November 2010
Preferences → Email notifications
✔ New messages
Per l’indimenticabile Assunta Patanè, per Capannelle, Er Pantera, Brancaleone e Teofilatto. Per Giuseppe Tritoni, per il conte Mascetti, per Sassaroli, Necchi, Perozzi e Melandri; per Giovanni Vivaldi, per zio Gugo, per Gasperino il carbonaio, per Onofrio del Grillo, per Achille Mengaroni, per Fausto Talponi, per Alberto Menichetti.
Per Tortorella e Infortunio, per i Corallo e Cesare Marchetti, per Bertoldo, Bertoldino e fra Cipolla, per Guzman de Alfarache e il marchese de Aragona, per Pautasso e per tutti quelli che adesso non ricordo.
Grazie, Mario.
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
—[Epigraph to Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, quoted from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being]
Labirinto Fellini
Roma, MACRO Testaccio, 30 ottobre 2010 - 30 gennaio 2011
Labirinto Fellini, che ha l’ambizioso obiettivo di percorrere, nell’enorme patrimonio artistico che Fellini ci ha lasciato, strade nuove e inedite, si compone di due parti che si integrano vicendevolmente.
La prima curata da Sam Stourdzé, dal titolo “La Grande Parata” che, attraverso una selezione di fotografie, spezzoni, disegni, ci restituirà la grande ricchezza e modernità dell’opera di Fellini; l’altra, curata da Ferretti e Loschiavo, sarà una sorta di installazione magica, in grado di portare lo spettatore dentro ai set del grande regista riminese, attraverso una straordinaria esperienza
evocativa.
Uno spazio animato dai luoghi inventati da Fellini, simboli tratti dai suoi film, che rimandano immediatamente al sogno, alle immagini oniriche, ai colori e alle emozioni dei film del Maestro. Scenografie, proiezioni, materiali inediti che immergeranno lo spettatore in un vero e proprio labirinto animato, capace di instillare nei più giovani il desiderio di conoscere Fellini, un artista così importante e moderno, la cui voce è parte fondamentale della nostra cultura.
Location di questo percorso labirintico intorno ad una figura che ha segnato in maniera fondamentale il Novecento e il nostro modo di guardare, sarà La Pelanda del MACRO Testaccio, cuore pulsante della mostra-evento che è di per sé un luogo cinematografico, già utilizzato da Fellini, nel 1969, per il suo “Block-notes di un regista”.
Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats,
William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett
Writers Mural in Barter Books
Johnny Cash - The Mercy Seat (American III: Solitary Man, 2000)
Every cover song the Man in Black did was better than the original and this one with Hurt is his greatest. That ravaged, wise, bleak, Old Testament prophet’s delivery convinces you that Cash really is up there on death row, strapped to his chair, uttering his last words.
Pink Floyd - Summer of 68 (Atom Heart Mother, 1970)
Keyboard player Rick Wright here contributed by far the best song to Floyd’s most underrated album. Lovely, swirly brass; lashings of trippy English pastoral; ace key and tempo changes. Best moment: “Goodbye to you. Charlotte Pringle’s due”, natch.
Ah, the majesty of hot-air-balloon travel. The freedom! The sights! The complete inability to steer! It’s the perfect vehicle for those wanting to travel without the hassle of actually picking a destination. You just get in and see where the wind takes you. While it’s quite possibly the most unpractical way to get anywhere (actually, see our last slide before coming to your own conclusion on that one), it was the forerunner to modern flight. The invention of ballooning is credited to the French Montgolfier brothers, who climbed aboard the first untethered manned balloon in 1783 (witnessed by Louis XVI and Benjamin Franklin). The brothers supposedly took inspiration from watching one of their wives’ skirts billowing in the kitchen from the heat of a charcoal burner being used to dry laundry, making this the only invention in history inspired by laundry.
Tom Waits to publish book of poetry →
guardian.co.uk
Singer teams up with photographer Michael O’Brien on Hard Ground, a collection of poems and images about homelessness.
“In this big game that we play, life, it’s not what you hope for, it’s not what you deserve, it’s what you take.”
—[Frank T.J. Mackey, Magnolia]
Bookàbar, Rome, Italy
Just the thought of big, sexy art books makes us consider diverting our travel dollars to collecting coffee table beauties. Alright, it’s rash talk; but even hardened travellers might agree when they ogle the arty tomes in Bookàbar – the perfect setting. With a curvy ceiling and long, smooth shelves, the shop’s coolly contemporary, snow-white interior hordes books, catalogues, CDs, DVDs and merchandise. It looks like a space station staffed by extremely well-read astronauts. The neighbours certainly don’t lower the tone, as it’s part of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni exhibition centre. Bookàbar’s adjoining cafe serves dishes inspired by the centre’s exhibitions.
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, which normally has a few exhibitions covering various art forms, is near the junction of Via Nazionale and Via Milano.
Next year marks the 30th anniversary of synthpop’s annus mirabilis, which saw the release of OMD’s Architecture & Morality, Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell, Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Japan’s Tin Drum, the Human League’s Dare and Heaven 17’s Penthouse and Pavement. Hailing from different parts of the country, the bands constituted less a scene than a shared sensibility: synthesisers before guitars, outlandish ideas before rock’n’roll cliches. The future of pop glittered with possibility.
