November snuck up on me. So I don’t have a plan for my first Vegan MoFo post – d’oh!
So I’ll share this instead.
Apparently one of the most popular Halloween costumes this year was Lady Gaga’s raw meat dress. Fuck that – I’d rather go as this awesome lady I found on Muslims Wearing Things.
Her name is Amina Tariq, and she is the least offensive member of PETA I’ve ever come across. She led a pro-veggie protest in Jordan this summer.
Well done Amina on your awesome creativity – and for not letting PETA sexually exploit you like they do in most of their campaigns.
I love the idea of a dress made of leaves… I remember going for springtime walks in the countryside where I’m from and fingering the fresh new beech leaves, wishing that there were clothes as soft and beautiful…
BONUS: here‘s a guide to making your own Gaga dress, vegan style!
I really wish I could go and see Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds.
There are one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, each one unique and handmade.
I want one.
So it was with dismay that I learnt that the exhibition will no longer allow visitors to walk across the carpet of seeds. Not that I would ever have a chance to see the exhibition anyway, but being herded behind a barrier would surely scupper my chances at getting my hands on one of the seeds…
I’m inexplicably drawn to tiny things. I love them. There are lots of little jars and bowls in my flat, just filled with tiny things – a tiny seashell, a marble, a mini matryoshka, a button, a little wooden ladybird, a bead… and I covet a sunflower seed to add to my little collection of treasures.
I like reading about and looking at other people’s tiny things, too. I love this blog post about little things - the precious, the miniature, the mundane – and one of my favourite experiences when we visited Prague earlier this year was the Museum of Miniatures, where you need to view all the exhibits through a microscope or magnifying glass. You can see a list of their exhibits here, including this – a train of camels in the eye of a needle.
Perhaps the allure of tiny things is that you can put them in your pocket so easily. I remember being very little and being taken to some kind of historical re-enactment event. There was a big medieval gun thing, with a barrel of lead ball bearings, and I spent most of the day runnings my hands though the metal balls and eventually slipping one in my pocket when it was time to leave. I forgot about it until weeks later, I put on the coat I had been wearing that day and was surprised by the weight of it - the tiny little metal ball, small enough to forget about, was enormously heavy! I think I got panicky about having stolen the ball bearing, and threw it away in the end.
Thankfully, it seems Ai Weiwei understands the temptation. He said:
If I was in the audience I would definitely want to take a seed. But for the museum, it is a total work, and taking a seed would affect the work. Institutions have their own policies. But I know I would want to take a seed.
As one Guardian blogger pointed out, it is anticipated about 2 million people will visit the sunflower seeds. Even if everyone takes one, there will still be 98 million left.
A friend of mine will be in London for a few days soon, and is going to attempt to get me one… here’s hoping.
In celebration of everything small but perfectly formed, here is the world’s smallest stop motion animation, filmed through a microscope.
Hundreds of human forms – cast from real people – sunk to the bottom of the sea for an underwater museum.
The sculptures are made from a special cement with a neutral PH, which will attract corals to grow on them. The artist hopes that the underwater museum will draw people away from the fragile natural reefs.
I wanted to create an image of humans living in balance with nature instead of in opposition to it… The ‘people’ will become a habitat. There is no way I would be able to create that kind of beauty with my own hand, it is only something nature can make.
