Spotted by Slevinator, Super Excited! PS, "alphabet" is one of those words that, when you type it a few times, just never looks as if it is spelled right. You know?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekioayeumv0&w=700] "EREBUS" is a film collaboration between award winning choreographic director Russell Maliphant and film directors Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones.
Adapted from "The Rodin Project" a full-length work of contemporary dance by Maliphant, inspired by the work of Auguste Rodin. Maliphants' work is characterised by a unique approach to flow and energy and a concern with the relationship between movement, light, music, form and dynamics.
The future/past philosophy behind film makers Du Preez & Thornton Jones informs levels of abstraction and mystery that resonate and challenge notions of beauty. Their subconscious homage to classicism and surrealism convey the pair's vision of 'dreams in reality'.
The trio worked with a multi-award-winning team on EREBUS including director of photography Tim Maurice Jones, editor Xavier Perkins, art director Robin Brown, musician James Lavelle, and costume designer Stevie Stewart, amongst others.
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In Greek mythology, Erebus was a primordial deity, representing the personification of darkness. Hesiod's Theogony places him as one of the first five beings to come into existence from Chaos.
It was also the part of Hades you went to immediately after dying. Erebus is darkness.
Here's Wordsworth:
"Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man— My Haunt, and the main region of my song."
Fantastic set of aerial nudes by NZ photographer John Crawford - love the cows and sheep! And the train! Lovely idea, beautifully done. More at his website. (via) [gallery]
Black Belt magazine, 1981. Via. I remember seeing this being demonstrated on Tomorrow's World when I was a kid.
French photographer Benoit Pallé enjoys exploring the theme of the Stranger. This project, spotted on the excellent It's Nice That (a glorious soubriquet for a cultural web colander if ever I saw one), sees him wandering the beaches of Mexico allowing tourists to capture themselves, photo-booth style. They are fab. ‘Tourist Stranger Self Portraits’
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His "pansexuality" stopped him getting into politics, he was punched by Norman Mailer, described Truman Capote's death as "a good career move" and he never quite hit the same literary orbit as some of his peers (Updike, Bellow, Roth et al), but Gore Vidal was a stunning essayist, a brilliant speaker and a glittering wit. The following comes from his obituary in The Guardian, but if you're interested, read the one in Time too:
For as long as democracy lasts, people will quote the most brilliant of his many epigrams – "Politics is just showbusiness for ugly people" – and, for as long as competitive endeavour exists, will parrot his cruel but psychologically astute observation that: "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail." It is rare for a week to pass without one or both of these remarks being quoted approvingly somewhere.
He was open to the charge of namedropping, but claims of famous acquaintance were never faked: he had been a friend and relative of the Kennedys and, when I went to interview Vidal at his breathtaking clifftop villa on the coast of the Amalfi coast, there were photographs of him with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who were reputed to have taken refuge there during one of the presidential scandals. However, though distantly related to Clinton's vice-president, Al Gore, Vidal delighted in declining to meet a branch of the family he regarded as dull, grey sheep.
As often with Vidal, the remark about politics compensating the plain was double-edged. Famously attractive as a young man, he would have been a beautiful politician but, with the American electorate reluctant even now to back for most high offices candidates known to be gay, he was surely doomed to fail in the profession of his influential grandfather, Senator Gore of Oklahoma, who, being blind, relied on the newspapers being read to him by a group of assistants who included his grandson[...]But, even had he been straight, a mainstream political career would likely have been undermined by the savagery of his analysis of America. Politically, she was a corrupt and failing empire with a government that ruled through paranoid invocation of national security, he felt. However, he liked to reassure people that there was no risk of American culture dying – because it had never existed.
Despite the extremity of these opinions – and the fact that early novels such as The City and the Pillar (1948) and Myra Breckinridge (1968) were censored and banned because of their sexual content – Vidal later achieved mainstream bestseller and Book of the Month club status with a fictional sequence designed to correct what he saw as the deficient historical knowledge of his fellow Americans.
