June 08, 2006

Poetry takes time, we know that.

Poetry takes time, we know that.
Music (pop, puff) takes sometimes even more time.

On July 20th, 2005 I posted (under Creative Commons) the following post as part of Dead Engine. The plan was to have UnderWave, a local band, use the lyric for a song of theirs. I'm happy to report they finally did it and the track is now in the wild.

It is here

I like their blend of early Smith with moderately polished Velvet Underground. Can't complain about the English as that's possibly the best you can get around here - Amen.

Poetry takes time, we know that.
But sometimes poetry knocks down early. So it is for Sara Carothers, which first and only piece is here. I read and read this piece and how can I believe this is coming from a 17 years old? Would you? So I asked her. And she sent me 6 unpublished pieces. Sara is on PixArtisan. In a few more days.

In 10 or so years nothing called literature has surprised me more than these 6 little poems of her.

Poetry takes time. Sometimes doesn't.

Posted by lck at 01:40 AM | Comments (1)

May 23, 2006

Hel-Looks

HEL LOOKS is selected street fashion from Helsinki, Finland. The pictures are taken in the streets and clubs of Helsinki from July 2005 onwards.
HEL LOOKS is a hobby project of Liisa Jokinen and Sampo Karjalainen. The project is a tribute to Fruits and Street magazines, the pioneers of street fashion photography. And is very addictive.

At least as addictive as this absurdity. Karoli Kiralyfalvi (Budapest?) is not exactly bad and at least a very productive. But 411 500x500 px images weight from 70 to 150K each on the same page? The trend is being pushed somehow to limits and if that is we may want to ask Dell, Logitech and HP to use BIGGER wheels on their mices.

Posted by lck at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2006

Sztuka Fabryka

The comming weeks we will be busy with the last "Independent Arts"-Festival.
Drop by check

Sztuka Fabryka is a worldwide non-profit artists organisation, conceived conceptually by Geert De Decker, with technical and creative support of: Bert Rocket (U.S.A.), Stanislaw Dragowanowitz (U.S.S.R.) and Sir Walter Crunckett the 3rd of Paddington High (Scotland).

Posted by lck at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon

[This article appeared in The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167-78.]

This is a story about the sixties: it's about me and some friends of mine, it's about Berkeley, and it's about Pynchon. It's about a decade in which we were all young together and thought we would stay young forever. Berkeley was our Vineland, a dream of a perfect new world. The time was ripe, America was ours, and we were going to change the world: Paradise Now or Apocalypse Now.

Neither one happened. As the decades pass, is anything left of that refuge, that Vineland, apart from memory and isolated dreams? Where are the sixties now? Where are we? And where is Thomas Pynchon?

We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion-year-old carbon,
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
(Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock")

Ultimately, I suppose this story is all about me. Everything you write always is, disguise it as you may. I don't know what I can tell you about Thomas Pynchon, but I can tell you something about myself, about the impact that the sixties and Berkeley and Pynchon had on me. Vineland looks back on the late sixties, and I'm going to look back on 1964-67, from ages 19 to 22, when I was first going out into the world on my own and when my life became enmeshed with the fictions of Thomas Pynchon. I want to trace some of the parallels between life and fiction.

According to his friend Jules Siegel, when Pynchon lived in Mexico in the sixties, "The Mexicans laughed at his mustache and called him Pancho Villa." There's a hoary old joke whose punchline goes, "Did I know Pancho Villa? Hombre, we had lunch together!" Mine goes, "Did I know Thomas Pynchon? Man, we smoked dope together!" Except it's no joke; it really happened.

I often feel that way about the nineteen sixties in America: they were no joke, they really happened to us, and they happened to me, although in retrospect they boggle the imagination and seem too incredible to be real. The truth of the sixties is stranger than fiction. As Philip Roth wrote about the period, "is it possible? is it happening?" ("Writing American Fiction" 121). That's why the sixties have so rarely been captured well in American fiction, except by a few authors such as Pynchon: if somebody told you the history of the decade as a story, you wouldn't believe it. You'd wonder: Is this for real? Is this some kind of joke? Is it supposed to be farce or tragedy? You wouldn't know how to feel, to laugh or to cry.

And although I met Thomas Pynchon one evening in Berkeley in June of 1967, I cannot say I really know him. He remains for me a figure as mysterious and ungraspable as Pancho Villa, a dope-smoking guerilla warrior of the imagination, disappearing into his Mexican desert.

Part I: Entropy
I consider Pynchon a quintessential American novelist of the nineteen sixties because he came of age as an artist during that entropic decade and shows its stamp in all his work: V. (1963) covers the century from 1898 to 1956, but most of it was composed during the Kennedy years, and its zany mood reflects the liberatory burst of energy of the Thousand Days, that peculiar mix of Camelot idealism and Cold War paranoia also found in Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is set in the relatively innocent sixties of the early Beatles (when they were still the Adorable Moptops and the Fab Four) and of legal LSD. Nevertheless, all the attraction, danger, and destructive tendencies of the New Left and the counterculture are prophesied in the insidious underground web of the Trystero. Gravity's Rainbow (1973), ostensibly about World War II, was written during the Vietnam War and indirectly reflects that topsy turvy time; Pynchon also sneaks in references to Malcolm X, Kennedy, and Nixon. Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow discovers what many young Americans found out in the late sixties: that our Magical Mystery Tour in the Zone of Vietnam was a love affair with death, that the war never ends, and that your own country is your enemy. We weren't in Kansas anymore, the Wicked Witch of the West was after us, but there was no Yellow Brick Road and no kindly Wizard to come to the rescue. Finally, Vineland (1990) is the sixties revisited from the perspective of the eighties, about all the unresolved issues, about our sympathy for the Devil and our betrayal of the revolution, and about the long arm of the Nixonian counterrevolution continuing under Reagan. And whether or not his four novels are set in the sixties, they are ultimately all of the sixties, and always conjure up the contradictory moods of that decade and evoke the peculiarly mixed response.

Part II: The Adventures of a Schlemihl and Human Yo-yo
I was introduced to Pynchon's fiction in the fall of 1964 at Rutgers by Richard Poirier: V. was the last novel assigned that semester in his course on the twentieth-century American novel. I immediately glommed on to Pynchon the way I had to Kerouac in the late 50s. He had an epic, wild, wide-ranging imagination. He was hip, he was funny, alternately farcical and profound. He also had modernist traits: he was learned, dense and allusive, and he liked to write about wastelands (even in the early sixties, in many English Departments T.S. Eliot was still God). That Pynchon was camera shy added to the mystique: he actually lived by the Joycean ethic of "silence, exile, and cunning"!

Unlike Kerouac, Pynchon appealed to two sides of me: the adolescent and the cerebral--the anarchist and the intellectual. Nevertheless, I connected Pynchon to Kerouac because both wrote about restless post-WW II young Americans. Except that Kerouac's heroes were filled with romantic angst and an unfulfilled yearning to burn like roman candles, whereas Pynchon's were clowns, schlemihls and human yo-yos, bouncing between farce and paranoia. Kerouac was of the cool fifties; he wrote jazz fiction. But Pynchon was of the apocalyptic sixties; he wrote rock and roll.

Fall 1964 was my last semester at Rutgers. I had enough credits to graduate, and had already been accepted to study English at Berkeley the next fall. I was a New York City boy, but the East couldn't hold me anymore; for years, I had been California dreaming. All I'd ever known of life was school. The summer after high school I had retraced part of Kerouac's route in On the Road; now I was ready to live like a Pynchon hero, to start bouncing around the globe like a human yo-yo. Restless and terrifically naive--in other words, a perfect schlemihl--I boarded a boat for Europe in February 1965, just after my twentieth birthday, ostensibly to learn French in Paris but mostly, as it turned out, to bum around. A last fling before graduate school. Fiction imitates life, but life also imitates fiction, in an endless feedback loop: I soon found myself yoyoing in a Pynchonesque narrative involving historical change, illegal substances, FBI agents, farce, and paranoia.

I stayed at a dirtcheap fleabag on the Left bank with the pretentious name of "Grand Hotel du Midi." I learned about squat toilets on the stairwell; instead of toilet paper, last year's Paris telephone directory hung on a hook. But I was young and in Paris, where even the cockroaches spoke French. I fancied that Rimbaud had once checked into the "Grand Hotel" to shoot up.

There I met a newlywed couple, Berkeley students, the first I had ever known, veterans of the Fall 1964 FSM (Free Speech Movement), the first big battle of the campus wars of the sixties. I'm going to change some names here, so let's call them Peter and Wendy. They gave me the first dope I had ever smoked; in 1965, your first drug turn-on meant losing your cultural virginity. Peter was tall and dashing, Wendy a petite California blonde. They were the advance guard of the armies of the night, the new hippie freaks with the unisex look: both had shoulder-length hair and dressed in cowboy boots, patched jeans, and velour jackets. They had been living together on Shattuck Avenue (also known as Shackup) until Wendy left to join her father, an American General stationed in Paris. Peter followed. I could picture the scene at the front door when the hippie met the General and told him he had come for his daughter. They were married in the American church in Paris. (Two years later, Peter lost Wendy to the lure of methedrine and the Haight-Ashbury.)

I got swept up in a student demonstration on the Rue des Ecoles; I didn't even know what it was about. Les flics advanced, swinging their clubs to disperse the crowd. I waved my passport above my head like a flag--"americain, americain!"--as if that would grant me diplomatic immunity. It was a foretaste of Berkeley and of Paris 1968.

