I have been watching old elegant skating by John Curry on youtube. Today is Philip Glass‘s birthday; a good way to celebrate his birthday is with a piece done by two great skaters from the forgotten past. Curry wanted to introduce the idea that figure skating can also be an art form, not just a sport with medals, winners, and losers.
He was light on his feet like Fred Astaire, see here. Today Sasha Cohen, Johnny Weir, and Matt Savoie have inherited Curry’s elegant skating.
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
– Lumière and Company (1995, original title “Lumière et Cie”) was a collaboration between 41 international film directors in which each made a short film using the original Cinématographe camera invented by the Lumière brothers.
Shorts were edited in-camera and abided by three rules: A short may be no longer than 52 seconds; No synchronized sound; No more than three takes.
Claude Miller‘s ‘Un Secret’: A Jewish history lost and found in France
‘Un Secret,” a movie about ordinary Jewish people in extraordinarily savage times, is a current success with French moviegoers, and Claude Miller, who adapted the film from Philippe Grimbert’s eponymous novel, is surprised.
Claude Miller made a splash long ago with “The Best Way to Walk”, worked closely with Francois Truffaut in his early years.
We are still in the city and don’t call it Frisco. After Capp Street of David Ireland let’s zigzag to the Tenderloin Bush St and visit Jurgen Trautwein, a transplant from Germany. Like the consolidation work that David Ireland did for Capp Street apartment, Jurgen’s apartment is another pulsating piece of life as art, a place of magic and transformation. Jurgen has redesigned his homepage and is introducing new works including many ongoing interactive web projects. Take part, eat the heart and drink the wholly JT Wine.
For the International Geographic painting series I’m using found maps of the world as a two dimensional stage to populate them with immediate, essential, sparsely colored line figurations, acting out fragments of enigmatic dramas in an universe of maximum misunderstanding.
The NIESATT installations
an evolving drawing & multimedia hybridization project:
NIESATT is a neologism consistent of two German words, nie (never) and satt (full, enough, satisfied).
If NIESATT is read backwards and the double T substituted with a D it reads Dasein (being in this world or exercising being).
(For years I’ve been wondering what NIESATT meant.)
Wordabout (blog) – A project exploring perception and work process of blind artists with developmental disabilities working at Creativity Explored in San Francisco.
My drawings are raw thought. I draw what I observe about the human folly I experience in my San Francisco Tenderloin neighborhood and beyond. The Tenderlonians appear like an order of humans very much on the edge of existence.
“I’m being and seeing myself, seeing me see myself”. Paul Valery
Art is not a career to me, it’s a life in the realm of ideas, which are not necessarily monetary or consumable.
David Ireland has been a familiar figure in the West Coast art scene for three decades. Not focusing on a career in art until reaching his 40s, he spent his earlier years seeking out an array of experiences. After earning a B.A. in Industrial Design and Printmaking, Ireland lived in Asia, Europe and Africa. He pursued work in numerous professions, most notably serving as an African safari guide during the 1960s and early ’70s. Soon after completing graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974, he purchased a house at 500 Capp Street, in the city’s not-yet-gentrified Mission District. (via)
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The above two photos taken from magazine clips I saved from long ago.
The top right image is the exterior of Ireland’s house in San Francisco.
This article was written by John Ashbery. He wrote,
Ireland soon realized that this would be no ordinary restoration job–“consolidation” is the word he prefers to use.
“Slowly I progressed, as an artist, and I reached a philosophical point where I realized that the lively presence I was looking for in my paintings was here on the walls, as I stripped away and cleaned off the surfaces.”
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(Janet Paparelli sent me her new year’s greeting with this image.)
Democrazy is here to stay. (Mark Young who posted this shortest blog entry is a poet from Australia) Dogmacracy (Daisy and Spike – or Hillary vs Obama, the two chihuahuas’ one act play) now enters another round for a re-run. (They can’t raise money but they can growl and pretend better than any of the current candidates. Growling politicians is universal, here is Issay Ogata playing a politician.)
Matt has two great links on Why not outsource American politics? and Bullshit
The point is this: Voting machine security is essential to our democratic process, and remains a problem that has not been resolved.
As long as these devices have serious vulnerabilities, doubt is possible, and a healthy democracy cannot function effectively in the shadows.
And something else that turns your ear to dead meat. David Ireland Three Attempts to Understand Van Gogh’s Ear in Terms of the Map of Africa, 1987 (image source) David Ireland’s 500 Capp Street: Inside And Soon To Be On The Market. (David Ireland mini retrospective is long overdue, stay tuned.)
(Directed by Alfonso Cuarón) “The Shock Doctrine” is high lighted at agog for people who don’t have time to read.
This funny opera was composed by John Adams, produced by Peter Sellers, and choreographed by Mark Morris.
Judging from these clips on youtube, Pat Nixon is the only non political person in the mix of power hungry world leaders, providing the audience with maternal warmth and humanity.
As a big fan of the opera Nixon In China, I was so excited to find the following clips from it on YouTube. As the title implies, NIC is about the historic meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. The composer, John Adams, once described it (jokingly) as an opera for “Republicans and Communists.” Well, I’m neither and I still love the hell out of it.
This third clip is one of my favorites. Kissinger (as Lao-Szu) whips a peasant woman half to death in a stage play. Pat Nixon comes to the woman’s aid and then the music gets better.
Today January 8 was the day China lost their beloved leader Zhou En Lai. in 1976.
How do you assess Zhou’s achievements in China’s tumultuous history?
Some accuse Zhou of going along with Mao and not protecting the Chinese people; others show gratitude to Zhou for saving China from Mao’s tyranny.
Zhou was first and foremost a survivor. Most of Zhou’s contemporaries died directly under the hand of Mao or died in mysterious accidents. Zhou alone, of his stature, survived. Mao was determined to outlive Zhou and did so by a few months.
Perhaps my favorite image of Zhou is from footage of Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. As the US President blathered on about ‘friendship and mutual respect,’ the jaded premier shifted in his chair unable to contain a mighty yawn at the dog and pony show onstage. Zhou’s work with Kissinger was done and in the books. That had been the important part.
Perhaps, he was simply tired. (This date in history: The Death of Zhou Enlai)
A restrained Hutton explained onstage that — having spent 10 years as a merchant marine in his youth — he initially wanted to make a film about ship-breaking, the messy and dangerous process by which rusting hulks are broken down into their component elements in cash-starved countries like Bangladesh. After three hours of shooting in one of these ship-breaking yards, he was kicked out, but the usable footage prompted him to construct a trilogy of sorts: the building, voyage and dismantling of a ship.(the reeler – scroll down)
After experiencing mankind’s ability to create such a monstrosity once it’s at sea the camera is locked on to a wide shot of many cargo boxes. I couldn’t help but begin to become concerned with what all those cargo boxes contain. Perhaps some of them are full of grain and other essentials but more than likely they contain garbage that will be consumed and tossed out on to the trash heap, just like the ship that carries them.
At Sea is a 60minute motion picture postcard that delivered an experience distinct in the cinema a un-tethered, by the constraints of conventional story-telling, look at commerce and its consequences. Tim Massett
Part I discussion Peter Hutton had after his retrospective screening at the Capitol Theater in Windsor Ontario for Media City 13 on February 17, 2007 on Youtube.
Thanks Hal Lum for sharing and introducing Peter Hutton to us.
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a green and a red ball
1994
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Palm tree trunks
