Steve Breen (March 23, 2011)

Bureaucracy

"036"

directed by Juan Fernando Andrés Parrilla and Esteban Roel García Vázquez
written by Andrea Gómez
cinematography by Ángel Amorós
music by Paco Martín

with Carolina Bang and Tomás del Estal

Only somebody brave, with a rebel soul, may enter the jungle of the outlaw and fight face to face against the most dangerous men at this side of the river...

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Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila

Zach sits down with Tila Tequila who may become his new best friend and also welcomes another guest on the show who some people may recognize.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila from Between Two Ferns

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis: Natalie Portman

Zach interviews Natalie Portman and her dog, Whiz.

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis: Natalie Portman from Between Two Ferns

Paul McCartney Wins Grammy for Helter Skelter

McCartney won for a rendition of the Beatles tune Helter Skelter, which he recorded for his 2009 live album "Good Evening New York City.".

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Esperanza Spalding

Jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding has won the Best New Artist award at the Grammys.

The Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price has died

Gramophone
January 29, 2011

Dame Margaret Price has died at her home near Cardigan in Wales aged 69. Her pure, warm, lyric soprano will always be associated with the music of Mozart, a composer whose music ran through her career like a thread. In 1962 she made her stage debut as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro for Welsh National Opera and, as a young singer at Covent Garden later that year, she took over the role from an ailing Teresa Berganza: her career took off overnight. Her first major recording was as Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte under Otto Klemperer (EMI). And she would go on to perform and record the roles of the Countess (Figaro), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni). She also sang the soprano part on Peter Schreier’s Gramophone Award-winning recording of the Requiem (a disc that had critic Robin Golding commenting that she sang the part “more beautifully than I can remember ever hearing it”).

Though her career took to the world’s great houses, her dislike of travel meant that she always preferred to make her base with a particular company, first Covent Garden, then the Cologne Opera and finally the Bavarian State Opera in Munich where she lived until her retirement in 1999.

Like many Mozart sopranos, Price also excelled in the music of Richard Strauss and her stage roles included Ariadne auf Naxos. Sadly, she never made a commercial recording of a work she was perfectly suited to, Strauss’s Four Last Songs (though she was due to record the work for CBS with Michael Tilson Thomas). She also included a number of Verdi roles in her repertoire and was a memorable Desdemona in Otello (the role with which she made her Met debut in 1985, and which she recorded twice – once with Solti for Decca and then with Alain Lombard for Forlane). She also sang Amelia (Un ballo in maschera – an opera she recorded alongside Pavarotti for Decca). The most surprising addition to her repertoire was on record as Isolde in the DG recording of Wagner’s opera under Carlos Kleiber, a conductor with whom she often worked.

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Margaret Price

Incredible Image: 24-hours shot from Greece’s Temple of Poseidon

TNW
January 28, 2011

After a moment of inspiration and hours of planning and preparation, photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos created this beautiful image portraying 24 hours, shot from Greece’s Temple of Poseidon, also known as Sounion promontory. It took him 12 hours to pull together and process a single image that included over 500 star trails, 35 shots of the Sun and 25 landscape pictures.

Waiting for a clear day, Kotsiopoulos shot the above image on December 30th-31st of 2010. He had to stay at the same place for approximately 30 hours, on location 2-3 hours before sunrise in order to make the preparations and test shooting and an extra 2-3 hours the second day so as to shoot part of the Sun’s sequence that he lost the first morning due to clouds.

In the morning, he took photos with his camera and tripod facing east. He captured dozens of shots throughout the day and night of the landscape from east to west, then west to east at night. He also took images of the Sun and Moon’s courses across the sky, from sunrise to sunset and to sunrise. Kotsiopoulos recorded the Sun’s position exactly every 15 minutes using an intervalometer, with an astrosolar filter adjusted to the camera lens. The “all-night” star trail shots lasted almost 11 hours. Finally, he took a series of night-to-day transition shots.

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Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares

Variety. 1925. Germany. Directed by Ewald André Dupont

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
New York, USA

Organized in association with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden and in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, this exhibition—the most extensive ever mounted in the United States of German films made between the world wars—includes seventy-five feature-length films and six shorts, along with a gallery exhibition of Weimar-era film posters and stills. The exhibition continues the tradition of Iris Barry, the world’s first curator of film and founding curator of MoMA’s Department of Film, who began adding German films to the collection in the mid-1930s and exhibited a deep commitment to this rich period of film culture throughout her career. Daydreams and Nightmares also builds upon the scholarly legacy of Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, which the émigré film and social critic wrote (at Barry’s invitation) at The Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to classic films by Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst, among others, the exhibition includes many films, unseen for decades, that were restored after German reunification. The extensive program reaches beyond the standard view of Weimar cinema—which sees its tropes of madmen, evil geniuses, pagan forces, and schizophrenic behavior as dark harbingers of Hitler—by adding another perspective: that of the popular German cinema of the period. The development of Weimar cinema coincides with the coming of sound, and German filmmakers also excelled in the making of popular musicals, cabaret-type comedies, and dramas, shot outside the studio, that tackled social issues.

All silent films have piano accompaniment by Ben Model, Stuart Oderman, or Donald Sosin.

