Happy birthday, Mahatma.
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“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.”
(attr. Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1869-1948)
“And this independence is gained, not by means of strife, not by the destruction of existing forms,of life, but only by a change in the interpretation of life. This independence results first from the Christian recognizing the [...]
“I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again.” [Andy Warhol]
I’m in San Francisco at the moment visiting Casey. So far, the cultural highlight of the trip (aside from drinking in the Castro; my friend gingerbeer and I went out and had a couple of drinks on Monday, [...]
One of the many reasons I love Los Angeles: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. People who roll out the tired, “LA has no culture” trope can sit on it, Potsie-style; we’re not New York or Berlin, but there’s excellent stuff going on here. The newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum (which is on the LACMA [...]
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The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral—but the birds are shackled to their perch, which is in turn connected to the hand crank.
Somewhere between nature and the mechanical, between the comic and the tragic, his birds “twitter” with a music that expresses how frail and vulnerable existence is, especially in the post-WWI modern world.
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“Birdhouse In Your [...]
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My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post). But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.
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Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:
In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence [...]
This past Monday was the 50th anniversary of the first recording sessions for Miles Davis’s masterpiece Kind of Blue.
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There is a Japanese art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a special parchment, with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or [...]
The Federal Music Project was a short-lived (1935-41) US federal work project under the umbrella of Federal Project Number One. At the program’s height the project employed 16,000 musicians who gave lessons to children in rural and urban areas, transcribed/recorded folk songs for archival purposes, and performed in thousands of concerts (34 new orchestras [...]
An amazing photo gallery: Ninety Years of Bauhaus
The Bauhaus photo pool on Flickr
The Bauhaus-Archiv Museum of Design in Berlin
Via plep: A virtual gallery of the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Some nudity, in case you’re at work.
I like this one a lot (it almost seems Pre-Raphealite). Maybe I need to do a Medusa-related post at some point?
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“She’s Love, she loves and yet she is not loved.”
[Wm. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis]
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Ten years ago, the Magnetic Fields (a project by Stephin Merritt; the band is apparently named for Les Champs Magnetiqués, a Surrealist novel published in 1920) released 69 Love Songs, a three-part genre- (and gender-) bending collection of songs that are by [...]