The Narratives of Empire books, from Burr (1973) to The Golden Age (2000), combined fact, gossip and waspish commentary in the most entertaining and subversive history lessons until the advent of David Starkey, whose style somewhat echoes Vidal's.
These popular works and lucratively paid but cheaply produced screenplays for projects including Bob Guccone's Caligula permitted Vidal to live in some splendour in Italy and California, while writing the essays on politics, literature and culture. They were premiered in periodicals and later preserved in book-form and had the feel of his true vocation. It was in one of these pieces that he characteristically claimed to have sneaked a gay sub-text into the screenplay of Charlton Heston's Ben-Hur.
A walking rejection of the claim that America has no class system, Vidal had the manner of an aristocrat. During the BBC coverage of the 2008 election, he spectacularly blanked David Dimbleby, whom he seemed to feel was pulling rank on him. Often, while interviewing Vidal, it struck me as a minor tragedy that no director had ever cast him as Lady Bracknell, for no actress has ever managed the levels of hauteur that this author could summon.
A few years ago, when I mentioned a passage in his memoirs that admits to being unable to express any open distress after the death of Howard Austen, his supportive partner for almost 50 years, he drawled: "Have you seen that film with Helen Mirren? The Queen? Our class are brought up not to show emotion."
This effortless identification with one of the highest-born figures in history was very Vidal: both in its social self-confidence and the fact that a question about emotional evasion was itself emotionally evaded through a provocative aphorism.
With a writer who was such a brilliant speaker and a natural entertainer, it is fitting that he has left a more durable record on film than most writers do: through occasional acting turns such as the arrogant senator in the political satire Bob Roberts. That part was a vision of another life he might have led. But anyone who relishes elegant and incisive writing and speech will be glad that Vidal was fated to explain, rather than practise, politics.
“The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart.” ― Gore Vidal, Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories
“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”
“Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”
"Politics is just showbusiness for ugly people"
"You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: 'Where are the readers?'"
"A writer must always tell the truth, unless he is a journalist."
"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."
“I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”
“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."
“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
"Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."
“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”
"At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler."
"All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself."
"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin."
"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
(on Norman Mailer) "You know, he used the word 'existential' all the time, to the end of his life, and never even learned what it meant. I heard Iris Murdoch once at dinner explain to Norman what existential meant, philosophically. He was stunned."
“Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.”
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."
“Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [John Lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]”
"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."
“In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.”
“I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.”
"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."
"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin."
"Envy is the central fact of American life."
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”
"In America, if you want a successful career in politics, there is one subject you must never mention, and that is politics. If you talk about standing tall, and it's morning in America, and you press the good-news buttons, you're fine. If you talk about budgets, tax reform, bigotry, and so on, you are in trouble. So if we aren't going to talk issues, what can we talk about? Well, the sex lives of the candidates, because that is about the most meaningless thing that you can talk about."
(on Ronald Reagan) "He is not clear about the difference between Medici and Gucci. He knows Nancy wears one of them."
"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults."
"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."
"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."
"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."
"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either."
"Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults."
"We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself."
"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."
"Never have children, only grandchildren."
"Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60"
“The unfed mind devours itself.”
"A good deed never goes unpunished."
“I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”
"All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself."
"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."
"Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent."
"Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences."
"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return"
"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."
“If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature.”
“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”
"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."
"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."
"Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine."
"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."
"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days."
"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself."
"Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die."
"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."
"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."
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Your suggestions:
He described Reagan during the 1980s as “a triumph of the embalmer’s art”. – Clarence
Checked in on The Atlantic for the first time in a while, and saw these gorgeous images. Lovely Sky Monsters is a series by Camille Seaman, who partnered with storm chasers to track down and photograph a magnificent cloud type - the supercell. Do definitely make time to look at the original set, and also her pictures of icebergs.
Boom.
Pixar story artist Emma Coats has tweeted a series of “story basics” over the past month and a half — guidelines that she learned from her more senior colleagues on how to create appealing stories: #1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone. #12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later. #18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Presumably she’ll have more to come. Also, watch for her personal side project, a science-fiction short called Horizon, to come to a festival near you.