In the Paris Metro that winter of 1965, my friend Keith and I picked up a beautiful young woman who turned out to be Valerie Percy, daughter of the Illinois senator. In 1966, in the bedroom of her Chicago home, Valerie was murdered.

One morning in the fall of 1966, there was an insistent ringing on the phone in my Berkeley apartment. I was living in a dingy, dope-filled pad with two roommates, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. I rarely answered the phone then because our landlord was trying to evict us for keeping cats and we were trying to last out the semester. But after fifteen rings I thought maybe this wasn't the landlord, maybe this was important, so I picked it up.

The caller asked for "Mister Gordon," so I knew it was no friend; he said his name was Farquhar. I'd never met anyone by that peculiar name, but I knew of a Restoration dramatist named Farquhar, so I suspected it was a fellow graduate student named Paul playing a joke on me. To string him along, I said that was quite an unusual name and asked how he spelled it. "F-A-R-Q-U-H-A-R," he said patiently. I told him Mr. Gordon wasn't in, but could he state the nature of his business? He said he was with the local FBI.

I hung up, congratulating myself on outsmarting Paul.

But then I began to sweat: suppose this call was for real? Could I be arrested for lying to the FBI? I'd said I wasn't at home, but I'd spoken in my normal voice! I panicked for several minutes. Then I called the number he had given me: "Is Mr. Farquhar there?" I asked in a high, squeaky pitch.

They wanted to question me about Valerie Percy. Keith was a suspect because he had been dating her, and they needed to corroborate his story.

So two agents showed up at my door bright and early the next morning, looking like Hoover vacuum cleaner salesman. Yes, they really did have close-cropped hair and wear those plain black suits with narrow ties and shiny shoes; they were as straight as missionaries. (My roommate Danny, who had been up all night dropping acid, freaked out when he answered the door: "Andy, it's the Feds!" All during the interview, I could hear the toilet flush as he frantically disposed of his stash.)

For the sake of privacy, I led the two FBI into my bedroom, which was furnished in graduate student minimalism--board and cement-block bookcases and a mattress on the floor. They stood stiffly while I sat on the mattress. My answers simply confirmed what they already knew. Later, I heard rumors that Valerie had been killed by drug dealers, or that she had been killed by someone who mistook her for her twin sister. The murder went unsolved.

In March of 1965, I was sleeping in a Land Rover with American plates, parked on the streets of Bordeaux. I woke up in the morning to find the car freshly plastered all over with posters, courtesy of the French Communist party: U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM. I hadn't read a newspaper in months; I remember asking someone, "Where is Vietnam?"

In a student lounge at the University of Bordeaux, I watched a televised speech by Charles de Gaulle. Most of the French students left when Le Grand Charles came on; the rest listened and laughed uncontrollably.

Because we had picked up so many passengers along the way, a young woman and I rode into Madrid on the roof of the Land Rover, waving to passersby. It felt like a triumphal procession. In Madrid, we met some fellow Americans with no visible means of support who explained they worked as extras for MGM's Spanish studio. We got our pictures taken by a photographer in the Retiro Park, waited several hours till he could develop them, and then drove out to MGM. They said our beards would have been great for Dr. Zhivago (1965); unfortunately, that picture had just finished filming. If we hung around a few months, we could be soldiers in The Battle of the Bulge (1965). We'd have to shave, though. We left town. Maybe our scruffy mug shots are still on file somewhere in Madrid MGM. Whenever I watch Omar Sharif trudging through the frozen wastes to get back to Julie Christie, I wonder about the career I missed: I could have been one in the mob of starving peasants trampled by mounted Cossacks!

In Morocco, we slept in the car, on the beach, or in the fields. It seemed a friendly country: in a restaurant, a stranger passed us a clay pipe called a chillum and gestured that we should take a puff. We asked what it was. "Kif." I had to have that explained to me too.

I was being wrung out by a savage episode of the traveler's trots. Waking at three a.m. in Tangiers, the only place I could find to relieve myself was a barrel in a dark alleyway.

A lineup of little kids would trail us through the Casbah, hands out, chanting the only words of English they seemed to know: "Money, hipi? Hipi, money?" Finally we hired as guide a twelve-year-old street kid named Victor who apparently spoke six languages. He said he could get us anything we wanted: Hashish? Heroin? His sister? Mostly we wanted protection. By now, Victor must be Mayor of Tangiers.

On the deck of the boat returning to Algeciras, we threw all our dope overboard.

In Lisbon in April 1965, I saw A Hard Day's Night with Portuguese subtitles; some wag had translated the title into Cuatro Cavaleiros do Aposcalypso, meaning either "Four Guys After Calypso" or "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

I learned to faire l'auto-stop and picked up some hitchhiker's French. My low point came during a night in May spent in a fish truck in Calais after I missed the last ferry; for a week, I stunk like old mackerel.

By June of 1965, I was broke and lonesome and took the Cunard line home from England; I got back just in time to graduate with my class. Despite my insistent letters and packages of French perfume, my girflfriend of the fall had moved on to another guy.

I returned to a different country than the one I had left four months earlier. The first teach-in on the War had been held at Rutgers that spring. The number-one tune was no longer the Beatles' sweet chant, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"; now people were listening instead to the angry, insistent lament of the Rolling Stones, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." A chemistry major told me about his experiences with a new wonder drug called LSD. He said he had found nirvana and met God. I thought, if it could do that for this schnook, then what could it do for me? I ingested 250 micrograms and wound up in the hospital.

Part III: In Which Oedipa Meets The Shadow
I didn't realize at the time that I had fallen into a Pynchon novel and that the author was about to appear on the scene.

In the fall of 1966 I was writing a seminar paper on V. for a graduate course taught by Sheldon Sacks. Sacks was a sweet man and an inspiring teacher, a formalist and neo-Aristotelian of the Chicago school of R. S. Crane; out of place at Berkeley, he soon returned to the University of Chicago, where he edited Critical Inquiry and died much too young. Sacks and Frederick Crews--then in his Freudian phase--were my most influential teachers at Berkeley in the late 60s.

Briefly, I argued that V. was organized not so much like a novel as like a moral fable or apologue, and that its message read, "Keep cool but care." Anyway, that's what I believed then; I was a lot more certain about many things in the late 60s than I am now. Maybe that's the message I read because that's the way I was trying to live: cool but caring, a Berkeley hipster.

But I found V. so dense that it took my entire paper just to begin to explicate the first chapter. I never went further: I was overawed by Pynchon`s complex and daring imagination and intimidated by his learning. Nevertheless, I lived with that novel for a time. And, in a curious way, the novel led me to Pynchon when I wasn't even trying to find him.

I used to carry around a dogeared paperback of V. (I have it still, scotch-taped together. How could I give it up? It has all my notes!). I turned friends on to Pynchon; we became cognoscenti, sharing favorite lines of dialogue: "Oh, man,. . . an intellectual. I had to pick an intellectual. They all revert" (111) or "You're turning our marriage into a trampoline act" (113). Later we would similarly appropriate The Crying of Lot 49, sending each other letters with the stamps pasted upside down and pencilling on the envelopes "W.A.S.T.E." Once again, fiction was infiltrating life.

One friend, a woman graduate student, noticed me carrying V. and said, "Oh, are you reading that? I know the guy who wrote it." I was naturally skeptical about her claim and asked if this mysterious Pynchon really existed and if he was a man or a committee.

She said she had met him in Berkeley in 1965 and that they stayed in touch. She asked if I minded if she sent Pynchon my paper. I gave her a copy, suspecting that it would vanish into a black hole.

Several months later, she mentioned that "Tom" had read my paper and liked it, thought it a lot more perceptive than the reviewers' comments. I thanked her but still wondered what kind of game she was playing.

From time to time, she dropped convincing sounding details about Pynchon. She said he picked his friends carefully and that they guarded his privacy. She said he had written a second novel in haste and for money and that he was not too proud of it; that would be the just-published The Crying of Lot 49. She claimed he had people help him with research and that he was working on an endless novel in which all of his friends would appear, including her. Is Gravity's Rainbow a roman a clef? If there is ever a biography of Pynchon, someone should investigate that angle. I once combed through Gravity, searching for the character who is supposed to be her; there are just too many, and I couldn't be sure.

In fact, she reminded me most of Rachel Owlglass in V: she was a bright, lovely Jewish woman who liked to mother people. I was half in love with her but I was also friends with the guy she was living with. They later married and divorced; she claims he's in Gravity's Rainbow too.

One sunny afternoon in May 1967, I was sitting at an outdoor table of the Terrace, a cafeteria overlooking Sproul Plaza. At Berkeley, I got my political education on the streets or among the Terrace Rats--New Leftists who cut classes to table hop all afternoon, indulging in heavy conversation and strategy sessions. That day, we were awaiting a speech by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was beginning to speak out against the Vietnam War. Dean, a fellow teaching assistant in English, announced to the entire table that he had been taking acid nonstop for a week, that he had fallen in love while tripping, and that he was dropping out and going to Mexico. No one batted an eye or tried to change his mind; I remember envying his nerve. This was happening all the time; people were dropping like flies, and every semester you had to renew your vows to stay in school. Dean had already given away all his books. "Who wants my watch?" he asked, melodramatically stripping it off. "I`ve passed beyond time." I said I'd take it; I already had a watch, but I figured I could hock his. A lovely woman I'd never met sat down at the table and asked me why I was wearing two watches. Several years later, we got married.

As for Dean, the next day he had sobered up and wanted his watch back; I returned it. He went to Mexico and returned a few months later sans girlfriend. Last I heard, he became a computer programmer for IBM.

