armani ooh saw a very pretty armani bag in the window of the collins st store black & voluptuous, expensively louche ... (looks better in the window than in this washed out shot)
audi mmm, audi a6 quattro here's a review, the engine is "a sweetie. Superbly refined, with linear power delivery", the cabin "has a magic ambiance", while handling "is just perfect. It hunkers down on its 18-inch wheels and tyres beautifully, yet rides comfortably" i don't mind sturdiness in cars (in fact i find it kinda sexy - viz. saabs) while i don't hanker after it, audi's R8 is a super-fast super-beast jeremy clarkson gave it the once over on top-gear...
i love this painting. it is profoundly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. stirring, painterly and mystical, the colours shimmer and hum. and its subject is something intrinsically beautiful which lends another quality, another level of experience. i find a similar resonance and shimmering quality in the rings of katherine bowman, especially her random rings with their constellations of gems and engravings i don't think the wonder of stars and the night sky ever ceases. it hits you whenever you look up and look. not just glancing up, but gazing at the stars. and watching the night sky away from the cities is even better of course. the depth of the galaxy is deeper, blacker - the absence between the stars. i've never camped under the stars - i've always had a protective sheath of tenting between me and the night, but it's something i long to do. my sister went to uluru for her 40th birthday and saw the skies there. she says she never saw the sky so dark or the stars so bright. i would love to see those skies and hear their stories. this is the emu
Not all constellations are seen by using imaginary lines joined from star to star. Many Australian Aboriginal groups used the dark patches that they could see in the night sky to trace out shapes. A good example is a giant emu that was seen by many of the people who live in the western central desert of Australia... The head of the emu is marked by a conspicuous dark cloud that is easily seen in the country and also visible in the city depending on light pollution levels...located within the constellation of ... the Southern Cross... The long neck of the celestial emu, extends down dark lanes through Centaurus and the body into the dark lanes of Scorpio. The celestial emu is truly a large and spectacular sight for those who get the opportunity to get away from the pollution of the city.
i recently heard about another art piece that makes us look to the skies - nancy holt's sun tunnels. at first they look like great concrete pipes (which they kind of are), but she has placed them in the desert - they are exactly positioned to catch the sunrise and sunset at solstice. One of the wonderful features of the Sun Tunnels is the series of holes drilled in each of the concrete tubes. Without knowing what they were, you would be tempted to think they were just holes that make for terrific viewing of the desert and mountains beyond, but in fact, they have a very specific purpose. The holes come in four sizes, either 7, 8, 9, or 10 inches in diameter), and according to Holt, "each tunnel has a different configuration of holes corresponding to stars in four different constellations--Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. "The sizes of the holes vary relative to the magnitude of the stars to which they correspond." from here there is a lovely frieze article which "revisits" holt's place in the sun images on this article are pretty
like being held by a red balloon, or flying on the back of a dragon or winged horse
it feels like fantasy
i want to have a working studio
in my mind's eye, i have imagined it many times - there is plenty of light and a big table and on shelves nearby there are pots of paint and pens, brushes and implements. there are boxes full of stuff, and images of inspiration.
i have been in studios like this. where people work hard to produce works that looks as they've emerged effortlessly from their fingers.
studios ... jen martin,
gold & silversmith
the nicholas building swanston street melbourne
miro's creative space
lovely photograph,
joaquim gomis (1902–1991) "montroig's studio ( miró’s studio) from creation in space of joan miró, 1956–1961
Alexander Calder in his Roxbury, Connecticut, studio, 1941
louise bourgeois
minnie pwerle at work
sophie calle's studio, with her mother substitute-stuffed giraffe looking down at her hemingway's living room hemingway's desk at la finca vigia (cuba) and the painting he looked at every day from his favourite chair
picasso working away, he seems to embody "studio" - whereever i am, i work the great matisse, working in bed
perhaps there's not so much to this "studio" as i thought the cramped space of a working artist, no famous name, just getting on with it.
although i have never been one to seek out role-models, i felt a need to give a nod to some classy dames.
martha graham.
i don't know much about martha graham's work. i think i saw the martha graham dance company on telly years ago. one of the principal dancers was a black woman and i mistook her as being "martha graham". silly me. but this was well before google. i do like modern dance, though. much prefer it to classical ballet. and the good stuff is very good. (my mummy did isadora duncan-martha graham like "movement" classes when she was little. what a cool child she was growing up in the 40s) i like this description of graham's work:Graham believed that through spastic movements, tremblings, and falls she could express emotional and spiritual themes ignored by other dance. She desired to evoke strong emotions, and achieved these visceral responses through the repetition of explicitly sexual and violently disjunctive movements. some of her moves
martha gellhorn. best known for being ernest hemingway's squeeze for a number of years, she also had a reputation for being a fearsome journalist and wartime correspondent. i tried reading a biography and found her truly unlikeable. but i figure, that's just me. doesn't mean she wasn't a stand-up lady. maybe i'll go back to it and skip her early years. after all, i'd rather know her for her work than being mrs hemingway (that would really piss her off). more pointedly, maybe i'll read her work. the thing is i first read about martha gellhorn when i was reading about cuba - she and hemingway lived atfinca vigía (lookout farm) near havana - it sounded wonderful ... see lots more pictures here
Over a bottle of Famous Grouse, they talked about "the struggle of memory against organised forgetting", agreeing furiously on almost everything... Strongly adverse to "the kitchen of life", the former Mrs Ernest Hemingway was a terrible cook. On subsequent visits, Pilger took food. Sometimes they would stroll in the park, talking surfing and snorkelling between denouncing the vileness of Kissinger...[Gellhorn] died of cancer in 1998. John Pilger continues to annoy the buggery out of his critics.
