20% innovation = 80% zzzzzz

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway talking about composer John Cage’s dictum to take it slow or suffer the consequence of empty houses for 15 years.

John Cage suggested that if you introduce more than twenty percent of innovation into any artwork, you immediately lose 80 percent of your audience. He suggested this might remain the case for a subsequent fifteen years. He was being optimistic. We have to travel slowly, since I want to continue making movies. They’re expensive. I don’t know why they have to be so expensive, but that’s the way things are. They’re also complex collaborations. I can’t make movies on my own. I think we have to travel at a certain pace, to accommodate the introduction of radicalism or exploratory ideas embracing both old and new technologies.

Peter Greenaway, by Lawrence Chua, BOMB 60/Summer 1997

extra train anyone?

What about adding another train?  Did any think about that?  Two trains, twice as much space.  1 + 1 = 2 last I checked.

Ah, the civilized world, a train full of company men – and women – scuttling to ‘work.’  Right.  All worth it, the pushing and shoving, the being pushed and shoved, clawing and hissing, pressing against glass for the rocking ride into town, being ejected out like a fart onto the platform, the sweat cooling and congealing around your pits and temples and rage.  Repeat on the way home.

It would be so easy to make an alternate way, but that would only serve the majority, and what’s the sense in that?  So loosen your knees, hug your attache, keep your nose up and to the side and go with the flow, the heave ho.  And repeat and repeat.

Oren Lavie Her Morning Elegance

deadline

eduardo paolozzi

British pop artist who came to fame in the 50’s in London for collage, sculpture and later film.  Here is an excerpt from British Council –

A period of two years in Paris in the late 1940s brought him into direct contact with new ideas in art, particularly with primitive art at the Musée de l’Homme. Under the influence of Dada and Surrealism, Paolozzi began to develop his distinctive collagist approach to handling material. In 1952 Paolozzi was co-founder of the Independent Group which had a particular interest in mass media and the new developments in the science and technology of the post-war era. Based at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the group set a new programme of aesthetics attacking the cosiness of post-war British culture, and promoting the urban over the pastoral, the public over the private mode of expression, the embrace of ‘commercialism; and mass marketing. Paolozzi’s sculptures of this period were totemic machine-age figures , mostly executed in aluminium and either brightly polished or painted.

At the same time he produced three important series of collage-based prints.

-excerpted from British Council.

sam-c’est moi

Perfect, perfect, perfect!  Green Eggs and Ham en francais! Now we can learn and read real literature at the same time.

“Would you eat them / in a box? / Would you eat them / with a fox?” translates as “Veux-tu les manger / avec un renard? / Veux-tu les manger / dans un placard?”

Beside “Les Oeufs Verts au Jambon,”  “Horton Entend un Zou!” is also available.

From the article Je Ne Les Aimes Pas, Sam-C’est Moi in Paper Cuts at the New Yorker.

I found this on the interesting blog educating alice.

alice

Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton – an obvious match.  How difficult it must be to take material like Alice in Wonderland – otherworldly, sublime, meaningful – and turn it into a film.  The production photographs are breathtaking.  Sometimes I think produced perfection and human meaning are mutually exclusive.  The overproduction smothers the joy and foible and transparency and serendipity and expectation and mess of an unfolding narrative.  It’s a set up.  On the other hand, I think Burton has the skill to pull the beautiful production back enough to let the humanity shine through.  He did in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  We shall see with Alice.

german silence is better than french silence

Glenn Gould introducing the brilliant German reductionist artist Karlheinz Klopweisser for a CBC show Voyage to the Void – fact or fiction?  Either way hard to believe – apparently German silence is better than French silence!

Klopweisser speaks –

” I am convinced that my work which is concerned with the resonance of silence.  But more with German silence which is of course organic as opposed to French silence which is ornamental.”

I found this on small drawings.

paris metro

willi dorner bodies

Bodies in Urban Spaces by Willi Dorner at Guardian