#very figures in a landscape (1970) coded

[greml1nb0i]

Hazbin Hotel Rewrite [WIP- this is copy and pasted from my docs; this is old but i wanted to share it anyway]

Rewrite the Characters:

Original +opinions (ooo~ Spicy) :

Charlie - Princess of Hell, Daughter of Lucifer. Sheltered and Cheery.

  I hate that she’s just Disney Princess coded. They could have used the whole sheltered route well but TBF we don't see that either.  We see a weird rendition of that where everyone forgives her for her terrible actions but yet other characters like Husk and Angel Dust are somehow held to a higher sense of accountability for their actions?!

  I also don’t believe whoever raised Charlie could keep her away from the ever growing and changing landscape of Hell. Like if you're going to be a Princess of anything its really important for the next heir to be well acquainted with their kingdom's landscape and history. At the very least talk to the locals and commonwealth. 

 Her design is...ok. It didn't change much from the pilot but tbh i liked her Pilot design, I feel like it makes sense for her to wear hints of red and white, but i wish they added more than just red, i feel like black or gold would have been better or even purple for Biblical accuracy of Pride.

Vaggie - Girlfriend to Charlie and protector of the Hotel, ex-Exorcist. 

 Why did they change the lore? Also why does it feel like the VA hated being there or was just given 0 directions. She sounds dull and plain except for when she’s sounding like she’s angry, which is 99.98% Of Vaggie’s emotions.

  That, an amnesia apparently?! How does vaggie not remember the very weapon that cut out her FUCKING EYE that still makes no sense, like how tf her and Lucifer and even Husk have wings, if wings are going to be used for ANY character why make them seem important to Vaggie when Husk literally has wings, and Lucifer the supposed “fallen Angel” STILL HAS HIS?! Like why? How does this make sense? 

Angel - FemBoy, Sex worker. Deals in Self destruction, self loathing and deep depression while also being flirty and promiscuous. Was in a Mafia family. 1940s timeline. 

 Trauma porn character and just a bunch of gay men stereotypes. As a survivor, his story doesn't hit the way its meant to. There's a good and bad way to show SA and Abuse and while they did it “eh” (im saying this loosely) at first, they were completely unrealistic and downright infantilizing at the end.

  There's no way someone who just went through a beating, an having to almost get drugged and dragged out of bar, is going to forgive the same person who started the stupor in the first place- ESPECIALLY ON THE SAME NIGHT!!!!!

I FUCKING CANT WITH THESE WRITERS THINKING MENTAL HEALTH CAN BE SOLVED IN A 20 MIN EPSIODE, IS THIS A KIDS SHOW ABOUT FRIENDSHIP OR AN ADULT SHOW ABOUT CARTOON DEMONS IN HELL. 

And don’t get me started on that terrible musical number, it’s just soft core rape in a cheery pop tune i fucking hate it!! It doesn't help that Raph, an SA fetishist STORYBOARDED THE DAMN SCENE

WHAT THE FUCK MEDRANO!?

Husk - Angry grump, bar keeper. Contracted to Alastor. Gambler. From the 1970 or 60. 

 The design is a character designer's worst nightmares come to life on the screen. Every furry from the early 2000s clutching their pearls in cringe. It screams “omg rawr xD uwu” era and i think we as a society are way past that, i figured a 30 something year old woman would be too.

[apparently it was her sisters OC that was put into the show, viv why?!]

Alastor - radio show host from the 30s. Cannibal. Half Creole. “Wendigo design”. Cocky and always smile but is "quite dangerous when provoked." [yea ok pal]

  An OC from middle school that should have stayed in middle school. There is a reason so many OCs from artists' early childhood don't make it into their new and growing art style. Most of the time if you keep obsessing over the same OCs you stunt yourself on growing in your art. Tumblr Sexy Man is that exact thing. I like him in concept but, if he was drawn better and actually looked like a man from the 1900s and in his 40s,(or even a half creole man; that's supposedly a Wendigo) I'd have less to complain about. His concept is good and interesting, but its not the first or the last and Alastor def isn't the first. Also give that man a haircut please!

Nifty - Japanese-American. From the 50s Obsessive and a neat freak. Camera shy but psychotic.

  I feel like this is just a racist stereotype waiting to be exposed. The “young psychotic Japanese  girl” trope is so fucking old and repetitive that i cant vibe with a character like Nifty when i know her only purpose is to be used as comedy bait. It doesn't help that Viv didn't give Nifty almost any merch! Like WOW really showing favoritism over the merch sales and that is disgusting.

Sir Pentious - British inventor. Kinda an idiot but is a brilliant machinist.

  We were robbed of a decent villain. I hate that he became part of the cast and became the first redeemed as if Angel wasn't there longer and started showing signs of Redemption sooner, like we got more Redemption scenes of Angel but like NONE of Pentious and we are supposed to believe this weird snake dude is redeemed just cuz he kissed a girl and got himself killed for nothing???? VIVZIE YOUR ASS WRITING IS ASS!!

Also he's a stolen Character...seems to be a trend for Viv..

Lucifer - King of Hell, Father of Charlie, Sin of Pride. Depressed and non-serious, deep self loathing. Complex of some sort. Short King.

 He’s fine..i guess, i mean its freaking Jeremy Jordan VA-ing him…he kind fixes whatever is wrong with Lucifer character wise. [this is for very obvious reasons a joke, while re-reading this i realized some people might not know i'm being sarcastic,oopsies] He’s a terrible character for numerous reasons. He is kinda homophobic if you really think about that “i like girls too” line and then proceeds to call her “MAGGIE”;  Lucifer feels like he is just there to satisfy Viv’s  disney esque “daddy issues” type kink she has for “tragic characters and shitty dads” type characters.

 Designs wise he trash. He looks like jeff the killer but blonde and drawn by your aunt who refused to go to art school

Cherri Bomb - Angels Friend. Arsonist. From the 60s(?). Punk rock.

 Her design is literally traced and just the Addict design…the fans are just stupid. Also i dont like the fact that Viv EXPECTED viewers of her show, to have done homework on who the fuck Cherri is, cuz if you're a new watcher, and didn't read the fucking Vivziepop Bible, you wont know who tf she if or why you should even care about her.

 Why is Angel hanging out with someone like this in the first place, You’d think because Angel is older and from a different time period he wouldn't vibe with Cherri?? But apparently Viv thinks a fem gay man from the 30s would be the best homie to a 20 yr old punk rock Aussie from the 60s, a whole 3 decades of time difference!! Tell us why and how they know each other!! How can these fundamentally very different people even vibe together!! Is it just cus "wow shared trauma of abusive lovers" cuz wow Viv.

(her entire design is also stolen soooooo~)

Mimzy - who?

This one also feels really fucking racist. Idk what it is with Viv but the jewish stereotypes of Mimzie are absolutely atrocious. 

Fix:

Charlie - [TBD]

Vaggie - [TBD]

Angel - [TBD]

Husk - [TBD]

Alastor - [TBD]

Nifty - [TBD]

Sir Pentious - [TDB]

Lucifer - 

 Was an Angel with dreams, and took part in the Creation of All Things.

   However Lucifer was too ambitious and went off course with the designs of Earth’s creatures, causing the other Angels to feel uncomfortable by him and his new creations. 

While the Angels were tolerating him, he was allowed to visit the First Human, but in doing so felt that their lack of knowledge was unfair and so in hopes of helping the other Angels see things his way, he gave the Apple of Knowledge to Adam and Lilith. 

 This didn't go as planned though, Where Lilith became kinder and more empathetic, Adam however became more uptight, and acted as if he was better than Lilith.

 Lucifer defended Lilith against Adam thus causing the Angels attention to be drawn. Seeing what Lucifer had done; Ultimately bringing evil (free will) into the world, They (strangely) cast Lucifer AND Lilith, as well as the creatures Lucifer had created to the dark void;

 The Angels now would call it, Hell. Lucifer, home. 

Lucifer would first land in Hell confused and depressed, Along with Lilith they both begin to freak out as they look into the dark, empty landscape in front of them. Feelings of bitterness begin to reside within Lucifer, that settled into a resilient sense of ignorant Pride. 

Lucifer’s Creations - 

 The demons and most of the Hellborns. Lucifer is treated as the Divine Judge of Hell, His punishment is having to witness all the evil that had been created due to him and He in turn must turn what could never be, into another one of his creations. Though he is given it a process. He has given up on making anymore Hellborns due to them fixing that themselves. Demons that are specifically Dead Humans (The Sinners).

Sins - 

 All of the Sins were once creatures created by Lucifer that began to Form into The 7 Deadly Sins. However the rest of these creatures evolved into lower ranks and a hierarchy was formed. With the Sins and Lucifer being at the top.

 The 7 are special creatures that Lucifer held a special fondness to in particular. More so than some of the other Creations. Each of these Sins were given a mission after the fall and were subsequently turned into the Sins by the Angels, who felt they deserved the same punishment, if not worse, as Lucifer. Forcing each of the Sins to work as their prince/princess of their specific ring unless they want their entire existence to cease. They rather that not happen.

The angels cursed all the sins, and Lucifer himself. that if they ever stop their torment they will cease to exist. Angels thought this was humane but didn't realize or rather didn't care that much at the time how barbaric it actually is. 

Dubbed the Curse of the Angels or Angels Kiss 

(play on Kiss of Death where whomever Death kissed is marked for death, 

here the Sins were “kissed” by the Angels and a “kiss” was once used to symbolize a curse or bad omen onto another)

their "death" however is more than they evaporate into nothing

its their very minds and bodies slowly begin to deteriorate painfully to the point of being empty husks. No expression, No emotions, No sense of self. Nothing. Their consciousness and personality essentially gets erased entirely.

Premise IDEAS for Rewrite: 

1] 

Sinners go through character arc delving into their issues that lead to each one's Redemption

Heaven gets upset over the rise of redemption in Sinner 

 Earthly Denizens of Heaven/ “winners”  attack the Hotel

The Sinners and the Staff defend the Hotel

Heaven’s attackers are turned fallen. 

{END}

so i started this almost a year ago, it was right when i really started to dislike Viv and Helluva Flop Boss. If you wanna give a suggestion on what you think could make this better go for it. It's a WIP- so any advice is welcome and appreciated!!

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

Super Heroes ARE NOT INHERENTLY a Conservative power fantasy

Master Post

I don’t really agree superheroes are inherently a Conservative power fantasy nor that they simplistically preach law and order and justice are necessary for a happy ending.

After all Superman was fighting corrupt politicians in his very first appearance. The X-Men are institutionally persecuted often by government forces. Stan Lee did an entire story arc in refutation to Law and Order politics in the early 1970s.

Yeah, they hit people to save the day but like...I honestly think that’s far more of a human power fantasy than something of any specific ideology. There have been examples of mythic and folklore figures doing that since forever. The broad appeal of those types of characters throughout history and across political ideologies speaks to how it’s not inherently a political power fantasy of one type or another.

I know someone who is incredibly Liberal and has himself and people he’s known been persecuted by the police and he’s outspoken against such institutional persecution. He loves Daredevil and more poignantly the Punisher, a character outright adored by the police themselves but who is near universally framed (even within his own stories) as not a good person and someone you shouldn’t aspire to be like. This was even the case in his debut in Daredevil season 2 where it was made explicit that he is self-destructive.

Obviously my friend would be disgusted by the Punisher in real life, as would we all (I’d hope). But the fantasy is still unto itself appealing despite it conflicting with his ideologies. Hence super heroes are not a power fantasy rooted in a specific political ideology. Now sure that is one anecdotal piece of evidence. But the Punisher is clearly very, very popular and the degree to which he is popular (especially in the 1990s) wouldn’t really add up if his fanbase were predominantly Conservatively leaning people with the occasional Liberal exception.

He’s very obviously a character people of either leaning or in-between enjoy and was after all created by an outspoken young Liberal in Gerry Conway. Batman too is often perceived as very conservative. But he is the most popular superhero ever so he obviously appeals across political ideologies. After all, the two most defining Batman writers (after Bill Finger) were the incredibly Conservative Frank Miller and the incredibly Liberal Denny O’Neil.

I also don’t think super heroes are analogous to stand your ground myths. For starters, super heroes are not enshrined by the law. The closest comparison you could draw is if you encountered a clear cut crime in progress and intervened non-lethally somehow. E.g. that scene in Spider-Man 2 where Peter Parker walks away from a mugging in progress, but for the purposes of what I’m saying actually tried to intervene.

I once received counterpoints to the above view that went something like this:

You are extrapolating specifically European myth created by white males and applying it to all humans. African myths are different. Native American myths are different. Asian myths are different. You’re making my point that comics are a dominant conservative culture - specifically white male - fantasy, not refuting it.

Actually I wasn’t. There examples of such figures in Eastern myths too such as Sun Wukong. Son Goku is a 1980s manga character based first and foremost upon him (and Jackie Chan) and is a veritable institution in Japan. There is a vast crossover between fans of him and fans of other superhero characters despite him not being directly based upon any of them, having distinctly Eastern cultural influences and also not being a crime fighter in the traditional sense.

Goku in truth is probably more comparable to figures like Theseus in spite of not being based or influenced by him. African myths and European myths may be different but most cultures involve figures who have beyond human abilities and among those figures those who engage in actions that, within the values of those cultures, are regarded as good. All human beings are innately attracted to stories that in one shape or form present them as physically more powerful than they are, a by-product of more innate survival instincts. On our absolute most deepest levels we are animals and because of this the fantasy of being stronger, faster, less vulnerable to injury or malnutrition and/or having the ability to defend our homes/territories/family units (which in superhero comics is usually extended to the general population of a native city) is incredibly potent and attractive.

The counter pointer continued:

“It’s not a female fantasy. Women tell very different myths, most of them lost because men wrote down the stories. The romance genre is dominated by female writers because those are the stories women are drawn to tell.”

Given the vast plethora of female fans of the genre from 1938-now I really do not see how we can honestly say this is a genre that is particular to the power fantasy of one gender or another. Wonder Woman was after all a distinctly female power fantasy created with a lot of input from two women very much ahead of their time.

But going into another culture Sailor Moon (and her predecessor Sailor V, who was more of a traditional crime fighter) was arguably even more of a female power fantasy. She was the singular vision of a female mangaka who was aiming at a young female audience and was very specifically creating a female power fantasy. In both cases they are people with secret identities who engage in physical violence to varying degrees against very clearly coded evil individuals who pose direct threats to innocent lives.

Now about the gun debate? Well, most superheroes use guns?

But for the sake of argument let’s extent ‘guns’ to mean stuff like:

Ray guns

Web-shooters

Firing concussive energy blasts, like Cyclops’ optic blasts

Any kind of projectile

Well, even if you define guns like that, the majority of superheroes’ weapons are non-lethal whereas guns are designed specifically to kill. Yeah you can wound or incapacitate but gun wounds can still be lethal or crippling. Plus you could in theory kill someone with a net but that wasn’t what it was designed to do.

Things get iffy if we count biological weaponry, like in Cyclops’ case. Whilst his super power is literally having a powerful gun for his eyes, it’s also part of who he is and he’s got no choice in that. This changes the context drastically from someone who owns a gun and seeks to use it.

In Cyclops’ case he’s forced to own that weapon and it’s an immense burden upon him . It curtails his ability to have physical and emotional intimacy with others the way anyone else would. I anything I’s more analogous to a disability. So it isn’t like this is a wonderful fantasy about how cool it’d be to own a big gun without the burden of choosing to own it in the first place

That doesn’t even make sense considering the real issue regarding American gun laws ultimately isn’t about people merely owning  guns but how they use  them upon  owning them. Cyclops still has to choose how to use his biological ‘big gun’ even if he didn’t get a choice in owning it one way or the other. It’s also a poor analogy considering Cyclops’ ‘Big Gun’ doesn’t even work properly due to a disability he has.

In fact, it’s posited superheroes are needed, especially vigilante heroes like Spider-Man who take law enforcement into their own hands despite being outside the law enforcement establishment, because the Marvel U is a dangerous, violent place. This is very similar to arguments used by conservative gun advocates in the US: we need guns to protect ourselves because our institutions can’t. Moving on let’s talk about the severity of crime. Is it not a Conservative power fantasy that the world of Marvel and DC comics is a dangerous and violent place? And therefore vigilantes who take the law into their own hands are needed?

That’s kind of similar to what Conservative gun advocates argue isn’t it? Guns are needed to protect one’s self.

Well for starters, the nature of the severity of crime is questionable in most Marvel or DC comics sans like Batman. It is made clear that superheroes absolutely do good but at the same time it wasn’t presented as though there was such a massive crime problem that say Marvel New York would’ve fallen apart without them.

That is exempting of course super villains.

Super villains however are cut from the same fantasy cloth as the heroes so how much to they really count towards representing real life concerns over crime anyway? They were after all literally created as a means to challenge the heroes. Action Comics #1 for example didn’t have any super villains.

Similarly modern interpretations of Batman do not seek to present the world or urban landscapes in general as inherently so riddled with dangerous crime that it necessitates Batman. They make it clear that Gotham is this extreme exception as opposed to the rule. Greg Rucka once spoke about this in an old documentary (for I think the History channel).The idea is that Gotham is exceptionally bad thus they need Batman.

In most versions of Superman post-1987 Lex Luthor has such a stranglehold on Metropolis that it needs Superman. And in Golden Age versions of Superman he was presented as just tackling general urban crime that existed amidst the Great Depression, most of which stemmed from organized crime or corrupt political figures. But it wasn’t as though Metropolis was on the brink if not for Superman’s intervention.