One night in early June of 1967, my Pynchon connection phoned me at my apartment on Shattuck Avenue. Pynchon was in town, staying with her and her boyfriend. He'd been living in L.A., flown up to Seattle to visit friends from Boeing, and on his way back to L.A. had stopped off for a day in Berkeley. She said, "Tom wants to meet you."

This was like a command audience with the Pope. I kick-started my motorcycle and, I think, made it across town to her place near San Pablo Avenue before she had time to put down the phone.

Many years later, I ran into her at a literature conference and she revealed some unexpected details about herself and Pynchon. They weren't just friends; they had been lovers and lived together in Berkeley for a while in 1965. She described him as being then a "prematurely middleaged" young man with "a lot of hang-ups." She claimed she was the first to turn him on to dope. They broke up because of the "hang-ups," but they remained friends and corresponded. From time to time, he would reappear suddenly and unexpectedly in her life--the last time at her wedding, with a wedding present of a kilo of Michoacan (a superior brand of Mexican killer weed).

That night in June of 1967 she made it clear on the phone that I was not to ask Pynchon about his work: past, present, or future. Just what did that leave me to talk about with him, I wondered as I drove across town, burning with anticipation. Yet I still had the nagging feeling that, like Oedipa Maas, I might be the victim of an elaborate hoax, that there would be no Pynchon at her apartment, just an imposter--or perhaps a locked door with a mail slot marked with the sign of a muted posthorn.

Part IV: A Screaming Comes Across the Sky
She had a tiny, one-bedroom house, living room separated from bedroom by a bead curtain. As I entered, the room was flooded with a pungent aroma and enough smoke to induce an immediate contact high; I coughed. A long, lanky young man was methodically rolling joints on the table; his stash box was a One-a-Day Brand Multivitamin pill bottle. He carefully finished rolling and extended the bomber to me, saying, "Hey, man, would you like a joint?" (This was Berkeley 1967; people really talked that way back then.) I took a toke gladly; it was obvious by the fog in the room that they were way ahead of me.

This man, who was introduced to me as Thomas Pynchon, appeared to be in his late twenties. I'm six foot one, but he was taller than me, about six two or three. He wore a corduroy shirt and corduroy pants, both green, and a pair of those brown, ankle-high suede shoes known as desert boots. He was lean, almost emaciated, and his eyes were wasted. His hair was thick and brown and he had a ragged, reddish-brown soupstrainer mustache; I wondered if he had grown it to hide his teeth, which were crooked and slightly protruding.

Pynchon was evidently a man of few words. I wanted very much to talk with him, to sound him out, at least to get him to laugh, but as we sat on the floor and passed around buzz bombers and grew progressively more zonked, he didn't say much, just listened intently as our hostess and host and I talked. The conversation was disjointed, grass talk consisting of little bits and revelations (Leslie Fiedler had just been busted for possession of marijuana) and silly stoned jokes, like the one about the woman who traded in her menstrual cycle for a Yamaha. I thought of Pynchon as a Van der Graaf machine, one of those generators that keeps building static electricity until a lightning bolt zaps between the terminals.

All of a sudden, he pulled out of his pocket a string of firecrackers and asked, "Where can we set these off?"

"Why don't we blow up the statue of Queen Victoria?" I replied.

"O wow, man, have you read that book?" Pynchon said. He'd caught my allusion to Leonard Cohen's novel, Beautiful Losers, recently released in paperback. Cohen's hero actually does blow up a statue of Victoria, a typically sixties symbolic gesture. I was pleased to finally get a response from Pynchon, yet I still felt like the overeager grad student trying too hard to impress the Prof.

There were no Victorian monuments to explode in Berkeley, so we drove instead to the Marina and set off the fireworks by the Bay. We walked by the water, past junkpiles, setting off cherry bombs and running like hell. A midnight ritual: four heavily stoned people hearing the snap, crackle, and pop, watching the dazzle against the black mud and the midnight waters. At that moment, halfway around the world in Vietnam, equally stoned soldiers were probably admiring in the same way the rocket's red glare.

Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, everyone had the hungry munchies and I suggested an all-night burger palace on University Avenue, probably the only restaurant open at that hour. It was a huge fluorescent Burgertown. As we sat at formica-topped tables and ate greasy sleazeburgers, Pynchon slouched in the booth, long thin legs in green Levi's sprawled out, pensively biting his nails. Then he ripped a styrofoam coffee cup into tiny, meticulous shreds. He had dissipated, tired eyes like Robert Mitchum's.

The place featured a colorful old baroque Wurlitzer jukebox. We fed the machine streams of quarters: the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" and Country Joe's "Sweet Lorraine." Pynchon chose Procul Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" and the Stones' "Ruby Tuesday," which remain for me associated with that night.

In Vineland, after D.L. rescues Frenesi from the Berkeley streetfighting, They sat devouring cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes in a waterfront place full of refugees from the fighting up the hill, all their eyes, including ones that had wept, now lighted from the inside--was it only the overhead fluorescents, some trick of sun and water outside? no . . . too many of these fevered lamps not to have origin across the line somewhere, in a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one. The jukebox played the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. . . . Revolution all around them, world-class burgers, jukebox solidarity. . . .(117).
D.L. and Frenesi's "jukebox solidarity" doesn't last. And that night in 1967 I made the mistake of introducing Pynchon to an acquaintance of mine who happened to be in the restaurant, the manager of a local rock band; they became engrossed in a technical conversation about music, and I was lost.

The last thing I recall is sitting with Pynchon in the open back of a red pickup truck, freezing, as we rocketed up into the Berkeley hills. The fog slid in like satin, so thick the water dripped on me. Suddenly, out of a cloud, San Francisco materialized below us. It was dawn.

Later that morning Pynchon caught a plane back to L.A. I never saw him again.

Part V: Conclusion: Slow Learner
That was twenty-five years ago. Since then, I've met over a dozen novelists of varying degrees of fame. The experience is almost invariably disappointing. You think you know them, but you don't; you only know their works. And they don't know you from Adam, so the conversations are usually the desultory ones of strangers with little in common. Nevertheless, my frustrating encounter with Pynchon continues to haunt my imagination because of the special circumstances: he's the only writer I didn't have to seek out, the only one who ever asked to meet me. Perhaps because I was a young student and a friend of a friend, he felt safe. We shared a joint, which creates a bond of sorts; in the sixties, it was a holy ritual, a passing of the peace pipe, one of the generational rites of passage. But now that I'm a certified professor, there is a permanent wall between us. Those times are gone forever.

So what can I say of Thomas Pynchon, except that we once smoked dope together? Does a writer's personality really matter, or only the authorial personality that we read in his works? A science-fiction novelist once told me, "Most science-fiction writers are nerds." He was correct: you meet a novelist whose imagination has sent you to Andromeda, and he dresses like an accountant.

Pynchon is no nerd, but the relative banality of his conversation that evening ("Hey man, would you like a joint?") and his reticence made it hard to get a focus on the man behind the books. But that's not surprising: Pynchon interposes his fictions between himself and the world. His novels are an elaborate screen he can hide behind, a form of both self-expression and self-effacement. The woman who brought us together once offered to arrange for Pynchon to speak in a university auditorium. She told him she could assure his anonymity by having him speak through a microphone from behind a screen. He refused: "They would still be able to recognize my voice." Ironically, that is exactly the situation of Pynchon's readers: he speaks to us from behind a screen, but we recognize him by his voice, that unmistakable Pynchon style.

Nevertheless, from my brief encounter with Pynchon I gleaned a few things about the man behind the screen. I know that he follows the reviews and evidently cares what critics say about him. That he probably has help with his research. That he usually works slowly and disparages Lot 49--wrongly, I believe--because he wrote hastily. That he's shy, doesn't talk much, and doesn't open up to strangers. That he's intense and has lots of nervous energy--the nail biting and cup shredding. That he picks his friends carefully to guard himself: no wonder trust and betrayal are central themes in Vineland. That he writes his friends into his fiction. That, at least during the late sixties, he was a heavy doper--thus his sympathy with an aging, beleagured head like Zoyd Wheeler. That he's generous, shares his stash and doesn't bogart his joints. That, like Benny Profane in V., he is "given to sentimental impulses" (1): he writes love letters, stays friends with a former lover, and shows up at her wedding. That, despite his reserved, introverted manner, he seems to care deeply: keep cool but care. That he reads a lot, including novels by his contemporaries. That he loves rock music, which is all over Vineland. That he's got a zany streak: the sense of play in his fiction is part of his life--he likes to set off firecrackers in the middle of the night. Does that explain the fascination with rockets in Gravity's Rainbow? Probably not, but it's nice to think of his fiction as a string of exploding firecrackers.

