05w21:3 The Artistic Stereotype Posted May 25th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 21 number 3 (the artistic stereotype) ——————————————————————— Face to face with Freud | John Cornwell http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-531-1610665-531,00.html “In the early days of his success half a century ago, Lucian Freud was a charismatic playboy, a lady-killer with an Alvis. He mixed as easily with Soho lowlife as with Mayfair toffs. Frail now, stick-thin, stooped, his face bloodless, his nose like a hawk’s bill, I see him shuffling up Holland Park Avenue to Lidgate, the bespoke butchers, to buy steaks for the whippet; woodcock, quail and snipe for his human sitters. In crumpled chinos and laceless trainers, a thin grey scarf around his collarless neck, there’s more than a hint of old Steptoe. Yet with an income estimated in 2003 as £12m a year, he is twice as rich as Robbie Williams, they say, and despite the geriatric grunginess, he can still mesmerise women old enough to be his granddaughters. At 79 he was dating a 27-year-old called Emily Bearn. His latest self-portrait (on show at the National Portrait Gallery) reveals a naked young woman, identified as one Alexandra Williams-Wynn, the 32-year-old daughter of a Welsh landowner and baronet. Her ankles are wrapped around his right leg; her left hand wanders, it seems, towards his fly; or is it his pocket?”Note: a very good read which nonetheless indulges in the stereotype of artist as womanising bad-boy The Canadian Art Foundation’s Symposium | Timothy Comeau http://tinyurl.com/8j2qy “On Saturday afternoon, a panel discussion was held around the question of ‘imaging the artist’, consisting of Myfanwy MacLeod (an artist from Vancouver), Mark Kingwell (the U of T prof), Michael Blackwood (the filmmaker), and Vera Frenkel (an artist from Toronto), moderated by Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine. It was an attempt to look at how artists tend to be represented in the media. Richard Rhodes introduced the topic with a little essay in which he described watching Lust for Life as a 14 year old one evening in Winnipeg during a snowstorm, and the images of the movie stars and the south of France during that winter night made an impression furthered by subsequently seeing a depiction of Michelangelo by Charlton Heston as an heroic worker in The Agony and the Ecstasy. Rhodes admitted these impressions of artists as glorious and heroic influenced and confused him for years and I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all gone through that. Sarah Milroy, in her pre-review of the film series in last Friday’s Globe and Mail, stated that she has never been flung on a filthy studio mattress and been ravaged by any of the artists she’s interviewed, and yet, year after year, artist’s biopics are made which depict them in this way. But to be fair, the biopics are made on artists who did behave that way.” Modern, Postmodern, Altermodern? | Nicolas Bourriaud http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aaanz/abstracts/nicolas_bourriaud Note: not really a goodread, at least not yet, but here FYI, for he brings up the idea of creolization which I write about in the symposium review; this is an abstract to a paper he will be delivering in Australia this July —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 25 May 2005 @ 1:44 PM
05w21:1 Followups Posted May 24th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 21 number 1 (followups) ……because I missed them the first time around…. ——————————————————————— The Life Quixotic | Charles Foran http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/21/193210 “Miguel de Cervantes published the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, a decade after the first volume had granted the sixty-eight-year-old Spaniard unexpected late-career success, and a year after the appearance of the counterfeit Part II. A failed playwright, he appears to have dashed off both parts of his masterpiece in a hurry, anxious to counter his imitators and return to what he believed was his serious work. In his haste, Cervantes allowed his imagination to wander so far and wide from existing prose genres?the pastoral tale and chivalric romance being the most popular at the time?that he ended up in an entirely new form. Today we call that form the modern novel, and credit him with its invention. The author himself died in 1616, his hopes for immortality pinned to a pastoral adventure titled Persiles y Sigismunda. It is said to deserve its obscurity. […]That might be so. But it might also be the case that four centuries after the birth of the novel?a spectacular birth it was, too, like delivering an eighty-kilogram baby with a wicked sense of humour and a Mensa IQ?the majority of us hardly recognize the form innovated by Cervantes in the fictions we currently admire. The anniversary offers a chance to revisit the enchantments of Don Quixote and also to wonder about the state of enchantment in the literature of our own age.” Da Vinci studio find thrills art lovers, experts | CTV.ca News Staff http://tinyurl.com/8qcn3 “Art lovers, historians and experts around the world are marveling at news Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop may have been found in Florence. Italian researchers uncovered the room in a building just off the Piazza of the Santissima Annunziata in the central part of the celebrated city.”NOTE: with links to video reports —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 24 May 2005 @ 11:24 AM
