Better Things

the photography and the silences in this film make you forget to breathe. all the colours are so sombre and reflect the bleakness of the story.

Peter Peri - The Preacher

1961 Forest Gate Methodist Church, London, E.7. The preacher. Diagonal sculpture.

Reminds me of this.... in Belfast...

'Draft And Overdraft' (nicknames) on The Ulster Bank Shaftsbury Square.

by Dame Elisabeth Frink 1964.

Siobhan Hapaska

Siobhan Hapaska's sculptures incorporate extraordinary objects from palm trees to buffalo skulls, goat skins to old socks.

They create metaphors reflecting on the fundamentals of life, unearthing the unsaid and the troubling.

Her sculptures of the mid 1990s had highly finished metallic fibreglass surfaces. Her new works reflect on how things have changed since. Their scale is larger than human. Themes of fertility and potential abound in 'Dry Spring' which uses copper pipe and flowers.

Politics, technology, speed, travel and nature are all made reference to, but ultimately you are encouraged to open your minds to the space her sculptures leave for imaginations to take hold.

my heart sang when i first saw slides of her work at a friday event, i can't remember what she said but it was very very important. i think i smiled the whole way through her talk which has never happened before or since.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called the film "so closely tuned to the pulse of communal life, to the rhythms of how people work, play and struggle together, it captures the larger picture along with the smaller. Like Poppy, the bright focus of this expansive, moving film, Mr. Leigh isn’t one to go it alone. Played by a glorious Sally Hawkins — a gurgling, burbling stream of gasps, giggles and words — Poppy . . . keeps moving forward and dancing and jumping and laughing and nodding her dark, delicate head as if she were agreeing not just with this or that friend but also with life itself. She’s altogether charming or perhaps maddening — much depends on whether you wear rose-colored specs — recognizably human and every inch a calculated work of art."

warming objeects

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (NY: Fa

this book is like relish, i can't have enough but its incredible. probably because the characters are completely fabricated. but the sentiments, the nostalgia and hope and despair is all real and from somewhere true.

'The book emulates the celebrity auction catalog (think of the six-volume Sotheby’s catalog for the many personal collections of Andy Warhol and you’re on the right track). The twist is that Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris are fictional characters and their joint possessions, carefully itemized and offered in rough chronological order in the auction catalog, are supposed to reflect the arc of their relationship, beginning with “the first known photograph of the couple together” (Lot 1005) and ending with various lots suggesting two lives going in different directions.

Shapton’s auction catalog mimicry is pitch perfect; her lot descriptions satirize the dead-pan verbiage of the high-brow auction house. And, in fact, Shapton’s “auction catalog” appears to have fooled the Library of Congress, which catalogs the volume not as fiction but in the CT class, or Auxiliary Sciences of History: Biography. Shapton must have had a blast collecting or faking the items to be included in the 332 lots: fake snapshots, tourist postcards, lingerie, clogs, 18 bras for “Lenore” and 18 tee-shirts for Harold, cheesy paperbacks, vintage sunglasses, stuffed squirrels…

On the other hand, Important Artifacts and Personal Property is less successful in giving much depth to the relationship between the two characters. Auction catalog language is deliberately wiped free of emotion and subjectivity, so Shapton often resorts to personal notes, letters, and annotations by Lenore and Harold themselves, buried in the descriptions of the various lots, as a vehicle for depicting the status of their changing relationship. For example, here is Lot 1253:

An unusual chair and a handwritten note
A vintage 1930s leather and oak chair. Good condition, some marking to leather. A note on the back of a receipt for groceries reads: “You said you’d be back at 8, you could have called. Have gone to the movies. here’s your present – Happy Birthday. L 9:45”
24 in. wide x 30 in. high x 18 in. deep
$700-900

The problem, of course, is that most of our personal possessions don’t really say much about us in isolation. (The fact that I have a Hello Kitty mug of Badtz-Maru in my office won’t tell you anything about me unless I tell you the story behind it.) When items in Shapton’s book do point to biographical traits of their owners, the message often seems forced.'

From the http://sebald.wordpress.com/

gloss over the artwork

in found this website which adds its own tagline on each work.

here jan bas ader 

and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

i don't think the website owner calls themself artist. actually i'm not entirely sure. but is still ok for me to use him or her as secondary research? i think their commentary on 'modern art' as a tool to impress a date is very valuable to me as an art student.

miranda's website

HERE

MIRANDA JULY

miranda july.

I liked her book here:

I really loved it, its ridiculous but completely normal at the same time. I can identify with all the shit in this book, every singleword.

David Shrigley's Worried Noodles

its very funny, here is one of the songs on the album by David Byrne.

There are also songs by

Hot ship

franz ferdinand

aidan moffat

scout niblett

deerhoof.

really good songs and words and music all in a thickly wrapped double cd box

unmade beds, the film.

other unmade beds

Unmade Bed

the warriors... what?

Michael Beck (Swan): Director Hill said that the studio forced him to veer from Yurick's ethnically righteous novel and cast a white actor as Swan. If Swan had to be a white guy, Beck turned out to a four-alarm cream-dream of a choice. Whether it's having the balls to stand up to a power-hungry Ajax or the speed with which he lays the pimp hand down on Deborah Van Valkenberg's Mercy, Beck was armed with enough bitch-slap in his holster for everyone. It might seem strange to anyone who witnesses Beck's powerful presence in The Warriors, but his best post-Warriorswork was in dramatic TV-movies. One would think Beck might have been able to write his own ticket after this star-making turn, but as to the fickle finger of script-choosing, Mike said it best himself: "The Warriors opened up a lot of doors for me. ThenXanadu closed them."

And also.... nipples.

Deborah Van Valkenberg (Mercy):

Equal parts slut and saint, Deb played up every teenage boy's sick dream-girl fantasy to the hilt in her movie debut. Though she got her start in the Broadway production of Hair, we all know her as Ted Knight's brunette daughter on Too Close for Comfort. Though Mercy's introduction to us in The Warriors is as subtle as Jm J. Bullock's line readings on Comfort, it's impossible to take your eyes off Deborah as she slowly chips away at Swan's (and our) defenses. Talk about an upgrade from whoring around with the Orphans! This talented actress dropped off the big screen for a while, concentrating instead on challe

nging TV roles. But her fortunes turned around thanks to charming, indie comedies like Free Enterprise and Chasing Destiny. Hey, if you were gonna resurrect your career, wouldn't you start with roles opposite Bill Shatner and Casper Van Dien? Okay, fine. Laugh all you want. But you're gonna have to meet Ted Knight in the afterlife and answer for those jibes—and it will not be pretty! Ted and his heavenly pals may even pull a train on you. Hell, you look like you might even like it.

unmade beds

family