drawing: faces 1822, 1823, and 1824 — fragments from a failed face/book project

by Jack Brummet

---o0o---

Achieving Nirvana

ü     Floating in a pool

ü     Sitting in hot oil

ü     Sitting in a room screaming

ü     Walking for weeks without lying down, not even to sleep

ü     Staying awake for three days

ü     Sitting in a box with pythons

ü     Sitting in a coffin

ü     Sitting next to a rotting corpse

ü     Total silence for ten days

These are some meditative paths to Nirvana as practiced by Buddhist monks, nuns, and laypeople in Thailand. [Details from an article by Bryant Rousseau: "Corpses, Pythons, Sleep Deprivation: Meditation Rituals in Thailand Can Be Intense," New York Times, Aug 30, 2016.

---o0o---

1977 NYC Blackout

By Jack Brummet, NYC Metro Ed.

7/13/1977 during the NYC Blackout. KeeKee, Jan, and I are all down there somewhere.  The fires were to the south of us, in Bushwick, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Embed from Getty Images

----o0o---

---o0o---

Drawing: faces 1821 — Smilers, now, and then

by Jack Brummet

---o0o---

drawing: Faces 1820—The Smiler heads back to work

by Jack Brummet

---o0o---

Mystery solved: the Ode To Darwin original by William Holbrook Beard (painted 1891)

by Jack Brummet

This is a painting I bought for $100 at a roadside stand in Jensen Beach, FLA in 2006 (It cost $150 to ship it home in its delicate, ornate frame). The painting is titled "Ode To Darwin" and was painted by David Zarkin.

The mystery of its origins was solved last night by an intrepid member of the Facebook Lowbrowart group, Jon Groobz  (see details below).

Detail:

The original canvas, titled "The Discovery of Adam," was painted by William Holbrook Beard in 1891 (30 years after Darwin published his famous book).  There is a good web site here with this and some other paintings (he was a fascinating painter).  The painting 

The painting I own is an amazing copy of this original, but I know no details of the painter at all or how or where he copied this work.  Here is the original, which resides at the Toledo Museum of Art.

---o0o---

drawing: faces 1819 - PSA: "if you see something, say something."

by Jack Brummet 

---o0o---

Take A Load Off Your Feet—one of the very strangest Beach Boys tracks

By Jack Brummet, Music Ed.

After Brian Wilson lost his way, his songwriting became, for a time, extremely bizarre.  This is probably one of The Beach Boys top five weird tracks. . .Brian Wilson's ode to good foot care.

---o0o---

Counting every tree in New York City

From Architecture Daily, 11-28-2016:

New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation has completed its two-year project of assigning ID numbers (with arboreal characteristics) to every one of the 685,781 trees in the city's five boroughs. More than 2,300 volunteers walked the streets, then posted each tree's location, measurements, Google Street View image, and ecological benefits for the surrounding neighborhoods (rainwater retained, air pollution reduced)."

---o0o---

drawing: faces 1818 - the lone woman at the party

By Jack Brummet

---o0o---

drawing: faces 1817 - the white elephant participants

by Jack Brummet

---o0o---

Drawing: faces1816 — heavy weather

by Jack Brummet

---o0o---