Really the levels of crime and such that exist in superhero stories exist purely to justify a superhero being a crime fighter in the first place; it’s a practicality issue not an ideological one. I think this is different to say police TV shows or films that present characters who allegedly exist in the real world, who represent real world police officers who do a real world job that involves them interacting with allegedly real world threat levels. In a superhero story, of course t here is more crime that actually exists in the real world but I don’t think anyone making the stories ever honestly thought otherwise or paid much thought to it one way or the other. It was just a means to an end of challenging the protagonists.

Okay, but how about the fact that heroes rarely (if ever) calling for gun control or gun bans? Surely that is a Conservative.

Well no not really. Again, it’s not really an ideologically driven factor in super hero stories. It’s more akin to how superhero comic books just do not touch for example the issue of abortion or how they rarely make it truly explicit what political leanings a character has one way or the other.*

John Byrne when discussing his iconic Superman run stated he felt the character was a card carrying Republican, but to the best of my knowledge no Superman comic before or since has ever come out and said that. No Punisher story to my knowledge has ever stated Punisher is a Conservative in spite of the fact that he obviously is. No Spider-Man story has stated Spider-Man is a Liberal/left leaning moderate. And yet he has been depicted that way in most stories and it’d just be incredibly likely given his age, where he lives and his family background. I don’t even know if any Captain America story has stated clearly and without question that Cap would obviously vote for the Democrats 100% of the time out of the two major parties, even though he was explicitly Liberal  from the very first piece of artwork depicting him. In ne of Bucky’s early adventures as Captain America though he simultaneously protected Democrat and Republican politicians.

So whilst superhero comics do not involve characters calling for the abolition of guns 99% of the time, that’s less because they are or are not a Conservative power fantasy and more because the companies do not want to touch what they at least perceive as an incredibly volatile issue.

If the gun debate in America (which to me shouldn’t even be a debate, just get rid of them) ever moves to a place where there is virtually nobody opposing the abolition of guns most superheroes would absolutely be depicted in support of that.

To strip back everything I’m saying, super heroes are intended more on, and consumed more on, a symbolic level  than something in line with a particular ideology.

They are vigilantes who fight crime. But it’s understood that the crime is in the story simply because it is universally understood as ‘a bad thing’ that can cause harm and damage. The superhero is you. You being a vigilante symbolises how you have to on an individual level deal with a problem, the ‘bad thing’.

And the super powers are the catharsis of how much easier it would be to deal with the ‘bad thing’ if you were more than what you are.

I don’t agree with 100% of this, but this video (which is interesting unto itself) touches upon this idea around the 15:30 mark.

It’s not as though a Liberal enjoys the genre for the escapism or the perverse indulgence in politics they wouldn’t agree with whilst a Conservative just loves it’s reaffirmation of their beliefs.

They love it for the same reasons and those are usually rooted in the human elements of the characters alongside the power fantasy. Which is why I maintain there is an innate human appeal to the genre regardless of what perspective you come at it from.

I mean Jesus, if we are really going to argue that superheroes are a Western  Conservative power fantasy why have countries with anti-Western  values, countries that American Conservatives are heavily in opposition to, devoured the genre on film?

Why is the MCU outright beloved  in China?

Why have they tried to create their own super heroes in a similar vein?

Because these characters are not a Conservative, or a white, or a male power fantasy. They are just a human  power fantasy.

*And contrary to what people who are hardline on one ideology or another think, not opposing an issue isn’t tantamount to supporting it. Neutrality exists. If you support abortion that’s Liberal stance on the issue. If you oppose gun control that’s a Conservative stance on that issue. If you do not care about them one way or another you ware not expressing a Liberal or Conservative view point.

The whole ‘With us or against us’ viewpoint is absolutely myopic and overly simplistic. By this logic America was supportive of Hitler before they joined the Allies in WWII. But they were also supportive of the Allies because they weren’t supporting the Axis powers either.

Neutrality can exist.

[eclisseacontextforfilm]

why should we be here talking, arguing? Believe me Anna, words are becoming less and less necessary; they create misunderstandings

eclisse inspirations, vol. IV Michelangelo Antonioni’s Trilogy of incommunicability  part. 1 - L’avventura, 1960

When Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura arrived in 1960 – amidst a tumultuous reception in Cannes that saw some disturbed audience members wanting to throw something at the screen – cinema was already changing in fundamental ways. The makers of individual, handmade films that had been institutionally kept out on the fringes (Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Norman McLaren, to name but three) were starting to draw more viewers and critical attention. The narrative feature film underwent a revision, from inside the nouvelle vague (Godard’s Breathless) and out (Agnès Varda’s first films, Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad). Meanwhile the Italian film world had already seen the old codes of neorealism swept away – much of it Antonioni’s own doing – and had moved towards a post-neorealist cinema liberated from melodrama and political ideologies, perhaps best exemplified in 1959 by Ermanno Olmi’s first feature Time Stood Still.

A new, maturing modernity became widespread in cinema. The years 1959 to 1960 can be identified as a world-historical moment for film. In line with the development of lenses, film stocks and new and smaller cameras (including a more ubiquitous use of 16mm), the modernism that took hold showed yet again the time lag after which cinema typically comes to embrace changes that have occurred first in other artforms: for instance, the radical overhaul of jazz by bebop; the transformation of the sound world of music by such figures as Edgard Varèse and Harry Partch; the abstract-expressionist movement in painting from Pollock to Rothko; the ‘new novel’ invading literature (on which Marienbaddrew, courtesy of a script by novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet).

In this exceptional moment, some of cinema’s old props were being kicked away, including Hollywood’s genre formulae, the three-act narrative structure, the privileging of psychology, the insistence on happy and ‘closed’ endings. But what did it mean to free oneself of the securing laws and traditions of genre, its capacity for creating worlds and codes? What did it mean to reject a storytelling architecture that had served dramatists well since Aeschylus? What kind of moving-image experience with actors could exist beyond psychology – which, after all, was still on the 20th century’s new frontier of science and society? What if endings were less conclusive, or less ‘satisfying’? These are the questions Antonioni confronted and responded to with L’avventura, the film that – more than any other at that moment – redefined the landscape of the artform, and mapped a new path that still influences today’s most venturesome and radical young filmmakers.

For some that film would instead be Breathless. Godard’s accidental discovery of the jump cut (courtesy of his editor) helped him rejig a more conventional yet sly imagining of the crime movie into a piece of radical art, a way of fracturing time as important as Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist fracturing of space and perception. It’s also arguable that Godard had the more immediate impact, especially through the 1960s, since his taste for pop-culture iconography, graphic wordplay and politics positioned him a bit closer to the centre of the period’s cultural zeitgeist than Antonioni (despite the Italian’s subsequent ability to capture swinging London and The Yardbirds in 1966’s Blowup, and Los Angeles counterculture in 1970’s Zabriskie Point). Even a movie with huge pop figures and crossover attraction like Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) would have been unthinkable without the example of Godard.

Yet I’d argue that L’avventura and Antonioni’s subsequent films – perhaps most importantly L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) – have exerted a greater long-term impact (his effect on the generations after the 1960s is something I’ll consider later). One of L’avventura’s many remarkable qualities to note now is its staying power – its ability to astonish anew after repeated viewings. Many great films are of their moment, yet lessen over time. Here, the entrance of Monica Vitti, with her classically hip black dress and sexily tousled blonde mane, amounts to an announcement that the 60s have arrived; a lesser work with her in it would be no more than a key identifier of that moment.

It’s the film’s subtle straddling of an older world and a new one still in the process of defining itself – reflected immediately and perfectly in composer Giovanni Fusco’s opening title theme, alternating between nostalgic Sicilian strummings and nervous, creeping percussive beats – that establishes its rich, unending landscapes of physical reality and the mind. This is part of the film’s timelessness, within an absolutely contemporary / modern setting. The early images of L’avventura trace a parting of the generations, as Anna (Lea Massari) – seemingly the film’s central character – tells her wealthy Roman father that she’s going away on a holiday to Sicily with girlfriend Claudia (Vitti), then seen very much on the periphery of the action, tagging along. But after Anna inexplicably disappears during a boat trip to an uninhabited island, it is Claudia who moves to the centre of the narrative – and into the affections of Anna’s architect boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) – as attempts to find Anna gradually peter out.

What makes L’avventura the greatest of all films, however, is its assertion, exploration and expansion of the concept of the ‘open film’. This had been Antonioni’s great project ever since he started out as a filmmaker after an extremely interesting career as a critic (like Godard). His early documentaries, such as The People of the Po (Gente del Po, 1947), and his earliest narrative films, such as the astonishing Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore, 1950), suggest an artist pulling against what he perceived as the constraints of neorealism towards an openness based on a heightened perception of constant change – a dynamic that was for him the fundamental quality of the post-war world.

A NEW QUESTION

For Antonioni, the issues of neorealism were essential, in that they gave him an aesthetic base from which to launch. The People of the Po is an early neorealist work, both in its submersion in unvarnished realism and its interest in the lives of working people, but it also works against the predominant tendency in neorealism to project sympathy and sentimentality. By the time of Story of a Love Affair, teeming with characters from the upper and middle classes, his was not a class-based cinema; it offered instead a broader perspective – observant, distanced, occasionally unsympathetic. It reached into a more modern realm than neo-realism, a realm that had no name for it – and in fact still doesn’t.

Antonioni was never a leader – nor even part – of a movement. That’s partly because with each successive film he constantly redefined his approach. Roland Barthes, in his profoundly perceptive and concise 1980 speech honouring Antonioni, identified the process this way: “It is because you are an artist that your work is open to the Modern. Many people take the Modern to be a standard to be raised in battle against the old world and its compromised values; but for you the Modern is not the static term of a facile opposition; the Modern is on the contrary an active difficulty in following the changes of Time, not just at the level of grand History but at that of the little History of which each of us is individually the measure. Beginning in the aftermath of the last war, your work has thus proceeded, from moment to moment, in a movement of double vigilance, towards the contemporary world and towards yourself. Each of your films has been, at your personal level, a historical experience, that is to say the abandonment of an old problem and the formulation of a new question; this means that you have lived through and treated the history of the last 30 years with subtlety, not as the matter of an artistic reflection or an ideological mission, but as a substance whose magnetism it was your task to capture from work to work.”

L’avventura builds on the work and experiences of Antonioni’s previous decade, which saw him working through his doubts about genre (film noir in Story of a Love Affair, backstage drama in La signora senza camelie, 1953); about narrative form (the counter-intuitive three-part structure of I vinti, 1952); his love of writer Cesare Pavese (author of the source novel for 1955’s Le amiche) – as important a literary voice to Antonioni as Cesare Zavattini was to the hardcore neorealists. And add to this his growing interest in temporality, the emptied-out frame, the composition that maintains both precision and an expansive gaze that treats bodies, buildings and landscapes with equal importance.

With only a few filmmakers (Mizoguchi, Renoir, Dreyer, von Sternberg, Resnais, Olmi, Kubrick, and more recently Costa, Alonso and Apichatpong) is there such a visible, constant seeking of artistic purpose through the process of each successive film – a striving, a refinement. Antonioni’s 1950s work represents one of the most fruitful directorial decades to watch of any filmmaker. Already in some ways a master in 1950, he proceeded to question his own positions with each film, as if the doubts he had about the state of the post-war world resided, originally, in himself, and then fanned out to the making of the work itself, so that the expression of mortality (most explicitly conveyed in a Pavese adaptation such as Le amiche) inside the film was part and parcel of the director’s own tentative stance. (Tentato suicido/Tentative Suicide is the title of Antonioni’s segment in the 1953 omnibus film L’amore in città.)

These were not only cerebral matters – though the intellectual currents running underneath these films and under the neorealist movement preceding them were crucial to their fecundity – but real concerns rooted in the hard factors that faced any Italian filmmaker trying to get a project off the ground. Antonioni’s tentativeness – a constant fascination to his supporters in the French critical community, and an irritation to many of his Italian contemporaries – was partly based on the tentativeness of Italian film production itself. In almost no case during the 1950s did he encounter a smooth pre-production, firm financial backing or drama-free production periods. The typically poor performance of his films at the box office did little to enamour him to distributors and producers, though in the then nascent world of the auteur film business, it helped enormously that his films did well – even smashingly well – in Paris.

After the commercial failure of Il grido (1957) and an initially limp critical response, Antonioni seriously considered abandoning the cinema altogether, and returned to the theatre, where he had worked in the early years of his career. Even when he did come back to film, to shoot L’avventura, all of his worst concerns came back to haunt him. Already shaky producers bailed out mid-shoot as their company, Imeria, went bankrupt, leaving the crew literally high and dry on the desert island of Lisca Bianca, without sufficient food and water, in a hair-raising episode that makes Coppola’s misadventures filming Apocalypse Now in the Filipino jungle sound like a stroll on the beach.

SURPASSING MYSTERIES

This context, in all its intellectual and practical dimensions, is crucial to comprehending the massive achievement that L’avventura represents. How a film of such constant perfection could even be made under such dreadful conditions is, for me, one of the surpassing mysteries of film history. Viewed in isolation (and aren’t almost all films, even more now in our isolated viewing environments?), L’avventura can superficially be seen as magnificently beautiful in its constant chain of stunning black-and-white images from cinematographer Aldo Scavarda (with whom Antonioni had never previously worked, and never would again).

L’avventura is populated by good-looking actors oozing sex appeal. Monica Vitti, for one, had never had a starring film role before, but with her smouldering presence it was she – as much as Sophia Loren or Ingmar Bergman’s ensemble of intelligent and worldly actresses – who set the standard and the look for the new, sexualised European movie star that was key to the successful foreign-film invasion that hit English-language shores (and was perceived as such a threat by LBJ and his White House crony Jack Valenti that they set up the American Film Institute as a nationalist bulwark against the foreigners supposedly taking over US cinemas). For New York downtown hipsters, London cosmopolitans and Paris cinephiles alike, the combination of serious cinema and sexual beauty was simply too much to pass up.

All that may be why L’avventura had its immediate impact. (A special jury prize from Cannes, after all that booing and hissing, also didn’t hurt.) But the endurance of the film, residing crucially in its conceptual openness, describes a pathway that cinema has been exploring and testing ever since. Much as Flaubert’s novels and Beethoven’s symphonies, concertos and string quartets are continually regenerated by way of the new directions they paved, and the new generations of work following such directions, so Antonioni’s work – and L’avventura in particular – is regenerated by the subsequent cinema that came in its wake.

As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith observes in his essential study of the film, the periphery in Antonioni is of absolute importance, for this is where the sense of drift in his mise-en-scène and narratives resides – a de-centred centrality. No filmmaker before Antonioni, not even the most radical visionaries like Vigo, had established this before as a part of their aesthetic project. In the early scenes when Anna visits Sandro, or when they join their holiday boating group, Vitti’s Claudia remains for a long time on the outside looking in, marginalised, seemingly unimportant. And yet there is something in her nervous gaze, her subtle physical gestures, that makes her impossible not to notice, especially in contrast to Anna’s inner tension and outward unhappiness – an unhappiness she can’t identify, even in private to Claudia.

These are most certainly not Bergman women, forever examining themselves, forever able to articulate the exact words in whole spoken paragraphs about their state of mind, their relationship with God. For one thing, in Antonioni, God doesn’t exist. The state of the world is one of humans searching for some kind of connection amidst a disinterested nature; the island on which the floating party lands is both exotically remote and barren, like a volcano frozen during eruption. The landscapes in L’avventura have been interpreted in a number of different ways that testify to the film’s Joycean levels of readings: from Seymour Chatman’s insistence on metonyms for his reading of what he calls Antonioni’s “surface of the world”, to Gilberto Perez’s more valuable view of the work in his extraordinary film study The Material Ghost, across a whole range of possible interpretations, from the literary to the visual. For me, however, it’s always tempting to see these people – on this island, at that moment – as the last humans on earth.

In L’avventura, more than any film before it had ever dared, the centre will not hold. The open film is a fluid thing, pulsating, forever changing, shifting from one centre to another, not quite beginning and not quite ending (or at least beginning something new in its ‘ending’). Anna, the centre, vanishes, with no visual or verbal clues to trace her by, except rumours of sightings. She was in effect the glue that held the party together, having helped bring Claudia in closer to her circle of friends – and to Sandro. But with Anna’s disappearance, the film alters shape in front of us; a sudden absence actually expands the film’s eye. Individual shots become more extended and prolonged, the sky and land grow larger, the elements become more tangible (clouds, rain, harsher sun).

HERE AND NOW

What’s even more disturbing is that nothing happens – no discovery, no evidence, no detective work and, finally, no memory. L’avventura is, in part, the story of how a woman is forgotten, to the extent that long before the film is done, Anna is less than a trace on a page, a ghost or a photo in an album. A more sentimental filmmaker or a Hollywood studio would have ensured that Anna lived on through Claudia and Sandro’s love affair and possible union. But here, after a while, they don’t speak of Anna anymore. She gradually fades, which is what happens to the dead as regarded by the living (not that Anna is necessarily dead; the film neither encourages nor discourages the suggestion). Although their joint actions ostensibly trace an effort to collect any information on Anna’s whereabouts, Antonioni suggests that the activity of Claudia and Sandro isn’t nearly as important as their time together in this moment, in this or that place.

