Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Paper-Airplane Collector


From the New Yorker:


 Smith, who died in 1991, was, according to his friends, always collecting things, and his groups of objects would constantly morph: because he moved frequently, bits and pieces would be lost from one long-term hotel stay to another.


Smith’s paper-airplane collection was one of the oddest of his many odd collections. (Among other things, he also accumulated string figures and Ukrainian Easter eggs.) Most of the paper airplanes were found in the streets and buildings of New York. (The map below plots the locations). Smith was “always, always, always looking” for new airplanes, one friend said: “He would run out in front of the cabs to get them, you know, before they got run over. I remember one time we saw one in the air and he was just running everywhere trying to figure out where it was going to be. He was just, like, out of his mind, completely. He couldn’t believe that he’d seen one. Someone, I guess, shot it from an upstairs building.” It’s not clear how many airplanes Smith collected in total; he would flatten them for storage, and friends recall seeing boxes and boxes of them. Smith’s “spiritual wife,” the Beat muse Rosebud Feliu Pettet, estimated that there were “multiple” boxes, “more than two, less than fifty.” Friends recall that Smith donated the bulk of his paper-airplane collection to the Smithsonian in the eighties. The museum sent a box containing two hundred and fifty-one planes, which he picked up between 1961 and 1983, to the Anthology Film Archive in 1994, at the request of the director of Smith’s personal archive, but it’s unclear what happened to the rest. The photos in this slide show are taken from a new collection, by J & L Books and the Anthology Film Archives, that contains images of all the airplanes in the surviving box.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

12-Step Heart for Heart Attack Assessment Awareness

Joel Stern via Origami Mailing List:

Hi everyone,
A while back, a mother of a young man who had died suddenly of a heart attack reached out to me to design an origami heart that could be folded in 12 steps. Here's the story behind this request.
Justin Carr was the young man's name, and his heart attack was caused by pediatric cardiomyopathy, which had gone undetected.
There exists a 12-question heart attack assessment that, in Europe, has proved over the last 25 years to be over 85% effective in saving lives. Currently, only 6% of U.S. doctors even know that these questions exist. These questions can be found here:http://www.origamihearttrust.org/index.php/59-pediatric-cardiomyopathy/youth-heart-health-assessment/96-12-questions
The mother wanted to use origami to publicize this assessment because her son had once used origami to reach out to a very shy young girl. The story can be found here:http://www.origamihearttrust.org/index.php/mission/inspiration
The 12-step origami heart integrates Justin's love of people, his skill with origami, and the 12-step assessment program which has the potential to save many young lives.
I am continually inspired by Justin's story, and by the dedication of his parents to create something meaningful and positive out of their pain.
Here is the heart that I designed in Justin's memory:http://www.origamihearttrust.org/index.php/get-involved/learn/how-to-fold-our-heart


NOA #481 September Issue

It seems I somehow forgot to schedule Heather's review to post at the beginning of this month:




Friday, September 11, 2015

Today is Tuesday...




Source

Remembering David, Ron, Daniel....

 


Video description:
Uploaded on Sep 5, 2008 These tiles were put up on the fence across the street from St. Vincent's, the hospital in the Village where they waited to take care of the survivors who never came. In case you can't read it, the name on the tile I walked up to at the end is David Reed Gamboa Brandhorst, who was only three years old. His fathers Daniel R. Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa died with him. I didn't know any of them. I just walked up at a certain point and pointed at the first tile that caught my eye. RIP.