Archive for the 'Cities' Category

Gordon Lightfoot – Nous Vivons Ensemble

Friday, May 12th, 2023
  • Gordon Lightfoot – Nov 17, 1938 – May 1 2023
    (See photo of Gordon and Bob Dylan + listen to his songs)

  • The title comes from a section of Arizona State Route 74 in north Phoenix. Said Lightfoot, “I thought it would make a good title for a song. I wrote it down, put it in my suitcase and it stayed there for eight months.”[2] The song employs “Carefree Highway” as a metaphor for the state of mind where the singer seeks escape from his ruminations over a long ago failed affair with a woman named Ann. Lightfoot has stated that Ann actually was the name of a woman Lightfoot romanced when he was age 22:[2] “It [was] one of those situations where you meet that one woman who knocks you out and then leaves you standing there and says she’s on her way. (via wiki Carefree Highway)

  • Fred Lyon San Francisco Photographer Dies at 97

    Wednesday, August 31st, 2022

  • SF Gate Obit

    His DNA was in San Francisco’: Prolific photographer Fred Lyon dies at 97

  • Fred Lyon Portfolio

  • Tokyo Toilets – Wim Wenders & Yakusho Koji

    Sunday, August 14th, 2022
  • Wim Wenders homepage

    „THE TOKYO TOILET“ Art Project with Wim Wenders, Koji Yakusho, Tadao Ando et al.
    Wim Wenders announces a new art project which includes a short film about high-end public toilets in Shibuya, Tokyo.

    Japan’s leading international actor, Kōji Yakusho (Memoirs of a Geisha / Babel etc.) will play the lead role.
    The spaces featured in THE TOKYO TOILET (TTT) were designed by world-renowned architects like Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban,and designers like NIGO, with the idea that a pleasant public restroom could counter the common expectation of a dark, dirty and dangerous place.

    “My first reaction was: What? Toilets? Chotto mattete,” said Wim Wenders during the press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, using the Japanese expression for “wait a minute”.

    For Wim Wenders, the project has high social value and he could immediately see the potential and story behind these stylish Tokyo toilets. „Because a toilet is a place where everybody is the same. There’s no rich and poor, no old and young, everybody’s part of humanity“, he said.

    The film shooting will take place in Tokyo in October 2022.

    Vigeland Park in Oslo, Norway – Set & Rewind The Conversation from the Past

    Tuesday, April 10th, 2018
  • 1aaVeravangVigeland
    photo by Vera Vang

    April 11 1869 –
    birthday of Gustav Vigeland

    Visited here when I stayed in Oslo for 3 months.

  • Did Edward Munch hate Vigeland?

  • The wild conversation here about this park, thanks to Mark Z. (scroll down to see him resembling the Noble man painted by Velasquez)

    City for Lovers and Friends – Lewis Mumford – Banksy in Studio

    Saturday, October 19th, 2013

    Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

    Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer.

  • Edward Burtynsky – Navajo reservation adjacent to a Phoenix suburb.


  • via Robin Gunningham/Mr Banksy… or Banksy in Studio
    Banksy homepage here.

  • Why Scandinavian Prisons are Superior.

    It’s a postcard-perfect day on Suomenlinna Island, in Helsinki’s South Harbor. Warm for the first week of June, day trippers mix with Russian, Dutch, and Chinese tourists sporting sun shades and carrying cones of pink ice cream.

    “Is this the prison?” asks a 40-something American woman wearing cargo pants and a floral sleeveless blouse.

    The Billy Rose Garden in Jerusalem – Isamu Noguchi

    Friday, November 16th, 2012
  • Dome

    Noguchi Garden
    in Jerusalem <>

    ( Photos by Fung-Lin Hall taken from the Billy Rose Garden in Jerusalem)

  • Isamu Noguchi – Nov 17, 1904

  • (image via)

    This set by acclaimed designer Isamu Noguchi, used in Martha Graham’s ‘Embattled Garden,’ was damaged when basement storage of the Martha Graham Dance Company, located in the West Village, flooded in late October 2012. The company said it is still assessing the extent of the damage.

    See Isamu Noguchi design from The Appalachian Spring..

  • Noguchi Museum NY..(youtube)

  • Yoshiko Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Noguchi
    Yoshiko Yamaguchi – Isamu Noguchi’s ex-wife .. an international diva who became a politican and has become a passionate advocate for Palestinian causes.

  • Edward Said on Israel occupation (youtube)

  • 24 City – Jia Zhang Ke

    Thursday, August 30th, 2012
  • 24 city

    See full film here

    The film follows three generations of characters in Chengdu (in the 1950s, the 1970s and the present day) as a state-owned factory gives way to a modern apartment complex.
    The apartment complex featured in the film is an actual development (also called “24 City”) built on the former site of an airplane engine manufacturing facility. Jia will also produce a documentary about the location.
    The film’s narrative style is described by critics as a blend of fictional and documentary storytelling, and it consist of five authentic interviews and four fictional scenes delivered by actors (but presented in a documentary format.


    Joan Chen (Photo via 24 City – Mixing and manipulating Chinese History )

    Peter Bradshaw (Guardian)

    His most sensational “fictional” interview is with a beautiful, lonely factory worker, who is nicknamed Little Flower on the shopfloor, because of her resemblance to the eponymous heroine of a popular 1980 film. The heroine of that genuine film was played by Joan Chen and this character is played by … Joan Chen. Using such an obviously famous star in my view exonerates Jia from the charge of dishonesty. It’s an extraordinarily audacious, even outrageous casting gesture, a day-glo post-modern joke amidst the dour factory dust: an alienation effect which is also its opposite, an identification effect, a way of dramatising how downtrodden factory workers dreamed of glamorous escape, of lives other than the ones they had.