About those places. The greatness of L’avventura is multivalent, situated in many realms at once: cinematic, aural, existential, literary, architectural, sexual, philosophical – all of them of equal importance. The open film, beyond its fluidity, is amoral in the best sense, or at least unconcerned with a hierarchy of values. Almost all films of any kind privilege certain artistic values above others, and the great ones do it for several: Singin’ in the Rainhonours the body, the sounds of showbiz, the fresh memories of Hollywood at its height; Vampyr celebrates the psychological effect that optical dislocations have on the viewer’s psyche, the spiritual possibilities of the horror film, the blurry line between genres and those alive and dead.

But L’avventura marks a new kind of film, not made before, in which the story that launched the film dissolves and gives way to something else – a journey? a wandering? – that points to a host of possible readings beyond what mere narrative allows, and yet at the same time is too specifically rooted in a form of acting – in situations, episodes and events – to ever become purely abstract. (Though this was an area Antonioni did address in various ways, including the semi-apocalyptic ending of L’eclisse, the visualisations of madness in 1964’s Red Desert and the slow-motion explosion near the end of Zabriskie Point.)

For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “L’avventura is a film about consciousness and its objects, the consciousness that people have of other people and of the environment that surrounds them.” It is a film that’s also about a change of consciousness – what that looks and feels like: for instance Claudia’s move from the edges to the centre and, in the final passages, back to the edges. This change of consciousness is realised in terms that encompass Antonioni’s grasp of a vast range of materials: Sandro’s relationship with architecture is framed with the couple’s bodies, both above buildings and nearly swallowed up by them, their shared sexuality first shared in open space and then further and further contained within smaller rooms; the sense of new possibilities (new towns, new relationships) seen in the curve of a highway, a train hurtling down the tracks and through tunnels; the insistence on the Old World in the hulking presence of churches, formal dinner parties, rigid bodies against Claudia’s free and easy one, always in motion; the sounds of creaky nostalgic ‘Italian’ music against Fusco’s disturbing atonalities and unnerving syncopations (in one of the greatest film scores ever written).

Antonioni, as Perez often notes, infuses his cinema with doubt – a doubt that extends to his questioning of psychology as a basis for cinematic drama (let alone his doubt in the value of cinematic drama). But doubt is not an end point in this or his other films; instead it represents the beginning of new possibilities. Thus the open film’s mapping of changes of consciousness – through the tools of mise-en-scène, temporality, elliptical editing, a matching of sound to image combined with a de-emphasis on actors’ faces presiding over scenes (close-ups are fewer by far in L’avventura than any of his previous films) – is a picture of a post-psychological topography of the human condition, a radical effort to find a cinema grammar to express inner thought with photographic means.

This is a map that did (as Perez has noted) go out of style for a time, perhaps during the period of postmodernism, and definitely during the period when Fassbinder ruled the arthouse. But the map has been opened again by a new generation. Its influence can now be seen in films from every continent – to such an extent that the Antonioni open film can be said to be in its golden age. Here are some examples: the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, from Blissfully Yours to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad through to Liverpool; Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia; C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Anchorage; Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness; the entire so-called Berlin School, of which Köhler is a part; Albert Serra’s Honour of the Knights and Birdsong; James Benning; Kelly Reichardt; Kore-eda Hirokazu; Ho Yuhang’s Rain Dogs; Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Still Life; Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation. The list goes on…

Some of these filmmakers may disavow any Antonioni influence – but we know that what directors (including Antonioni) say about their films can’t always be trusted. Besides, the ways in which L’avventura works on the viewer’s consciousness are furtive and often below a conscious level. In Apichatpong’s fascination with characters being transformed by the landscape around them; in Raksasad’s interest in dissolving the borders between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’, or the recorded and the staged; in Alonso’s precision and absolute commitment to purely cinematic resources and disgust with the sentimental; in Köhler’s continual refinement of his visualisation of his characters’ uncertain existences; in Reichardt’s concern for what happens to human beings in nature – especially when they get lost: in all these and more, the open film is stretched, remoulded, reconsidered, questioned, embraced. A kind of film that was first named L’avventura.

[by Robert Koehler, from BFI. November 2016]

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Best Activities to Explore in the Philippines for Travel Lovers

There is an unimaginable range of activities and travel-related things for a travel lover to explore in the Philippines. So much so that more you will read about the places and its attractions, the more confused your mind will become about the sorting out a travel itinerary of choice. When one gets too many good things to digest at once, this is always insisted to be selective and thorough rather than getting a piece from whatever you can. A piece won’t let you enjoy the taste while it does ruin in your dinner, on the other hand, you would miss out on many options when you will selectively pick just a few options but at least, you will be ensured of enjoying to the fullest and your heart’s satisfaction.

Similar kind of situation awaits every traveller while visiting a country as diverse as the Philippines. With more than 7000 islands and all being tropical paradise in their own right, you are prone to get confused. So rather seeking it all, go for the limited but the most unique ones that the place has to offer. For your help, we have figured out a few activities that you would surely love to explore as a traveller in the Philippines. You can simply choose the best Travel Deals to the Philippines using Klook Promo Code or Klook Voucher Code to avail exclusive rebates on your bookings.

Wander Around Banaue Rice Terraces

The tourist destination and rice terrace do not seem to go in the same flow for many people but you will be in no doubt about the synonymous meaning of Rice terrace once you wander around the beautiful landscape of Banaue. This place is impeccably crafted by the local farmers who were forced to develop a farming technique to grow food for themselves and their families amidst the mountainous and hilly slopes. Some geological studies have revealed that these terraces were prepared by the farmers around 2000 years back which obviously means they did it all by themselves without the help of any mechanical tools and machinery equipment. A hiking trip down these locales would serve a big lesson for your life and motivate you to rise up against adversities.

Witness the Taal Lake of Tagaytay

This is an active volcanic site located near a freshwater lake which together adds to form an invaluably exquisite view you would never be able to get it out of your memories for the rest of your life. Such is the insane charm and attractiveness of this place that it keeps you will forget to blink in between on a number of occasions while touring this place. The lake filled with freshwater covers more than 240 sq km and covers a portion of the volcanic sight on one of its end known as Mount Taal. The height of the volcanic mountain site is around 300 metres though it is deemed very risky to visit the top of the mountain as it is considered an active volcanic site which spilt out the hot liquid in the year 1970 last time. All being said, this is indeed one of the most incredible natural wonders of the earth and the Philippines happens to be the lucky place to possess many such marvels of nature.

Get Mesmerized by Chocolate Hills

The Chocolate Hills is one of the most popular places in the Philippines and as a travel lover, you will be committing nothing short of a crime if you skip the tour to Chocolate Hill for any reason at all. These hills are found in the central island territory of Bohol. While many tourists would find themselves lazy to move further once they take a short rest on the tremendous beaches of Bohol, it is no lesser delightful to witness the astounding chocolate hills, a true marvel of nature. The exotic sightseeing locale is particularly known for its unusual geographic formations that never fail to awe-inspire you no matter how many times you look at them. Get the best hotel deals in the Philippines using the Hotels.com Promo Code, Hotels.com Coupons, Hotels.com Discount Code for saving hefty amounts on your travel accommodations.

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Aaron Lowell Denton: The Accidental Designer

The following post is brought to you by Squarespace, an easy-to-use website builder for your personal and professional needs. You can start a free trial for a website (with no credit card required) today and use coupon code DESIGNMILK for 10% off your website when you’re ready to publish. Our partners are hand picked by the Design Milk team because they represent the best in design.

Entering the world of Indiana-based visual artist Aaron Lowell Denton can feel like stepping through the doorway of an astonishingly preserved record shop you’d long had forgotten – a realm embellished in the hallmarks reminiscent of Stanislaw Fernandes’ finest OMNI magazine covers, the Memphis Movement, forgotten classics of the 1980s Japanese city pop albums era, and maybe even the neon hued geometric landscapes once emblazoned across blank VHS cassette tapes. With a portfolio pulsing with a surreal experimental glow, Denton has carved out a career as a musician’s artist, one adept at mining the collective memory of music’s imprint onto our emotions, expressed through an Indian summer spectrum of colors and absurdist’s sense of movement.

Photo: Anna Powell Denton

Originally from Upland, a tiny little town in northern Indiana, and now based in Bloomington, Indiana, Denton’s journey follows the trajectory more that of a squiggle than a line. “[When I first moved to Bloomington] I had a slew of day jobs before I went full time with design. I served tables at a vegetarian restaurant here in town called The Owlery,” says Denton, “I also painted houses for a while, alongside some carpentry work. I worked the door at a bar during a 10pm to 4am shift. That was a weird time.”

Between this hodge-podge of jobs, Denton was also designing flyers and posters for a local musical venue for the love of it, sometimes for just $50 a pop, but mostly for free. Over time he found himself spending an extraordinary time on these projects despite the modest pay. It was only when his then-partner-now-wife suggested making a go of a career as a visual artist that Denton decided to abandon toiling 70-hour weeks to dedicate himself fully into his design work.

“I was super scared to quit my restaurant job. I figured I’d try it for a few months and go back to waiting tables, but it worked out! I feel super grateful to have the job and life I have. It’s a privilege, especially in times like these, to be able to work for yourself and make art for a living. I can’t believe I get to do it everyday.”

The world would soon come knocking on Denton’s door by way of Instagram, where his work garnered a great deal of attention from design and music aficionados alike. He’d soon find himself inundated with commissions by promoters all seeking Denton’s uniquely hypnotic pop manifestations for the likes of musicians such as Wild Nothing, Leon Bridges and Khruangbin, John Maus, and Stereolab, tying a lyrical sense of typography together with a heart-on-his-sleeve affection for artists such as Donald Judd, Joan Miró, Helen Frankenthaler, and Bridget Riley.“That high art stuff is a bit in my aesthetic DNA at this point, and my sense of color and composition comes from all the time I spent (and still spend) in museums and looking in books.” 

Today Denton’s eye finds itself drawn toward other outliers of art, including surreal futurist Stanislaw Fernandes, 1960s-1970s Japanese typography, and OMNI magazine, influences clearly discernible across his portfolio, “I also got into a big city pop phase last year that resulted in a bunch of work in that style.  I just get really into looking and researching a certain style, and I think it’s fun to sometimes try on styles and techniques. It’s a way to give yourself permission to experiment and grow.”

This growth also included designing his own website on Squarespace, where his online portfolio resides alongside an e-commerce shop where some of his more recent work is available as posters. The site has become an integral extension of his online presence, allowing him to connect with new clients and customers alike. Denton remembers designing his site as surprisingly “easy”, crediting Squarespace’s robust site building tools. “There was definitely a time when building a website felt like such a feat, but it’s just not that way anymore.”

Denton also cites an appreciation for the collaborative nature of his work. As a musician himself, he calls the process a “conversation” integral to informing his eventual solution in tying together his vision with the artist, the venue, and even the audience. It’s a process he’s embraced increasingly more as he ventures solely from poster work toward collaborative commissions.

“Part of the art in it for me is the dialogue with clients, and the personal connection that can come out of creating art together,” notes Denton, “Especially when you’re representing someone else’s art with your own, that process has to be collaborative. That being said, like I mentioned, musicians can understand the need to not be caged in too much. They can empathize with needing a certain amount of autonomy to find something unique.”

“I’ve been lucky to work with some of my favorite musicians and it does sometimes feel like it’s coming from somewhere mysterious, pre-cooked.” Promotional risograph poster for Wild Nothing. September, 2018.

When asked about what makes for a good poster or album design, Denton is quick to point out the open-minded nature of his clientele – musicians – has afforded him a fairly relaxed relationship that tends to foster, rather than hamper good design.

“[Musicians] tend to be less intense than say, an art director. When I do a poster there’s not much between my idea and execution and the final piece; whereas, with something like a logo for a business, or a commercial project, it needs to be discussed and examined. That can be fun too…it’s all just different.”

These fairly unrestricted bounds have permitted Denton a level of interpretive freedom not all designers are always given, allowing the artist to consider both the complete oeuvre of the musician with his own personal connections with their music to form novel solutions. “I sometimes feel like the bands I get asked to work for already have visual representations, fully formed, sitting somewhere inside me. Like, they’re formed from my own relationship with the music and fandom. 

“Design has a rich history of endearing social messages with imagery. With the Abolish ICE poster I was working with a group called New Sanctuary Coalition to raise funds for immigration bonds, which are exorbitantly higher for people in that system. I’d love to collaborate on more social posters in the future though, it’s an area of my work I really value.”

Photo: Anna Powell Denton

Amusingly, Denton’s affinity for collaboration even extends to the nuts and bolts of operating as a one-person operation. “I actually enjoy emailing quite a bit,” admits Denton, “The dialogue between me and my clients is something I’m actively interested in. I don’t dread any of that stuff.”

Denton credits his Squarespace designed site as an alternative medium to show work outside of social media, one where his work can be shown without the expectations and associations of an audience-based medium like Instagram. “I like to think of my site just as a full view of a collection of work. It’s the fastest way for someone to see what my work is all about.” Visitors are welcome to peruse his portfolio of work and purchase posters from an e-commerce shop vertical. Denton’s design is clean, simple, and easy to navigate, permitting his artwork to be the centerpiece of the experience.

Squarespace has made selling my work all around the world a more accessible possibility. The commerce tools are really easy to use and understand.

With a majority of his past work connected to the music industry, Denton is using his site to aid in pursuing new opportunities, both out of curiosity and out of necessity, “When COVID hit, a majority of my poster work evaporated, so this year has been a lot different as far as where the work is coming from. I’ve been doing more editorial jobs, which I’m really into. I’d like to do a book design at some point, and also want to do more movie posters. I’m trying to learn about motion design in my spare time, so I could see myself trying that at some point.”

Ready to share your vision or brand with the world? Take the first step today with your very own website with Squarespace. Start your free two week trial (no credit card required!) and use coupon code DESIGNMILK when you’re ready  to get 10% off.

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A Look Back at the 10th Annual TCM Classic Film Festival

HOLLYWOOD — Double anniversaries: This year’s TCM Film Festival marked two milestones, the 25th anniversary of the classic movie channel, which bowed on April 14, 1994, and the 10th anniversary of its namesake annual event.

In a movie landscape challenged by new platforms, industry consolidation and general entertainment overload, TCM remains a beacon for film buffs. “We’ve stayed true to our mission of showing films the way they’re meant to be seen, uncut and commercial free,” said Jennifer Dorian, TCM general manager. “That mission has not changed over 25 years. And when we started doing this festival, it made sense that it would be the context in which we started to bring people together and then showcase these films once again on these incredible screens in Hollywood.”

Held April 11-14 at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre complex, Egyptian Theatre, Cinerama Dome and the Roosevelt Hotel, the classic movie marathon featured more than a hundred films and events, with most programmed to reflect the festival’s main theme “Follow Your Heart: Love at the Movies.” That certainly was the case for the opening-night attraction “When Harry Met Sally …” (1989), with stars Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan and director Rob Reiner appearing at the TCL Chinese IMAX to celebrate the rom-com’s 30th anniversary. Though “Harry” might seem relatively new by TCM standards, “We had no idea back then if it would stand the test of time,” Crystal told the crowd. Reiner added, “You never know. You make a movie, and hopefully it turns out well, and hopefully others like it, too.”

Also in the opening-night audience was Ted Turner, the broadcast industry magnate whose purchase of the MGM film library in 1986 gave rise to TCM. Along with Turner, others receiving special tributes during the festival were casting director Juliet Taylor, producer Fred Roos, filmmaker Nora Ephron and film historian Kevin Brownlow. Fox Studios, founded in 1905, reincarnated as 20th Century Fox in 1935 and swallowed whole by Disney in 2019, also was feted, with screenings of landmark titles such as “Sunrise: A Story of Two Humans” (1927), “The Sound of Music” and perhaps the studio’s biggest all-time blockbuster and game-changer, “Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope: Special Edition” (1977).

Adding star power were appearances by actors and filmmakers Diane Baker, Jacqueline Bisset, Ronee Blakley, John Carpenter, Keith Carradine, Frank Darabont, Dana Delany, Angie Dickinson, Louis Gossett Jr., Bill Hader, Barbara Rush, Kurt Russell and Alex Trebek. Also scheduled to appear but unable to attend were Norman Lear, Shirley MacLaine, Gena Rowlands and Lily Tomlin.

Among the restored titles receiving world premieres were “Do the Right Thing” (1989), “Escape from Alcatraz” (1979), “Holiday” (1938), “The Killers” (1964), “Kind Hearts and Coronets” (1949), “Merrily We Go to Hell” (1932), “Nashville” (1975) and “Winchester ’73” (1950, U.S. premiere showing). 

Though the festival’s tent-pole titles attracted overflow crowds, some of the greatest moments came courtesy of lesser-known films, such as the many pre-Code offerings, rediscoveries and special formats (including nitrate and Cinerama). Here are 10 for the 10th:

"Night World"

Eighty the hard way: Introducing the pre-Code drama “Night World” (1932), Susan Karloff noted that her father Boris “made a lot of films like this”—movies that weren’t prestige projects but were entertaining and well-made nonetheless. A year earlier, Karloff teamed with Mae Clarke for “Frankenstein,” his breakthrough movie, and they reunited for “Night World,” which also features Lew Ayres, George Raft and Hedda Hopper, before she reinvented herself as a professional gossip-monger. “’Frankenstein’ was his 81st film,” Susan Karloff said. ”Nobody saw the first 80.”

Ted Turner on the success of TCM: It comes down to one simple truth: “People like old stuff.” That’s how the founder of Turner Broadcasting, which begat Turner Classic Movies, explained the enduring popularity of the acclaimed cable channel. Now that he’s reached his golden years, the onetime Mouth of the South admitted that he has realized “I’m old, so people finally like me.”