Most of all, I learned that the sixties profoundly affected Pynchon, or at least I like to believe that they moved him the way they moved me. According to his classmate Jules Siegel, at Cornell in the fifties, "Tom Pynchon was quiet and neat and did his homework faithfully. He went to Mass and confessed, though to what would be a mystery. He got $25 a week spending money and managed it perfectly, did not cut class and always got grades in the high 90s. His only disappointment was not to have been pledged to a fraternity. . . ." This well-behaved Pynchon was a member of the Silent Generation that went to college in the 50s, a generation taught to act prematurely middle-aged. In the late 1960s, the critic Theodore Solotaroff looked back on the repressed behavior of his generation in the 1950s:

It [the 1950s] was a time when the deferred gratifications. . . and the problems of premature adjustment seemed the warranty of "seriousness" and "responsibility": those solemn passwords of a generation that practiced a Freudian/Jamesian concern about motives, pondered E.M. Forster's "only connect" and subscribed to Lionel Trilling's "moral realism" and "tragic sense of life." In contrast to today [the 1960s], everyone tried to act as though he were thirty (314-15).
In the introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon mentions "a general nervousness in the whole college-age subculture. A tendency to self-censorship. . . .a felt constraint on folks's writing" (6). He didn't enjoy the 1950s: "Youth of course was wasted on me at the time. . . . One of the most pernicious effects of the '50's was to convince the people growing up during them that it would last forever. Until John Kennedy. . .began to get some attention, there was a lot of aimlessness going around. While Eisenhower was in, there seemed no reason why it should all not just go on as it was" (9, 14).

In the early sixties, Pynchon felt "claustrophobia. I wasn't the only one writing then who felt some need to stretch, to step out. It may have gone back to the sense of academic enclosure we felt which had lent such appeal to the American picaresque life the Beat writers seemed to us to be leading" (Slow Learner 21-22). All of his novels are picaresque, testifying to his restlessness. Recall Pynchon's zany streak, and the fact that he dropped out of Cornell for two years to join the Navy and see the world; this is a writer with wanderlust. After he finished V., he says, "I was on the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about" (22).

Nevertheless, when he first got to Berkeley around 1965 he must have felt like a stranger in a strange land, displaced in time and space, as Oedipa did: It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. . . . posters for undecipherable FSM's, YAF's, VDC's, suds in the fountain, students in nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search through alternate universes it would take. For she had undergone her own education at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them. . . this Berkeley was like no somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about. . . the sort that bring governments down. . . . Where were Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so temperate youth? . . . . Among them they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts (Lot 49 75-76).
Pynchon arrived in Berkeley in the early sixties a young man with a lot of hangups to overcome; that place and that time helped to liberate him, as they did so many of us. Like Oedipa, he had been shaped by the fifties into an uptight, bookish young person. But he couldn't live anymore on his overdeveloped intellect alone. Now he was ready to move beyond the books into experience. In the sixties, Pynchon lived a peripatetic life; as in the Beatles song, he got by and he got high with the help of his friends. Throughout the decade, he was close to the life of the counterculture, absorbing its values and smoking its weed, but always listening and observing intently, storing sensations for later use: "for the first time I was also beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality" (Slow Learner 22).

Judging from the evidence of Vineland, he has forgotten nothing of that intense, contradictory decade, neither the dewy-eyed revolutionary idealism nor the grim paranoia, neither the comic excesses nor the tragic waste. The era raised issues that are still unresolved in American society and culture. We keep going back to the 1960s, just as we keep going back to the Civil War of the 1860s: these are contested terrains. As in Gravity's Rainbow, the war goes on, although at levels more difficult to trace.

The struggle now is to define the meaning of a passage of American history which ripped this country apart, to sift through the shards and determine what remains worth carrying into the future. By creating his Becker-Traverse-Gates-Wheeler clan, Pynchon demonstrates how a certain strain of American rebelliousness is passed down the generations. It is imperfect, but it survives. In the words Jess Traverse quotes from Emerson, "Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of divine justice" (Vineland 369). Pynchon has kept faith with all the changes of that decade; they live again in Vineland. Even more, he demonstrates that the sixties aren't over yet--no more than Budapest 1956 or Prague 1968 were the end of that particular story.

According to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, "history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory" ("False Documents" 25). Vineland is such a superhistory; it provides a countermyth to pose against the official stories, writing our times more truly through the play of imagination. In all his fiction, Pynchon has helped to create and to recreate our history. He has also helped me to write myself.

Do I know Thomas Pynchon? Do I know the 1960s? Both are mysterious and contradictory, but I'm certain they're still hiding out there somewhere in the desert. Their history has not yet been fully written. Pancho Villa lives.

Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday,
Who could hang a name on you,
When you change with every new day?
Still I'm gonna miss you.
(Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "Ruby Tuesday")

Works Cited

Doctorow, E. L. "False Documents." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1983.

Jagger, Mick and Keith Richards. "Ruby Tuesday."

Mitchell, Joni. "Woodstock."

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966; rpt. NY: Bantam, 1967.
-------- Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
-------- V. 1963; rpt. NY: Bantam, 1964.
-------- Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.

Roth, Philip. "Writing American Fiction." Reading Myself and Others. NY:

Farrar Strauss, 1975.

Siegel, Jules. "Who is Thomas Pynchon and why did he take off with my wife?" Playboy, March 1977.

Solotaroff, Theodore. The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties. NY: Atheneum, 1970.

Posted by lck at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2006

Benjamin Krain

Photo Journalism at its best.

here

Posted by lck at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2006

Cal Update

The Cal06 gallery has been updated (banner-click or here) with my Feb06, Wendy's perfect shot of a pretty exotic dye coloring process (the dark silhouettes are leaves) and Christian Lindemann's of lindedesign vector illustration. Cute Whale!

Posted by lck at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2006

Mieke is Calendaring

Mieke sent her January Calendaring. You can see it here direct or in the Gallery along with the rest.

Mieke makes the cutest and simplest puppets on earth, so naive and expressive they are stunning. We adore her work. Don't miss it!

Posted by lck at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

Annette Bugansky

Annette Burgansky trained and worked in fashion and costume design, becoming a ceramicist. She worked as a cutter for Jean Muir as well as the BBC costume department. Graduated in 2003 from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in Ceramic Design.

Her work is greatly inspired by her experience in the fashion and costume industries and this has influenced her approach to ceramics.

Very inspiring work.

Posted by lck at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2006

Calendaring for 2oo6

Welcome into 2oo6. Hope there's still fresh leftover to drink.

The focus is on change. And best way to change is to change what we know best. January 1st: a calendar. The first one for January 2006 is available here (or banner-click). 6 different resolutions are available that will fit most desktops and portables. Left over are the few guys who own a Cinema Display. Feel free to work the canvas up to 3000 or more and request by mail, if needed, my original artwork.

1024 x 768
1140x900
1152x768
1280x854
1440x900
1600x1200

Change is not much on what I've done but on what you all can do. Your own artwork illustration (or own photographic), on this same template. The template is available as a layered PSD file. Paste your artwork and name and send it. Copyright will stay with you. Distribution of the flat JPEG file is encouraged, realize that each artwork bears copyright and name. The template itself is free to travel with no modifications (unless you find errors, please call). We are staying off of print for now, 72 dpi will work.

Photoshop Template for January 2oo6

All submissions will be reviewed and posted in a Gallery. The best authors will be invited to work in the near future on a similar theme, by that time we'll have a shop set up to sell the artwork.

Clear like Joe Pesci, I hope.

P.S. You don't have to produce 6 different sizes of your calendar, I'll take care of the technicalities. You'll clearly need Photoshop, the template is bulky to stay compatible with ANY VERSION of our pet graphic program. Again, I do not necessarily expect submissions from professional Illustrators as I am not technically an Illustrator myself. Stay with us and remember to have fun.

Posted by lck at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

Eleanor Yap

The endtail to 2005 is fireworks of amazing Illustration work.
Check out Eleanor's gallery (Australia, again). Very pretty for a young design student, with good cards for extremely attractive packaging assignments in the future.
Good job Eleanor (and all the best).

Posted by lck at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

Lillian Piri

Little Galaxie is the website of Lillian Piri, born 1985, Australia.

A naive website but a truly breathtaking portfolio.

Posted by lck at 12:48 AM | Comments (1)

December 26, 2005

Poetry takes forever

In Our Own Words:A Generation Defining Itself, Vol. 6, Marlow Peerse Weaver (2005) is out.

210 authors contributed to this International Anthology of Poetry from all over the world. One of the 210 is me, contributing with the titles:

Bi-directional prediction
and
Song for Edweena - YOU OWE ME FOR THE FLESH

This book series is a platform from which a generation (born 1960 to 1982) is speaking out about its realities, dispelling the narrow, simplified stereotypes created by the mass media and commercial marketing. The series now includes nearly 900 "voices" in essays, poetry, music lyrics, short stories and verse from more than 70 countries.

Volume 6 is distributed by Ingram and Baker & Taylor, and can be obtained or ordered through most book stores, worldwide. The title is also available through Barnes & Noble, Borders, ChaptersGlobe, Amazon.com, and most other online booksellers.

Product Details:
ISBN: 0965413675 - Format: Paperback, 288pp
Pub. Date: August 2005 - Publisher: MW Enterprises

on Amazon.com
on Borders (USA)
on Barnes & Noble

Posted by lck at 01:53 PM

November 24, 2005

Mia & Jem make invitations

Mia & Jem make designs for invitations of the wedding kind.
I have made invitations in the past and never for a wedding.
We are getting more and more customized.

Check the site (banner-click) for more and some radical poster designs.

Posted by lck at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

Schoeller

Stern has the best gallery (click banner) for Martin Schoeller's recent "Big Heads" series. Martin insists that these photo have not gone thru digital color correction. I don'y think so, sometimes lying is for good. However, it is all very remarkable and outstanding material. More abut Martin can be found within Life Magazine.

Posted by lck at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2005

London Fair 2005

London Design Festival 2005, a must see with digging potential.

And what's better than running a brand design for Phillip Morris and actually finishing it? Having them request a redesign of one of their existing major brands. Right? Crunching.

