vomweissweinstar

going to Naturalia!

String Along — Harry Smith Figures via Best Made Co. (who was featured in yesterday’s New York Times)

This image is from a book of string figures by Harry Smith, the compiler of the enormously influential Anthology of American Folk Music.

“Harry Smith would talk at great length and in extraordinary depth on topics spanning many subjects and ranges of knowledge. […] a typical chain of free association might range from, for example, the macrocosm and the microcosm and the great chain of being to bioelectromagnetics and electrophysiology and the geomagnetic field and the psyche, Sylvanus Thompson and Max Knoll and the generation of phosphenes, musicology and molecular physics, parapsychology and poltergeist phenomena; the Margery and Helene Smith mediumship cases, the tarot and the Key of Solomon the King, Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter’s Regular Polytopes and the Leech Lattice, his collection of 30,000 Ukrainian Easter eggs and Seminole quilts; alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone; all in an effort to demonstrate the underlying connectedness and interrelatedness of all things for his audience of the moment.”