The low-budget bang of the Bs: A turn-away crowd flocked to “Open Secret” (1948), a film noir tinged with social activism, and screened as one of the festival’s many “Discoveries.” Eddie Muller, “The Czar of Noir” and host of TCM’s “Noir Alley,” observed: “This is probably the biggest single crowd ever to see this movie, which is as B as B gets. If they spent more than $2,000 on this film, I’d be amazed.” Despite the movie’s modest origins, “Open Secret” bravely takes aim at nativism and prejudice in post-war America. “I’m very happy to present this movie,” Muller said. “It’s as down and dirty as it gets.”

"Santo vs. the Evil Brain"

Lucha libre, viva Mexico! The midnight screening of the cult/camp classic “Santo vs. the Evil Brain” quickly turned into spectacle as two fans in lucha libre garb swarmed the theater, tossing out treats and trinkets, including El Santo masks on sticks. A Mexican folk hero, El Santo was a luchador enmascarado (masked wrestler) and fighter for justice. As portrayed by actor Rodolfo Guzman Huerta, El Santo appeared in more than 50 films, including the first in the series, “Santo Contra el Cerebro del Mal” (1961, “Santo vs. the Evil Brain”). “It’s a miracle that we’re showing this film,” said archivist Viviana Garcia Besne, whose grandfather introduced El Santo to the screen. “The Mexican film industry is not supporting these movies, despite their popularity.” Her father found the original camera negative of “Santo vs. the Evil Brain,” “so with the centennial of El Santo [Guzman Huerta] in 2017, we thought we should restore his movies.” She implored the audience to revel in the film’s over-the-top spirit: “You must react or you’ll fall asleep.”

Remembering the King of the Cowboys: Through the ’20s, Tom Mix rode tall in the saddle and revolutionized the Western by focusing on action and performing his own stunts. A century later, however, he’s all but forgotten. Introducing a double feature of “The Great K&A Train Robbery” (1926) and “Outlaws of Red River” (1927) at the Legion Theatre, TCM senior programming director Scott McGee paid tribute to “the ultimate cowboy star” and mentioned that several of his younger TCM colleagues had never heard of Mix, once nicknamed “The Rent Man” by theater exhibitors. Most of Mix’s nearly 300 films (all but nine were silent) were lost in a 1937 studio fire, so those TCM youngsters could be forgiven for their ignorance.  

Shot on location in Colorado, “The Great K&A Train Robbery” proved that “the real natural wonder was Mix himself,” McGee said. “He was a bona-fide cowboy and horseman of the highest order.” Mix’s penchant for fancy duds emphasized that he was “all about the show and the flash. He knew that clothes do make the man.” MoMa curator Anne Morra added that even though “his clothes weren’t trail-worthy, he always gets the girl,” and pointed out that Mix’s trusty steed, Tony the Wonder Horse, outlived his master, who died in a car accident in 1940, by two years.

"It Happened Here"

Speaking truth to power: Accepting the second annual Robert Osborne Award, which honors individuals crucial in maintaining the legacy and preservation of classic films, historian, author and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow warned the crowd that he was going to go off-script. “Where’s release of ‘Hollywood’?” he said, referring to his influential documentary series about the silent-film era, shown on TV in 1980 but never released in a home-video format due to rights issues.

As part of the Brownlow tribute, TCM screened his own “It Happened Here,” which imagines what might have occurred if Germany had conquered Britain during World War II. At 15, Brownlow began making the docudrama with creative partner Andrew Mollo, and over eight years, the two attracted eventual assistance from directorial lions Tony Richardson and Stanley Kubrick. As “It Happened Here” began to roll at the Egyptian, and introductory credits about the movie’s restoration identified it as a 1965 release, Brownlow from his seat shouted out “1964!”

The patriarchy strikes back: Though she was the first female to receive the Directors Guild Fellowship Award and successfully helmed seven films from 1966 to 1974, writer/director/producer Stephanie Rothman found herself on the outs by the mid-’70s. Speaking before a midnight screening of her “Student Nurses” (1970), Rothman recalled that studio chiefs thought she was “too intellectual”—even though she specialized (by necessity) in exploitation fare. In the early ’80s, one exec finally brought her in for a meeting to discuss a project for a young male director about to make his first studio film. “It sounded just like my own ‘Velvet Vampire’ [1971],” Rothman said. “So I asked them, why not hire me? They didn’t.” The filmmaker and film in question turned out to be Tony Scott and the vampire-themed “The Hunger” (1983).

"The Killers"

Taking dead aim at the truth: Always the straight shooter, actress Angie Dickinson told it like it was in her introductory remarks before “The Killers” (1964), Don Siegel’s crime thriller, loosely based on the Ernest Hemingway short story. Shot in unusually vivid Eastman Color, it follows two hit men (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) trying figure out the score of their score. Neither of the male leads—John Cassavetes as the mark and Ronald Reagan as the mastermind—wanted to be in this movie, she recalled. In his last film before he launched his political career, Reagan made “The Killers” “just to get out of his contract.” And Cassavetes—“that is some Greek”—“was pretty quiet,” she said. “The film wasn’t his style but he needed the work,” she added, referring to the actor-director’s preference for his own indie, iconoclastic projects. Dickinson attributes the film’s success to Siegel (“an absolute doll—adorable!”) and Cassavetes (“he was so charismatic, he didn’t have to do anything on the screen”), and not so much to Reagan: “You could tell that he was kinda dying back there.”

As for why she didn’t become a bigger star, Dickinson said, “It didn’t happen. It takes a lot of luck, and I didn’t have the drive. The parts weren’t there. So I did ‘Police Woman’”—her hit ’70s series—“which was a grind and did me in.” At that point, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz reminded her that 100 episodes of “Police Woman” was nothing to sneeze at, and Dickinson quickly corrected him: “Actually, 91.” She laughed and added, “I am such a truth buff.”

The circle of life, Tinsel Town edition: Introducing the silent film “A Woman of Affairs” (1928), starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, which was screened with a full orchestra led by Carl Davis conducting his own score, at the historic Egyptian, film scholar Leonard Maltin acknowledged a stroke of serendipity: “We have one of those only in Hollywood moments tonight. Performing on the French horn in the orchestra is the great-great grandson of John Gilbert.”

The enduring legacy of Robert Osborne: Throughout the festival, many luminaries saluted the late figurehead of TCM. “Robert loved this festival,” said Kevin Brownlow. “He lobbied for it for years and basked in its success and its shared community.” Speaking ahead of “Magnificent Obsession” (1954), in which she co-starred opposite Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, Barbara Rush recalled, “We grew up together in the business. It was Robert who really got TCM going,” she said, reflecting on Osborne’s own magnificent obsession. “He was like a very dear brother to me. Plus, he knew everything, especially about the movies.”

from All Content http://bit.ly/2PkpYgT

[dom-contemp]

CAPE TOWN ART FAIR QUESTIONNAIRE

The Goodman gallery had the same gallerists as the gallery, and the layout of the booth was similar to the gallery’s layout. The walls were not too cluttered, each work was spaced out evenly. There were about 2 Goodman gallery booths. None of them had works from the current artists being shown at their gallery in Cape Town. The Stevenson Gallery booth felt interactive, much like the gallery itself. There were different gallerists and different works up. The vibe was very similar to the main gallery in Woodstock. The Blank Gallery booth was run by the same gallerists, and displayed some work of the same artist who was being shown in the gallery. There was some other work up by other artists as well. A few pieces in the booth were installation and hanging pieces, much like the gallery in Woodstock. The booth was a bit more filled than the gallery itself.

2.  I absolutely loved Sheltering by Matt Philips. This painting was geometric and colourful and abstract. It is a very textured painting made up of many sharp shapes such as triangles. The artist used silica and pigment to paint this on linen fabric, which adds to the texture. I love this piece because I love abstract art. His use of colourful shapes in the order they are makes the painting seem like a ladder of some sorts. Ascending. Another piece I loved was An unexpected absence by Kirsten Beets. This piece made up of many other pieces is part of a series of paintings this artist did. Very simple, minimal painting of three chairs in a seemingly confined landscape. The lack of people in this painting makes it enticing to look at. It brings sadness to the surface, but yet so aesthetically pleasing. One of the three chairs is tipped over, making it seem left out. The role of these chairs are almost personified. Another piece I loved was by Kenneth Baker, called Abstract. This old piece resembles an almost tribal symbolic message. The dark lines and colours create a sense of a journey that has been undertaken by the artist. Either inward or an outward journey. I love this piece because of how raw and rough it is. One can see the layers of paint, and the thick lines he wished to present. This piece brings up many questions, and makes one wonder what the artist had to experience in order to make such a piece.

Three pieces I disliked were to do with large figurative, slightly realistic pieces. I really do not like realistic figures painted in a “commercial” way. Time keeper 113 by Norman O’Flynn does not interest me because of how saturated it is. The Large painting of a figure in bright vibrant colours draws me away. The slight street art aesthetic is played with in this piece by using some spray paint and thick paint. This piece comes from a series called The timekeepers. I struggle to find meaning and authenticity is this styled work. Another piece I disliked was Ornama 119 by Kilmany-Jo Liversage. Another large scale painting. This portrait was created by acrylic, spray paint and markers on canvas. This vibrant and saturated colour portrait resembles a pop art type artwork. Using conventional materials. The street art style is also seen in this piece by using spray paint, and tagging a section of the painting. The artist’s use of thick colourful lines does not resonate with me as I find it too distracting; I’m not sure where to look at. Finally, Nouvo Mondo by A. Collesano - an ink drawing of a giant eel hovering over a lighthouse. I am not a fan of tattoo styled drawings, nor fantasy creatures. This artwork does not sit well with me because it doesn’t say much to me. I feel Andrea’s olden day technique of ink drawings are too outdated to be creating them today.

3. The predominant mediums used in this year’s art fair were painting, mixed media. Predominant processes were repetition and collaging using other materials such as fabric, string etc.

4. The major differences between booths were obvious when looking at the size of some booths. Some were much larger than others, displaying more and larger works. Some booths went inside a smaller room; this was not often, but a few booths did so. A few booths were interactive, thus allowing the viewers to really take part in the work they were displaying. Some booths just had works displayed on the four sides of their walls, where as others had pieces in the middle of the booth. 

5. In terms of signage, some booths have more than others. Solo booths have more signage around the pieces; more descriptions. Sometimes there were description of the exhibition on the wall next to the artist’s name. Other booth only had a small sign stating what gallery they were, and small labels on each work. Some booths didn’t have label on their, thus one would have to ask who the artist was and what was the work called. Most of the time, titles of the works were very small next to the piece.

6. The general layout of the fair was straight forward. Borders around the room, and columns going down the middle. This made it easier to navigate through the venue, and see all the work without missing anything. This layout, too, highlighted the favoured galleries and works being displayed in the middle, and the more ‘average’ galleries were on the outskirts.

7. The lighting at the fair was bright, but calmly bright. It made it easy to critically and clearly see the work. Each booth was very clearly and nicely lit. 

8. The general dress code at the fair is semi formal. Mostly button up shirts and longs, or dresses. The people running the booths differ from causal formal to very formal. Mostly the international booths were dressed more formal than South African booths. I think this is so, to make an impression the viewers. A lot of people running the booths were dressed in black, alongside a few of the fair attendees. Some attendees were dressed rather quirky and unique, whilst others were dressed more casual. 

9. The various ‘markets’ at the fair were around food, alcohol, books and prints. These products being sold are aimed at the general public attending the fair, either tourists looking for souvenirs and lunch for the viewers. These various markets are quite higher end markets, selling more expensive products. The fair is aimed the slightly more wealthier people.

10. An artwork that exemplifies wealth is done by Ayanda Mabula. I do not know the name of the painting, but it is very large framed painting of a black woman on a horse. This vibrant painting shows a black woman dressed in old victorian dress, riding a bucking horse. The background resembles a bright wallpaper. This pieces displays wealth because of the clothes this woman is wearing, and the animal in the painting. The golden frame also emphasises wealth because of it elaborate design. The connotation of horse riding depicts wealth, along with a victorian styled dress. 

11. An artwork that I feel does not fit in with the context of the art fair is Singer, bissection by Jake Michael. This metallic and sharp sculpture, I feel does not resonate with the rest of the art fair because it does not feel welcoming, nor does it give a sense of hope, much like I feel most of the artworks in the fair does. This sculpture is part of a series of metallic sculptures of similar style. As this artwork does give this artist presence and freedom of displaying his vision, it does not form part of the collective vision I felt from the rest of the artworks; the vision being bringing awareness to certain issues, or highlighting up and coming artists.

12. It is not very easy to ask about prices at the art fair. It feels very intimidating to ask a gallerist how much a piece costs, as this is not the normal thing to do. The gallerist immediately pauses and gives a certain look of shock when asking about the prices of artworks. One gallerest, of whom I knew personally was willing to share the prices of some pieces, but others were sort of reluctant.

13. There was not too much branding around the art fair, but the brands I did notice were alcohol brands, and magazine brands. The alcohol sponsorship was targeted at attendees or the fair, and was pushing the name of the alcohol company. The company being Boshendal Wine, the brand is rather fancy and the clientele is for the wealthy. The magazine branding was for inquisitive art lovers, and young people, because the Magazine brand is curated for young people (The Lake Magazine).

14. The CTICC is a popular event venue in Cape Town, and has a large enough space to cater for such an event like the Art Fair. The CTICC is home to other international commercial events such as the Design Indaba and the Cape Town International Jazz festival. To host an event at the CTICC gives one status and recognition. I think that the Cape Town Art Fair is hosted at the CTICC because of the venue’s popularity and status.

15. The oldest artworks I found at the Art fair were works made by Kenneth Baker and William Kentridge. Both artists dating back to the 70’s. I do not know the date or the name of the artwork by William Kentridge, but Baker’s work dates back to the 1970’s.

16. I found that the local Galleries were showing some of the younger artists works. Fanie Buys, Bronwyn Katz and Chris Valentine were some of the younger artists.

17. The solo booths drew me in more. By displaying a variety of work by one artist, an impact can be made. The solo booths had more information in the booth, and similar themes were touched on in the body of work, making it easier to follow what was going on in the work. The group booths did give face to various artists, but I feel that to have a solo booth allowed a strong message to be conveyed to the viewers.

18. Pierre Vermuelen was a big name that I picked up on at the art fair. He is a young, but very strong artist. His work was also on auction at the Cape Town auction house. William Kentridge popped up a few times. His work is becoming historic, and a few different galleries were displaying his work. It was interesting to see different galleries showing the same artist - that, to me, shows how loved and valued the artist is. 

19. Trends in subject matter that I noticed were over racism and psychological issues or tendencies. A lot of African galleries were displaying bodies of work showcasing issues around racism. I think this was done to invoke emotion and awareness to the typical art fair goer, being a white middle class person. Psychological subject matter was displayed in order to demonstrate the so called “norm” of having psychological issues. Trends in materials I noticed were the use of fabric and painting. Mixing the two has become evident in a lot of works. Artists are expanding their mediums and attempting to use mixed media.

20. I would love to be represented by Ebony curated or Smac gallery. Both these galleries are open to new and different art. The open mindedness behind these galleries is promising and hopeful. 

21. I would love to work for 99 on Loop. This gallery, I feel, is one that is on top of the times, and showcases very new artists and gives these new artists a chance in the art world. I would love to be a gallerist for this gallery in one of their shows. Either this, or to find new artists to showcase. 

22. Questions that came up for me were questions around where is art going to? I found a lot of the same ‘commercial’ work in many booths. I do not feel that this is where true art should be going. Other questions that came up was why were there so many European galleries present at the fair, and why non of the America’s? Another question was how do people want to perceive art? Do they want to see change, emotion, protest, or do they want to see colourful and big paintings that look ‘nice.’?

23. If I had a gallery or some sort of art institute, I would want to show it at the fair. I would want my booth to differ from the others by displaying many different works by many different people. Almost littering the walls with different local art, from artists who are almost nameless, to up and coming artists. Each piece would be titled and the artist’s name would be shown. This would attract people because of how much would be in the booth. 

[transhumanitynet]

Episode 99 - Erik Davis on How to Navigate High Weirdness

This week’s guest is Erik Davis – one of my great inspirations, someone who has influenced me and this podcast in immeasurable ways since I first encountered his amazing criticism, histories, and “seen it all” visionary cool – I still recommend his first nonfiction book (Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information) on a near-daily basis, and his show Expanding Mind has got to be my number one most-listened podcast of all time.

Erik is a native Californian Gen X mystic who played no small part in the explosive West Coast visionary cyperpunk scene in the 1990s alongside folks like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Doug Rushkoff, and Jaron Lanier. But he’s taking a profoundly different stance these days, with a Religious Studies PhD in hand and a new book at the printers, drawing on his thirty-plus years experience investigating modern life’s weird marginalia to help us navigate a world in which the weird’s no longer marginal.

https://techgnosis.com

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-weirdness

High Weirdness Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies by Erik Davis

“A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality— but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.”

“Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, and counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica.”

We Discuss:

Enacting the weird through media

The 1970s understood as the sort of beginning of our darker, weirder time – capitalism, consumer credit, surveillance, paranoia, density, historical dread…

“The occult, conspiracy theory, a dark dreamlike character…is now central…the way fictions become operational as quasi-truths to navigate the post-truth environment…the popularity of psychedelics…”

Key literacies for navigating Our Weird Future

Slender Man as operationalized fiction, as a kind of “tulpa” or thought-form activated into quasi-life

The intermarriage of reality and the hoax

HP Lovecraft’s modern distance from his horrors vs. Phil Dick’s postmodern intimacy with his horrors

The Coming Age of DNA Monsters and Routinized Weirdness

“We are called upon to analyze our resistances to all variety of shifts, mutations, couplings – and unless we want to go reactionary and hold onto certain ideas we have about how humans should be, or how the world should be, we’re in a situation of a strange kind of embrace with the other.”