Posted by lck at 01:11 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2005

Eric Feng, surrealist

Who: Eric Feng
Who? Eric Feng, NYC Director and Designer
Works for: Feric Design
Featured: Idents for MTV2, the US Sci Fi Channel, ESPN and the MTV Movie Awards packaging. Was also featured in ResFest in 1999 and 2001
Interview maybe? here
What's cool? Hovering between fantasy and reality, interwoven with natural and mechanical beings, Fevolution is about infinite evolutionary possibilities.

Each and every drawing is impressive here, Eric has no fillers. Magnifique!

Posted by lck at 03:08 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2005

Ubu's back

After a long summer of building, UbuWeb is back.

Originally focusing on Sound Poetry proper, UbuWeb's Sound section has grown to encompass all types of sound art, historical and contemporary. Beginning with pioneers such as Guillaume Apollinaire reading his "Calligrammes" in 1913, and proceeding to current practitioners such as Vito Acconci or Kristin Oppenheim, UbuWeb Sound surveys the entire 20th century and beyond. Categories include Dadaism, Futurism, early 20th century literary experiments, musique concrete, electronic music, Fluxus, Beat sound works, minimalist and process works, performance art, plunderphonics and sampling, and digital glitch works, to name just a few. As the practices of sound art continue to evolve, categories become increasingly irrelevant, a fact UbuWeb embraces. Hence, our artists are listed alphabetically instead of categorically.

UbuWeb embraces non-proprietary, open source media. As such, most of the newer files are encoded in MP3 format.

One of the most valuable sites of all.

Posted by lck at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2005

100 Keith's paintings

Possibly the most extensive ever, the Keith Haring Show kicked off in Milan on the 28th of September and will close on the 29th of January, 2006. Sponsored by Chrysler at the Triennale in Milan. More info here and the press release (in Italian) here

Posted by lck at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

Candykiller

Brian Tailor's Candykiller smells of old comics, with a nostalgic twist for the Marvel classics (plus much more). This portfolio is also available as a comprehensive book at Lulu, here.

Posted by lck at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2005

Drezign

"This site is a personal portfolio of Karoly Kiralyfalvi aka Drez. This is not a studio or a company."

Behind a "kinky-like" interface an extensive and flexible site illustrating the work of Karoly Kiralyfalvi. Check the Portfolio (allow for pop-ups in Safari and Firefox or you won't see it coming).

Posted by lck at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2005

How

Creative inspiration, business advice and tools of the trade.
Current Issue: HOW October 2005 Price: $15.00
Plus: get a free issue

Posted by lck at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

Petra Stefankova, Bratislava, Slovak Republic.

Petra Stefankova is a graphic designer and illustrator, born in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. She studied animation at Academy of arts, architecture and design in Prague, Czech Republic, Jiri Barta's Department of Film and TV Graphics.

Her vector-oriented material is one of the best I have seen in years. Child-oriented Illustration is beautiful, minimalistic and poignant, years away from the materic materials that has been mainstream for years. Astounding, really!

Brava Petra!

Posted by lck at 09:55 PM | Comments (2)

Experimental Design, Portugal. 2005

The most recent European design biennale is getting worldwide recognition thanks to the extreme professionalism of its organisers and conceivers. As only regular event in the field of design theoretical reflection and practical projects, Experimenta already plays an essential role in finding new forms of repositioning the design culture as a strategic point of leverage between economic capability and cultural identity.

Posted by lck at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

A chair is a chair is a chair

Herman Miller Inc. is a global provider of office furniture and services.

An excellent website: easy to browse, consistent, with built-in search capabilities and shining back-end support. Research and Design/Ergonomic issues and solutions are well documented, product presentation is excellent and a working online retail locator is provided.

You may not like chairs but no question that one day you're going to need one or even sell one. Both ways the Herman Miller website is an excellent destination.

Posted by lck at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2005

ZoneZero

ZoneZero is dedicated to photography. Its name intends to be a metaphor for the journey from analog to digital image making. One of the references comes from "The Zone System" a fine example of the analog heritage in photography made so famous by Ansel Adams. From the analog dark room we are now moving to the digital one; where everything analog is transformed into digits represented through the infinite combinations of either zeros or ones.

Pedro Meyer, with a an excellent staff of 17, does an excellent job.
(English and Spanish spoken)

Posted by lck at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

Mono

Typing on the new aluminum typewriter (not true, the PowerBook will arrive next week).

Slow and slow eastbound design & attitude are maturing distinctively different from (and lacking the seriousness of) our westerner everyday routing advisors, which is appreciable. Planning for an out at the "stairs", mid section, between the aged and sleepy Margarita drinkers and the die-hard young skunk smokers on top.

Austrian's monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group of basket weaving enthusiasts and theory do-it-yourselfers having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is the super-affirmation of the globalization trap. monochrom has existed in this (and every other) form since 1993.

monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. publishes the book of the same name in addition to its activity in other areas. international art scene, panel discussion event technology, souls bought and sold, game and shame shows, readings of the dreariest sort, theory cocooning, film short processing, website squatters' consultancy, alternative space travel projects, do-it-yourself surveillance courses, riddle rallyes, ecumenical field services, overhead projector comics, circumstantiation, Power Point fairytales, layouting and decomposition, propagandistic summer camps, monumental puppet theater, aesthetic pregnancy counseling, producing, promoting and destroying music, party service, expressional dance, Biennial brawls, GDR rock, DJ events.

The Deutsche version is the default: here.

Posted by lck at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2005

A good portfolio is a good portfolio

A good portfolio is a good portfolio. An exceptional portfolio is better and Sven Kils beats anything you can find right now. Outstanding work. Never be in a hurry when you build yours.

Posted by lck at 07:33 PM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2005

An Italian festival

The first of its kind on an international scale. Site is in good English, Italian, Spanish and French. An embarrassment of riches made possible by massive sponsors. Not widely advertised on the net, 3 days from Sep 30th to Oct 2nd in Ravenna, Italy, will pack a rainbow of talents active in several areas of Illustration. Details "inside"

Exhibition: Komikazen: International Festival of reality comic-strips
Curators: Elettra Stamboulis and Gianluca Costantini
Locations: Ravenna's "Museo d'Arte" at "Loggetta Lombardesca" in Via di Roma 13, Ravenna; the "Almagià" in Via dell'Almagià, Ravenna; the
"Centro Giovanile" in Via Chiavica Romea n.88, Ravenna
Organised by: The Mirada Association and Ravenna's Local Authority for Youth Initiatives.

Inauguration: 30th September, 6 p.m.

Dates: 30th September - 2nd November 2005

On Friday 30th September at 6 p.m., the Mirada Association in collaboration with Ravenna's Local Authority for Youth Initiatives will present Komikazen, the first International Festival of reality comic-strips, hosted by the city of Ravenna at three different sites: the "Museo d’Arte" of Ravenna; "Almagià", the former sulphur factory; and the "Centro Giovanile" in Via Chiavica Romea.

After the success of exhibitions entitled "Per Ventiquattromila baci: fumetti dall’altra Europa”, “Joe Sacco: Nuvole da oltre frontiera”, and “Marjane Satrapi ovvero dell’ironia dell’Iran”, that centred narration around real life accounts, the Mirada Association wanted to provide the public with a greater opportunity to make contact with, and get to know, the most internationally important authors to recount reality through words and pictures.

The Festival, the first of its kind on an international scale, is arranged by Gianluca Costantini and Elettra Stamboulis and will last three days, while the planned exhibitions will be open to the public throughout October. At MAR (the Office for External Relations and Marketing), there will be an exhibition of original storyboards from the winners of the International Competition La Battaglia di Algeri: racconto a strisce di una storia in bianco e nero as well as the works of authors already established in their respective countries, such as Phoebe Gloeckner, Nicole Schulman, Felipe H. Cava, Tomaž Lavric and Kamel Khélif.

The festival will intersect with other methods of communication, such as journalism and photo-reportage, thanks to the collaboration of the magazine “Internazionale”, a partner in this project.
The festival will above all, however, be an opportunity to meet the guest authors, including Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco, who will both meet the public. The show will also offer associated workshops for school groups relating to autobiographical comic-strips.

Biographies of guest authors

Phoebe Gloeckner: a reader at Michigan University, USA, is known in Italy for the now impossible-to-find "Vita da bambina" (Topolin Editions), an autobiographical account of domestic violence. Gloeckner has produced many comic books and has worked with authors such as James Graham Ballard; Robert Crumb is one of her fans.

Nicole Schulman: a young American designer, linked to the noglobal movement and to the alternative American scene, she collaborates with the World War III collective. Schulman designs posters, tattoos and illustrations for the political performances of activists and is characterised by her xylographic sign and strong interest in social issues. Together with Paul Buhle, she created Wobblies, a book about the history of American Trade Unions. Her work has been published in Italy in the magazine "InguineMAH!gazine".

Kamel Khélif: the work of this French-Algerian writer has been printed by publishing houses such as France's "Fremòk". The stories, of a very pictorial nature, are all linked to the transverse theme of the search for identity by "those born in other people’s countries". The sense of exile and of belonging is portrayed through short scenes set in the cities of provincial France and Algeria. These stories are a tribute to the lost youth of these countries and a homage to the nostalgic beauty of memory. He is, as yet, unpublished in Italy.

Felipe H. Cava: a Spanish scriptwriter (also of film), he has worked with many writers, including Raul. Cava is known abroad particularly for "Berlin ‘31" and "Ventana a Occidente" (unpublished in Italy), and he also coordinated the editorial initiative 11 Marzo, created by a group of Spanish scriptwriters, and concerning the railway attacks that led Spain to withdraw from Iraq. During the 70's he was part of the political-creative collective known as El Cubri.

