MediaFromDanteToTheLostAndFound

The beautiful thing about upcycled materials is that the end results often bear no resemblance to the original items. Such is the case with sculptor Kris Kuksi’s toy sculptures, which are constructed out of old toys, statues, and mechanical parts. According to Kuksi’s artist statement, his work is “feeling that he has always belonged to the ‘Old World’. Yet, Kris’ work is about a new wilderness, refined and elevated, visualized as a cultivation emerging from the corrupt and demoralized fall of modern-day society. A place where new beginnings, new wars, new philosophies, and new endings exist.” That place is apparently also quite macabre and grotesque. In any case, Kuksi’s mindblowingly detailed toy sculptures remind us that trash and discarded materials can be refashioned into nearly anything we want. Source: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/11/19/kris-kuksis-recycled-toy-sculptures-will-scare-the-kids/

What should be done with the unfinished works left behind by master composers at their deaths? This question has long dogged musicians and scholars of later eras, and the debate goes on. Maybe the proper way to respect the masters is to leave their incomplete scores alone. How can we presume to know what an ingenious composer might have intended? On the other hand, some of these scores are tantalizingly close to being performable. When there are enough sketches, composers and scholars have often tried to fill in the gaps and produce a playable version of a piece. The composer Friedrich Cerha’s completed Act III of Berg’s “Lulu,” which Berg died before finishing and orchestrating, has been embraced by many prominent musicians, including James Levine, who will again conduct the three-act “Lulu” at the Metropolitan Opera in May. My choice for the most frustrating case of an unfinished work by a master composer is Debussy’s opera “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Debussy’s libretto, adapte...

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture. His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom. With “Pops,” his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins’s excellent 1988 study, “Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong,” and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier’s patronizi...

VILMOS ZSIGMOND and Laszlo Kovacs, whose cinematography would help change the look of American movies in the late 1960s and 1970s, first met in 1953 on a Budapest street corner near the Academy of Drama and Film, where both men were enrolled as cinematography students. Three years afterward — on Nov. 11, 1956, a week after Soviet troops poured into the city to crush the Hungarian uprising — they ran into each other again on the same corner. “The Russian tanks were going up and down the street,” recalled Mr. Zsigmond, 79, in a recent phone interview to promote the documentary “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos,” an account of their long friendship that will be broadcast Nov. 17 on “Independent Lens” on PBS. “I said, ‘Laszlo, you know the Arriflex camera, you have it up in the film school in college.’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s where I have it.’ He knew what we were about to do.” Mr. Kovacs got the camera and some 35-millimeter film stock. The two men roamed Budapest, surreptitiousl...

Reinhard Kleist's brand-new graphic novel, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness (Abrams Books), opens with a vintage Caddy (license plate "HELL") barreling past a neon sign on the outskirts of Reno. Without a word, its surly driver—the Man in Black himself—makes his way to the strip, where he spots a short, wealthy, sleazy-looking man walking into an alley with a prostitute and proceeds to fill him with lead. In the scene's final panel, the killer is inside an armored bus, pulling up to the gates of Folsom Prison. Get it? I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die. The Berlin-based artist has fun with this concept in his well-researched biography of the late country star, segueing into pen-and-ink depictions of Cash hits like "Big River," "Cocaine Blues," and "A Boy Named Sue" (which unbeknownst to me was penned by Shel Silverstein). Kleist uses a different, faux-tribal drawing style for "The Ballad of Ira Hayes"—a choice that reflec...

THERE is a demand and a prayer made in each of Ibrahim El Salahi’s designs. This pioneer of Sudanese modernism has fused the diverse traditions of Sudan to make an art that is universal in its importance. His monumental painting The Inevitable (1984) is an uncompromising condemnation of civil war and injustice. The comparison with Picasso’s Guernica is not misplaced: indeed, the painting can be seen as an African counterpoint to it. Born in 1930, El Salahi trained in Sudan and at the Slade in London, before travelling through Europe and returning to his home country to become a professor and Minister of Culture. He was one of the early members of what is now called the ‘Khartoum school’, which tried to define a cultural identity for the nation after the end of British colonial rule. Sudan is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse countries in Africa, and the early Khartoum school stressed this inescapable plurality. The grouping of poets and literary critics who called t...

