Category: Art

In a Lonely Place

So….. Once upon a long time ago my favourite song was a song I couldn’t identify.  It was on a mix tape DJD made for me back when I was 50 pounds lighter and random menfolks still occasionally mentioned the fertility quotient of my ass rather than its powerful ability to block the sun.   I knew that it was a band called Joy Division.  When the movie about Joy Division. Control came out I got to hear it again in quad sound, which blew my lights out because that drum riff MAKES ME NUTS.  It’s so ominous and amazing. While I was googleriffing the song, which turned out to be called “In a Lonely Place” I read a Criterion Collection review of the movie “In a Lonely Place” and it sounded SO frickin’ awesome I asked Jeff to rent it.

It turned up scant days later and Jeff and I were BLOWN away.  I mean, apart from the soundtrack, which is standard ish 50’s swelling strings and stuff that doesn’t really fit the mood, the movie approaches perfection. Humphrey Bogart is so good in this movie it beggars description; Gloria Grahame is magnificent, and the script is so uniformly excellent…. just rent the damned thing and be amazed.  Oh, it’s Noir.  Very, very noir.

So that’s my In a Lonely Place story.  I’m not in a Lonely Place…. Katie’s here, and in about five minutes I’ll finish making brekkie for the three of us.

Wackdoodle Wednesday

Oh my.  There be lots of crazy for you this am.

This is a very special kind of Canadian crazy.

Ya gotta be effin kidding me.  Lady Liberty is a minion of Satan?

Star Wars Crafts?  Ok,

Put your hand over your crotch – gently.  Now open this link.

A life of infrequent contact with the police is not likely in the cards for this gent.

Fox – where mammon collides with art.

 

Hey hey my my Ai Wei Wei

One of the most brilliant and humane artists of this or any century is Ai Wei Wei.  I recently saw a documentary segment on Frontline about him and both Jeff and I were blown away at how amazing he is.  He’s being set up for a long jail sentence.

The church spring potluck was last night.  It went very well and in the end, as always, there was enuff fud.  I contributed two entrées, set up, clean up, butter, a starch dish and the Tapioca Song and I was exhausted when I got home.  Paul turned up for as much as he could stay for and contributed his best ever quinoa salad and home made bread.

At 2:35 am I woke up

And moonlight was falling on my hand.  I got up and stood on the back deck and looked at the moon for a while.  I remembered seeing the Hammer Codex of Leonardo da Vinci in Montreal almost a quarter century, being enraptured to see his handwriting with the translation. He spoke of how the wind was the breathing of this terrestrial machine, and how the moon “has no light of itself, and yet is luminous.”

Brian Eno talk

Last night at the Vogue, Eno gave an illustrated talk (with some truly charming and useful on the spot illustrations) about art and his relationship to it.  A number of interesting points came up, most of which will probably lose their sharpness for you because they were filtered through me.

He said that English is missing a word.  We had theatre, and then we had film, and those two disciplines are quite separate.  They have their own words and their own understandings both aesthetic and technical.  When performance music split from recorded music we got no such division in words, which is a loss.   I was immediately thinking about filk, and the emphasis on performance.  Anyway, he believes that they are two different disciplines and should be as distinct as theatre and film in how we speak of them as well.

Another thing he said is that art has been shaped very dramatically by three pivotal changes in the human world view, at least as expressed as an outgrowth of ‘Western thought’.

One was Copernicus; hey guess what, we’re not the center of the universe.  One was Darwin; we are at the top of the food chain because of evolution, not God.  The last was the development of complexity theory, including cellular automata which allow you to see without equivocation how complexity can proceed – in fact, must proceed – from extremely simple rules.

At the end he talked about how his work slides along the Control at one end and Surrender at the other end Axis.  Once again, a good working image.

He talked for two hours and Jeff and I came home.

busy tizzy

1.  Paul and kids over to watch latest True Blood.  Since I knew they were coming I went to Choices and got delicious om-nom-noms for them, like fresh bread and Dijon turkey and Avalon chocolate milk, which still comes in a glass bottle and is the best commercial chocolate milk in the known universe.  Even Paul had some and he stopped drinking cow’s milk years ago.  Damn, it’s fine!  Also edamame salad and fresh veg.

2.  Leo and Linda coming tonight…. can’t wait for them to meet kitties.

3.  Jeff biked to and from work yesterday… go Jeff. The last three 3 k involve about three hundred feet of elevation, so he was rather warm by the time he got back.  I took one look at him and asked him if he wanted some water.

4.  At church meeting last night (Nominating committee, my house) we had fun and got shiz done.  I was so happy to see everybody.  Now I have more work to do, even though an item came off my list!

5.  I’ll be doing a bed and breakfast thing in Bellingham in September but I don’t know which weekend.  I’ll be taking Katie for some CBS.  (Cross border shopping).  Clothing for women my size is more easily obtained Stateside.

6.  I’m helping train somebody at work, and as a consequence my house-fly strength attention span is even MORE truncated.  I’d like to thank her family for raising somebody so smart.  And she takes kick boxing classes, too.

7.  Keith was too – I don’t know – to check flickr for pictures of Animé Evolution, and when he said he didn’t know where pictures would be, I said, “You’re daft, check the flickrstream.”  Gosh all whacky, am I the only person in the world who knows how to use the internet, grump grump.  And there he was, in his costume.  Now I go looking for it and I can’t find it, but suffice it to say Keith made a GREAT Dr. McNinja. Grandparents are warmly encouraged to apply to him directly for photographs.

8.  Dropped by her workplace to see Lady Miss Banjola and inspect her tummy.  Yup, she’s knocked up.  She’s also artistically pale but I think she looks great.

9.  The spicy Thai beef salad yesterday was unbelievably yummy, but the transit time of 8 hours was accompanied by the burnination of a lifetime.  I can no longer eat hot peppers, unless I want multiple lashings of discomfort and abrupt departures from whatever conversation I’m engaged in at the time to flee for the house of ease.  It was worth it, but only just.  Ky can cook.

There’s more but I gotta go.