nina simone i have a "best of" collection of nina simone's songs. in one of the songs, mississippi goddam, she intersperses the song with comments. i was going to write about it, but someone (with more knowledge) beat me to it: At the beginning of the song, she announces "the name of this tune is 'Mississippi Goddamn'. And I mean every word of it," [the largely White audience laughs and are] still laughing with Simone after she sings the opening chorus ("Alabama's got me so upset / Tennessee makes me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi, Goddam") and states that "this is show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet." But this is where the song, and its reception, changes. Simone rips into America's race policy, simmering as she sings "don't tell me, I tell you / Me and my people just about due ... The audience is dead silent after the verse, a fact that Simone acknowledges, when she says to the crowd "bet you thought I was kidding". The moment seemed to only fuel the fury brewing underneath Simone's performance up to that point. When she starts singing "This whole country is full of lies / You all gonna die, die like flies," it is clear that she is in a space, in opposition to the non-violent stance of the mainstream Civil Right Movement, and one that portended the violence in American cities like Los Angeles (Watts), Newark and Detroit in the coming years. nina simone, singing it live she was smart, ferociously talented and determined, "my original plan was to be the first black concert pianist - not a singer - and it never occurred to me that they'd be drinking and carrying on when i played the piano. so i felt that if they didn't want to listen, they could go the hell home." read more in this well-considered article last year, protest anthology was released - a compilation of her civil rights songs and interview it's available for download
sophie calle i have only recently come across sophie calle and her smörgåsbord of an oeuvre. i saw (or perhaps was told about) a doco on sophie calle. talking to a friend later he mentioned that she was the artist "maria" in paul auster's novel, leviathan. now i am a big auster fan, so i skipped off to find the relevant passage. apparently auster and calle didn't know each other when auster wrote about her, but calle subsequently re-created or perhaps re-claimed the works of her alter-ego "maria" (frieze article talking about it). all this became their collaborative work, double-life. how very post-post-modern of them. looking up calle's shenanigans, i found an article on the guardian, he loves me not, recounting the story of sophie calle's work at the 2007 venice biennale, take care of yourself or how sophie calle turned being dumped by her boyfriend by email into a modern masterpiece. says calle, "The idea came to me very quickly, two days after he sent it ... I showed the email to a close friend asking her how to reply, and she said she'd do this or that. The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary." she's hilarious. i love her work. usually i hate conceptual pieces, but she is genuinely smart and her work is adept, and stylish and witty.
in a recent issue of frieze, sophie calle is asked 'what images keep you company in the space where you work?' She answers: 'In my studio there is a stuffed giraffe that I bought when my mother died, to replace her. Her name is Monique too, and she looks at me from on high with sadness and irony, just like my mother did.' She concludes the questionnaire with 'I don't think my mother would have chosen to return as a stuffed giraffe in the studio of her daughter, but she is dead.'
she has recently collaborated with a brazilian outfit, tetine. classy. here they are, tetine vs sophie calle and samba de monalisa 2
tallulah bankhead a minor actor, tallulah bankhead was a large personality. she happily laid claim to laying marlene dietrich, greta garbo and numerous others. she was also a bit player at the algonquin round table.
Some compared her to Dorothy Parker, who was not amused to hear that she had competition. Of course, one friend noted that Tallulah never kept her mouth shut, so she was bound to say something witty occasionally. Tallulah indeed was always talking and was never at a loss for something to say, even if it was an untruth. During one party, someone brought up the subject of rape and Tallulah quiped, "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. You know, dahling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel." other naughty things she said: **my father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine. **if i had my life to live again, i'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
my first experience of marguerite duras was reading her autobiographical novella, the lover. i liked the idea of the novel more than the experience of reading it, i must admit.
what got me in, though, was a magazine spread in french vogue in the 90s, where duras spoke of some of her favourite things, a link to the images here
a view from her apartment, her favourite bag (black leather clutch with gold handles), her favourite pen, her diamonds - delicate rings on her fragile hand
i've carried the last photo with me to all my work desks -the image is now coffee stained and wrinkled. i love it.
a friend has sent me this wonderful article, the muse of trouville, written by victoria best, about an aging duras taking up a young man who became her muse
she also sent this truly subslime photorgraph of duras by richard avedon. duras looks like a naughty gremlin (which by all accounts was just about right)
louise bourgeois
edith bouvier beale ("little edie") a documentary about little edie and her mum, "big edie" - the beales of grey gardens
society dames who took to living reclusively in their east hamptons mansion with several cats and a lot of cat tins and detritus ... ladies of big character,
drew barrymore played little edie in a movie about them a few years ago, grey gardens
armani
here's a review, the engine is "a sweetie. Superbly refined, with linear power delivery", the cabin "has a magic ambiance", while handling "is just perfect. It hunkers down on its 18-inch wheels and tyres beautifully, yet rides comfortably"