Distrusting the Apocalypse

Figure-ground collapse in the impression of planetary hyperobjects into our immediate awareness

Neuroplasticity and neoteny – becoming childlike in order to surf accelerating change

Future shock and getting drawn into (right-wing, fundamentalist, fear-based, racist, boundary-defending) stories as a bid for solid ground

“Not knowing who we really are is part of the game. In fact, it’s one of the great opportunities of our moment.”

Plasticity vs. Flexibility ~ Will or Flexibility

The discipline of transforming subjectivity – religions as practical algorithms for self-transformation, not as collections of beliefs

Everything you do is a self-engendering practice

“I look at the 20th Century, and the most important thing that happened in the 20th Century is cybernetics – both the concept and the operationalism of creating communication feedback loops that begin to generate their own processes.”

“The further I go into a cybernetic model, at least for me, it needs to be ground out in a deepening relationship with animals, with weather, with food, with plants, with plant wisdom, and definitely with those peoples – in whatever traces, in whatever mutations we can encounter them now – those groups, those societies, that had a very different relationship that’s not really mediated by the machine.”

The return of the nonhuman, cultural retrieval, the archaic revival, “reanimism”

Intelligence is Everywhere

Present Shock & the collapse of history & Jurassic Park

The future of time – metaperspectival time

Zizek’s critique of Buddhism and how mindfulness has been coopted by neoliberal surveillance capitalism

Episode 99 – Erik Davis on How to Navigate High Weirdness was originally published on transhumanity.net

[caveartfair]

Legendary Designer Paula Scher on How to Get Started in Graphic Design

Portrait of Paula Scher by Ian Roberts. Courtesy of Pentagram.

When you look down at your exhibition guide at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you’re looking at Paula Scher’s handiwork. If you’ve been to Shakespeare in the Park or any other Public Theater event in the last 20 years, you know one of her most loyal clients. If you live near any of Citibank’s thousands of branches, eat at Shake Shack, or have used Microsoft Windows 8, you’re familiar with her designs. A partner at Pentagram’s New York office since 1991, Scher is not only one of the most important designers of our time, she is also a testament to the communicative power and reach of graphic design.

“I think in terms of being excited by ideas,” Scher recently explained over the phone. “Sometimes I see something that triggers a thought of something I want to attempt.” Her mind might shift into gear over a few spoken words or a sign on the road; it can even happen in the bathtub, she admitted. Like artists, graphic designers rely on their creativity to make images. In their particular case, however, these images are tasked with a wide range of duties—from expressing brand identity to telling Floridians how to vote.

But Scher is wary of the notion of “creativity,” which she playfully referred to as “the C-word.” To be creative “is to have ideas and ideas come from all kinds of places,” she explained. “It’s mostly being able to have an open mind about something.” Ideas come to her, but she doesn’t concern herself with why or how that happens. But she does have a good sense of what fuels her work as a graphic designer.

“My output seems to come from a physical and emotional sense of activity,” she explained, “and usually optimism.” At times in life, she’s been brimming with ideas, while at other points, she’s drawn a blank. But the key, she explained, is to accept both circumstances and run with the ideas when they strike. Here, we share just a few takeaways from a conversation with Scher on how to pursue a career in graphic design.

Trust your instincts

Photo by Can Swire, via Flickr.

The story of how Scher designed the Citibank logo has reached legendary proportions in the graphic design world, primarily because she got it right on the first try.

It was 1998, and Citicorp and Travelers Group had just merged to become the largest financial company in the world, and Citibank needed a logo to reflect it. The curve at the bottom of the T in the word “citi” reminded Scher of the curved handle of an umbrella—like Travelers Group’s old logo. She took a napkin and swished her pen back and forth between the dots of both Is, and so was born the new Citibank logo.

Scher said that a lot of her designs come from her first sketches. “Though it has happened,” she explained, “it’s rare that I don’t come up with a good initial idea.” The key is to always be observing and sketching. She’s not precious about her sketchbooks and usually jots down her ideas on whatever scrap pieces of paper she can find. Importantly, she makes a point to always be receptive and ready for inspiration to arise.

Find your voice through your surroundings

Bring in’Da Noise, Bring in’Da Funk poster for The Public Theater. Courtesy of Pentagram.

Him poster for The Public Theater. Courtesy of Pentagram.

If “New York” were an adjective, then Scher would easily rank as one the most New York graphic designers of all time. Her earliest contributions to the city’s typographic identity can be traced back to the 1995 poster for the Public Theater’s show Bring in’Da Noise, Bring in’Da Funk, where the weight and proportions of words seem to narrow, widen, and turn like the city’s streets. The impact of that first round of posters was so great that they’ve “inspired” a good number of other “tributes.”

Scher was born in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where her father worked on the U.S. Geological Survey as a photogrammetric engineer. Since her mother was from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the family often drove to the city to see relatives. “The typography of the Holland Tunnel is emblazoned in my memory as this entryway to something big and powerful,” Scher recalled. She keenly remembers the experience of emerging on the other side—the scale of the buildings, the narrowness of the streets, and the cacophony of signs that welcomed her into the city.

“The crowdedness of the city affected my typographic landscape,” she explained, adding that it’s also played a role in how she sees the world. “I look at it through an urban lens.” New York is her influence, her style, and its institutions are frequent clients; beyond the Public Theater and MoMA, she’s also lent her urban sensibilities to the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera.

She does, however, keep a studio in Connecticut to paint. It’s the middle ground between city and country that she “can’t stand,” she added with a chuckle.

Get your hands dirty

Area Codes and Time Zones, 2015. Paula Scher Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Scher is quick to profess her affinity for materials (“I love art supplies!” she exclaimed). Up until the 1990s, a graphic designer’s workstation would typically smell of paper and paint; its surface would host an array of rulers, eraser dust, and a hazardous number of X-Acto blades. Scher’s workstation at CBS Records in the 1970s was certainly all analog, but over time, as a computer replaced her art supplies (“It doesn’t smell like an art supply,” she said about the computer, “it smells like a car!”), Scher leaned into her own painting practice.

“I go to the country to paint because I have space there,” Scher said, referring to not just real estate, but also mental space that gives her a necessary distance from her weekday duties. She’ll put on a movie she’s seen a hundred times to play in the background as she obsesses over the slow and considered process that her paintings entail. Scher creates massive paintings of maps with as many small demographic details as she can fit in them. The dense, swirling typographies document everything from zip codes and county names to median home prices.

But painting is more than just a way to relax and regroup. “I have to challenge myself to grow bit by bit as a painter, and it’s a very different territory,” Scher explained. It reinvigorates her creative cycle and replenishes her enthusiasm for her work. “I think it kept me going,” she added.

Teach clients how to see

Example of Shake Shack’s graphic identity. Courtesy of Pentagram.

When you’re a graphic designer working at an agency, you have to include your client’s needs and tastes in your design. Scher has learned what works for her, and she’s mastered the art of the client call. “I know how to read what someone’s level of expectation [is], how much chance they’re going to take,” she explained.

She hops onto client calls with as many as five or more decision-makers on the other end of the line. Her questions are leading and conversational; she asks about the clients’ needs, purpose, and competition. If they come to her agency, Pentagram, she gives them the books that compile all the logos the firm has designed and asks them to mark the ones they like and the ones they hate.

“Ninety percent of what I do is…teach people how to see,” she explained. She schools them on why typeface matters, how form conveys a certain message, and describes it in relation to the client—“so that you’re making the design another adjective to express them,” Scher explained.

Subvert expectations (but don’t try too hard)

Box office at The Public Theater. Courtesy of Pentagram.

Scher was once on a panel at Rockefeller University, where they were trying to figure out what motivated both artists and scientists. “The thing we agreed upon was a real contempt for rules,” she explained.

Before 1994, the Public Theater was focused on promoting its seasonal programing. It made sense: The theater’s employees wanted the public to come see the shows, so they promoted the shows. But promotion for the shows was only as successful as the shows themselves.

For Scher, the expectation for a given project is just a starting point. “I sort of flopped that expectation by making it about the place, and the show became an aspect of the place—not the other way around,” she said. The visual identity she was crafting for the Public Theater gave the place a voice and a point of view in the public imagination. Scher acknowledged that during the first dozen years she designed for the theater, she did some “very nice” posters, but she feels that her current work is much better. Indeed, the precedents and expectations Scher subverts today are often her own past work.

And while the desire to challenge and subvert can fuel innovation, sometimes the job at hand is not that exciting. Scher likens it to being overdressed for a casual get-together with friends. At the end of the day, graphic design using typography has to be legible, informative, and efficient. “So many of the things that need to be designed, in a funny way, they sort of don’t matter,” she said.

Scher admits that graphic designers often have projects that don’t give them space to make breakthroughs—and that can be demoralizing. But, as she’s learned through her painting practice, it’s important to recognize that “there are small breakthroughs and there are large breakthroughs.”

from Artsy News

[travelworldnetwork]

The tiger shark was having a really bad day.

Other sharks and fish were picking on him and he was fed up. After fighting them, he met up with the hammerhead shark and some stingrays at Vanderlin Rocks in the waters of Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria to speak of their woes before they set out to find their own places to call home.

This forms one of the oldest stories in the world, the tiger shark dreaming. The ‘dreaming’ is what Aboriginal people call their more than 40,000-year-old history and mythology; in this case, the dreaming describes how the Gulf of Carpentaria and rivers were created by the tiger shark. The story has been passed down by word of mouth through generations of the Aboriginal Yanyuwa people, who call themselves ‘li-antha wirriyara’ or ‘people of the salt water’.

View image of The Aboriginal Yanyuwa people believe Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria was created by the tiger shark (Credit: Credit: The Institute of Marine Science)

As we sailed past the rocks and sandstone cliffs of Vanderlin Island, heading towards the mouth of the Wearyan River, dugongs and fish swam by. We were searching beneath the waves for a glimpse of shark fins, following in the path of the tiger shark in this creation story.

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The tiger shark’s journey was challenging as he forged his way through the Gulf, creating the water holes and rivers in the landscape. He was turned away by many other angry animals who did not want him to live with them. A wallaby even hurled rocks at him when he asked if he could stay with her. But as he swam, the dreaming story explains, the shark helped create the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria that we see today.

“Tiger sharks are very important in our dreaming,” said Aboriginal elder Graham Friday, who is a sea ranger here and one of the few remaining speakers of Yanyuwa language. Some people here still believe the tiger shark is their ancestor, and the Yanyuwa are known for their ‘tiger shark language’, as they have so many words for the sea and shark.

Tiger sharks are very important in our dreaming

The Yanyuwa traditionally fish these waters, catching and eating fish, turtle and dugong, but very rarely shark. Their heartlands lie over five main islands and more than 60 smaller, barren sandstone islets of the Sir Edward Pellew Group, which are scattered over 2,100 sq km. Vanderlin Island is the largest and furthest east, 32km from north to south and 13km wide. The 5.5m-long tiger shark, which travels over thousands of kilometres from these coastal waters to the Pacific Ocean each year, would have been a powerful mythological figure.

However, today conservationists are concerned about tiger shark numbers, with them currently listed as ‘Near Threatened’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“Not many sharks any more. But this dreaming story shows there were once,” Friday said.

Changes to climate have reduced their numbers, with warming waters having a knock-on effect on their growth and ability to swim long distances, according to scientists from the University of Adelaide. Although the shark may not be seen much in these waters anymore, it is still spoken of with respect, as the giver of life and creator of this land.

View image of The Yanyuwa traditionally fish the waters around the Sir Edward Pellew island group (Credit: Credit: Auscape/Getty Images)

Part of Friday’s job as a sea ranger is to patrol the Gulf islands to monitor the numbers of marine animals in the area and to educate people in the old ways of hunting – that you only take what you need to eat from the waters. But just as importantly, he is helping teach young Yanyuwa their language and the cultural significance of sea animals. The rangers also maintain ceremonial sites and burial grounds on the islands as well as the ancient rock art, which, although very weathered, still shows images of sharks.

“It makes sense to now have us, Aboriginal sea rangers, here to look after the seas; we know this country and how to fish sustainably,” Friday said.

Up here in ‘saltwater country’, I often heard the expression that everybody looks north towards the Gulf, where the sharks would come in from. But few Australians or tourists make it this far north. John Bradley, schoolteacher and linguist is one, and I first read about the region in his book, Singing Saltwater Country. The landscape here is flat, hot and sparse. To understand it you really need to understand the language and stories of its original owners who know it best: the Yanyuwa.

Yanyuwa's rhythms sound like the sea it so perfectly describes

Yanyuwa is a beautiful, poetic language. Its rhythms sound like the sea it so perfectly describes. The language precisely expresses a sense of place, often describing complex natural phenomenon in a single word, showing how attuned the Aboriginal people are to nature.

From the boat in the morning sun, I saw light beams shifting through water.

“Yurrbunjurrbun,” my guide Stephen told me, who is partly Aboriginal and has family in the Gulf. He knows some of the language and this region.

As we sailed, passing clouds cast their shadows on the sea’s surface.

“This is ‘narnu ngawurrwurra’ in Yanyuwa,” Stephen said, describing exactly what I was seeing.

I repeated the words, feeling their weight and resonance.

View image of Yanyuwa words such as yurrbunjurrbun (light beams shifting through water) show how attuned the Aboriginal people are to nature (Credit: Credit: Reinhard Dirscherl/Getty Images)

What’s especially unusual about Yanyuwa is that it’s one of the few languages in the world where men and women speak different dialects. Only three women speak the women's dialect fluently now, and Friday is one of few males who still speaks the men’s. Aboriginal people in previous decades were forced to speak English, and now there are only a few elderly people left who remember the language.

Friday told me that the women in his family taught him to speak their tongue as a child. Then in early adolescence, he learned the men’s language from his male relatives. While women have a passive understanding of men’s language, they do not speak it, and vice versa for the men. No-one I spoke to could say why these different dialects originated. Perhaps it’s because men and women had different roles and spent little time together tens of thousands of years ago, or maybe it was a sign of respect to not speak another’s dialect.

Language brings about understanding of the shark

Some local Aboriginal people told me, “It’s just the way it’s always been.”

But what is known is that the Yanyuwa language is intertwined with the animal.

“Language brings about understanding of the shark. The five different words women and men have for shark shows how close a bond Yanyuwa have with the animal,” Friday said.

Women’s words for the shark describe its nurturing side, as a bringer of food and life, while men’s words are more akin to ‘creator’ or ‘ancestor’.

You could be punished if you didn't speak the right dialect at the right time.

“See, there, to those rocks, if you broke the rules, you could be sent there!” Stephen said, as he gestured towards the barren Vanderlin Rocks.

I had a feeling he might have been adding a bit of drama to the situation, perhaps to stop me repeating his Yanyuwa words. But it’s true that the language’s beautiful tones belie the strictness surrounding its use. Men and women do not speak the other’s dialect as it shows disrespect in their culture or is considered rude. At the very least it sounds extremely odd if a man speaks the women’s dialect or vice versa.

View image of Graham Friday: “The five different words women and men have for shark shows how close a bond Yanyuwa have with the animal” (Credit: Credit: David Doubilet/Getty Images)

But Yanyuwa does not stop at just dialects for men and women – there are yet more for ceremony and respectful language, too. There was also ‘signing language’, according to Bradley, useful for hunting when people needed to be quiet or sometimes to signal when travellers were entering a sacred place, but few people remember many sign words now. Children also learned ‘string language’ – tying straw or string together in specific patterns to represent sea creatures and food.

Preserving the Yanyuwa language is tied to preserving the culture and creatures of the sea. Linguists like Bradley are working with Friday and other Yanyuwa people to preserve this language in written form. Without their language, it will be hard for the Yanyuwa to preserve their deep understanding of the sea and their home.

“English just does not understand the sea like Yanyuwa,” Stephen said.

View image of Preserving the Yanyuwa language is tied to preserving the creatures of the sea (Credit: Credit: Mico Siren/Alamy)

In 2015, parts of the Gulf were handed back to the Yanyuwa by the Australian Government, after a long fight as part of land claims in the region dating back to the 1970s. As I left tiger shark country, I felt pleased that it is being looked after by the rangers who know these waters so well, working to preserve this disappearing language and the creatures of these seas.

“It’s what we call futureproofing,” Bradley said.

That’s saving an ancient sea language for future generations to enjoy.

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[manouchka-june-blog]

That Time (among many others) When Serge Gainsbourg Revolutionized French Music

On the 24th March of 1971, the album Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg was released by Philips Music. Although this album was a commercial fail at that time (its sales only reached 71 400 copies), it is nowadays considered as a corner stone of French and international music. The French audience was surely not prepared for this cutting-edge album. Actually, the popular French musics of the early 1970’s were a mix of naive love songs sang by who are now called the « chanteurs à minettes », like Mike Brant or Alain Chamfort. Looking at the most successful hits of these years, you will find plenty of sappy titles such as Si tu savais combien je t’aime by Christian Adam (1973) or Fan de toi by Michel Delpech (1970). Thus, we can easily understand why the troubled and depraved relationship between a fifteen year old British girl and an old French guy, which is exposed in this album, was not exactly what people expected to listen to. How did this album passed from a fail to the fourth best French rock album of all times according to the magazine Rolling Stones?