    Early film – 1997

    Jia Zhang Ke photo via

    “Part of the reason I started making films was to respond to cinema’s blind spots, its silences, on the kind of life I knew. I wanted to express all the memorable things that I had experienced, and I think this is still my primary responsibility as a filmmaker.” – Jia Zhangke (MUBI)

    The quest for memory – documentary – (Senses of Cinema)

    There Will Be A Couch

    Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

    Photo by Paul Chinn (image source)

    Pick a title from the list below.

    1 – The Last of the Mohicans Couch
    2 – A Room with a View and Why the Couch Got Away
    3 – The Crucible
    4 – There Will Be Blood
    5 – The Unbearable Lightness of Furniture Being
    6 – The Boxer in the Age of Innocence

    Photo by Paul Chinn (image source)

    The image below is a repost, more about this here.
    <> <> <> <> bedwindow.jpg

    This post is dedicated to Heath Ledger who inspired Daniel Day Lewis.

    Buenos Aires to Hong Kong

    Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

    Robert Weight is blogging from Buenos Aires.
    A few of his photos are featured at Agog post featuring two novels by Argentinian Martinez.

    Yesterday an email came from Valery Grancher announcing his new project, Miniature China blog.

    Valery Grancher Stanley Bay Hong Kong
    Stanley Bay Hong Kong by Valery Grancher (via)
    Buenos Aires and Hong Kong are happily linked together here at vitro-nasu.

    RIP Jane Jacobs – D+A = nD

    Sunday, April 30th, 2006

    Jane Jacobs Jane Jacobs

    There is perhaps no person in the 20th Century who was more influential in raising the benchmark for our quality of life in cities than Jane Jacobs, who died on April 25, 2006 at 89.
    Remembering Jane Jacobs (Cool Town Studios)

    She decided to leave the United States in part out of her objection to the Vietnam War and due to worry about the fate of her two draft-age sons. She chose Toronto as she found it a pleasant city and its rapid growth meant plenty of work for her architect husband. She quickly became a leading figure in her new city and was involved in stopping the Spadina Expressway. A common theme of her work has been to question whether we are building cities for people or for cars. She has been arrested twice during demonstrations. (Jane Jacobs Wikipedia)

    Dark Age Ahead (Ideas That Matter Quarterly)

    D+A = nD (D is labor division in a given economic system, A new activities of entrepreneurs and nD the resulting new form of labor division.)

    In the forty-plus years since her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” appeared, her views, which then seemed wildly eccentric—basically, that New York’s future depended less on tall buildings and big projects than on the preservation of small, old blocks and catch-as-catch-can retailing—have been vindicated so many times, and in so many ways, that by now one can hardly think about this city without thinking about her, and like her.

    Jacobs has closely followed the Ground Zero plans and debates, and she thinks that the right thing to do is not to do anything right away. “The significance of that site now is that we don’t know what its significance is,” she said. “We’ll know in fifteen or twenty years.”
    (Cities and Songs – Adam Gopnik, New Yorker )

    Deptford X Ephemeral Cities – Net Art Open from London

    Friday, October 28th, 2005

    The Ephemeral Cities web art project is curated by Paul Malone and hosted by A2 Arts in collaboration with the Deptford X Festival.
    Click on the small thumbnail image to the left of the page to see each artist’s project.

    6artists

    Contributors : Caspar Below, Elizabeth Coulter-Smith, Errol Francis, Valery Grancher, Fung Lin Hall, Susie Hinchliffe, Julian Konczak, Mac McKean, Paul Malone, Andy Parsons, Nicola Rae, Jurgen Trautwein

    (To Paul, thanks for putting together Net Open and for inviting me. Fung-Lin Hall.)

    Ephemeral Cities

    Friday, October 21st, 2005

    Lost in Words Lost in Words
    Watercolor on the photos of Jungmannova in Prague.

    ” … the city which can not be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember…” Italo Calvino.

    Uffizi Ephemeral Cities
    Uffizi, Florence Photo Fung Lin Hall –

    “Perfection is a road that leads only to solitude: I no longer see in men anything but surmounted rungs. The Maestro, who has greater genius than I, is in my presence nothing more than a poor man no longer in possession of himself, and Michelangelo would gladly exchange his ardor for my serenity…..
    That mad emperor wished that the world had only one head, so that he could cut it off. Would that it were only one body, that I might embrace it: one fruit, that I might pluck it: one enigma, which I might finally solve. Shall I seize an empire? Shall I construct a temple? Shall I write a poem, which will last longer?…
    One has to have too many illusions to desire power, too much vanity to desire glory. Since I possess myself, what enrichment could the universe bring me – and happiness means nothing to me. ” (excerpt from “That Mighty Sculptor, Time” by Marguerite Yourcenar.)

    Boboli Boboli Fung Lin Hall
    Boboli Garden, Florence photo by Fung Lin Hall – Sculpture by Sculpture by Igor Mitoraj

    The archive of Cities from this blog will be presented at the Deptford Festival in London. The following index was created to offer an alternative viewing experience for the audience. The individual pages will be presented without the sidebar menu.

    -c- New Orleans

    -i- San Francisco

    -t- Walking in the Clouds – New York City

    -i- Cities + Cinematheque

    -e- Venice to Florence

    -s- Besieged