Hello Friends,

The Arctic front has taken us into a tight embrace the last two weeks. I always forget how winter feels like until it comes around once again and takes me by surprise.

I put together a few videos and cartoons I made in this newsletter. I was lost the last few days reviving a ten year old mac, christened Thiruvanmayur ^[1], with a fresh install of Linux. Like winter, the joys and heartaches of Linux is just as easily forgotten. It does bring me satisfaction thinking about how Thiruvanmayur is going to live along happily for another couple more years. Thanks to tireless work of countless people building a world of open software.

• Stumbled on some of my old experiments. A Jonas Mekas inspired daily vlog. Some experiments in making cartoons

• My old experiments got me back to doodling. Nothing like seeing graphite branding itself on paper.

• I haven't been listening (or, logging) to music as much as I used to. But, I got curious the other day and this is a snapshot of the Summer . 🐣K. Loves Riz Ahmed's music as much as I do.

• Woolf, Thoreau, Nabokov and map of maps.

• In Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a music composer would drag an orchestra to the middle of the Amazons to make music. For how impressive the movie is, the documentary of the making of the movie is breathtaking. Only an artist with grit can pull is off. Here are the rules of filmmaking according to Herzog

• My need to build a library that is insurmountable has a word in Japanese - tsundoku

• I reviewed Joan Miro's, I work like a gardener before. This is a deeper look at how he works, his roots in folk art.

• Ocean Voung on making art for ourselves

  There's a legend about a Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor to paint a landscape so pristine that the emperor can enter it. He didn't do a good job, so the emperor was preparing to assassinate him. But because it was his painting, legend goes, he stepped inside and vanished, saving himself. I always loved that little allegory as an artist. Even when it is not enough for others, if it is enough for you, you can live inside it.

• I saw Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides on a sleepy afternoon in middle of an art workshop in Kolkata. His complete surrender to nature's whimsy, ambition of his art and his understanding of the eventual decay in play jolted me awake.

poem by mary oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.