2. Deliciate
Verb intr. – “To take one’s pleasure, enjoy oneself, revel, luxuriate” – Often I feel the word “enjoy” just isn’t enough to describe an experience, and “revel” tends to conjure up images of people dancing and spinning around in circles – at least in my head. “Deliciate” would be a welcome addition to the modern English vocabulary, as in “After dinner, we deliciated in chocolate cream pie.”
12. Perissology
Noun – “Use of more words than are necessary; redundancy or superfluity of expression” – A useful word for editors: “Thanks for your 4,000-word submission. Unfortunately there is too much perissology in this piece for us to publish it.”
Obsolete English words that should make a comeback
The probability of finding a seat on the subway is inversely proportional to the number of people on the platform.
Even worse, the utter absence of people is 100 percent proportional to just having missed the train.
Abstract City Blog: Unpopular Science
Listen
David Sylvian - I Surrender
Man Ray was one of the greatest Surrealist painters and photographers of the 20th century. From 1934 to 1942, he produced a body of work for Harper’s Bazaar, photographing personalities in the society, entertainment, and literary worlds as well as the fashions of Chanel, Schiaparelli, Molyneux, featured with his own artwork and those of his friends Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti. Man Ray had an immediate impact on fashion photography. His work made use of many of the innovative and unorthodox techniques he experimented with.
”Man Ray - The Bazaar Years” is a tour of an exhibit of Man Ray’s commercial work, mainly as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. It discusses the relation between his commercial work and his artistic photography.
“Of course, people who don’t like Bruce Springsteen would probably disagree, and say that this is just evidence that the guy writes the same song over and over again. But, you know, that’s only proof that they have a shriveled lump of coal where their heart should be.”
—[Dave Bry | The Awl]
Eerie visions from a life cut short →
telegraph.co.uk
In January 1981, a young American photographer called Francesca Woodman committed suicide by jumping off a building in lower Manhattan. Within five years of her death, Woodman was hailed as something virtually unheard of within the male-dominated world of photography: a female prodigy who had left behind an improbably mature body of work, consisting of more than 800 pictures.
Since then, her beguiling black-and-white photographs, frequently featuring her naked body, have been steadily assimilated into the canon of Western photography. Sometimes described as the last great Modernist photographer, working within a tradition begun by important Surrealists such as Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun, she is now universally recognised as a unique talent.
“Aire and Angels” by John Donne
In amorous enthusiasm, Donne takes literally the notion that his beloved is an “angel”. She is as pure as a heavenly being, but has had to take bodily form, “For, nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere.” When an angel appears it takes “face, and wings / Of aire”.
”The Angel” by William Blake
The poet dreams of hiding his “heart’s delight” from his guardian angel, who flees from him. The poet resentfully arms himself against his angel’s kindness.
“Soon my Angel came again: / I was arm’d, he came in vain; / For the time of youth was fled, / And grey hairs were on my head.”
“But can you save me?
Come on and save me
If you could save me
From the ranks of the freaks
Who suspect they could never love anyone.” —[Aimee Mann - Save Me]
Come on and save me
If you could save me
From the ranks of the freaks
Who suspect they could never love anyone.” —[Aimee Mann - Save Me]
King Crimson
Sleepless
King Crimson - Sleepless
I Remember Nothing →
salon.com
Nora Ephron on life, death, hot dogs.
The Face, 1984
- Elissa Van Poznack: Have you now got what you were hoping for all those years in your room?
- Morrissey: Not completely, but Oscar Wilde had a few words to say, of which you should take careful note: "When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers."
Martin Scorsese and his long-term editor Thelma Schoonmaker turned up at Bafta in London to introduce the film that, in effect, destroyed the career of Schoonmaker’s late husband, the director Michael Powell. That film was Peeping Tom – now in its 50th anniversary year – about a young photographer and film-maker who kills the women he sees through his lens. Scorsese described how he and his pals (Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg) had struggled to see even a black-and-white version of the film in New York in the 1960s, so complete had its disappearance been after a slew of appalling reviews in the British press. “No one was sure it existed… it was like a rumour,” he said on Friday, describing Powell’s film as “about the madness of making movies and the danger of an artistic obsession”. He added: “In our society today, in the era of YouTube and surveillance, it is even more relevant. The morbid urge to gaze needs to be thought about today.”
Seeing the film again – horrifying as it is – the surprise was how funny passages of it are, and with what confidence Powell plays with tone, giving Moira Shearer an ebullient dance number before dispatching her in grotesque fashion.
A masterpiece of British film-making.
“The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve.”
—[Jean Rhys, The Left Bank and Other Stories]
Robert Schumann: Love, music and madness
Two hundred years after Schumann was born, and following on from a festival at Kings Place in London, actors Juliet Stevenson and Sebastian Koch, cellist Natalie Clein and pianists Lucy Parham and Alan Rusbridger discuss the composer’s music, his passionate relationships with his wife Clara and fellow composer Brahms, and his painful descent into mental illness.
[Alongside excerpts from Clara’s letters, hear specially recorded excerpts from Aufschwung (Fantasiestücke Op 12), the Fantasiestücke No 1 for cello and piano Op 73, and the slow movement from the Piano Quartet Op 47.]
Waking Life (2001)
- Man on the Train: Hey, are you a dreamer?
- Wiley: Yeah.
- Man on the Train: I haven't seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It's not dead, it's just that it's been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day.