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These bonkers photos are by Alan Sailer, who likes nothing more than to take some sausages to his garage, set them up with some pretty lighting on a nice background, and then shoot them. He sets up a camera and a high-speed flash (ased off an article from a 1974 volume of the Scientific American), and then shoots them with an air rifle or blows them up. The pictures are taken as early into the impact/explosion as possible.
He has hundreds of images on his Flickr page, where he also chats about the process - which is often very very funny.
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Pretty!
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“I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
"We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.
"For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.”
James Kavanaugh on his first book of poems There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves. An ex-priest, he wrote it in the early Seventies when he was living in a tiny flat in New York, surviving off peanut butter and processed cheese. He died in 2009 at the ripe age of 81.
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Here are three from it:
Where are you hiding my love? Each day without you will never come again. Even today you missed a sunset on the ocean, A silver shadow on yellow rocks I saved for you, A squirrel that ran across the road, A duck diving for dinner. My God! There may be nothing left to show you Save wounds and weariness And hopes grown dead, And wilted flowers I picked for you a lifetime ago, Or feeble steps that cannot run to hold you, Arms too tired to offer you to a roaring wind, A face too wrinkled to feel the ocean's spray.
and
I saw my face today And it looked older, Without the warmth of wisdom Or the softness Born of pain and waiting. The dreams were gone from my eyes, Hope lost in hollowness On my cheeks, A finger of death Pulling at my jaws.
So I did my push-ups And wondered if I'd ever find you, To see my face With friendlier eyes than mine.
plus of course
There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who prey upon them with IBM eyes And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon. There are men too gentle for a savage world Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws And murder them for a merchant's profit and gain. There are men too gentle for a corporate world Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who devour them with appetite and search For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry. There are men too gentle for an accountant's world Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky. There are men too gentle to live among wolves
There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant's world Unless they have a gentle one to love.
In 1966-7 my Dad got a job as a young reporter for the Daily Mail's Manchester office, just as it was made Newspaper of the Year. All staff received the memo below from editor Mike Randall. When Dad sent it to me, he added: "Mike Randall left the paper soon afterwards. It became a tabloid and in ethical terms its downhill slide began. However, I think Randall's statement still stands as the model of propriety to which all journalists working for all media should aspire."
I couldn't agree more - and it's certainly how I'd hope people expect writers to behave. I'd add though that in the 15 years I've been writing, I haven't noticed nearly as much awareness of the dangers of libel, sensationalism and indiscretion in young journos as was drilled into [my generation of] pre-internet trainees. I don't think Twitter and the pressure of instant comment helps much though.
[EDITED TRANSCRIPT] 1. No member of the staff intrudes or is called to intrude into private lives where no public interest is involved.
2. No ordinary member of the public is lured, coerced or in any way pressed by a Daily Mail representative into giving an interview or picture which he is clearly unwilling to give.
3. It remains our duty at all times to expose the fraud and reveal the mountebank wherever public interest is involved.
4. In the reporting of Divorce Cases we use our own and not the Judge's discretion. We give details only where the case and the summing up are of valid legal or public interest. We do not at at any time carry reports which merely hold either party up to ridicule or reveal aspects of their private lives which cannot be any concern of the public.
5. No member of the Daily Mail invents quotes or uses subterfuge to obtain quotes.
6. We are not in business to suppress news. Where anybody is guilty of withholding information that ought to be made public we use every legitimate method to give our readers that information.
7. Daily Mail staff do not allow themselves to be used as vehicles for the promotion of publicity stunts which have no legitimate news value.