Histoire de Melody Nelson is what is called a « concept-album ». Music historians attribute the genesis of this new kind of album to jazz musicians such as John Coltrane with Afer Midnight (1957) or Miles Davis with Bitchies Brew (1970). It was then adopted and enhanced by rock artists such as Bob Dylan with Blonde on Blonde (1966) or the Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). This new genre of composing music is an album which is built like a novel, or at least a story, where all the titles of the album are linked together and evolve around common themes. Thus, concept-albums often include settings and characters who interact together and evolve. This way to write melodies was innovative in modern music because, at that time, this kind of narrative construction was only to be found in classical operas. What is very powerful with the idea of concept-albums is that it can be applied to any genre of music and knows no boundaries regarding the musical style or production.

In Histoire de Melody Nelson, we follow a male character, whom voice is incarnated by Serge Gainsbourg himself. This character hits a young girl riding a bike -incarnated by the graceful and heart-breaking Jane Birkin- with his Rolls Royce. Here is the dramatic opening of their disturbing romance. As the songs go by, the main character starts to regret what Melody makes him do, and sometimes drowns in madness because of his love for her. In the end, he lost her in a plane crash. All along the album, Gainsbourg depicts a violent and forbidden love story, which could only conclude on a dramatic end. This story was obviously far from the sentimental themes treated in French pop music in that time.

Jane Birkin in Melody’s role

One of the reasons this album was misunderstood by the French audience was the foreign codes and references it convoques. Histoire de Melody Nelson obviously explores the nabokovian figure of the nymphet, which is now a recurrent scheme and has been explored by many artists. Althought, at that time this reference was not shared by most of the population. Flirting with tabous like pedophilia, prostitution or drugs, the story of Melody Nelson had the potential to be what we call today a « bad buzz » and gain censorship like Lolita did when it was published by Gallimard in France in 1959. However, Gainsbourg’s album was just ignored.

book cover by Penguin Books for Lolita, by Nabokov

It can be explained by its kind of elitist compositions. Actually this album does not fit in the general standards of pop songs, which last between two and four minutes. In this album, Gainsbourg felt free to create some seven-minute-long songs, which do not follow the pop musical construction in alternate verses and chorus. Also, Gainsbourg does not really sing in this album, he rather recites long texts full of metaphors on death, love and life. The depth of these texts surely doesn’t help to make this album more accessible, but this is what makes it such a masterpiece of poetry. Histoire de Melody Nelson is also seen as a musical masterpiece thanks to its lyrical and jazzy arrangements. The strange mix created by the strings assemble and the electrical bass evolving together in obsessive and tormented melodies gives a mysterious and fascinating character to this album.

Although his intentions were misunderstood when he released his album, Gainsbourg definitely achieved something new in French music with Histoire de Melody Nelson. Above all, he introduced France to the concept-albums, which are now recurrent in the French musical landscape

[micaramel]

Artist: Jack Whitten

Venue: Hauser & Wirth, London

Exhibition Title: More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten, 1979 – 1989

Date: September 27 – November 18, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London. Copyright Jack Whitten. Installation photos by Alex Delfanne; Individual photos by Genevieve Hanson.

Press Release:

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Jack Whitten’s first-ever solo exhibition in London and the gallery’s inaugural project with the artist in the United Kingdom. Whitten is an American abstract painter celebrated for his innovative transfiguration of paint in works equally alert to materiality, politics and metaphysics. Mentored by both Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis, with a career spanning five decades Whitten holds a unique place in the narrative of postwar American art. Curated by Richard Shiff, this presentation has a historical focus, bringing together a large number of Whitten’s paintings from 1979 to 1989. These years marked a period of intense experimentation for the artist and reflect his intellectual engagement with contemporary changes in science and technology. Whitten’s work is a focus of ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’, on view at Tate Modern until 22 October 2017.

Whitten’s diverse practice bridges gestural abstraction and process art. He experiments ceaselessly to arrive at a nuanced language of painting that hovers between mechanical automation and spiritual expression. The common denominators across the many phases of Whitten’s artistic practice – which he describes as ‘conceptual’ – are zealous technical exploration and a mastery of abstraction’s potential to map geographic, social, and psychological locations, particularly within the African-American experience. To account for his experimental attitude to materials, Whitten recalls his time as a pre-medical student at Tuskegee Institute (today Tuskegee University) in the 1950s. He once said, ‘[It was] an all-black college where the African-American scientist George Washington Carver did all his experiments. His laboratory is still intact. He was also a painter. I’m convinced today that a lot of my attitudes toward painting and making, and experimentation came from George Washington Carver. He made his own pigments, his own paints, from his inventions with peanuts. The obsession with invention and discovery impressed me’.

Uniting Whitten’s work from the period 1979 – 1989 is a process analogous to electronic imaging and photography. Inspired by photographic technology of the time – cathode-ray scanning, radar, electron microscopy – he conceived of his painting as a process of transmission, channelling the subjective qualities of a person, spirit or sense of time and place, through a coded repeatable unit. Hence, we see the dedication of certain works to notable figures, such as novelist James Baldwin and artists Norman Lewis or Andy Warhol. Whitten articulates his approach to abstraction in photographic terms, saying, ‘I maintain that abstraction is a symbol. It’s very much like holding a camera. I can direct it toward any symbol that I choose. As a painter, I have to locate that symbol in the paint, as opposed to giving an illustrated narrative. The narrative content and the figure are still in there – they’re built into the paint’.

In 1980 a fire devastated Whitten’s studio, resulting in a three-year hiatus in his practice. In 1983 The Studio Museum in Harlem, organised the exhibition, ‘Jack Whitten: Ten Years, 1970 – 1980’ curated by long-time champion of the artist, Henry Geldzahler. With the prospect of a new show, and aided by Geldzahler’s curatorial reflection, Whitten’s return to the studio ushered in a prolific new phase of painting – he returned to the gesture of the hand, working with small, self-designed tools and reintroducing the paintbrush. He began by developing a series of circular oil and acrylic reliefs that call to mind systems of celestial navigation. Using a trammel head, Whitten incised arcs, lines and concentric circles into quarter-inch-thick acrylic planes. The dashed lines reveal buried layers of primary colour underneath a large swathe of black or grey, as if to offer a glimmer of a hidden cosmos. The artist describes these works, including ‘Annabelle II’ and ‘To My Valentine’ (both 1984), as ‘just explosive – geometry and a lot of gesture’.

1985 saw the artist introduce wire mesh netting as a tool, using it to create a grid on wet acrylic. Each small square is coloured individually, creating a canvas that flickers like a distant metropolis. Its pixel-like elements derive from grids designed for electronic scanning. The artist would return to a similar use of units of colour in the late 2000s with a series titled E-Stamp.

Whitten refers to his DNA paintings as having ‘a unified surface that opens to multi-dimension’, which seems to describe a raster (a pattern of parallel scanning lines followed by the electron beam on a television screen or computer monitor). Curator Richard Shiff explains the artist’s process for this series saying, ‘like a light-sensitive photographic film, a pictorial raster awaits its activation, as if differentiated tonalities might be projected from within the surface as much as from without. Whitten generated a raster by applying a grey slip over existing abstract imagery and then raking the slip in a horizontal direction to create a set of lines that, from above, ‘developed’ the image below. He repeated this process vertically to complete the grid. The grid of parallel lines connotes the raster of an electronic imaging system; in contrast, the scattering of variant greys beneath the lines resembles the irregular distribution of tone in the emulsion of analog photography’. The raster and image compete for visual attention as one and the same surface, resulting in a painting with strong photographic depth. In ‘DNA III’, ‘DNA X’ and ‘DNA XII’ (all 1979) it is as if a layer of netting obscures a blurred vista beyond.

Also during this period, Whitten first conceived of the surface of his painting as ‘skin’, associating the incisions and marks with keloids (scarring after skin is cut). Whitten would apply the concept of ‘painting as skin’ to objects, and he developed a series of collage-like reliefs from acrylic castings of objects and surfaces he scavenged from around the city – using plaster of Paris he would take moulds from man-hole covers, car tires, and walls that were later cast in acrylic paint. Titled ‘site paintings’, for Whitten these works are complex topographical maps of the urban landscape. The matrix of lines and shapes incorporate, and figuratively recover, lived experiences and histories of the urban environment. In works such as ‘Site I’ (1986) and ‘Site IV’ (1986), the mottled texture and monochromatic colour palette create the illusion of shifting planar space and set the relief surface in motion. The brightly coloured, vibrant works ‘Ode To Andy: For Andy Warhol’ (1986) and ‘Willi Meets The Keeper (For Willi Smith)’ (1987) illustrate an evolution with this technique. Here the castings are layered and set amongst other fragments of cured, acrylic paint that function as a dry palette, and the cast forms lean towards abstraction. Recalling this technique Whitten says ‘I’m dealing now with paint as a collage, paint as sculpture… I don’t paint a painting, I make a painting’.

Animism is founded on the belief that a supernatural power organises and animates the material universe – the Spirit needs Matter to manifest itself, whether that be in nature, flesh or art. Whitten grew up within the Black Fundamentalist Church where animist religious beliefs were not a formalised system of belief condoned by the Church. However, being sensitive to spiritual vibrations, he absorbed the animist presence of spirit as a fact of being. When speaking on this subject in 1998, Whitten said, ‘We are familiar with things being either / or, abstract or representational, but there is a third order out there… an image comes out of matter… I’m aware of something being caught in that matter… There is a relation here when I speak of spirit and matter… it is possible to direct something into that matter’. In the Site works, paint becomes light and matter in one – the low reliefs capture more light than a flat surface, conveying a unique sense of place. By building and embellishing the surface of the canvas he gave the form of low sculpture relief to the animist principle. This is in contrast to the artist’s earlier paintings for which he pushed aside layers of paint to release streams of light and energy seemingly trapped beneath the surface. Whitten’s interpretation of animism is at the heart of his contribution to post-war contemporary art – he extended the vocabulary of modernist abstraction to include a deeper, more spiritual experience of contemporary life.

About the artist Jack Whitten’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including the major travelling show ‘Jack Whitten. Five Decades of Painting’, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego CA (2014); ‘Jack Whitten. Erasures’, SCAD Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah GA (2012); ‘Jack Whitten’, MoMa PS1, Long Island City NY (2007); ‘Jack Whitten. Ten Years, 1970 – 1980’, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem NY (1983); and ‘Jack Whitten. Paintings’, Whitney Museum of America Art, New York NY (1974).

His work is included in prestigious public and private collections around the globe, including the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Tate, London, England.

Whitten has received numerous grants and fellowships throughout his career, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1964), Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowments for the Arts (1973), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1976). In 2014 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. Brandeis University awarded Whitten an Honorary Doctorate in May 2016 and in September of the same year he received the 2015 National Medal of Arts in recognition of his major contribution to the cultural legacy of the US.

Link: Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth

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from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2zN0zGU

[katebushwick]

ARTISTS, AESTHETICISATION AND GENTRIFICATION

At the same time, within the cultural field there is an abiding struggle to shape legitimising principles between these autonomous criteria of an avant-garde and the compromising criteria of market-determined values. So there is a tendency towards an insidious subversion of the other-worldliness of an autonomous aesthetic disposition, which is predicated, reasons Bourdieu, upon “the suspension and removal of economic necessity and by objective and subjective distance from groups subjected to those determinisms” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 54).3 Its locus within the dominant class defines the sociology of the aesthetic disposition and thus its availability to dominated members of that class. Provocatively, Bourdieu identifies bourgeois adolescents and women who are

typically excluded from the economic and political power held by men in their class as sometimes adopting responses of aesthetic appropriation or resistance

Bourgeois adolescents ... sometimes ex- press their distance from the bourgeois world which they cannot really appropriate by a refusal of complicity whose most refined expression is a propensity towards aesthetics and aestheticism (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 55).

Such a habitus is one example of a ‘stylisation of life’, most fully realised by artists, that informs and is formed by aesthetic views and practices—including, as will be seen, the occupation and valorisation of space.

There has been a long tradition in art history of extolling the creative individual, the artist, the anguished performative genius. There is, of course, immense personal creativity in art works, and here it seems as if, partly for his own disciplinary objective of establishing sociology over against philosophy in the French academic canon, Bourdieu (1993) tends towards an over-socialisation of the artistic project. But he is surely correct to state that a hagiographic celebration of individual artistic genius is a hugely incomplete analysis—for art is part of a much broader social terrain, reminiscent of Sharon Zukin’s narrower, but evocative term, the artistic mode of production (Zukin, 1982). The social contexts of art have be- come a significant emphasis in recent art criticism, extending earlier work such as Becker’s (1982) study of the art world, with its fellow artists, colleges and critics, its bars and hang-outs, buyers and patrons, galleries and museums, to a much tougher critique of the social consequences, for some even the social purposes, of art which have much to do it seems with the politics of displacement (Deutsche, 1996).

The artistic mode of production involves social relations between different players in the art world, but Bourdieu (1993) makes that analysis more formal as he considers in addition the conditions that permit an auton- omous artistic field, exemplified in the slogan

‘art for art’s sake’, to exist at all. In other words, art should be understood not only as a material product with a creator, not only as a symbolic product with an audience and set of facilitators who bring it to the attention of the audience, but also as a manifestation of positions within the artistic field as a whole, the positions of predecessors and contemporaries, of valued and devalued, of dominants and dominated. Bourdieu regards the art- work as a joint creation. It is not just the creation of the artist, other than in a crude material sense, for its value has to be received and confirmed in an intersubjective art world. But this art world is itself shaped by the whole field of cultural production.

The quasi-magical potency of the [artist’s] signature is nothing other than the power, bestowed on certain individuals, to mobilize the symbolic energy produced by the functioning of the whole field, ie. the faith in the game and its stakes that is produced by the game itself (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 81).

Value should be understood as socially produced in a ‘game’ involving the artist, the art-world and also the social conditions producing the art-world, including the position of the art-work in an historical space of genres, techniques and patterns of recognition. “In short it is a question of understand- ing works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 37). Now what does this argument have to say to gentrification as an aestheticisation of urban space? What defines the field of gentrification?

The Field of Gentrification

Bourdieu’s development of the field of cultural production as the proper site for the creation of value is a powerful heuristic and the remainder of this paper will extend it to think of gentrification also as a field of relationships, practices and historical traces. This historical standpoint, so emphasised by Bourdieu, is critical, for there are fragments of precedent and memory that are part of the cultural codes of the gentrification ‘game’

and that shape the field into the present. A first step is to establish some of the key relationships in the field: first, the type of capital held by artists, and, secondly, their position within the dominant class, albeit as Bourdieu would have it, as the dominated segment of the dominant class.

In North America, the life of the artist is an invitation to voluntary poverty and here is the first manifestation of a calculus that is incomprehensible to economism. Surveys abound highlighting the minimal economic capital of the artist. A 1993 analysis of Canada’s cultural producers found artists in the lowest niches; painters and sculptors re- ported a mean annual net income from cultural activity of under $8000, dancers, musicians and writers, $15 000 or less (Statistics Canada, 1995). A few years ear- lier, a Toronto survey had discovered that half of a sample of visual and performing artists had registered a net loss in art-related income the previous year (Social Data Re- search, 1990), while in New York an ethnography of urban artists in SoHo estimated that only 1i n a100,at best 1 in 20,would achieve commercial success (Simpson, 1981). In art, as in statistics, the significance level seems to stop at 5 per cent. Or does it? For the deep deficit in economic capital is relieved by a surfeit of cultural capital. Re- member Carole Itter’s assessment of the density of graduate degrees on her block in Strathcona. The survey of Canada’s cultural producers revealed the same pattern. Al- though economically impoverished, artists had very high levels of education, with 51 per cent possessing university degrees— more than three times the national workforce average.

Not only the appropriation of high levels of cultural capital, but also the discipline and achievement of learning an aesthetic disposition, identify artists as members of the middle class. Correlations of the location of artists in Canadian cities in the 1970s identified them as overlapping with the residential areas of higher socioeconomic status, if sometimes on their margins in districts whose gentility has become frayed at the

edges (Ley, 1996). This interdigitation is evident, for example, in several of Margaret Atwood’s Toronto novels where characters move between the social worlds of artist or writer in Cabbagetown or the Toronto Is- lands and such middle-class bastions as the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum, showing joint membership of a larger professional middle class in the central city. So, too, the studios of art colleges are filled by the children of middle-class parents. At Vancouver’s art college

The students are protected and middle- class. They face 10 years of apprenticeship after 4–6 years of little to no income. They have wonderful ideas but not the means to follow them through. One hundred and fifty graduate each year. A lot of them are very quickly on welfare (interview with assemblage artist).

Here, succinctly, is Bourdieu’s concept of rich cultural capital, limited economic capital, but nonetheless membership of the dominant class.

Artists, however, are very special members of the middle class for they stretch its imagination, its desires, even its practices, beyond its norms and conventions. The artistic lifestyle, like the creative art-work, deliberately presses the borders of conventional middle-class life, while at the same time representing its advancing, colonising arm. In a more abstract discussion, Habermas (1983, p. 5) declared that “the avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured”. But this venturing is part of a broader field of relationships where the dialectical ties be- tween artistic imagination and middle-class convention may lead to a synthesis in the aestheticised product. One such valorised product is space.