05w21:2 Star Wars Posted May 24th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | episode 2005 week 21 number 2 ——————————————————————— Star Wars | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars “Whereas Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, another science fiction franchise that has enjoyed long-lasting popularity in American popular culture, takes a rational and progressive approach to storytelling, Star Wars has a strong mythic quality. Unlike the heroes of earlier space-set sci-fi film and TV series such as ‘Star Trek’, the heroes of ‘Star Wars’ are not militaristic types but romantic individualists. College literature professors have remarked that the Star Wars saga, with its struggle between good and evil, democracy and empire, can be considered a national epic for the United States. The film has many visual and narrative similarities to John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’ that also provides a clue to the relationship between Leia and Luke. The strong human appeal of the Star Wars story probably accounts for its enduring popularity; it has also been postulated that this popularity is based on nostalgia. Many Star Wars fans first saw the films as children, and the revolutionary (for the time) special effects and simple, Manichean story made a profound impact. The Star Wars films show considerable similarity to Asian Wuxia ‘Kung Fu’ films, as well as Roman mythology. Lucas has stated that his intention was to create in Star Wars a modern mythology, based on the studies of his friend and mentor Joseph Campbell.” Space Case: a review of Ep. III | Anthony Lane http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050523crci_cinema “‘Revenge of the Sith’ is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation” Is new ‘Star Wars’ an anti-Bush diatribe? | CBC http://tinyurl.com/76hn3 “At a press conference, Lucas said the film does mirror history, but he did not set out to comment on U.S. foreign policy under Bush. ‘As you go through history, I didn’t think it was going to get quite this close. So it’s just one of those recurring things,’ he said. ‘I hope this doesn’t come true in our country. Maybe the film will waken people to the situation,’ Lucas added jokingly. Lucas also said he penned the film long before the U.S. went to war against Iraq. ‘When I wrote it, Iraq didn’t exist,’ the filmmaker said with a laugh. ‘We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We didn’t think of him as an enemy at that time.’ He added that the ‘parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.’ As research for writing the prequel trilogy, Lucas studied how democracies become dictatorships with the consent of the electorate. ‘You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody’s squabbling, there’s corruption.’ Although his films are not overtly political, Lucas has included some allusions to U.S. politics in previous episodes of Star Wars. In The Phantom Menace he named characters after politicians: Nute Gunray, for instance, was named for Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House. “ Save the Republic! | Moveonpac.org http://tinyurl.com/br4m8 “This week, Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith opens in theaters nation-wide. And weirdly enough, the plot of what will undoubtedly be one of the biggest films in movie history revolves around a scheming senator who, seduced by visions of absolute power, transforms a democratic republic into an empire. The movie?s opening buzz and its parallel theme to our current judicial fight present a great opportunity to educate the public ? and have some fun. So we?ve put together a flyer that draws on themes from the Revenge of the Sith story to explain the very real threat to democracy posed by the nuclear option.”Note: with a video file Darth Vader’s Family Values | John Tierney http://tinyurl.com/8d4b4 “The new installment of ‘Star Wars’ has set off the usual dreary red-blue squabble, with liberals using the film to attack Republicans, and some conservatives calling for a boycott. But – and I know this is hard to believe for a movie with characters named General Grievous and Count Dooku – there’s actually a serious bipartisan lesson about the dark side of politics. […]He says he could never betray the Jedi because they’re his family, but then the chancellor puts the family question in perspective: ‘Learn to know the dark side of the Force, Anakin, and you will be able to save your wife from certain death.’ Anakin promptly recognizes the limits of altruism, just as Adam Smith did in the 18th century.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 24 May 2005 @ 12:00 PM