8. Anyone who works for the Daily Mail should be watchdog of ours standards and a person who commands public respect.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/18022468 w=700&h=700] [vimeo http://vimeo.com/36330801 w=700&h=470]
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Freud was born in Berlin but his father, Ernst, moved the family to England in 1933 to skip the rise of Nazism. Grandson of Sigmund Freud, elder brother of Clement Freud (who told the world's funniest joke), he seems to have chosen to paint without much fuss or fanfare - it's what he was meant to do. He was one of a group of artists in Britain at the time, the "School of London", which along with Francis Bacon and a few others concentrated on figurative painting. He had a pretty crazy personal life (many lovers, at least 14 kids) - but there's plenty on that elsewhere.
Freud's subjects, who needed to make a very large and uncertain commitment of their time, were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really." However the titles were mostly anonymous, and the identity of the sitter not always disclosed; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had a portrait of one of Freud's daughters as a baby for several years before he mentioned who the model was.
In the 1970s Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, about which art historian Lawrence Gowing observed "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt." For me, the ones of his mum are the most emotive of all. She was in a deep depression at the time as Ernst had died, and you can instantly feel that mood in the room, almost disengaged (he couldn't paint her before because she was too animated and interested in him) as she stares into space.
A prodigious worker, Freud spent a huge amount of time on his paintings, and always needed to have the subject in the room. He'd work in five-hour sessions, and a single painting easily take over two thousand hours to complete. He'd start by drawing in charcoal, then paint a small area of the canvas, and gradually work outward from there. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened. A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished, as a reminder that the work was in progress. The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.
It's crazy - the closer you get, the more abstract the paint becomes. I can't imagine how he could stare intently at someone's mouth, say, then go to the canvas and carve a green slash into a thick layer of paint on it, and yet, from a metre away, it looks exactly perfectly right in tone and texture and everything. Astonishing. And a lot of people talk about the distance between artist and subject, or the odd perspective (he often painted from above) and the inherent anger, but to be honest I didn't necessarily get that. To me it almost makes things more intimate, like he's there, but not necessarily intruding, a bit like Dad coming in and waking you up for school or something. There's a familiarity to it and passion, but I'm not sure anger is the word I'd use.
I also really like the way he does people's foreheads. Quotes below - and they're relevant for all types of artist, writers, singers, painters, the works.
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"There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so."
"I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them."
"The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with."
"A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure."
"Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much."
"Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin."
"Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh."
"The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn."
"I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do."
"A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art."
"The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really."
"The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real."
"I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
"What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."
(To Martin Gayford about his portrait) “The picture of you has always been linked in my head with the one of the back end of the skewbald mare."
"I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen. Perhaps if painters did know how it was going to turn out they wouldn't bother actually to do it."
"The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught."
"I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness."
"The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body."
"I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out."
"A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure."
(On Models) "And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model."
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5RpAxwPiGM&w=700] Overture from "Die Fledermaus" by Johann Strauss. Really kicks in after about 6.00, but you need the first bit (there's a beautiful piano arrangement of it here).
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/38372163" iframe="true" /]
Upon a time the amiable Bill Hawkins, Married a fair wife, demure and of chaste repute, Keeping closely from her, however, Any knowledge of the manner of man he had been.
Upon the nuptial night, Awakening and finding himself couched with a woman, As had happened on divers occasions, He arose and dressed and departed, Leaving at the couch's side four goodly coins. But in the street, Remembering the occasion and his present estate of marriage, He returned with a haste of no--dignity, Filled with emotions of an entirely disturbing nature, Fear that his wife should discover his absence, And place evil construction upon it, being uppermost.
Entering stealthily, then, with the toes of the leopard, With intention of quickly disrobing, And rejoining the forsaken bride, He perceived her sitting erect on the couch, Biting shrewdly, with a distressing air of experience, At one of the coins.
Beautiful campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - series showing musical instruments from the inside to nail the feel of the music they play. Nice bit of CGI and that. Hot.
Copywriter: Mona Sibai Agency: Scholz & Friends (Berlin) Client: Berliner Philharmoniker Photographer: Mierswa Kluska (via)
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BONUS BONUS BONUS! Here, have a pianogasm on the house, courtesy of Lang Lang's encore following his first performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2009:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_BlYlBi40&w=600]
No words.