JACKSON, Miss. – The mystery surrounding bluesman Robert Johnson's life and death feeds the lingering fascination with his work. There's the myth he sold his soul to the devil to create his haunting guitar intonations. There's the dispute over where he died after his alleged poisoning by a jealous man in 1938. Three different markers claim to be the site of his demise. His birthplace, however, has been verified. The seminal bluesman came into the world in 1911 in a well-crafted home built by his stepfather in the Mississippi town of Hazlehurst. Now, 71 years after his death, local officials want to restore the home in hopes of drawing Johnson fans and their tourism dollars to Copiah County, about 100 miles from the Delta region that most bluesmen called home. Johnson's life and music have been the subject of multiple books. And producers are shopping a script in Hollywood about him penned by Jimmy White, the screenwriter for the Academy Award-winning film, "Ray....

When Morace Park bought a can of nitrate film on eBay for $5, he was surprised to discover that it contained footage of Charlie Chaplin. The inventor was utterly astounded when his friend John Dwyer, a former member of the British Board of Film Classification, told him that he had discovered rare footage of the performer, and possibly an unknown Chaplin work. Unlike many nitrate films, the contents of this 1916 can were still intact. The unearthed film, called Charlie Chaplin in Zepped, features footage of Zeppelins flying over England during the First World War, as well as some very early stop-motion animation, and unknown outtakes of Chaplin films from three Essanay pictures including The Tramp. These have all been cut together into a six-minute movie that Mr Park describes as "in support of the British First World War effort". It begins with a logo from Keystone studios, which first signed Chaplin, and there follows a certification from the Egyptian censors dating the proj...

Another new blog that features what I spend quite a bit of my time doing. I watch and listen to lectures online. This new blog is a way of achieving an archive and presenting those that i find. The interests are varied like the education I have prescribed for myself since escaping "higher education". http://lectureandlearn.blogspot.com/

Through the slave quarters and to the river below, cross sections of freshening earth… 1. Shaft scene Syphilitic skeletons borne in blood menstrual pillars of Sodom coitus breath scars thorns milk interprets the scrotal consummating corpse labia drunk and made holy clitoridectomies penis sheaths paleolithic barriers scavenging decomposition narrow receiving bowl. Bushmen read the koka shastra, wandering wombs dilate the reproductive cycle… 2. Venus in furs Hedged yogic castration, umbilical suckling male hymen ejaculatory ducts the membranous urethra pastoralists, conjugated estriols feminized (double castration) dislect of deep incised consumption an infant’s sexual attributes cranial/uteral childbirth masturbation swallows. Whaling asps three miles by four, heavens corpse spinal venerated. It’s flaccid genital beard, (it’s) (madness to be confined-Rimbaud) 3. Coffin birth Menstruation (ovum) migration explicit breath sutras tenderness, thick wash rape (decay) copulation abortifacient...

You quickly learn, at a museum of naval history, that there is art, and then there is marine art, a particular genre of painting that derives, not so much from the love of saltwater in its life- and danger-dealing aspects, but as commissioned expressions of ownership and power over vessels and fleets. At their best, paintings of raging seas, icebergs, and atmospheric effects in ranges of blues and oranges may rise to Turneresque heights, but ship imagery fixes them to a mundane plane. By contrast, Yu-Wen Wu's practically monotone images of water in various forms, applied to compositions meant to evoke the experience of music, fall squarely on the side of pure art. In Suspended, A Song Cycle, an exhibition of wall-mounted mixed media works on panels, Wu manipulates selected visual effects of water and other fluid environments as elements to make artworks that are visual (that is, silent) musical compositions. The simple pictorial means and their reserved appearance yields surprising...

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks to Erik Morse about the 20th- and 21st-century phenomena of chemical warfare, designer ventilation and high-density urban living The most celebrated and controversial German philosopher since Jürgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdijk has established an academic career confronting the darkest traditions of 20th-century European ideology. President and professor of the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe in Germany, his first book, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason, published in 1983 and translated into English in 1988), remains the best selling philosophical work in the German language since World War II, but it was his controversial polemic on the language of genetic engineering and biopolitics in a lecture he gave in 1999, ‘Regeln für den Menschenpark’ (Rules for the Human Park), that brought him to international attention. It also marked the philosopher’s distinctive turn toward a Heideggerian approach to Postmodern...