Penny Anderson

Andy Goldsworthy makes beautiful, ephemeral things out of leaves, twigs, roots, stones, and the like. The web site gives you a taste, but better are the books and videos of his work. It's only an inference, but I think I've twice stumbled over anonymous Goldsworthy-inspired urban works: once I encountered a fan of autumn leaves arranged on a wet sidewalk with perfectly graduated colors, and once in a disused, weedy tennis court I found a circle in the weeds with a twig-and-leaf sailboat sailing on a pebbly…

Jeff Frost makes beautiful, frightening photographs and videos, all highly recommended. This one is from his series Modern Ruin.

The photographer Irene Suchocki's combination of color and texture choices with seductive images creates, as she says, something like a "secret doorway" to a nostalgic world of dreamy pleasures.

Against all family advice, the young Richard Feynman married his high-school sweetheart Arline, who was very ill with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after her death, Feynman wrote a letter to her, which you can read at the wonderful site Letters of Note. Here is a characteristic excerpt:

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

Someone has uploaded all of Taj Mahal's live performance at the Fillmore from 1971. He always went his own way, and it's great fun to go with him.

Dave Nitsche makes clever photographs out of all sorts of unlikely things. The image here is from his series Broken.

These high-speed photos of broken glass and colored liquid are sometimes oddly anthropomorphic, sometimes evocative of scenes of disaster, but always seductive, with their shiny surfaces and high-fashion lighting.

Each of these meticulously assembled photographs by Karen Knorr sets my mind wandering into a once upon a time dreamy place. Found via La Boîte Verte.

Sonic Journeys commissioned the composer Adrian Utley to create this melancholy minimalist piece inspired by a walk through Croft Castle in Herefordshire. Listen to it here, or follow the link to see a video that marries the music to mostly still black-and-white images of the landscape and to read more about the project.

I'm in the mood for Jacques Tati these days, so I was tickled by this photograph from the gallery of winners and finalists in the 2012 competition of the Grand Prix de la Découverte. There are lots of other pleasures on the site.

I can only wonder how much planning and how many takes went into this amazing car wreck from Jacques Tati's Trafic. Personally, I would have cut this video at one or two minutes. The rest is anticlimax; it's needed for the plot but doesn't share the concentrated musicality of the wreck itself.