Monday, December 25, 2006
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Thom Yorke The Eraser harrowdown hill
Don't walk the plank like I did
You will be dispensed with
When you've become inconvenient
In the harrowdown hill
Where you went to school
That's where I am
That's where I'm lying down
Did I fall or was I pushed?
Did I fall or was I pushed?
And where's the blood?
And where's the blood?
I'm coming home
I'm coming home
To make it all right
So dry your eyes
We think the same things at the same time
We just cant do anything about it
So don't ask me
Ask the ministry
Don't ask me
Ask the ministry
We think the same things at the same time
There are so many of us
So you can't count
[ these lyrics found on http://www.completealbumlyrics.com ]
We think the same things at the same time
There are too many of us
So you can't count
Can you see me when I'm running?
Can you see me when I'm running?
Away from them
I can't take their pressure
No one cares if you live or die
They just want me gone
They want me gone
I'm coming home
I'm coming home
To make it all right
So dry your eyes
We think the same things at the same time
We just cant do anything about it
We think the same things at the same time
There are too many of us
So you can't count
It was a slippery slippery slippery slope
It was a slippery slippery slippery slope
I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness
I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness
thom yorke person of the year
Friday, December 22, 2006
The Clock Thom Yorke lyrics
Time is running out for us
But you just move the hands upon the clock
You throw coins in the wishing well
For us
You just move your hands upon the wall
It comes to you begging you to stop Wake up
But you just move your hands upon the clock
Throw coins in the wishing well
For us
You make believe that you are still in charge
But you just move the hands upon the clock
You throw coins in the wishing well
For us
You just move your hands upon the wall
It comes to you begging you to stop Wake up
But you just move your hands upon the clock
Throw coins in the wishing well
For us
You make believe that you are still in charge
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
dark pages
The first time I came across - not through readings or narrations - terrorism and the humiliation of human beings in the Former German Democratic Republic, it was October of the year 2002, in Berlin.
In the "heart" of the city, at the Museum of Communication, the creepy exhibition “Open Secret" was presented. Many akward exhibits from that violent historical period, enforced in my eyes, the intervention of the famous Ministry of State Security- Known as Stasi- in the private life of the citizens: mechanisms of wire taping, steam machines with which they opened the correspondence of the suspects and torture methods upon the citizens who were against the subjection of the country.
In the "heart" of the city, at the Museum of Communication, the creepy exhibition “Open Secret" was presented. Many akward exhibits from that violent historical period, enforced in my eyes, the intervention of the famous Ministry of State Security- Known as Stasi- in the private life of the citizens: mechanisms of wire taping, steam machines with which they opened the correspondence of the suspects and torture methods upon the citizens who were against the subjection of the country.
Outside in the fresh air , all the magnificent statues of the city, the ultramodern buildings with the famous architectural signatures in Potsdamer Platz … had shrunk inside me. All of them were only human fabrications, some highlights from human misery, artificial goods of mankind capable, at any moment, of the worst. Unfortunately in the name of humanism and socialism!
The same feelings emerged watching the film “The Lives of Others” directed by Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck. The film set in East Berlin spanning from 1984 to around 1992. It tells the story of a Stasi officer who is assigned to watch a group of artists. The difficult daily life in the country, the suicides of the citizens, the red fascism and the white loneliness, create a great, profound movie, homage to our common dark, European history.
G.K. for J Alfred’s Song
G.K. for J Alfred’s Song
Friday, December 15, 2006
THE FAIRY'S NEW YEAR GIFT BY EMILIE POULSSON [ADAPTED]
Two little boys were at play one day when a Fairy suddenly appeared before them and said: "I have been sent to give you New Year presents."
She handed to each child a package, and in an instant was gone.
Carl and Philip opened the packages and found in them two beautiful books, with pages as pure and white as the snow when it first falls.
Many months passed and the Fairy came again to the boys. "I have brought you each another book?" said she, "and will take the first ones back to Father Time who sent them to you."