Glenn McCoy (Jan 12, 2011)

Orhan Pamuk: Finding an Authentic Voice

Conversations with History
University of California at Berkeley
Institute of International Studies
November 6, 2009

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. On the occasion of publication in the United States of his new novel, The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk reflects on his intellectual journey, including the influence of his parents, writers who shaped his world view, the "huzun" of Istanbul, writing, and recurring themes in his novels.

Orhan Pamuk

Paul McCartney's Tribute to John Lennon (SNL, December 11, 2010)

When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity

New York Times
December 13, 2010

The painting was beautiful, just not admired. Then suddenly, after more than four centuries, it was. It acquired a pedigree. The art hadn’t changed, but its stature had.

And there it was the other day, propped on an easel in the Prado’s sunny, pristine conservation studio here, like a patient on the table in an operating theater. The most remarkable old master picture to have turned up in a long time revealed its every blemish and bruise, but also its virtues.

In September the Prado made news. It announced that this painting, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” a panoramic canvas showing a mountain of revelers drinking the first wine of the season, and a few of them suffering its consequences, was by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Only 40-odd paintings by this 16th-century Flemish Renaissance master survive. This one, from around 1565, came from a private seller, whose ancient family, unaware and clearly unconcerned, had kept it for eons in the proverbial dark corridor, in Córdoba, where it accumulated dirt. Then the Prado conservators took a look. What seemed to be the artist’s signature turned up beneath layers of grime and varnish.

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A detail of the painting, showing a peasant celebrating during a festival for the first wine of the season.

Vintage Photos from Robert McCabe's Trips to Greece in the 1950s

Rhodes 1954. This marble Aphrodite, in the museum in Rhodes, was found in the sea.

Huffington Post
December 12, 2010

Legendary photographer Robert A. McCabe has compiled what are, in essence, stunning photographic journals of Cuba and Antarctica, among other places.

McCabe also traveled as a Princeton undergraduate to Greece in June 1954, witnessing firsthand soaring unemployment (at the time of his visit, unemployment was hovering around 30%) and poor wages (those who did work were making a little less than a dollar a day). McCabe recalls in his introduction to his book, Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, 1954-1965, how unspoiled the landscape of Greece felt before all the tourists and development starting happening, which has forever changed the landscape in Athens.

He traveled extensively through the Aegean after that, from 1954-1965, to document fully the experiences, people and places there (he was, in particular, interested in Greece's iconic architecture).

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Sounion 1955. At the temple of Poseidon.

Epeiros 1961. Young friends.

Athens 1955. The Agora and the Acropolis from Observatory Road.

Athens 1955. Acropolis. The Propylaia from the Parthenon.

Athens 1955. The Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion.

Serifos 1963. A church in Chora.

The Aegean 1954. On the bow of a caique.

Mykonos 1955. At a baptismal festival.

John Lennon (1940-1980)

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

by Timothy Farrington

Wall Street Journal
November 20, 2010

As a young man the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk painted seriously and dreamed of becoming a professional artist. This early passion shows in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, an engaging but sketchy account of the novel as an "essentially visual" literary form. Novels, the Nobel Prize winner argues, consist of "ordinary human details which are quite often visual details," strung in sequence like beads on a necklace. An author's first task is to evoke each image as precisely as possible in the reader's mind, because it is the immediacy and realism of this welter of detail that gives the novel its uniquely immersive quality.

The proper subject of the novel thus becomes, in Mr. Pamuk's view, not people's moral character but the sensibility revealed in how they react to "the manifold forms of the world—each color, each event, each fruit and blossom." The features of a character's physical and social environment, in turn, must be a "necessary extension" of their inner "emotional, sensual, and psychological world." The snowflakes that Anna Karenina watches from a train "reflect the mood of the young woman to us."

In these essays, originally presented as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard last year, Mr. Pamuk shows himself to be at the very least an excellent reader, and his enthusiasm for his favorite novels (especially Anna Karenina but also Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain) is winning. He also touches on the work of many earlier critics, including Nabokov, E.M. Forster and Friedrich Schiller, whose 1795 essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry inspired his title. But Mr. Pamuk's own attempts at theory can be frustratingly vague.

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10 Questions for Woody Allen

Time
January 17, 2008

He's brilliant at portraying neurotics of all kinds. But the multitalented director swears he's actually quite normal.

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Also see

The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875

National Gallery of Art
October 31, 2010–January 30, 2011

A few years after the discovery of photography was announced in 1839, the British art critic John Ruskin named it "the most marvelous invention of the century." Making permanent what the eye saw fleetingly, the new technology seemed an almost magical revelation.

As photography gained a foothold in the 1840s, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. These young painters and their followers wished to return to the purity, sincerity, and clarity of detail found in medieval and early Renaissance art that preceded Raphael (1483–1520). But they were also spurred on by the possibilities of the new medium, which could capture every nuance of nature. Indeed, Pre-Raphaelite artists painted with such precision that some critics accused them of copying photographs.

Many photographers in turn looked to the language of Pre-Raphaelite painting in an effort to establish their nascent medium as a fine art. Both photographers and painters—many of whom knew one another—drew inspiration directly from nature. In choosing subjects, they also mined literature, history, and religion, as well as modern life. Together they developed a shared vocabulary that is explored in this exhibition through the genres of landscape, narrative subjects, and portraiture.

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