Artists’ Spaces

As modern art attempted to create a world for itself with greater independence from the patronage of the church, the court and the aristocracy, so artists congregated in large

modern cities such as Paris, New York, Lon- don and Berlin, close to the art world, their market and, perhaps, most important, close to each other. Various avant-garde movements have been synonymous with urban life (Mar- cus, 1989), and so it remains today. Artists remain disproportionately associated with large urban areas. In 1991, just over half of Canada’s artists were located in the three principal cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Further specificity exists within these three metropolitan areas, for, against a national standard (of 1.0), suburbs are under- represented as homes for artists, while cen- tral cities are overrepresented. Average location quotients of 0.97 in the suburbs contrasted with a quotient of 2.46 in the central city. The 1996 Census of Canada uses a new occupational classification that permits a more precise specification of artists’ occu- pations. Now against the standard of the metropolitan area as a whole ( 􏰃 1.0), a loca- tion quotient of 2.95 is identified for artists in the City of Toronto, compared with a figure of 0.62 in the remainder of the metropolitan area. Similar, if less polarised profiles existed in Montreal (1.87, 0.68) and Vancouver (1.65, 0.74). Moreover, adding the older oc- cupational classification shows a steady in- crease in centre-city concentration in each of the four censuses from 1981 to 1996 in each metropolitan area. Within the inner-city neighbourhoods, quotients are even higher (Figures 1 and 2). In Toronto, a semi-circle of tracts around the downtown area registers quotients in excess of 4.2; in Vancouver a broken circle of tracts around downtown has values of 2.5 or greater. This is a remarkable development considering that Toronto and Vancouver have consistently had the most expensive housing markets in the nation. Artists must be enduring considerable sacrifices of both housing quality and afford- ability to maintain this residential habit. Once again, their behaviour defies economic rationality, confirming that they are marching to a different drummer.

Repeating the evidence of the Census, a survey of artists in Toronto identified the importance of a central location as part-and-

parcel of the artistic habitus. Among import- ant locational requirements, 86 per cent specified a residence in downtown Toronto and (supporting Richard Florida) 85 per cent required a ‘socially tolerant’ district (Social Data Research, 1990). Interviews with artists in Vancouver add some flesh to this skeleton and revealed that not just any central-city neighbourhood will do. A sculptor showed the keen spatial differentiation that may take place

Artists need authentic locations. You know artists hate the suburbs. They’re too confining. Every artist is an anthropol- ogist, unveiling culture. It helps to get some distance on that culture in an en- vironment that does not share all of its presuppositions, an old area, socially di- verse, including poverty groups.

Poverty areas (like Carole Itter’s Strathcona) also offer cheaper rents, making a cultural virtue of economic necessity. In contrast, areas, including areas formerly occupied by artists, lose their allure with redevelopment even if heritage preservation or historical or cultural theming is part of the new landscape. A painter revealed the cultural as well as economic limitations of such redeveloped districts, including the festival market of Granville Island, very popular with Vancou- ver’s inner-city professionals

I used to work with Dundarave printmak- ers on Granville Island, a dreadful place, Disneyland. You can’t ever park there, it’s too planned, too sanitised. It’s better if the city keeps out, rents get too high, the place becomes too sanitised. The live-work spaces the City set up in Yaletown are too expensive and sterile. They’re alright, you know, if you like wall-to-wall clean.

The live-work spaces, frequently marketed as artists’ lofts, are rarely popular (or afford- able) with many artists. An artist interviewee confided that she “doesn’t know anyone who lives in these artists’ studios”. What she sees there and in other redeveloped central-city settings is something other than authenticity.

Commodification is what I see. Gastown looks pretty but there’s nothing for me there. Is it a romantic notion that brings people to places like Granville Island? There’s no place there for me.

Once again, the aesthetic disposition inverts the normal ranking of stimuli. Those com- modified sites that are popular, even popular with middle-class professionals, are subject to aesthetic rejection, while what Bourdieu (1984, p. 40) might class as ordinary and everyday, even plebeian, are subject not only to aestheticisation, but to aesthetic approval. “An old area, socially diverse, including pov- erty groups” can be valorised as authentic, symbolically rich and free from the com- modification that depreciates the meaning of place. For the aesthetic disposition, com-

modified locations, like commercialised art, are regarded as sterile, stripped of meaning: “there’s nothing for me there”. The suburbs and the shopping mall, emblems of a mass market and a failure of personal taste, are rejected. The related but opposing tendencies of cultural and economic imaginaries re- appear; spaces colonised by commerce or the state are spaces refused by the artist. But, as scholars know, this antipathy is not mutual; the surfeit of meaning in places frequented by artists becomes a valued resource for the entrepreneur.

[trendingnewsb]

How Hong Kong artists reflect on the city’s difficult relationship with China

Hong Kong (CNN)In an industrial complex on Hong Kong’s island of Ap Lei Chau, Kacey Wong’s art installations and performance props set an idyllic scene. Below the studio’s wide balcony, freighters and pleasure craft set out into the South China Sea.

“I don’t feel safe,” Wong tells CNN, in the run up to this weekend’s 20th anniversary of the handover of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China. “Anything can happen.”

Using art as resistance

Wong, who was born in 1970, has made a career of “resistance work” — using art as a bulwark to what he sees as the “eradication” of Hong Kong culture during its first twenty years as a Chinese city.

“When I was living under British rule, I didn’t feel like there was a colony going on as much as (I do) now,” he says. “Now I really feel it. I feel like this is the colony of the Chinese Communist Party.”

For a 2017 performance piece, “Everything is Fine,” Wong displayed the artwork’s title on a placard while bound to a lamp post, duct tape covering his mouth. The work was a response to the disappearance of five booksellers in 2015. The televised confessions and return of some of the detained men from mainland China reflects what Wong describes as the “absurdity” of Hong Kong’s political situation.

Read: Missing Hong Kong bookseller: I was kidnapped by Chinese ‘special forces’

Protest is the cornerstone of Wong’s artistic resistance. Between 2011 and 2014 he appeared at Hong Kong’s annual vigil for the Tiananmen Square massacre dressed as the ghost of a slain student demonstrator — on a bicycle. The work, titled “Don’t want to remember, dare not forget,” was a high-profile contribution to an act of remembrance that goes to the core of Hong Kong identity.

“I remember, back in 1997, when the Chinese Government sent all the tanks in through the border, and I was so scared,” Wong recalls. “I was so surprised that when these armored (vehicles) from the People’s Liberation Army drove across the border, there was a bunch of people holding little flags to welcome them.”

As Wong recalls the incident, he dabs correction fluid on a wooden panel — a work of art he began in 2007, ten years after Hong Kong was passed from Britain to China. “WhiteOut” presents Wong’s unsubtle view of the broken — or ignored — promise of “One Country Two Systems,” the principle behind Hong Kong’s access to rights and freedoms not afforded to mainland China. Every year, Wong blots out one of the work’s fifty panels, marking another step toward 2047, when the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to the pledge will expire.

“I should have used red paint,” Wong laughs ruefully.

‘Searching for direction’

High above Admiralty — the area where Hong Kong’s legislative chambers meet its skyscrapers — artist Chloe Cheuk has suspended three crystal balls atop a steel post. The 28-year-old created the artwork to reflect the city’s new cultural dynamic.

The interactive piece, titled “…Until I Am Found” is made from glass, concrete and steel. It invites passersby to peer into each crystal ball and orient themselves in relation to their ever-changing city. As they do so, the skyline appears to meld and distort, frustrating hopes of seeing into Hong Kong’s future.

“We are still trying to figure out our position in the world,” Cheuk says. “Hong Kong is losing its strengths slowly. Shanghai and other Chinese cities are taking over as ‘global’ cities. China has (put) Hong Kong is an awkward position, we are constantly searching for direction.”

Cheuk’s work was commissioned for an exhibition called “Breathing Space,” in which the Hong Kong chapter of the Asia Society asked 11 artists to engage with the politics, history and urban landscape of the city. The exhibition allows visitors to question whether Hong Kong’s increasingly cramped living conditions mirror people’s growing inability to express themselves politically.

“We’re constantly getting hints from the government,” Cheuk says. “I am quite aware of the restrictions on me but that doesn’t mean that I won’t make political art. We have to accept the facts of reality, we have to find a way to deal with the problem and survive. We need to deal with issues creatively.”

Shrinking freedoms

Members Hong Kong’s coterie of political artists say that they feel the pressure of shrinking freedom of expression. While Beijing keeps most of its political coercion for artists working in mainland China, the heavy-handed treatment of figures like Ai Wei Wei has struck a nerve in Hong Kong. Many of the artists CNN spoke to question how far they can push a political message.

Read: Ai Weiwei: Trapped in China, I saw my creations ‘through a mirror’

Nonetheless, the organizers of “Breathing Space” claim not to have felt pressure from Beijing to self-censor. Instead, executive Director of the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Alice Mong, says that contemporary art in Hong Kong explores a “duality” that exists in a city at the crossroads of East and West. “There has been no political pressure from China,” she emphasized to CNN.

Contemporary artists in Hong Kong have become active participants in society, according to 31-year-old artist Sampson Wong. Wong sees his art as an opportunity to address an “intense political contradiction (between) the People’s Republic of China and (Hong Kong) people’s anxiety”.

His 2016 work “Countdown Machine” emblazoned a digital clock face on the city’s tallest building, literally counting down the seconds until 2047 — a year now imprinted in the public consciousness.

Read: The daring message hidden on Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper

When Ai Wei Wei was jailed in 2011, Kacey Wong (no relation to Sampson Wong) called on Hong Kong artists to use their freedom to speak out for their mainland colleagues. Now, he says it is time for Hong Kong artists to look at the tactics of political expression used in China.

“We’ll go to the internet — maybe (we’ll) use code,” Wong says. “That’s what’s going on in mainland China. They are not saying it directly; they are saying it sideways. Instead of saying June 4 (the date of the Tiananmen massacre), they say May 35.”

“The whole of China is resisting, but because of this massive suppression (people’s voices are becoming) more and more obscure. In Hong Kong we don’t have to do that. But that freedom is diminishing very fast.”

Read more: http://ift.tt/2upDXpX

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[lisaraespsychotronica]

Investigations Into Binaural Beats and Solfeggio Frequencies

* This is a more in depth look at the material I presented as part of week 4 of my process journal

PRODUCTION STRATEGIES WEEK 5-

SOME IDEAS RELATED TO MY PROJECT

I’d been investigating the idea of Solfeggio frequencies and Binaural Beats as a way of stimulating healing

through sound Interestingly in terms of Magical Correspondences the 5th frequency of 741 is called Sol traditionally a word for the Sun in the major Western Scale SOL is generally a G though in order to tune my instruments exactly with the Solfeggio of 741 I have tuned the Instruments to 440.6. In order to achieve this I had to switch my project from Protools to Logic as none of the virtual instruments in Pro-tools allow exact tunings (They are still reloading Native instruments on the school computer). Logic allows you to tune your project to any desired tuning system, which is nice. The 741 Hz  solfeggio frequency is meant to stimulate intuition. The scale is a medieval and  was used in Gregorian chants and has 6 notes. At this stage I’m not a hundred precent on the validity of these frequencies if they are ‘Magic” but it seems as good a place to start as any and I have to say I felt quite lovely after working on the 741hz piece. I made a binaural beat from the 741 theta brain wave.I decided to write the piece in F and note G as that was more in tune with the 440.6 tuning system I found a website that listed how to tune guitar/ piano to be in tune with the solfeggio frequencies. 440.6 is very close to the standard pitch of 440 so I figured if I want to I can tune my guitar to this pretty easily (I had to do an extensive search for a tuner that could detect such micro frequencies.) I also did some investigation into musical intervals and the feelings they are meant to induce.

For instance why a minor third is considered to feel sad.  Interestingly I found an article by Simon heather-http://www.simonheather.co.uk/pages/chapters/thehealingpowerofmusicalintervals_sample.pdf

He describes how unison is generally used in mantras as it creates wholeness. The 5th creates comfort and creativity the major six is considered the most beautiful.  He had this to say about the fifth and how it can be used to stimulate the energy centres of the body-

FIFTH INTERVAL - NOTES C-G

Fabien Maman says that, "The fifth interval expands in all directions and provokes the widest movement of energy in space. It can be heard in Brazilian music where there is often the interval of the fifth between guitar and voice." Because of its stimulating nature, the cycle of fifths can be used both to concentrate and align chakra energies. The following order can be used to relax the body and bring about the maximum expansion of consciousness: - F C G D A E B." (Each note being five notes above the last)

In my piece I used this idea with 5ths the main tonal building block it also interestingly led back to another reason to use F as the basis of my work. I start with F as a tone to bring that sense of tuning or unity. It then spreads out to use fifths in this pattern for chakra alignment. For the melodic parts I use a major arpeggio as it is the most recognizable building block of western musical systems and I wanted a sense of universality. I also experimented with another pattern based on fifths and sixths. Simon heather describes the fifth as the sweetest interval and as a way to open yourself to the universe. Using octaves to create a sense of togetherness. Interestingly he also shows that intervals make specific patterns under and oscilloscope it would be interesting if this could be a visual component of the work.

I found another website quoting a book by Kay Gardner ( also used in the Simon Heather article) I should find this book Interesting as it breaks down the building blocks of healing music. Also of note is how when making my piece I felt it needed both drones and melodic components that repeat I was thinking about the Indian and its use in meditative practice. The form of the Raga is another point of departure I could look into. I felt that just drones or music wasn’t enough on its own . I would like to add rhythmic elements and the sounds of nature I’ve described above. I also feel its really important to have played instruments and not just synth as it seems in authentic in some way. I’d like to find a harp player as its so inspiring in the work of Alice Coltrane.

Kay Gardner, author of Sounding the Inner Landscape: Music as Medicine, has identified nine elements that demonstrate the healing effects of music.

1. Drone – healing music should have a constant tone that drones behind a simple melody. 2. Repetition – short musical phrases, vocal and instrumental, should be repeated over and over which produce a calming effect. 3. Harmonics – long sustained tones produce harmonic overtones, which balance the entire physical body at the cellular level. 4. Rhythm – rhythm duplicates many pulses in the human body and via entrainment, move the pulses into harmonious pattern 5. Harmony – affects the emotions. Various keys (minor or major evoke feelings of joyfulness, sadness or calmness. 6. Melody – the mind becomes enchanted with melody and ceases to engage in its continuous mental chit-chat. 7.Instrumental colours –each instrument has its own unique vibration. (playing the note of C on the piano would sound very different to the same note on a violin) 8. Form. – pieces that have many changes in tempo will affect stimulate us and steady pieces will calm us. 9. Intention – music played with a focused intention of healing would contain that intention in its frequency.

The main six Solfeggio frequencies are:

396 Hz – Liberating Guilt and Feart

417 Hz – Undoing Situations and Facilitating Change

528 Hz – Transformation and Miracles (DNA Repair)

639 Hz – Connecting/Relationships

741 Hz – Expression/Solutions

852 Hz – Returning to Spiritual Order

Binaural Beats are a way of stimulating the brain waves of humans by creating two sine waves and spacing the frequencies of the two tones within the Hz range specified and panning them hard left and right to stimulate the brain function required, For my first piece I used the spacing of HZ as that number ties into the use of the number 6 in the talismanic square of the sun. This works at the theta range to stimulate imagination daydreaming, As Apollo the sun is the father of the muses and father of imagination this seemed correct. For the most part my decision making had been based on a type of intuition anyway which seems the right way using the tables and correspondences as an entry point to the work. I was talking with my friend who runs a childrens music based play group. She said if you could make a deep sleep track that works parents would flock to it. We also talked about how she had an African drummer in he would drum the kids who seemed angry before would start shaking and rocking to music and would be happy after, She expressed interest in testing the workd on children which would be interesting as Childrens ears are clean and they would be a blank slate without the musical cultural consitioning of adults. I should  also look into rhythmic functions of music in my creation

▪   Beta (14 – 30 Hz) – This is our awake and active state of awareness. In Beta state, we have lots of energy as we get things done and are in our peak concentration mode. If we stay in this mode too much, it can be very stressful to our minds and bodies.

▪   Alpha (8 – 14 Hz) This is our awake but relaxed state of awareness. In this state we can figure out creative solutions to problems. Our mind is clear and able focus on a goal. When we watch top performing athletes, chess players or jazz musicians, they are drawing from their alpha state of awareness.

▪   Theta (4 – 8 Hz) This state is associated with imagining and dreaming during sleep as well as imagining and daydreaming during the day. Our memories and things we learn are stored and retrieved from our subconscious mind in this state.

▪   Delta (0.5 – 4 Hz) This state is associated with deep sleep. Our minds and bodies are getting the rest and rejuvenation we require before the new day begins.

▪   https://ask.audio/articles/how-sound-affects-you-making-binaural-beats

* please note I did not write the material below  it was copied this website https://attunedvibrations.com/solfeggio/

Where do these tones come from?

According to Professor Willi Apel, the origin of the ancient Solfeggio scale can be traced back to a Medieval hymn to John the Baptist. The hymn has this peculiarity that the first six lines of the music commenced respectively on the first six successive notes of the scale, and thus the first syllable of each line was sung to a note one degree higher that the first syllable of the line that preceded it. Because the music held mathematic resonance, the original frequencies were capable of spiritually inspiring mankind to be more “god-kind”.

The original Solfeggio scale was developed by a Benedictine monk, Guido d’Arezzo

(c. 991 AD – c. 1050 AD). It was used by singers to learn chants and songs more easily. Today we know the Solfeggio scale as seven ascending notes assigned to the syllables Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti. The original scale was six ascending notes assigned to Ut-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La. The syllables for the scale were taken from a hymn to St. John the Baptist, UtQueant Laxis, written by Paulus Diaconus.

