Place Via The Royal Forest of Dean is situated on the English and South Wales border in the UK, 120 miles west of London,65 miles from Birmingham (via the M5), and 35 from Bristol to the centre of the Forest.
The tent city, a former nine-hole golf course, is now home to 50,000 people. There is no way to make money except by selling goods or services right here. So a schoolteacher might open a candy stand. A government accountant might sell spices or batteries.
This is mixed news for Samard. She has more competition for her business, but also more choices as a consumer. Every day, she goes shopping, tent to tent.
Watch Plastic bag by Ramin Bahrani – a sad story narrated by Werner Herzog.
Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) ventures through the environmentally barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.
NYtimes obit Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62
Ai means “Love’ in Japanese.
Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 – March 19, 2010) was an American poet who legally changed her name to Ai. Obit from Jacket copy
National Book Award winning poet Ai died unexpectedly of natural causes in Oklahoma on Saturday. She was 62.
She was Ai, she was a woman who did whatever the hell she wanted, and I admired that immensely. If anyone had any doubts about that then they hadn’t read her work–she didn’t use periods or commas to punctuate her poems, she used goosebumps.
PASSAGE for Allen Ginsberg
Sunflowers beside the railroad tracks,
sunflowers giving back the beauty God gave you
to one lonely traveler
who spies you from a train window
as she passes on her way to another train station.
She wonders if she were like you
rooted to your bit of earth
would she be happy,
would she be satisfied
to have the world glide past and not regret it?
For a moment, she thinks so,
then decides that, no, she never could
and turns back to her book of poetry,
remembering how hard it was to get here
and that flowers have their places as people do
and she cannot simply exchange hers for another,
even though she wants it.
That’s how it is.
Her mother told her.
Now she believes her,
although she wishes she didn’t.
At fifty-three, she feels the need
to rebel against the inevitable winding down.
She already feels it in her bones,
feels artery deterioration, and imagines
cancerous indications on medical charts
she hopes will never be part of her life,
as she turns back to the window
to catch the last glimpse of the sunflowers
that sent her thoughts on a journey
from which she knows she will never return,
only go on and on
and then just go.
Ai Ogawa
If you are new to William Lamson‘s playful, inventive action videos start with these beautiful works. Tundra and Emerge.
Fan of basketball game? Check this Long Shot (video loop)
Paul Scofield documantary (6 parts) starts with King Lear footage.
In 2004 Shakespearean company memebers voted Paul Scofield’s acting in King Lear as the greatest performance in history.
As a 12-year-old he witnessed 13 people being shot on the streets of Derry in 1972; he then watched as media reports denied the event.
Twice nominated for the Turner prize, in 1994 and 2003, Doherty’s icy portraits of terrorism, conflict and paranoia are unexpectedly seductive. (more here)
Doherty: Which is a way of talking about the cinema. Increasingly, the cinema has found a place in my work. Maybe this goes back to the earlier issue of a body of images that existed about Derry that I responded to, there’s also cinematic work that I’ve responded to. The installation, “The Only Good One is a Dead One” refers to something like the road movie, this idea of the road as metaphor, as journey.
Maul: In your “installation” the viewer is suspended between victim and assassin. There’s really no where to go and besides being really beautiful looking, it’s done very inexpensively and low tech. It refers to grand historic painting on one level, and I also see it as a kind of compressed cinema.
Niall de Buitléar was born in 1983 in Dublin. He is the current occupant of the Irish Artists’ Residential Studio at the Red Stables in the St Annes Park, Dublin. Niall has a great blog
A look at how the intense relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud gives birth to psychoanalysis.
Viggo Mortensen Replaces Christoph Waltz In “A Dangerous Method”.
DAVID CRONENBERG (born 1943) has been lauded for his blurring of boundaries between technology and the individual, but this praise has consistently missed the point, for his films have singularly denied the existence of any such boundaries. (Read more here)
As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she became Joyce’s secretary, editor, impresario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her shop. She organized international and local subscription lists for the book to help finance its printing. After typesetting had begun at Dijon, in a kind of postscript ecstasy of creation, Joyce scribbled some ninety thousand words more on the costly, repeatedly reset proofs, making a four-hundred-thousand word volume, of which Sylvia managed to have two copies printed for his birthday on February 2, 1922—one for him, one for her. (Janet Flanner)
What is it with March 14 birthdays?