05w19:4 Don Quixote Posted May 15th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 19 number 4 (Don Quixote) ——————————————————————— A Rational Quixote | Julian Evan http://tinyurl.com/82gqs “For 400 years – the first edition of the Quixote was distributed in Madrid in 1605 – his story has supplied the archetype of the bookish dreamer and the outermost comic landmark of our idealism. Yet Don Quixote’s achievement is surely greater than that. Without him, and without Cervantes’s own constant shifting between tradition and modernity, we might have remained for longer in a world of superstition and dogma. ‘Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity,’ Kant wrote in 1784, 180 years after the first publication of the Quixote. ‘The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence.'” The most read novel of all times | Mireya Castaneda http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2005/abril/lun18/17quijote.html “Don Quixote rides throughout time and, in its literary immensity, is the favorite work of great writers of all periods, continents and trends. It was the preferred work of Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky and Galdós, and in the 20th century, of Kafka, Joyce, Proust and Faulkner. […] Scholars agree that it is a work that fascinates on account of its poetry, its extraordinary narrative universe containing all human life, its motor forces, its essential conflicts.” Let them read Quixote | Stuart Jeffries http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1464835,00.html “The Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has printed one million copies of Don Quixote to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’ novel. This week they are being handed out free in public squares for the improvement of his citizens […]. So, for making this wonderful novel freely available to Venezuelans, hats off to Hugo, whose devotees incidentally are known as chavistas, but not for the reasons that link them to Wayne or Colleen. Chavez’s gesture, however, is itself Quixotic; a project as adorable and misguided as tilting at windmills. On his TV show Hello President, Chavez explained that Venezuelans should all read the book in order ‘feed ourselves once again with that spirit who went out to undo injustices in the world’.” Don Quixote Symposium at U of T | Timothy Comeau http://blogto.com/arts/2005/05/don_quixote_symposium_at_u_of_t/ “This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance caveat lector. So why review it in the first place? Because I like that word – ‘re-view’. Because you missed it, and I was there, I can try to fill you in, paint a picture enabling you to ‘re-view’ it.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Saturday 14 May 2005 @ 2:00 PM
05w19:3 The Indomitable Ed Deary Posted May 12th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 19 number 3 (the indomitable Ed Deary) Those who know me will know that these selections are highly biased but I think they definitely qualify as goodreads worth sharing, especially the guest posting on Chris Lloyd’s blog of letters to the Prime Minister (the tinyurl’d one). – Timothy ——————————————————————— Sons and Uniforms | Ed Deary via Chris Lloyd http://nobilliesplease.blogspot.com/ “I cannot imagine coming of age now. When I was a child the world was still stable. He was born in the shadow of Y2K – we were told that the world may even stop – and when 2000 came to Australia and we could see the live broadcast from the beaches – seeing the sun rise – I felt such a great sense of release – that the world would not stop – I tried to hide this, I remember – because Willow caught me there with a tear in my eye and she laughed at me. Well then came 911, and the litany of what has followed. These are things that we all shared – and I suppose that, in sharing them, it made them bearable.” I’ve linked to the blog rather than the entry as all the entries are on that one page. Guest Posting on Dear PM | Ed Deary via Chris Lloyd http://tinyurl.com/cmnxf “You know this sponsorship thing is sooo stupid – I mean shit how much money are we talking, a thousand here a few hundred thousand there – what’s the big freaking deal? Who doesn’t think that the government doesn’t grease wheels (nobody)? I think Stephen Harper looks like a big jerk. I would never vote for him after the stuff that he’s pulled. Maybe I don’t get it – but I don’t think that I’m in the minority – just ask some people the next time you go for your double americano from starbucks if they give a rats ass that you are sorta responsible for the misappropriation of funds run through an ad company – no, I don’t think anybody really cares. Cause, like I said, don’t people think that your doing that anyway? And that big jerk Harper, running with it like that. What a total jerk. Canada is important to me, in the morning I wake up and think that god I’m in Canada and not New York City with that old girlfriend of mine that kicked me out. I’m still mad at her cause she dumped me 4 times.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Thursday 12 May 2005 @ 11:53 PM
