Top: The Moon Seen Through A Telescope Ca. 1920-ca. 1925

“What were astronauts like when they first returned from outer space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: ‘They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t got their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us… a rage at having come back to earth. As if up there they’re not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body. Did you know that for months John [Glenn] and Wally [Schirra] and Scott [Carpenter] went around looking at the sky? You could speak to them and they didn’t answer, you could touch them on the shoulder and they didn’t notice; their only contact with the world was a dazed, absent, happy smile. They smiled at everything and everybody, and they were always tripping over things. They kept tripping over things because they never had their eyes on the ground.’”

— Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (via m-l-rio)

Terra Keck

— Laura Gilpin, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (1977)

Window to the Cosmos

The sun, the moon and the stars. Out-of-doors. v. 2. 1932.

I feel like a Million Dollar…

Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” 1995

An astonishingly irreverent piece of work.  This triptych features the artist dropping a Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) in three photographs.  

When questioned about the work, he suggested that the piece was about industry: “[The urn] was industry then and is industry now.”  His statement, therefore, was that the urn was just a cheap pot two thousand years ago, and the reverence we feel toward it is artificial.  One critic wrote: “In other words, for all the aura of preciousness acquired by the accretion of time (and skillful marketing), this vessel is the Iron Age equivalent of a flower pot from K-Mart and if one were to smash the latter a few millennia from now, would it be an occasion for tears?”

However, the not-so-subtle political undertone is clear.  This piece was about destroying the notion that everything that is old is good…including the traditions and cultures of China.  For Ai Weiwei, this triptych represents a moment in which culture suddenly shifts (sometimes violently), shattering the old and outdated to make room for the new.  

queer astronaut sticker

"Having orbited the Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. Humans, let us preserve and increase the beauty, not destroy it!"

― Yuri Gagarin

Sun Center, Ingo Swann, 1975