Tomaž Lavric alias TBC: a Slovenian writer, he is known in Italy for Racconti di Bosnia (Magic Press Editions), that won various international prizes for best comic book, Tempi Nuovi and La Fuga di Lucertola, by the same publisher. He also created Il Decalogo IV for Panini comics. Lavric uses pictures to tell stories that describe his country as it reaches a junction between the past and the present, from a disenchanted and pitiless viewpoint.

Guests at the festival will include Joe Sacco, a reporter who draws comic strips regarding conflicts such as those in Bosnia and Palestine, and also an observer of the American internal political debate (published recently by "Internazionale"), who has already exhibited in a solo show organised by Mirada at the Museum in 2001, and Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian comic-stripwriter, of French adoption, known in Italy particularly for Persepolis, which was also published as a comic book supplement to the daily newspaper "Repubblica".

The catalogue published by "Coniglio Editore" of Rome, and produced for the Festival, will present stories, previously unpublished in Italy, by all the featured writers as well as a critical contribution by Elettra Stamboulis and Tahar Lamri and a piece by Felipe H. Cava on historic events and the comic-strip.

Press Office
MAR - Office for External Relations and Marketing
Tel. 0544 - 482017/482775 ufficio.stampa@museocitta.ra.it
Associazione Mirada
Tel. 0544 – 600825/61446 Fax 0544 – 590810 Mobile 3295372762 mirada@tele2.it http://www.mirada.it

Posted by lck at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2005

Carl Blender's Bendable Element

Specializing in work for the music industry and print, Carl sports an impressive portfolio. Take a good 30 mins off before start digging. Very effective site.

Posted by lck at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2005

Art Lebedev Studio

Art. Lebedev Studio, founded in 1995, is the largest design company in Russia. Industrial design, graphic design, web design and interface engineering.

Very impressive Industrial and Environmental design samples onsite and a good, large pack of Illustrators.

Posted by lck at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

From Russia with (sudden) Love

Russian, minimalistic, extremely simple website, good and excellent print design, worth a look. Very young designer.

Posted by lck at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2005

Mauricio Pierro

Outstanding illustration presented in a simple Portfolio for this Brazilian artist.

Posted by lck at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

Mieke is on the loose

[ed - Mieke updates us on her roamings - lck]

Gutentag liebe luite!

On the 3th of September there is a Nekojuice Party-Expo in Berlin.
My puppets will be there in real life! Joehoeoeoe. Come by and snuff some art and come and dance, you are welcome! The evening starts at 21.00 o,clock!, At the Schonhauser Allee 167c in Berlin (als je toevallig in berlijn bent, kom effe langs, gezellig!)

See ya!

Greetings von die Mieke

Mieke Driessen illustraties

Posted by lck at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2005

Kooki

You may not like sushi but you may like chocolate. Superb and effective website execution, beautiful copywork and graphics. And you don't have to be a New Yorker! en-joy!

Posted by lck at 12:55 AM | Comments (2)

August 20, 2005

Are we that bad?

The cherry on top of a week of iconoclastic currencies, features and op-eds is the one on Icograda (front porch). Guaranteed to spark a hot debate, fireworks included, When the Branding Circus Comes to Town by Naseem Javed, recognized as a world authority on Global Name Identities, Image, Cyber-Branding and Domain Issues, is close to knocking your socks off. To the extent that some in the know are wondering if this short essay on branding is serious at all. In this case maybe the issue will die out and Icograda may have missed a case for heating up the Fall. What do you think, are we really that bad?

Posted by lck at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

Don't Click

I'm clearly having a day on the sarcastic or is it reviewing the old Zappa live in NYC, which is due every six months or so for good brain cleansing.

Don't click it is a brillant experiment and there it stays. In the context of the current and here-to-stay, point-and-click interface metaphor, clicking is an essental element of the decisional process. Tiny little mustaches, that is what we do when we browse structures and content, in a word: filtering.

To play is part of life so try (not to click), see how well you fare!
Clicking gets you ten seconds of white noise and some guilt. You have been warned.

Posted by lck at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2005

Istra

A virtual walk through cities in Istria - Croatia, using 360 panoramas and flash technology.

Posted by lck at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

Sebastian Kutscher

I agree with Carol about Sebastian and his little movie PANTONE.
Between G. Reggio and the Quay Brothers and still nothing short of amazing.

Posted by lck at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2005

I will survive?

Banal, terrifying and dull, anonymous. War of the Worlds is a survival story depicting a family against pure evil. Scary, "War" lacks the kind of details and breadth of ideas that elevated later Spielberg efforts like "Minority Report" to the ranks of instant classics. Spielberg has decided to cast his version of the H.G. Wells novel as another affirmation of his peculiar brand of fractured family values. As an alien race makes a smash-and-grab attempt to eliminate humans and take over Earth, we view the action solely through the eyes of one family, a divorced dad (Tom Cruise) shucking off a lifetime of selfishness to protect and cherish his two children. The movie establishes the family dynamic in its first 10 minutes. Blue-collar dockworker Ray (Cruise) has custody of his 15-year-old son, Robbie (Justin Chatwin), and young daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), for a couple of days while his ex-wife (Miranda Otto) goes to visit her parents with her new husband. Robbie resents Ray for years of neglect; the girl tolerates her Peter Pan father (will Cruise ever show signs of aging?). These relationships will be tested when Ray wakes up one morning and finds his neighborhood torn by a menace that has been long watching the planet with envious eyes. For the next hour or so, Spielberg has us in his grasp and keeps tightening the vice, serving up the devastation from a street-level point of view that highlights the brutal and horror of the events.

The movie draws on very specific 9-11 imagery but since it is tightly focused on its single family, there's never any attempt to broaden or do anything with this very obvious metaphor. It's effective, but facile. Spielberg affirms family unity at the expense of logic and in the face of the pitiless tone of all that has come before.

All in all, our 5-year-old tester was not at all scared which draws negative to the overall. Not recommended.

Posted by lck at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2005

3-Iron, quiet trespassers

Squatter's luck and love spiraling out of control - recommended

Strange, tragic, chilling and sweet -- and for all practical purposes a silent movie, "3-Iron" is a drama about a resourceful squatter in Seoul who finds empty houses to crash in by blanketing neighborhoods with pizza-delivery flyers.

When Tae-suk (Jae Hee) returns to these areas at night, he breaks into the houses where flyers remain, assuming the owners away. He sleeps in their beds, eats food from their refrigerators and takes photos of himself posing next to family portraits, in exchange he does laundry or fixes broken clocks. His subsistence takes an unexpected turn when he's caught sneaking around a wealthy home by the docile, abused young wife (Lee Seung-yeon) of a temperamental businessman, and within hour feels compelled to save the girl (by wielding the titular golf club) when her husband returns home in a rage...

Written and directed by Kim Ki-Duk (of this year's controversial "Bad Guy," and 2004's highly praised "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring"), "3-Iron" touches upon themes of loneliness, helplessness, aimlessness, coincidence, self-worth and hope as it grows more odd and absorbing with twists of fate and character developments that lead in unexpected directions. Remarkably, Kim brings this story to life with almost no dialogue. Jae and Lee give captivating performances without uttering a word until two laconic lines of dialogue in the closing minutes. It's a choice that leaves you hanging on their every glance and gesture, and it makes the imaginative "3-Iron" all the more memorable.

Written & directed by Kim Ki-Duk
Starring Lee Seung-yun, Jae Hee, Gweon Hyeok-ho, Ju Jin-mo, Choi Jeong-ho.

Posted by lck at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)

Vivienne Westwood, a retrospective

A retrospective of Vivienne Westwood's life and works in images and words.

Posted by lck at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2005

Zeyko

Very impressive interior design and kitchen cabinetry from Zeyko, celebrating German craftsmanship and excellence in both products and website design. Stunning.

Posted by lck at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

2046, The train that never returned

I finally had a chance to watch this DVD, which has been lying on my desk for a while. Unfortunately this release I've got is in Italian only, a bothering since, beside English, I would have preferred the original Cantonese with subtitles better.

What does the number "2046" mean? In 1997, when Hong Kong returned to China, Hong Kong was told that everything would remain unchanged for 50 years. 2046 would be the last year of this promise. In the movie, 2046 is a room number in a hotel where Mr Chow first met Su Li-zhen in In The Mood For Love (2000).

The movie was screened in Cannes Film Festival 2004. The print for Cannes arrived three hours late and was escorted by police. It is the first film in Cannes history to arrive so late that re-schedulings were necessary. 2046 was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 but did not win it due to showing an unfinished product. A Hong Kong reporter for Sudden Weekly was jailed for 3 months for taking photos of the set in Oriental Hotel. Wong Kar Wai had the set rebuilt due to the photos leaking to the press.

This 2 hour length movie is about loneliness, longing, and the futility of recapturing past memories of suppressed love. This is Wong Kar Wai's pseudo sequel to the highly acclaimed In The Mood For Love where Mr Chow love for Su Li-zhen is never fulfilled. In the Mood For Love ended with Mr Chow moving to Singapore living as a journalist and a novelist. Su Li-zhen raised the child he would never know he had in Beijing.

In 2046, we look at Mr Chow's life after he moved back to Hong Kong. He stays in room 2047 at Hotel Oriental which is next to room 2046, a number that holds all kinds of memories for him. Mr Chow spent his time in the room writing a science fiction novel called "2046" where a mysterious train left for 2046 every once in a while. In the story anyone taking the train bound for 2046 has the chance to retrieve their lost memories. No one knows if it is true since nobody ever leave 2046. Everyone who went there had the same intention, to recapture their lost memories.