"May I not keep mine a little longer?" asked Philip. "I have hardly thought about it lately. I 'd like to paint something on the last leaf that lies open."
"No," said the Fairy; "I must take it just as it is."
"I wish that I could look through mine just once," said Carl; "I have only seen one page at a
-4-time, for when the leaf turns over it sticks fast, and I can never open the book at more than one place each day."
"You shall look at your book," said the Fairy, "and Philip, at his." And she lit for them two little silver lamps, by the light of which they saw the pages as she turned them.
The boys looked in wonder. Could it be that these were the same fair books she had given them a year ago? Where were the clean, white pages, as pure and beautiful as the snow when it first falls? Here was a page with ugly, black spots and scratches upon it; while the very next page showed a lovely little picture. Some pages were decorated with gold and silver and gorgeous colors, others with beautiful flowers, and still others with a rainbow of softest, most delicate brightness. Yet even on the most beautiful of the pages there were ugly blots and scratches.
Carl and Philip looked up at the Fairy at last.
"Who did this?" they asked. "Every page was white and fair as we opened to it; yet now there is not a single blank place in the whole book!"
"Shall I explain some of the pictures to you?" said the Fairy, smiling at the two little boys.
"See, Philip, the spray of roses blossomed on this page when you let the baby have your playthings; and this pretty bird, that looks as if it were singing with all its might, would never have been on
-5-this page if you had not tried to be kind and pleasant the other day, instead of quarreling."
"But what makes this blot?" asked Philip.
"That," said the Fairy sadly; "that came when you told an untruth one day, and this when you did not mind mamma. All these blots and scratches that look so ugly, both in your book and in Carl's, were made when you were naughty. Each pretty thing in your books came on its page when you were good."
"Oh, if we could only have the books again!" said Carl and Philip.
"That cannot be," said the Fairy. "See! they are dated for this year, and they must now go back into Father Time's bookcase, but I have brought you each a new one. Perhaps you can make these more beautiful than the others."
So saying, she vanished, and the boys were left alone, but each held in his hand a new book open at the first page.
And on the back of this book was written in letters of gold, "For the New Year."
She handed to each child a package, and in an instant was gone.
Carl and Philip opened the packages and found in them two beautiful books, with pages as pure and white as the snow when it first falls.
Many months passed and the Fairy came again to the boys. "I have brought you each another book?" said she, "and will take the first ones back to Father Time who sent them to you."
"May I not keep mine a little longer?" asked Philip. "I have hardly thought about it lately. I 'd like to paint something on the last leaf that lies open."
"No," said the Fairy; "I must take it just as it is."
"I wish that I could look through mine just once," said Carl; "I have only seen one page at a
-4-time, for when the leaf turns over it sticks fast, and I can never open the book at more than one place each day."
"You shall look at your book," said the Fairy, "and Philip, at his." And she lit for them two little silver lamps, by the light of which they saw the pages as she turned them.
The boys looked in wonder. Could it be that these were the same fair books she had given them a year ago? Where were the clean, white pages, as pure and beautiful as the snow when it first falls? Here was a page with ugly, black spots and scratches upon it; while the very next page showed a lovely little picture. Some pages were decorated with gold and silver and gorgeous colors, others with beautiful flowers, and still others with a rainbow of softest, most delicate brightness. Yet even on the most beautiful of the pages there were ugly blots and scratches.
Carl and Philip looked up at the Fairy at last.
"Who did this?" they asked. "Every page was white and fair as we opened to it; yet now there is not a single blank place in the whole book!"
"Shall I explain some of the pictures to you?" said the Fairy, smiling at the two little boys.
"See, Philip, the spray of roses blossomed on this page when you let the baby have your playthings; and this pretty bird, that looks as if it were singing with all its might, would never have been on
-5-this page if you had not tried to be kind and pleasant the other day, instead of quarreling."
"But what makes this blot?" asked Philip.
