Faces as Hanging-Posts, again

The title of Larisa Shepitko’s film is not apotheosis but the hill near the end; she died in a car wreck.

The Ascent hints at first that it’s about human figures in an unforgiving landscape.  War, a safer subject as far as censors were concerned. Russian soldiers, women and children flee Germans through the forests in [...]

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COLD HEAT has drugged me up

In my mailbox: Cold Heat #5/6 Double issue
By Ben Jones and Frank Santoro
Picturebox
I forget who said it, but when Pavement hit back in the day every band wanted to do the slant-rock thing but nobody wanted to suck.
So here’s this comic book, a pamphlet still.  The form’s not dead yet, like the 7″ single in [...]

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On Walls, In Books

Two great announcements in my inbox:
First, from Tommi Musturi, the birth of Glömp X.  One whole kilo of comics, the 10-year anniversary edition of the Finnish anthology features a tribute to 3-D comics, and– wait for it– a touring exhibition through galleries across Europe.

First exhibition: Bologna, Italy, with 12 different sites throughout Europe through 2010.  [...]

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Tara Donovan’s Piles of Cups, Straws

Tara Donovan has piles of cups, loops of tape, and a front of straws installed at Cincinnati’s CAC, all worth a look and thought.  In 2006 I saw two of these works at St. Louis’ unbelievably fine art museum, but prefer their Cincinnati versions.  Before, Haze stood in an obscure nook by the staircase; now [...]

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March, almost

There’s this.  And then this.
***
I listened to the Elliot County boys’ basketball game last night.  They won a tight one with too many whistles over East Carter, 73-68. Got T’d up near the end, which won’t fly in the Sweet 16 state tournament.  If East Carter had hit their foul shots, etc etc.
The first this, [...]

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Newspapers are doomed.

Up late during a windstorm, I caught a Charlie Rose roundtable on “The Future of Newspapers.”  He talks with Walter Isaacson, Mort Zuckerman, and Robert Thomson.
Based on what they said, all newspapers but the Wall Street Journal are utterly doomed.
Isaacson drives the point home with his plan to save the papers: micropayments.  When it comes [...]

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Lower, low

Filmmaker James Fotopoulos:
I think that serials from the 30’s and exploitation films, horror films, and these types of cinema that are considered “low” are much closer to life. Because of the complete lack of anything that is rational and the brutality is closer to how we live. For example, I saw some lowly exploitation film [...]

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(Add the Net, PCBs, MRSA)

When myth exhausts its power to transmit messages (how to marry, how to eat, how to be brave), it becomes a narrative that does not know how to resolve itself.  Everything, says the contemporary novel, comes to a bad end.  (It was in Victorian times that novels began to have ambiguous, unresolved, ironic endings.)  Music, [...]

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Josef’s Art

From Josef von Sternberg’s autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry:

All reference books seem to agree that art requires uncommon skill, though this too is open to debate, as skill often reveals shallow content. Nowhere is it stated that art, might perhaps, be a hygienic search for obscure values, or a cultural memorandum, or an attempt [...]

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No Funes

Architect Nadim Karam:

Is memory a vacated dilemma?  We’re in a state of memory zero.  We erase memories almost as quickly as we experience them to be able to keep up with the spirit of the age.

From Nadim Karam & Atelier Hapsitus, Voyage, 2000.

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