Wong Kar Wai has a gorgeous visual style. The use of strobing light, slow motion, fast motion, freeze frame, tilt shots, color filters, neon-sign lighting are all superb. This visual style is greatly assisted by his three cameramen. Music by Shigeru Umebayashi is haunting and sets the right mood, the classic theme is Bellini's Casta Diva, which works extremely well. Fun to say composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) was born two blocks away from where I live.

2046 is both lyrical and evocative. A deceptively simple movie, despite its fractured and non-linear narrative. I would recommend this to anyone. Brilliant and a must see.

Posted by lck at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

Plus et plus

More amazing broadcast work with a minimalistic web front.

Posted by lck at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

Pinthin

Some beautiful new works at pinthin.

Posted by lck at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2005

Donald Weber, photojournalist

An award-winning photographer, Donald studied at OCAD in Toronto and Photojournalism at Loyalist College, Belleville. He is listed in the Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche, a compendium of the best Canadian photographers, and is a nominee for the prestigious Worldpress Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam and participated in the Eddie Adams Workshop in New York. He has worked as an architect for Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and won a Governor General's Gold Medal in Architecture with Kongats Architects in Toronto. He has traveled extensively in the First through ‘Tenth’ worlds.

Don is a regular contributor to the Globe & Mail and Getty Images, and is Photographer-at-Large for Outpost Magazine, where he is a featured character in the regular comic, Welcome to My Country. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Time, Maclean’s, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian and The Guardian Weekly, The Times of London, The Chicago Sun Times, National Post and Los Angeles Magazine. Currently he is working on the book Satellite, about the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and When the Snake Whispers Your Name, with writer Larry Frolick.

Posted by zib at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2005

3 movies

Out of a long strand of movies I watched recently the following three: Constantine, The Assassination of Richard Nixon and The Statement, with Iron-3 and 2046 to follow next in the pipeline.

Constantine's strengths are in its visuals. Director Lawrence comes from the music video business, and he develops a vivid palette. Hellfire-tinged mirror image of Los Angeles, innards of a nightclub that caters to those of both angelic and demonic persuasion. The film looks so good that it's almost possible to ignore some of the screenplay's ludicrousities. Source material is "Hellblazer", a series of graphic novels. Reeves filmed after being immersed in the Matrix sequels, is therefore in Neo mode, just less likable and more cynical. The supporting cast is eclectic with Swinton at her most androgynous as Gabriel. The movie fails to take direction and stays loose the longest between several collateral genres.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon offers a compelling title. Director Mueller, making his debut, takes us to 1974, when Watergate was preparing to take down the President. Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn) is a furniture salesman who can do no right. His boss is losing patience with his inability to close sales; his wife, Marie (Naomi Watts), is desperate to get a divorce; and his plans for a new business with his best friend (Don Cheadle) are at risk because the bank is reluctant. As Sam's life disintegrates, he gropes for someone to blame, and he decides that the source of his woes is the President of the US. Sam comes up with a plan: hijack a plane and fly it into the White House, killing Nixon and making himself a martyr. But, as with everything else, Sam screws it up. The Taxi Driver influence is unmistakable. The dissociation from society of the main character is the same. The need to lash out through violence is the same. Where The Assassination of Richard Nixon fails is in its inability to make Sam a compelling character. An irritating loser and whiner who is intent upon abdicating personal responsibility for his failures, preferring instead to blame others or society. It's a trial to spend 90 minutes with this man. Penn provides a great performance with a lot of his mannerisms.

The Statement, a strong cast and some fascinating ideas are enough to keep us glued to this political-religious thriller. One of those odd films where everyone speaks in clipped British accents, even though everyone's French. The story is set in 1992 and centres on Pierre (Caine), a 70-year-old who as a young man in the 1940s was a member of the Vichy Milice, a French police force that carried out Nazi orders. For nearly 50 years he's been in hiding, protected by a secret Catholic society. Now a Jewish organization has found him at just the same time as a French magistrate (Swinton) and her military assistant (Northam) have caught his trail as well. The Jewish radicals want to bump him off, the French government wants to try him as a war criminal. How long can he keep hiding? It's a sharp tale. The cast is very good, with Caine commanding sympathy as a seriously unsympathetic character, Swinton and Northam adding off-beat touches, and Charlotte Rampling excellent as usual in an extended cameo as Pierre's estranged wife.

Posted by lck at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2005

Jason Todd, photographer

Jason's website could be utilizing space more efficiently but is easy on the mouse and his photography is top-notch, subtle, clean and provocative.
Jason's bio is funny!
Banner-click as always (if you dunno what to do just click-it.)

Posted by lck at 12:35 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2005

Ricardov

Ricardo Vega is an independent graphic designer. His minimalistic site is a worthy experience, with a full range of illustrated projects and web design as well as drawings, notebooks and more. And there's more in here than we could browse at all at once!

Santiago, Chile

Banner-click!

Posted by lck at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2005

Mieke Driessen, puppetmaker

Mieke Driessen is a young, playful Illustrator and puppetmaker. Not every day you find somebody who happily uses such a definition. A puppetwhat??? We invited her to showcase and she happily indulged us. We liked her wild and astonishing imagination that puts her apart from mainstream. Thumbs are clickable, click them and read the funny biography that she sent.
Don't forget the Interview (Dutch)

.

Welcome Mieke.

Miekillustratiek.

Hallo, my name is Mieke, some people call me MiekMiek. In 1978 my mum popped me out somewhere in the south of Holland. I graduated in 2004 from the art academy in Breda. Now I am working in mostly a chaos as an illustrator and puppetmaker. My work is most of the time colourful, happy and funny. I made an animation for the Dutch Sesamestreet, for magazines and for some differed expositions. My love and interest goes to little things that make me and other people smile. Most of the time is that something with eyes. If you’ve nothing planned today go to my website.

Greetos from Miekos

Posted by lck at 01:13 AM | Comments (1)

July 22, 2005

Senses of Cinema (36 is out)

Issue 36 is out, beautiful as always. I point out by Scott Murray, filmmaker and a co-Editor of Senses of Cinema (based on a chapter in his forthcoming book, Heroines of Desire): The Films of Walerian Borowcyck. Boro is finally being reconsidered which reassures me that any good born-animator dies at least as a movie-maker cult.

Senses of Cinema home is here

Posted by lck at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

Wim, get a job

In a modest attempt to take it away with Wim Wenders and recommend everybody to stop trying to convince themselves that one of these days Wenders is going to deliver again something coherent, I am reporting below his biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film. Giving up is good. So give up and look elsewhere for sharp, convincing views and images.

Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film

Occupation: Director, screenwriter Also: producer
Birth Name: Wilhelm Ernst Wenders
Born: August 14, 1945, Düsseldorf, Germany
Education: University of Freiburg (philosophy, medicine); Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Munich

One of the best known directors of the New German Cinema, Wenders is often characterized as the "existentialist" of the movement. Stylistically, his films blend Hollywood forms and genres with elements of counter-cinema. Thematically, his films attempt to disclose states of consciousness-loneliness, irresolution, anxiety-and explore the ambivalent impact of American culture on post-WWII German life. "All my films," Wenders claims, "have as their underlying current the Americanization of Germany." No other German filmmaker has dealt more extensively or more obsessively with the American presence in the European unconscious. Wenders's fascination with American culture began in his childhood. He grew up at a time when American culture provided a diversion for West Germans eager to forget their own past. Extremely shy and introspective as a teenager, Wenders planned to study for the priesthood, but this desire soon gave way to an interest in American music and American film. After studying medicine and philosophy at the University of Freiburg and painting in Paris, Wenders enrolled in Munich's film school, where he made several student films between 1967 and 1970. His first professional feature, THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK (1971), attracted considerable critical attention. The film is based on a novel by Peter Handke, a Wenders friend who would write WRONG MOVE (1975) and collaborate with Wenders on WINGS OF DESIRE (1988). After THE SCARLET LETTER (1973), his least satisfying work, Wenders made ALICE IN THE CITIES (1974), WRONG MOVE (1975) and KINGS OF THE ROAD (1976)-a trilogy of "road movies" that exemplifies his formal and thematic concerns. The best of the three, KINGS, focuses on the relationship that develops between two men as they travel in a van along the border between East and West Germany. Lonely and introspective, they both long for the company of women. By the end of their journey, they derive comfort from the fact that "in the course of time" (the film's German title) their lives have taken on some shape and some significance. KINGS OF THE ROAD is a quiet, almost lyrical film that disdains psychological motivation, suspense and dramatic tension. In that sense, it reflects Wenders's admiration for the films of Yasujiro Ozu. But in its intricate allusions and resonant implications, it evokes Wenders's favorite themes: the difficulties of communication, the Americanization of German life ("The Yanks have colonized our subconscious," one of the characters says) and the fate of German cinema. In THE AMERICAN FRIEND (1977), a film that won Wenders international attention, the director continues to explore these themes. Based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, Ripley's Game, the film depicts the last few weeks in the life of Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), a picture restorer and framemaker living quietly in Hamburg. The real interest of the film, however, is the friendship that develops between Jonathan and Ripley (Dennis Hopper), an American underworld figure who manipulates Jonathan into committing a series of murders. Jonathan finds himself irresistibly drawn to Ripley, even as he is gradually corrupted and destroyed by the friendship. This story allows Wenders to focus on German/American cultural tensions and to explore the exigencies of international filmmaking dominated by Hollywood and American interests. (Two of Wenders's American idols, directors Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller, play minor roles in the film.) In 1978 Wenders came to the United States under contract to direct HAMMETT for Francis Ford Coppola. After numerous problems with the script and conflicts with Coppola, less than 30 percent of Wenders's original film was retained in the final version, released in 1983. Wenders indirectly documented his problems with HAMMETT in THE STATE OF THINGS (1982), a self-referential film that contrasts European and American ways of making films. PARIS, TEXAS (1984), based on a script by Sam Shepard about a reunion between a drifter and his family, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1984 and represents in many ways the culmination of themes that run through Wenders's earlier films. Wenders returned to Berlin to make WINGS OF DESIRE, a lyrical, largely black-and-white meditation starring Bruno Ganz as an angel who wanders the city, yearning for a physical, human existence. The relative commercial success of the film, which earned Wenders the Best Director Award at Cannes in 1987, led to the production of a sequel in 1993. UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) is a metaphysical detective romp of global dimensions, with William Hurt, Sam Neill, Solveig Dommartin and others pursuing each other around the world in search of a camera that enables blind people to "see." Half a post-modernist road movie, half self-indulgent meditation on the nature of the recorded image, the result is a disappointingly banal exploration of some of Wenders's most cherished themes. Wenders's WINGS OF DESIRE sequel, FARAWAY, SO CLOSE! (1993), proved to be even less coherent, running well over two hours with little of the lyrical elegance of WINGS OF DESIRE. Coming after the disappointment of UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, Wenders's recent films have represented a significant downturn in the director's critical and audience reception.