"That," said the Fairy sadly; "that came when you told an untruth one day, and this when you did not mind mamma. All these blots and scratches that look so ugly, both in your book and in Carl's, were made when you were naughty. Each pretty thing in your books came on its page when you were good."
"Oh, if we could only have the books again!" said Carl and Philip.
"That cannot be," said the Fairy. "See! they are dated for this year, and they must now go back into Father Time's bookcase, but I have brought you each a new one. Perhaps you can make these more beautiful than the others."
So saying, she vanished, and the boys were left alone, but each held in his hand a new book open at the first page.
And on the back of this book was written in letters of gold, "For the New Year."
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
vanity fair magazine
The Art Issue
The Subject as Star
Brad Pitt has done it. So have Sean Penn, Princess Caroline of Monaco, and Winona Ryder. For them it was gratis, but now, for a modest $150,000, any contemporary-art lover can sit for a life-size video portrait (with soundtrack) by Robert Wilson, king of the avant-garde, multi-media performance event.
The Subject as Star
Brad Pitt has done it. So have Sean Penn, Princess Caroline of Monaco, and Winona Ryder. For them it was gratis, but now, for a modest $150,000, any contemporary-art lover can sit for a life-size video portrait (with soundtrack) by Robert Wilson, king of the avant-garde, multi-media performance event.
by Bob Colacello December 2006
Attention, all self-adoring major contemporary-art collectors! Get out your checkbooks and American Express black cards! Or call that Swiss bank and order an instant wire transfer! Robert Wilson, the king of extravagantly avant-garde stage events that mix so many media nobody knows what to call them—theater? opera? performance art?—is going into the commissioned-portrait business. Yes, the high priest of high culture is taking a page out of Andy Warhol's business-art philosophy—and, one might add, following in the footsteps of a small horde of younger masters who also accept commissions, such as Julian "Broken Plates" Schnabel, Francesco "Platter Eyes" Clemente, Eric "Heavy Brushwork" Fischl, and Chuck "A Little Dab'll Do You" Close—and is lining up private clients for life-size, high-definition-video renditions of themselves at $150,000 each, which is peanuts in today's through-the-roof art market. The price includes a soundtrack by one of several composers, among them Marianne Faithfull, Bernard Herrmann, and Michael Galasso, who has collaborated with Wilson on theater projects since the 1970s.
Wilson has already been commissioned by German princess Ingeborg von Schleswig-Holstein, who had him do her 11-year-old son. "I put a fox head on him," Wilson says, "this little prince standing there all dressed up in his Giorgio Armani suit." Paris grande dame Jacqueline de Ribes has also asked for a portrait. In January, Paula Cooper Gallery, Phillips de Pury & Company, and Nathan A. Bernstein & Company, all in New York, will mount simultaneous exhibitions of 30 different video portraits of movie stars and other cultural figures—each of whom was given one in exchange for allowing Wilson to sell another two. The subjects include Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Robert Downey Jr., Isabella Rossellini, Alan Cumming, and Brad Pitt (caught in the rain in his boxer shorts). Paula Cooper will also show 12 variations of Wilson's video portrait A Snow Owl.
"I got started on these portraits thinking of Andy's commissioned work," Wilson says, "as well as those of classical portraitists like John Singer Sargent." But whereas Warhol's working motto was "Fast, easy, cheap, and modern," Wilson's approach is slow, difficult, expensive, and replete with historical references, as one might expect from a man whose works have titles such as A Letter for Queen Victoria and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, have had casts of hundreds, and have run as long as seven days. He posed ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov as Saint Sebastian, French actress Jeanne Moreau as Mary Queen of Scots ("There's this sense of power going on," says Wilson), and Princess Caroline of Monaco as Sargent's Madame X, but from the back, in homage to her mother's starring role in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Wilson loosely based Winona Ryder's portrait on the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, burying her up to her shoulders in a pile of sand, on which sit a gun, a toothbrush, and a bright-red handbag. Steve Buscemi's portrait—which has the actor, famous for his creepy roles, standing behind the carcass of a cow—seems to channel Salvador Dalí via Damien Hirst.