Einstein
Albert Einstein (photo by Fung Lin Hall from the supermarket rack).
Like Simone Weil whose brother was a famous mathematician, Diane’s brother was Howard Nemerov, a respected poet, unlike Simone Weil, Diane’s parents were strange and cold. Maybe to esacpe them Diane married early to Allan Arbus and had two daughters.
Many interesting links here -(Upgraded Arbus archive with her brother’s eulogy)
Michel Legrand who is known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Windmills of Your Mind provided the soundtrack for Go Between a memorable film starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie, directed by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter. It was clearly a time to learn more about Michel Legrand and found another fact that seems to shed important light to history of 20 Century music.
Recently I learned that Michel Legrand studied compostion under Nadia Boulanger who seemed to have taught some of the important composers of the 20th Century such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Elliott Carter, Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, and Philip Glass.
These two sisters made an extraordinary impact on French musical life, Lili being the first woman to win the much coveted Prix de Rome, and Nadia becoming perhaps the most influential musical teacher of the 20th century.
Madmoiselle focused on Nadia Boulanger as a teacher. The film does not provide biographical information and says nothing about her sister. Leonard Bernstein speaks fluent french in this film. He facetiously calls her followers the Boulangerie (French bakery).
Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris. Her emotional life was largely centered around her love for her sister, Lili Boulanger, who was six years younger, and whose care Nadia had been entrusted with by their father. Lili was one of Nadia’s first composition students, and it was largely under her guidance that Lili won the Prix de Rome, in 1913.
Nadia and Lili Boulanger had an interesting relationship. While she loved her sister unconditionally, Nadia always felt overshadowed by her sister’s compositional abilities.[original research?] She once said “If there is anything of which I am very sure, it is that my music is useless.”[1] Ten years passed between when Nadia Boulanger entered the Paris Conservatoire and when she placed second in the Grand Prix. Lili only spent one year in the conservatory before winning the first place prize with an overwhelming landslide vote.[citation needed] The death of their father in 1900 had been an important factor in Lili’s turn towards composing[original research?], and yet, after she died in 1918, Nadia Boulanger never composed again. Lili had asked her to complete her unfinished works, but Nadia did not feel her composing abilities were on par with her sister’s, and she felt she could not do the compositions justice (Via)
Duncan Jones who directed the Moon is David Bowie’s son.
It is strange that we do not hear much about him.
1)-Oscar 2010 -Avatar averted. (Actors need jobs and plastic surgeons need custormers)
2) A woman who makes macho film wins for the first time as a Female director.
Jane Campion who did not win for the Piano was not even nominated for “Bright Star”
3) Omission of Farrah Faucett and Bea Arthur from Oscar obituary of the year
4) Penelope Cruz who won the best supporting actress last year got nominated again.
5) Sandra Bullock compensated for her lack of credentials with gracious speech.
6) Abbie Cornish who was excellent in “Bright Star” was not even nominated.
Update: Oscar bosses defend Farrah Fawcett snub (She was not just a TV actress, Farrah appeared in the films Extremities and the Apostle. The Oscar snub demonstrates their total ignorance of their own profession.)
Boom, Destruction, and Austerity: Gabriel Orozco, Kitty Kraus, and Urs Fischer John Haber from his blog
Many people have the feeling that something has gone wrong with contemporary art. They see only conceptual art and theory, when artists have moved on to more impulsive creation—and self-creation. They see only overblown installations, just when galleries and museums are cutting back.
For all that, museums still devote shows to young artists and midcareer retrospectives. With Gabriel Orozco, Kitty Kraus, and Urs Fischer, that makes one more aware than ever of the disappointments.
Digital Pioneers is a deceptively modest exhibition hidden away in two rooms upstairs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It contains some of the earliest examples of art produced using electronic devices and computing machinery along with some creative later work.
On Saturday, May 15, 2010, New Yorkers invade New Jersey in mass exodus, leaving behind the insular art world of Manhattan for the wide open spaces of Paterson, NJ.
Running through June 19, 2010, over 30 artists will participate, including 2010 Whitney Biennial selectees Bruce High Quality Foundation and Kate Gilmore; Laurel Nakadate, Thomas Lendvai, Don Porcella, and Jeremy Earhardt, among many others. Curator – Olympia Lambert