Posted by lck at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

On the edge of the edge

Guy Maddin’s body of work is as beautiful as it is confounding and delirious. He incorporates the language of past cinema, with which he is most intimately familiar from his countless hours of film viewing, and combines this with a pre-cinematic sensibility learned from the books he voraciously devours. A man of prodigious intellectual appetites, Maddin’s many interests and obsessions can easily be discerned in his work.

His first film, produced through the Winnipeg Film Group, was the haunting family fable THE DEAD FATHER. This brought him the recognition he needed to embark on his second film, the cult hit TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL. This film played for months as a midnight movie in New York City and paved the way to perhaps his most delirious and insensible picture, ARCHANGEL. Certainly the most Iyrical of war films, ARCHANGEL is the story of amnesiac lovers skirting the northern frontiers of World War 1, and its release brought Maddin the U.S. National Society of Film Critics’ prize for Best Experimental Film of the Year.

Following this triumph was Maddin’s first work in color, a story of repression and unnatural couplings entitled CAREFUL. The film opened Perspectives Canada at the 1993 Toronto Festival of Festivals and it went on to screen at the Tokyo and New York Film Festivals.

In 1995 Maddin created a short filmic prose-poem based on the work of Belgian charcoalier ODILON REDON. It was organised by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who also invited such directors as Jonathan Demme, Jane Campion and Tim Burton. The resulting production won a Special Jury Citation at the Toronto Film Festival and played festivals from New York to London to Telluride, Colorado.

Also in 1995, Maddin was the recipient of the Telluride Medal for Life Time Achievement at the Telluride Film Festival. He is the youngest person ever to have been awarded this honor. Two years later he unveiled his biggest budget film to date, TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS, the shooting of which is documented in the Noam Gonick’s film WAITING FOR TWILIGHT.

Maddin has also made many short films, few of which have been seen. These include: MAUVE DECADE (1989), INDIGO HIGH-HATTERS (1991), THE POMPS OF SATAN (1993), SEA BEGGARS (1994), SISSY BOY SLAP PARTY (1995), MALDOROR: TYGERS (1999), and THE COCK CREW (1999).

In 2000, along with other notable Canadian filmmakers, Maddin was commissioned to make a six-minute “prelude” for the Toronto International Film Festival in celebration of their 25th anniversary. The resulting short film, THE HEART OF THE WORLD, was proclaimed by many festival-goers and critics to be the best film of the entire festival and became the most acclaimed film to date of Maddin’s career. It won a special award from the National Society of Film Critics as the best experimental film of the year, won a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival for best narrative short, and was voted one of the ten best films of 2001 by both J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, and A.O.Scott of The New York Times, a highly unusual honor for a six-minute film. In 2002 Maddin filmed the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance of Mark Godden’s ballet “Dracula” for Canadian TV and the resulting film, DRACULAPAGES FROM A VIRGINS DIARY won an International Emmy award and was released theatrically to great acclaim.

Now a regular contributor to Film Comment and The Village Voice, Guy Maddin recently premiered a video peep-show installation COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, (an hour-long feature will be released in August 2004 by Zeitgeist Films).

Maddin’s newest film, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD is based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of The Remains of the Day). Starring Isabella Rossellini and Kids in the Hall’s Mark McKinney, the film is set during the Depression in a Winnipeg brewery where a legless matriarch holds a contest to see who can create the world’s most melancholy music.

Posted by lck at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2005

Jonas Lund

More from Sweden. His Portfolio here.

Posted by lck at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2005

Susanna Marchi

Top-of-the-Game-Photography.

Posted by lck at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2005

Adam Neate - Stay Home Paint

A collection of original paintings from London's foremost Contemporary Street Artist.

On Beautiful Crime

In recent years Adam Neate has gained notoriety for his unique street canvases, left to their fate in the streets of London. Stay Home Paint is Adam Neate's first major saleable Exhibition of his street canvases and a seminal event to mark the launch of Beautiful Crime.

A series of beautiful and warped pictures in paint and spray on heavy cardboard and canvas.

The Exhibition features 20 of 100 new works, please check out the catalogue at 'Art' for the full listing.

Posted by lck at 07:29 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2005

Anti girl?

Hey, girl, hope you'll recover soon. How can we not make you a guest at least for a day :-?
Lithograph sale, you're all invited to check them all out.

Posted by lck at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2005

Gianmarco

Influenced [& heavily] by Robert Linstrom but offers some sort of re-interpretation. As usual, a joy to have him on. Read more for an interview, courtesy of zeroin.gr...

Hey Gianmarco! Please give us an idea of your background, your influences + inspirations!

Personally, I think the influences can be found everywhere, from design and art as such to nature itself and combine them with the imagination. As ironic as it might sound, one of my main sources of inspiration that I have and keep having during my whole life is music and I am positive about the big emotions that it can generate, thank you for all that music Sinatra. To Daniella, apart from the fact that she inspired and help me a lot to accomplish Silence Television, she has been a great companion, always being there for me.

You work a lot with vectors. Would you like to tell us more about your work + personal style?

The vectorial illustration is the means through which I transmit my design style. Without discrediting photography, because I am fond of it, vectorial design generates totally different sensations and less common than what we are used to observe, that is, to the exact replica of reality.

Any future plans for Silencetv that you'd like to share?

Silence Television operates as a main framework in which I expose ideas about myself and I communicate the design from a total personal point of view. ‘Perfect White’ is the first episode of everything that involves Silence Television. Even though this episode is somewhat simple and short, I use it as an introduction. Although I don’t have it completely defined, I imagine that ‘Inspire’ will be the name of the second episode. Leaving the introduction on the side, I am currently focusing on ‘Inspire’ and I am developing a brand new image for SilenceTV as a website.

In this new Project, I will try to develop a much more demanding work concerning: more detailed vectorial illustrations, much more interesting animations and personal graphics proposals. The interface will remain similar to ‘Perfect White’ because an important point is to create that personality of ample spaces and few elements that identify Silence Television. I imagine that episode 02 will be online by the end of the year.

Posted by lck at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2005

NYC in the '70s

Originally titled SoHo Blues, Allan Tannenbaum's book of photos from his work as SoHo News chief photographer is now called New York in the 70s. Published by Feierabend Verlag in October, 2003, the book is 272 pages in tabloid format. It features a reminiscence by Yoko Ono and a foreword by noted author P.J. O'Rourke. The book is available at all Amazon sites internationally and you can order signed copies here

You do not have to be a fan of the 70s to appreciate this book.
Read my lips. Do not miss the galleries:

Mondo Art
Man God Law
Music
Show Biz
Nightlife
Soho News

Incredible work and an incredible "body" of work here!
Thanks Allan.

Posted by lck at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

Design is...

Design is a creative activity whose aim is to establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life-cycles. Therefore, design is the central factor of innovative humanisation of technologies and the crucial factor of cultural and economic exchange.

Design seeks to discover and assess structural, organisational, functional, expressive and economic relationships, with the task of:

Enhancing global sustainability and environmental protection (global ethics)

Giving benefits and freedom to the entire human community, individual and collective

Final users, producers and market protagonists (social ethics)

Supporting cultural diversity despite the globalisation of the world (cultural ethics)

Giving products, services and systems, those forms that are expressive of (semiology) and coherent with (aesthetics) their proper complexity.

Design concerns products, services and systems conceived with tools, organisations and logic introduced by industrialisation – not just when produced by serial processes. The adjective "industrial" put to design must be related to the term industry or in its meaning of sector of production or in its ancient meaning of "industrious activity". Thus, design is an activity involving a wide spectrum of professions in which products, services, graphics, interiors and architecture all take part. Together, these activities should further enhance – in a choral way with other related professions – the value of life.

Therefore, the term designer refers to an individual who practices an intellectual profession, and not simply a trade or a service for enterprises.

Posted by lck at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

Bernstein & Andriulli, photography

Posted by lck at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)