Each portrait takes nearly a full day to shoot and is an elaborate undertaking, requiring a cameraman, sound technician, costume designer, hairdresser, and makeup artist. As with his theater productions, Wilson designs the set and lighting himself. The portraits are shot both in horizontal format for viewing on television or on movie screens and in vertical orientation for H.D. plasma flat-screen monitors. The subjects are directed by Wilson to "think of nothing," and he limits their movement to one or two gestures, in very slow motion. Each video is anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes long, but they are looped, so there is no discernible beginning or end to the finished work.
Wilson has already been commissioned by German princess Ingeborg von Schleswig-Holstein, who had him do her 11-year-old son. "I put a fox head on him," Wilson says, "this little prince standing there all dressed up in his Giorgio Armani suit." Paris grande dame Jacqueline de Ribes has also asked for a portrait. In January, Paula Cooper Gallery, Phillips de Pury & Company, and Nathan A. Bernstein & Company, all in New York, will mount simultaneous exhibitions of 30 different video portraits of movie stars and other cultural figures—each of whom was given one in exchange for allowing Wilson to sell another two. The subjects include Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Robert Downey Jr., Isabella Rossellini, Alan Cumming, and Brad Pitt (caught in the rain in his boxer shorts). Paula Cooper will also show 12 variations of Wilson's video portrait A Snow Owl.
"I got started on these portraits thinking of Andy's commissioned work," Wilson says, "as well as those of classical portraitists like John Singer Sargent." But whereas Warhol's working motto was "Fast, easy, cheap, and modern," Wilson's approach is slow, difficult, expensive, and replete with historical references, as one might expect from a man whose works have titles such as A Letter for Queen Victoria and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, have had casts of hundreds, and have run as long as seven days. He posed ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov as Saint Sebastian, French actress Jeanne Moreau as Mary Queen of Scots ("There's this sense of power going on," says Wilson), and Princess Caroline of Monaco as Sargent's Madame X, but from the back, in homage to her mother's starring role in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Wilson loosely based Winona Ryder's portrait on the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, burying her up to her shoulders in a pile of sand, on which sit a gun, a toothbrush, and a bright-red handbag. Steve Buscemi's portrait—which has the actor, famous for his creepy roles, standing behind the carcass of a cow—seems to channel Salvador Dalí via Damien Hirst.
Each portrait takes nearly a full day to shoot and is an elaborate undertaking, requiring a cameraman, sound technician, costume designer, hairdresser, and makeup artist. As with his theater productions, Wilson designs the set and lighting himself. The portraits are shot both in horizontal format for viewing on television or on movie screens and in vertical orientation for H.D. plasma flat-screen monitors. The subjects are directed by Wilson to "think of nothing," and he limits their movement to one or two gestures, in very slow motion. Each video is anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes long, but they are looped, so there is no discernible beginning or end to the finished work.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
EGYPT
From the Vanity Fair magazine
Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world, is the birthplace of nearly every major political and religious force to spread through the region in the past century. Islamic jihad has its roots there. Osama bin Laden took his disgruntled worldview global after his tutelage by an Egyptian spiritual mentor. One of the masterminds behind the first World Trade Center bombing was Egyptian, as was one of the ringleaders of 9/11. And yet Egypt’s government and its Western friends would have us believe that this is a place of progress, a placid land of pharaohs and sphinxes eager to welcome well-heeled tourists. Writer Scott Anderson and photographer Paolo Pellegrin visited Egypt for the October issue of Vanity Fair and found a country sowing the seeds of fundamentalism. Pellegrin’s images of sullen faces and shrouded cityscapes reveal a place burdened by the past, and a poverty-stricken people, many seething with resentment. —AUSTIN MERRILL
Saturday, September 02, 2006
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