Ninja June 30th, 2008
This viddy is about a year old, but it brings a smile to my face. An eccentric, Chinese farmer with no formal robotic education, Mr. Woo, creates robots from other people’s discarded parts.
Related postsPenguin June 30th, 2008
Rating: 4/4 stars
When We Left Earth documents 50 years of NASA’s manned missions. It starts with Mercury and ends with the International Space Station.
It’s an amazing story that we take for granted. The images that they returned, specifically of Earth Rise are tremendous and life changing. The human will and ingenuity to achieve such an enormously difficult task is awe inspiring.
What makes the series so good is that even though we know the ending, they still manage to weave a tail full of tension and suspense. This is achieved through masterful narration by Gary Sinise, a terrific soundtrack, and fantastic editing of archival footage with new interviews with the astronauts.
The images are beautiful in HD and gave me that sense of wonder of space all over again.
Watch it.
-Penguin
Related postsPenguin June 29th, 2008
Dali is at the MoMA.
The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí’s films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera.
[...]
Dalí grasped that film’s capacities — for depicting irrationality in action; for dissolving, continually mutating images; and for an intensely real unreality — were all ready-made for his sensibility and his desire to reach a mass audience.
[...]
“Destino,” the sprightly animated short of love and loss that Dalí worked on energetically for Walt Disney in 1946 [runs continuously].- NYTimes
The show runs through Sept 15 at the MoMA.
-Penguin
Related postsPenguin June 28th, 2008
Really well edited and kind of funny battle between Val Kilmer and George Clooney. They use the other Batmans for good measure.
-Penguin
Related postsPenguin June 27th, 2008
Paul McCarthy’s “Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement: Three Installations, Two Films” at the Whitney:
The show focuses on a core strand of McCarthy’s work: the use of architecture to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space.
the show of about 22 works dating from 1966 to the present includes three major sculptures, two early short films and assorted drawings, photographs and videos.
Two basic motifs connect the various pieces: the room and rotational movement, or spinning.
[...]
“Spinning Camera, Walking, Mike Cram Walking” that Mr. McCarthy made by rotating a camera on a tripod in a mostly empty room. The view goes round and round, alternating bright windows and dark walls and occasionally giving a glimpse of a man walking in circles in the room.“Mad House”… consists of a large steel-framed wooden box mounted on a powerful motor. A door in the box reveals a room with a padded seat inside. (There are also three square windows.) When turned on, the room rotates at high speed while inside the chair rotates too, though not necessarily in the same direction or at the same velocity.
[In] “Couple”,… Mr. McCarthy set the focus on his camera at two feet and then roamed around a room with it, creating a blurry, aimless tour. Two naked people, a man and a woman, appear intermittently.
In “Spinning Room,”… [f]our video cameras rotate on a gleaming high-tech machine within a square, walk-in enclosure made of rear-projection screens. Images recorded by the cameras pass through computers and then to projectors stationed outside the enclosure. The projectors direct streaming video pictures of people inside onto the screens.
- NYTimes
The show runs through Oct 12 at the Whitney.
In July, the Whitney will open “Paul McCarthy: Film List”:
McCarthy began making films as a student in the 1960s, and his current exhibition on the Whitney’s third floor includes two rare 16mm films screening for the first time in decades. In conjunction with his exhibition, McCarthy has curated a film program that brings together works by, among others, Stan VanDerBeek, Francis Picabia, Walt Disney, Kurt Kren, Yves Klein, and Bruce Conner.
This portion runs from July 11 through Sept 28.
-Penguin
Related postsNinja June 27th, 2008
I was trying to make a muxtape with songs that had the word, “bang” in their titles. So Radiohead’s Bangers and Mash, Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang, and The Breeders‘ Bang On are there.
Unfortunately, muxtape kept getting stuck on my St. Vincent’s Bang Bang live. Bah, so here’s a viddy of the song instead:
I didn’t get far, but if you’d like to hear what I was able to upload, click here.
TGIF,
Ninja
Penguin June 27th, 2008
There’s a new show opening today at the Guggenheim. Louise Bourgeois.
Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures, which range in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and across a diverse array of mediums including wood, bronze, latex, marble, and fabric. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, she has developed a richly symbolic visual idiom that encompasses totemic forms, ambiguously gendered anatomical fragments, and towering spiders, as well as the assemblages of found objects that are encased in her environmental-scale installations.
For her art is not a job; it is a life. It is what you do when you get up in the morning, and what you continue to do all day, through headaches and phone calls, breakups and breakdowns, silences and celebrations. It is what you keep doing after dark, and when you can’t sleep at night.
[...]
She has said that she works in response to emotions: fury at the past and fear of the present among them.
[...]
Your daily life is propelled by fear? Draw fear. You can. Impossible to sleep at night? Make night your studio, the cloth you embroider with needs and dreams. The past is an obsession you can neither embrace nor release? Make an image of obsession, any image will do.- NYTimes
This is pretty much how I approach the stories that I write. Sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. But I deal with my internal struggles and issues through my characters. I put them in the same situations, force them to deal with the harsh realities that I face. In a way, when they overcome it, I overcome it too. Of course, there are issues that are huge and require several stories to overcome, but it is extremely cathartic for me.
Luckily or unluckily, I don’t have the sort of issues that Bourgeois struggles with.
The show runs through Sept 28 at the Guggenheim Museum.
-Penguin
Related postsNinja June 27th, 2008
Related postsOur doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
– Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Act I, Scene IV
Limited edition lithograph prints. Signed + numbered.