05w19:2 Biomechanics Posted May 12th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 19 number 2 (biomechanics) These are Flash websites that animate processes that I find are best understood through visualizations. – Timothy ——————————————————————— ‘The Animated Bride at Understanding Duchamp’ | Andrew Stafford http://www.understandingduchamp.com/ An interactive Flash site detailing Duchamp’s body of work. Scroll over to 1923 to see the animated The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s, Even, with an explanation according to Duchamp’s notes. Mitochondria | John Kyrk http://www.johnkyrk.com/mitochondrion.html A flash animation explaining the function of cellular mitochondria. More animations are available via the menu at johnkyrk.com —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Thursday 12 May 2005 @ 11:27 PM
05w19:1 Leonardo da Vinci Posted May 9th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 19 number 1 (Leonardo da Vinci) ——————————————————————— Breaking the Da Vinci code | Lisa Jardine http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1360654,00.html “How many hundreds of thousands of words have been written since Vasari, trying to convey the extraordinary combination of talents and imaginative brio which made up the mind of this enigmatic man? While the exquisite drawings, diagrams, maps and engineering blueprints, and the handful of achieved paintings have consistently fascinated all who have seen them, the man himself continues to elude us. Leonardo himself would probably have regarded all those words spent on him as a mistake from the outset. Words are a poor resource for capturing complexity, according to Leonardo.” Biography Reviews: Leonardo da Vinci … | Lucy Hughes-Hallett http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1285750,00.html “Nicholl, who lives in Italy, conjures up in meticulous detail the physical reality of Renaissance Florence and Milan. He re-creates the din and flurry of building works that characterise Florence in its expansionist prime. He itemises the minerals used in paint manufacture and deduces from the widespread use of egg white in tempera that artists? studios must have been full of hens.” A Work in Progress | Melinda Henneberge http://www.artnewsonline.com/currentarticle.cfm?art_id=1240 “David Alan Brown, the longtime curator of Italian Renaissance painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., says he has lost patience with new theories that are not rooted in the visual record. Of the Mona Lisa, for instance, he notes that ‘everything has been said about that painting’?that it is a self-portrait, a mistress portrait, a male lover, a woman who had breast cancer or who was bereaved or pregnant or both. ‘I was amused by these things in the beginning,’ Brown says. ‘But now I find them tedious.'” Introduction to Leonardo and His Drawings | Carmen C. Bambach http://tinyurl.com/7tlxn From the Met show, January 2003 Old master’s mother was a slave, reveal Da Vinci researchers | Burhan Wazir http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,810926,00.html “Vezzosi said Caterina’s Middle Eastern heritage was a primary influence on Leonardo’s work as an artist, mathematician and philosopher. ‘There is some evidence that in his later years Da Vinci was increasingly becoming interested in the Middle East,’ said Vezzosi.”Article Date: 13 October 2002 —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 09 May 2005 @ 5:09 PM
05w18:1 The Face of Evil Posted May 8th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 18 number 1 (the face of evil) But first, the news: RM Vaughan wrote about my Cable Project in yesterday’s National Post (Toronto Edition) and the article will appear online at RM’s blog-archive (http://rmvaughanink.blogspot.com/) in the next few days.And I redesigned the Goodreads.ca homepage a little bit, incase you’re interested. And now, some Ann Coulter related stuff …. ——————————————————————— Open Letter to Anyone Who Gives a Shit About Justice | Ajai Raj http://www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Rant+225 “I’m writing this in response to the spectacle that occurred in the LBJ Library on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005, when Ann Coulter, a diabolical, ignorant, but nevertheless charismatic right-wing pundit, came to speak at the University of Texas at Austin. […] The title of the Daily Texan front-page story covering Ms. Coulter’s speech was ‘Arrest Made at Coulter Speech.’ You could also have caught it on CBS or in the Austin-American Statesman. The general idea is that some jackass made a scene, and Ann Coulter was also there. I am Ajai Raj, and I am a jackass.” Sticks and Stones | The 5th Estate, CBC http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/sticksandstones.html “One of the most talked-about exchanges in Sticks and Stones occurred between reporter Bob McKeown and Ann Coulter and concerned Canada’s role in the Vietnam War.” I Fucked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard | Bachem Macuno http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com/ More FYI than a goodread, it’s become famous in the past couple of weeks, with 211 comments —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Sunday 08 May 2005 @ 7:57 PM
