finding cain

At first glance, these colorful three-legged stools look like they're made of wood, but the material is actually from used face masks. It is the brainchild of a South Korean design student named Kim Ha-neul , who also plans to make other furniture pieces such as chairs, tables and lights. Using a heat gun, Kim melts the masks down into moulds at temperatures of 300°C. It takes about 1,500 masks to create one stool, which he calls "Stack and Stack". WATCH:

I'm not happy unless my blog has a little Wes Anderson on it from time to time. Here's the trailer from Bottle Rocket , his feature-length directorial debut. As a teen, I owned — and come to think of it, still own because it's in a storage box here somewhere — a VHS copy of this movie. I'm not sure why I bought it. I guess I just love to watch funny, obscure films.

Elaine Chiu is an artist from Hong Kong who paints beautiful cityscapes. Looking at her art...I was overcome, not so much by awe - though I am in awe of her watercolor paintings - but by a surprising sense of calm. It is not often that cityscapes could cause me to feel the least bit peaceful. Thanks, Elaine for your beautiful creations. Your paintings clear my thoughts just by looking at them.

Édouard Chimot garnered considerable praise and caused some controversy when he exhibited his work in the 1920s. His erotically charged pieces revolved explicitly around hookers and junkies, who usually worked and lived near his studio in Paris. Throughout history, artists have used prostitutes as key subjects for their artwork, and Chimot was no different. He often paid these ladies of the night to sit for him—as hookers were often cheaper to hire than models. Many of his drawings, etchings and paintings have a dark, slightly sinister feel to them. I can imagine the scandal they caused back in the early 1900s.   Thanks, Bridgette.

Dua Lipa helped make 2020 a little more tolerable, and her latest album, Future Nostalgia , will definitely get you through the many traffic jams you have to endure this week.  Here, the 25-year-old British singer talks about her decision to leave home at a young age to pursue a music career; how her lyrics reflect her growing confidence as a young woman in the industry; and how she came up with the next best thing to a world tour during the pandemic. Somewhere Donna Summer is dancing.

A few weeks ago I stumbled into the world of Felicia Chiao , whose imaginative drawings are an amazing homage to creatures in Hayao Miyazaki movies. What I love about her work is the strong sense of freedom I get from her illustrations, and the weird and wonderful places she lets her imagination go.  How about you? Where does your mind go when you look at Felicia's art?

Kate MacDowell is an extremely talented artist and I've wanted to share her work for a long time. I am not a sculptor and I make Play-Doh animals like a child, so I am not an authority on her work, but I just love the way her porcelain pieces are full of details. The hand-sculpted creatures "are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world." Here are some of my favorites, but I highly recommend that you check out Kate's full portfolio on her website , and maybe buy a figurine.

Those of you who are interested in The Queen's Gambit will be thrilled by this. The rest of you just skip to the next post.

I've been much enjoying Delilah Montagu's In Gold EP recently. A quick listen to Loud should give you a fairly good indication of whether you will feel likewise; I can't imagine that you will not but then again not everyone shares my taste in music. Enjoy.

Watched Kung Paano Siya Nawala last night for the fifth time. So why have I seen it so many times? I think it's because I like it a wee bit more with each viewing, which doesn't happen with many Filipino movies. Ang ganda ni Rhian, and she is so darn good in it that she forces you to love the character she's playing. The casting of JM De Guzman in the lead role is also superb. Lio (De Guzman) has prosopagnosia, commonly called face blindness, which means he has trouble recognizing familiar faces and learning to recognize new ones. He walks right past his officemates, his friends, his girlfriend, without being able to recognize them. I first learned about face blindness in 2012, when I watched a report by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes . It can be embarrassing, and it can offend people. Unfortunately, there are no widely accepted treatments. Although prosopagnosia is described as "blindness", it has nothing to do with sight, but rather with a diminished ability to cre