Guidod’Arezzo

In the mid-1970’s Dr. Joseph Puleo, a physician and America’s leading herbalist, found six electro-magnetic sound frequencies that corresponded to the syllables from the hymn to St. John the Baptist.

How were the frequencies discovered?

According to the documentation provided in “Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse“, Dr. Joseph Puleo was introduced, through an open vision, to the Pythagorean method of numeral reduction. Using this method, he discovered the pattern of six repeating codes in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 7, verses 12 through 83.

The Pythagorean method is a simple reduction method, used to turn big numbers into single digits. The values of all digits in the number are added up. When after the first addition the number still contains more than one digit,the process is repeated.Here’s an example:456 can be reduced to 4+5+6 = 15, and subsequently reduced to 1+5=6. So the number 456 reduces eventually to the single digit 6.

Pythagoras of Samos

Dr. Joseph Puleo found repetitions of a single issue or subject in the Book of Numbers. In Chapter 7, verse 12 he found a reference to the first day, the second day was mentioned in verse 18, the third day in verse 24, and so forth until the final reference in verse 78 which is speaking of the twelfth day.

The Pythagorean reduction of these verse numbers is:

Verse 12 = 1 + 2 = 3Verse 18 = 1 + 8 = 9Verse 24 = 2 + 4 = 6

Verse 30 = 3 + 0 = 3Verse 36 = 3 + 6 = 9Verse 42 = 4 + 2 = 6

…untilverse 78

Do you see the repetition of 396? This is the first frequency.

He found the next frequency by looking at verse 13, which is speaking of an offering. Six verses down, which is verse 19, the same offering or idea is repeated, six verses down at verse 25 there is another repeat, etc. Thus, by using the Pythagorean method of reduction, again he discovered a pattern. This pattern is 417. It is the second frequency. The rest of the frequencies were found using the same method.

The secret meanings of the ancient syllables

Each tone has its own unique potential

As you already know, the syllables used to denote the tones are: Ut, Re, Mi Fa, Sol, La. They were taken from the first stanza of the hymn to St. John the Baptist:

Ut queant laxis Resonare fibris

Mira gestorum Famuli tuorum

Solve polluti Labii reatum

Sancte Iohannes

Literal translation from Latin: “In order that the slaves might resonate (resound) the miracles (wonders) of your creations with loosened (expanded) vocal chords. Wash the guilt from (our) polluted lip. Saint John.”

In other words, so people could live together in peace and communicate in harmony about the miracle in their lives, and how God blessed them to produce this “magic”, people’s true unpolluted spiritual natures required revelation. The above text seems to suggest that Solfeggio notes open up a channel of communication with the Divine.

Each syllable was thoroughly studied by Dr. Puleo and other professional researchers. David Hulse, a sound therapy pioneer with over 40 years of experience, described the tones as the following:

UT – 396 Hz – turning grief into joy, liberating guilt & fear

RE – 417 Hz – undoing situations & facilitating change

MI – 528 Hz – transformation & miracles, repairing DNA

FA – 639 Hz – relationship, connecting with spiritual family

SOL – 741 Hz – expression/solutions, cleaning & solving

Another sun frequency-supposedly the frequency the sun vibrates at (interesting)

126.22 https://youtu.be/sv6fWTMSDAg

The Solfeggio Skein

Frequency Name

Angelic Scale

The 2nd Scale

The 3rd Scale

The 4th Scale

Universal Scale

The 6th Scale

Earthly Scale

Divine Scale

Natural Scale

Karmic Freqs

111

123

135

147

159

162

174

186

198

Remembering

222

234

246

258

261

273

285

297

219

Opening

333

345

357

369

372

384

396

318

321

Change

444

456

468

471

483

495

417

429

432

DNA related

555

567

579

582

594

516

528

531

543

Connection

666

678

681

693

615

627

639

642

654

Awareness

777

789

792

714

726

738

741

753

765

Spiritual Journey

888

891

813

825

837

849

852

864

876

Unity

999

912

924

936

948

951

963

975

987

The Masculine/Metatron Solfeggio Skein

Subset Name

Angelic Scale

The 2nd Scale

The 3rd Scale

The 4th Scale

Universal Scale

The 6th Scale

Earthly Scale

Divine Scale

Natural Scale

Karmic Freqs

111

123

135

147

159

162

174

186

198

Remembering

222

234

246

258

261

273

285

297

219

Change

444

456

468

471

483

495

417

429

432

Connection

666

678

681

693

615

627

639

642

654

Unity

999

912

924

936

948

951

963

975

987

Fractal Tone

1011

1023

1035

1047

1059

1062

1074

1086

1098

Harmonic Tone

1455

1428

1482

1455

1428

1482

1455

1428

1482

http://islandrepublicofdan.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/solfeggio-frequencies-and-gregorian.html

https://youtu.be/sv6fWTMSDAg

741hz

Tune to 416hz

Keyboard – play a G5, Guitar – play a G as follows:
B string 20th fret
E string 15th fret

(Actual frequency reached – 741.23hz)

(Closest you can get on guitar is to tune to 415.9hz which will give you 741.05hz)

Appropriate keys
G Major, D Major, A Major, E Major, B Major, F# Major,
E Minor, B Minor, F# Minor, C# Minor, G# Minor, D# Minor

741hz exact

If you can tune to 370.5hz you can get it exactly:

Keyboard – play a A5, Guitar – play an A as follows:
E string 17th fret
B string 10th fret

Appropriate keys
C Major, G Major, D Major, A Major, E Major, Bb Major, F Major
A Minor, E Minor, B Minor, F# Minor, C# Minor, G Minor, D Minor

If you can tune to 440.6hz you can also get it exactly:

Keyboard – play an F#5, Guitar – play an F# as follows:
E string 14th fret
B string 19th fret

Appropriate keys
C# Major, G# Major, D# Major, A# Major, B Major, F Major
Bb Minor, C Minor, F# Minor, C# Minor, G# Minor, D# Minor

If you can tune to 466.8hz you can also get it exactly:

Keyboard – play an F5, Guitar – play an F as follows:
E string 13th fret
B string 18th fret

Appropriate keys
B Major, F# Major, C# Major, Ab Major, Eb Major,  F Major
Eb Minor, B Minor, F Minor, C Minor, G Minor, D Minor

https://propheticguitar.com/solfeggio/

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

[mrmichaelchadler]

Book Excerpt: It's Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye by Jason Bailey

We're proud to present an excerpt from a new book by Jason Bailey, "It's Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye."

Synopsis (from Amazon.com): One of the cornerstones of the 1970s New Hollywood movement was the reinvention of genres from the studio era, with Westerns, musicals, and gangster movies getting the “revisionist” treatment by the so-called Film Brats who were raised on them. But few genres were revisited with as much vigor as the private eye movie – which found New Hollywood icons like Robert Altman, Roman Polanski, and Arthur Penn putting their distinctive spin on the timeworn conventions of the gumshoe film. So what was it about the private eye movie that was so compelling at that particular juncture, in both film history and American life? In It’s Okay With Me, author Jason Bailey dives deep into the essential detective pictures of the era, breaking down how they bridged past and present, while examining how each film was not only representative of New Hollywood, but of the wider cultural moment.

“At first I said, I don’t want to do Raymond Chandler,” Robert Altman recalled, of the initial offer to direct the 1973 film version of The Long Goodbye. “If you say ‘Philip Marlowe,’ people just think of Humphrey Bogart.” But when Gould’s name was floated, “then I was interested. So I read Leigh Brackett’s script, and in her version, in the last scene, Marlowe pulled out his gun and killed his best friend, Terry Lennox. It was so out of character for Marlowe, I said, ‘I’ll do the picture, but you cannot change that ending! It must be in the contract.’ They all agreed, which was very surprising. If she hadn’t written that ending, I guarantee I wouldn’t have done it."

Brackett’s participation was a key link to the character’s past – her second screenwriting credit, shared with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, was for Hawks’ Big Sleep. “I met Chandler only once,” Brackett said. “I know he wanted Marlowe to be depicted as an honest man, and somebody who was his own man. I wanted to get that into the screenplay. But I also had to show Marlowe the way he looks to us now in the Seventies… Because Marlowe, as Chandler saw him, would be unthinkable in the Seventies.” Altman agreed: “I think it’s a goodbye to that genre - a genre that I don’t think is going to be acceptable anymore.” To convey that displacement, Altman and Brackett hit upon their guiding principle. “I decided we were going to call him Rip Van Marlowe,” Altman said, “as if he’d been asleep for twenty years, had woken up and was wandering through this landscape of the early 1970s but trying to invoke the morals of a previous era.”

To drive the point home, Altman starts the film with Gould’s Marlowe literally waking up from a deep sleep. These opening shots are the only time he’s not in a full suit, which he even wears to take out his laundry. Throughout the picture, he’s the only one wearing a tie (even the gangsters are in turtlenecks), and he only removes it when he goes into the ocean (though he leaves his coat on). Marlowe’s the only one smoking – and he’s doing it constantly – the “Marlboro Man” sticking out like a sore thumb in the New Age, health-conscious enclave of Malibu. (He doesn’t stop smoking until the very end, when he needs that hand for his gun.)

The world has changed around him: his neighbors are naked yoga flower children, his cellmate is a chatty revolutionary, and he finds his missing person in a smiley/happy rehab facility. But this Marlowe is a walking anachronism – he just keeps smoking his cigarettes, tying his tie, and doing his job. He is surrounded by his time, yet he is not of it.

"He is a knight errant, and like Don Quixote imperfectly understands the world he inhabits,” Roger Ebert wrote of Gould’s Marlowe, noting that, in contrast to the sardonic narrators of the earlier Chandler pictures, his is a “meandering dialogue that plays as a bemused commentary to himself.” And perhaps he is, though “to himself” seems too purposeful a description for this Marlowe’s sideways mumble, which is less Bogart than W.C. Fields – and seems to point the way towards another muttering Altman protagonist, Robin Williams’ Popeye. His frustrated asides (“Boy, that cockamamie cat”) and nonplussed reactions (“Why don’tcha go over there and tell the girls they’ll catch a cold”) seem a coping mechanism, a way of at least amusing himself in a world where nothing else makes sense.

Altman’s refusal to play by the rules is made clear right from the jump, as he spends no less than eleven minutes on an opening sequence in which Marlowe goes on a late-night grocery store run to feed his finicky cat. It could just be one of Altman’s oddball touches, like the unexplained baby shoe in Marlowe’s apartment or the inexplicable carnival photo booth that takes his mug shot; maybe it’s just a character beat, establishing the proper anything-goes mood. But author William Luhr positions it as a miniature version of the complex mystery that follows, in which Marlowe shuttles his pal Terry Lennox off to Mexico, is accused of assisting in Terry’s murder of his wife, is hired to track down drunken, suicidal Hemingway-esque author Roger Wade, and ends up discovering (wouldn’t ya know it) that his two cases are connected. Yet in both the cat food jaunt and the Lennox/Wade mystery, Luhr argues, “empty characters and empty actions begin and end with Marlowe alone, feeling betrayed, and without the resources to understand or to cope with his situation.”

The opening sequence is one of three that comes up most often in discussions, both laudatory and critical, of The Long Goodbye, along with gangster Marty Alexander smashing a Coke bottle on his mistress’s face (a brutal echo of James Cagney and his grapefruit) and the surprise ending. All three scenes, significantly, are nowhere to be found in Chandler’s source novel, and anyone approaching the film looking for straight adaptation will find little to hold on to. Even casual viewers will likely find its borderline perverse visual style – with the camera in constant motion via zooms, dolleys, pans, and shifting focal points – disorienting or even off-putting. (Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond also inserts an extra dose of smoggy California haze by “flashing” the negative.) But these flourishes give the picture the wild, improvisational feel of a free-form jazz number – Altman as Mingus. More importantly, it’s of a piece with the storytelling; Marlowe cannot figure out his place in this world, and Altman never lets him (or, consequently, us) settle comfortably into his surroundings.

And as a result, it’s hard not to notice that Marlowe isn’t much of a detective. The payoff of his unsuccessful 3am cat food run is that he can’t even fool his own pet. When Terry Lennox arrives shortly thereafter, they pay “liar’s poker” – and Marlowe loses, an apt metaphor for the adventure to follow, in which he pledges constant allegiance to his friend, a conniving murderer who has exploited that friendship. The lug who gives Marlowe a lift home from jail puts it bluntly: “Sorry, Marlowe. Sorry you’re so stupid.” Other movies have their detective stumble around a bit, as is necessary to preserve the suspense of their mysteries; this one explicitly calls its hero dumb, and takes its time disproving the thesis.

Yet even this sap eventually wises up. When a drunken Marlowe presses Wade’s wife for the truth about his suicide, the mumble disappears; when he asks her, “Are you gonna tell me what really happened here,” he speaks plainly and clearly. Most people slur their speech when they’re drunk. Marlowe stops slurring. (Is it an affectation? Something to keep people off-guard?) When he chases her car down a busy street and she strangely ignores him, his sense of self is finally reignited – he plays the fool, but he will not be played for a fool. He finds the supposedly dead Terry luxuriating in Mexico and waiting for his newly single mistress Ellen Wade; Terry grins, “I guess if anybody was gonna track me down, it’d be you,” but he certainly doesn’t seem concerned about betraying his friend, or the consequence of that betrayal. Confronted with his crimes, Terry is unmoved. “What the hell, nobody cares,” he shrugs (a key concluding statement of Hickey & Boggs the previous year).

“Yeah, nobody cares but me,” Marlowe replies.

“That’s you, Marlowe,” Terry says. “You’ll never learn. You’re a born loser.”

“Yeah, I even lost my cat.” And with that, Marlowe shoots the fucker dead.

It’s a shocking, repugnant, and glorious moment, all at once – a “fuck you” to not only the customary hero code of the private eye movie, but the easy-come-easy-go spirit of the character until that moment. Throughout the film, he is passive in both action and in attitude; Terry’s “What the hell, nobody cares” isn’t that far removed from Marlowe’s own refrain of “It’s okay with me,” except that he’s finally encountered something that’s not okay. It’s the moment at which his anachronistic hero becomes, at long last, the modern man – evening the score for a personal slight, and thus philosophically equipped for the “Me Generation.” The ending doesn’t make him a better man; many would argue (and did, loudly, following the picture’s release) that it makes him a lesser one. But it certainly makes him a man of his time.

Considering its unconventional approach and unapologetic torching of genre norms, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that critics and audiences greeted The Long Goodbye with such hostility. It premiered at one of critic Judith Crist’s famed Terrytown weekends (fictionalized and immortalized in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories) in perhaps the worst possible circumstances: following screenings of all the previous Marlowe pictures. West Coast critics fumed; Variety dubbed it “an uneven mixture of insider satire on the gumshoe film genre, gratuitous brutality, and sledgehammer whimsy,” while the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin called Gould’s Marlowe “an untidy, unshaven, semi-literate dimwit slob who could not locate a missing skyscraper and would be refused service at a hot dog stand,” and sneered, “He is not Chandler’s Marlowe, or mine, and I can’t find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can’t be sure who will.” Kenneth Turan (also later of the Times) included it on a late-‘70s list of the worst movies ever made.

Box office was bad in its initial Los Angeles engagements, and runs in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami were likewise disappointing. Its New York premiere was cancelled at the eleventh hour, even though press screenings had already been held, and it was withdrawn from release nationwide. Rumors circulated that it would be re-edited, shortened, or abandoned altogether; it turned out, United Artists had re-jiggered its marketing campaign, torpedoing the initial posters and ads, which framed it as a straight thriller, for new posters by Mad magazine illustrator Jack Davis, which made it look like a madcap comedy. Opening in New York months later, it was a modest hit, championed by the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael (“Altman, who probably works closer to his unconscious than any other American director, tells a detective story, all right, but he does it through a spree—a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies and that Los Angeles sickness”) and the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who put it on the paper’s year-end top 10 list and praised its creators for having “the courage to create an original character and almost an original story that, by being original, does more to honor Chandler's skills than would any attempt to make a forties movie today."

But Farewell, My Lovely, a much more faithful Marlowe picture (with Robert Mitchum taking on the role) released two years later, was a much bigger commercial and critical success. By preferring that traditional appreciation to the tart aftertaste of Long Goodbye, contemporary critics were letting their own notion of nostalgia gloss over the blackness at the heart of true noir. That view, Luhr writes, “belies an understanding of the profoundly anti-nostalgic, anti-sentimental cynicism and despair that pervaded the actual films themselves, as well as The Long Goodbye.”

Films like Farewell, My Lovely regarded private eyes shallowly, refusing to wrestle with what a character like Marlowe truly meant in this era. It was easier to slap a trenchcoat on him, to put him in a window covered in streaming rain to a saxophone theme, and let us stash him in the past. Farewell was safe, a museum piece, a humorless presentation of fixed images, while the variation Altman presented was unbalancing – in his words, in his actions, even in the way his director framed him – and viewers resisted. "I suspect that people are reluctant to say goodbye to the old sweet bull of the Bogart Marlowe because it satisfies a deep need,” Kael wrote. “They’ve been accepting the I-look-out-for-No. 1 tough guys of recent films, but maybe they’re scared to laugh at Gould’s out-of-it Marlowe because that would lose them their Bogart icon. At the moment, the shared pop culture of the audience may be all that people feel they have left.” And that tension – between who was onscreen and what we needed them to be – would only pull tighter as the decade continued.

“It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye” is available now in paperback and Kindle editions. 

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