there,” we mean our bed, watching countless reruns of Sex and the City, wishing all those recruiters would understand how totally awesome we were.

So, to do all of you job-seekers a solid, we hit up HR execs and happiness experts to bring you our ultimate guide to surviving unemployment. Read through to get started on your brand new life, and crack open a cold one while you’re at it. Because, hey, it’s not like you’ve got a job to get to.

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After our (multiple) stints through the vices of unemployment, we now consider ourselves venerable experts in passing time. You’ll find that as your friends, roommates, and lovers head off to spend the day gainfully employed, hours turn into days, days turn into weeks, and a simple commercial break can feel like a lifetime. You’ll now be longing for the structure of Excel documents, lunch breaks, and mundane meetings. But, rest easy, because there are (temporary) solutions.

Break Out Of Your Routine: According to Anne Kreamer, author of It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace, being unemployed can be isolating and scary for even the most grounded and secure person. “One of the best things to do is expose yourself to something new that brings you in contact with new social groups,” she says. “Volunteer at an animal shelter or find a free lecture series that interests you.” It’s okay if what you’re doing isn’t directly focused on gainful employment — it will help you become an explorer of the world and maybe even expose you to a new direction you hadn’t even considered.

Get Your Rest: This may seem counterintuitive, but just think — when else in your life will you have the opportunity to get every minute of the beauty sleep you need? Not only will a solid eight (or 10, or 12) hours help you feel refreshed to tackle cover letter after cover letter, but you may finally banish those undereye circles that plague your salaried friends. Plus, the more you sleep the less time you’ll spend watching infomercials (and splurging on the Forever Comfy).

Tackle Your Netflix Queue: Are you constantly feeling out of the loop while the rest of your friends riff on The West Wing (Oh, President Bartlett, you ol’ curmudgeon!)? Now’s your chance to catch up on everything you missed at your 9-to-5.  (to read more….)

Paris 1900 – 2013

Click here to see full images and slide the red bar in the middle of the two photos back and forth to reveal different portions of each image.

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“Pablo Picasso once said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

If we didn’t buy in to the “lie” of art, there would obviously be no galleries or exhibitions, no art history textbooks or curators; there would not have been cave paintings or Egyptian statues or Picasso himself. Yet, we seem to agree as a species that it’s possible to recognize familiar things in art and that art can be pleasing.

To explain why, look no further than the brain.

The human brain is wired in such a way that we can make sense of lines, colors and patterns on a flat canvas. Artists throughout human history have figured out ways to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren’t actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real.

The illusion of clouds reflecting on water

And while individual tastes are varied and have cultural influences, the brain also seems to respond especially strongly to certain artistic conventions that mimic what we see in nature.

What we recognize in art

It goes without saying that most paintings and drawings are, from an objective standpoint, two-dimensional. Yet our minds know

[to keep reading]

A while back, Matthew J.X. Malady, wrote about the fascinating phenomenon of word aversion for Slate.  Most of us have words we dislike for emotional reasons — they sound harsh bunk or connote something gross(ish) zit or slug. 

Are there words you hate?

“But first, some background is in order.  The phenomenon of word aversion seemingly pedestrian, inoffensive words driving some people up the wall—has garnered increasing attention over the past decade or so. In a recent post onLanguage Log, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Libermandefined the concept as “a feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong, nor because it’s felt to be over-used or redundant or trendy or non-standard, but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.”