23 July 2010

This time, baby, I'll be bulletproof...



I heart Howard Tangye



Clothing designer, artist and teacher Howard Tangye gives us an unusual look at models, likely to inspire allusions to Schiele. The etched lines draw out a specific moment in time and the eyes seem to be sharing a conversation, listening to someone go on. You can almost predict what they are about to say, responding to you with compassion, yet keeping their guard up at the same time. His work is a combination of judgment, humanity and fabulous-ness, darling.

He also puts these images on t-shirts, I am off to purchase one tomorrow. Where you ask? Central St. Martins College of Art and Design where he inspires and works with such designers as Richard Nicoll.


by
Lost At E Minor

She is a pretend artist...



Mab Graves, 23, painter
Credit:Michelle Pemberton / Metromix

Mab Graves speaks quietly but paints loudly. Her self-described “pop-surrealist” art is bold and beautiful and will make you do a double take: Each painting is packed with tiny details and odd flourishes.

As the winner of the Art vs. Art competition — where she and an audience gleefully watched a chainsaw destroy her bride of Frankenstein painting — and with upcoming exhibitions in Indianapolis and New York, Graves just might be looking at her breakout year.

Inspiration: My dad. He is the Renaissance man, historian, theologian. Taught himself how to build, plumbing, carpentry. That’s how he raised me — to figure it out and to learn.

My painting process: I’m completely self-taught. I don’t have a good system worked out. Everything I paint lives in my head; it’s a matter of sitting down to plan it. Mostly, I just dive in and figure it out when I get there.

Music made by women that really gets to me: Anything played in the minor keys. It’s not a single person — it’s the key. It’ll tear my soul out. Tom Waits, but he’s not really a female.

Something I really want to get off my chest right now: I think that a lot of art these days is produced so quickly — people take a couple hours on a painting. I’ll take days, maybe a month. People used to take years to paint, putting their life and soul into them. I look at a lot of very expensive paintings and know they didn’t take very long. There needs to be a revolution, with people painting from their soul.

Mab Graves’ art will be exhibited Sept. 3 during First Friday at the Harrison Center for the Arts.

mabgraves.com

15 July 2010

Sleigh Bells: Infinity Guitars





Deaf chords, dead ends
Sling set can't meet their demands
Dumb whores, best friends
Infinity guitars, go 'head

Street wars, straight men
Cowboys, Indians
Red souls, red friends
Infinity guitars, go 'head

09 July 2010

Lohan, 23, wore a black top, black pants and sunglasses when she arrived at court early for a hearing that could end up with her in jail.



Lindsay Lohan sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating probation

By Alan Duke, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
NEW: Lindsay Lohan gets 90 days in jail for missing alcohol counseling sessions
NEW: Lohan sobs in court: "I did do everything that I was told to do and did the best I could"
Report said Lohan used "very creative excuses" for missed sessions

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Actress Lindsay Lohan was ordered Tuesday to serve 90 days in jail for missing alcohol counseling sessions in violation of her probation.

The judge also ordered Lohan to spend 90 days in a drug and alcohol rehab program after her jail term is completed.

The actress must begin serving her sentence on July 20, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel said.

After Revel ruled that Lohan had violated her probation in a 2007 drunken driving conviction by missing weekly alcohol counseling sessions, Lohan began sobbing as she addressed the court. "I did do everthing that I was told to do and did the best I could," she said.

Earlier, the alcohol counseling program director testified at the probation revocation hearing that Lohan missed nine alcohol counseling sessions since December, when the judge ordered her to attend weekly classes or face jail.

Lohan has apparently not missed a weekly counseling session since May 20, when Revel ruled that there was "probable cause to believe [Lohan] is in violation of probation" from a 2007 drunken driving conviction.

Lohan was ordered not to drink alcohol and an electronic bracelet was fitted on her leg on May 24 to detect if she did.

The SCRAM bracelet measured an alcohol level of 0.03 percent in the actress' body at midnight on June 7, but reported a zero reading four hours later, Revel said during Tuesday's hearing. The alert would be a bond violation, but not a probation violation, she said.

Revel said she would consider only if Lohan missed weekly alcohol counseling sessions, as Revel ordered in December.


Cheryl Marshall, the director of the Right On program where Lohan has been attending counseling, testified Tuesday morning that Lohan would sometimes call ahead when she was going to miss a weekly session.

A report from the program to the judge said Lohan "kept making up creative excuses" about her absences, prosecutor Danette Meyers said.

Lohan's father, Michael Lohan, was in court for the hearing. The judge denied him a chance to speak, although she did accept a letter from him. Michael Lohan has been calling for the court to order his daughter into alcohol and drug rehab.

02 July 2010

Joanna Newsom and the origami coda





All art is erotic.





Portrait of a Ladies’ Man

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying cold, obsessive aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. And in “Klimt,” Raúl Ruiz’s lavish biographical fantasia, his depiction of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt adds another Mephistophelean figure to his gallery of elegant monsters.

The painter, who died in 1918 at 55, joins Proust’s Baron de Charlus in Mr. Ruiz’s
“Time Regained,” the silent film director F. W. Murnau in “Shadow of the Vampire,” Gilbert Osmond in “The Portrait of a Lady” and Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons” in the roster of sinister Malkovich eccentrics, all more or less interchangeable beneath their elaborate period get-ups.

The actor’s chilly stare, attenuated speech and attitude of towering hauteur define a mannered acting style that is a technique unto itself. These imperious alter egos have little feeling for others, who are depicted as helpless objects in the laboratory of a mad scientist.

I have not seen the 130-minute director’s cut of “Klimt” that was shown at the 2006 Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, but I imagine it was structurally more sound than the 97-minute blur of a movie that opens today in New York. It’s not that Mr. Ruiz, a Chilean-born surrealist based in Paris since 1973, is the most accessible of filmmakers to begin with. The shortened version is lovely to look at, but the stilted dialogue and crude overdubbing in scenes where English is not spoken often make it an impenetrable hodgepodge.

“Klimt” can be appreciated as a voluptuous wallow in high-style fin-de-siècle “decadence,” to use a word bandied about in the film as a synonym for evil. The overstuffed salons of upper-class Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire are so cluttered with expensive ornaments that moving around feels like navigating inside a giant wedding cake.

The salon guests prattle endlessly about art. What is beauty? Can a portrait be an allegory? Blah blah blah. When the subject isn’t aesthetics, it is gossip and scandal. Half the men in Vienna suffer from syphilis, muses a doctor who is giving Klimt mercury treatments for that very disease.

The possibility of contagion doesn’t stop Klimt from continuing his sexual rampage. His studio is crowded with beautiful nude models, many of whom he beds, and rumors fly that he has sired 30 illegitimate children. In one phantasmagoric scene, he and a friend visit a brothel in which they don gorilla masks to cavort in a cage with women wearing paste-on mustaches.

The movie is more interested in observing Klimt carousing than making art, and works like his most famous painting,
“The Kiss,” are not shown. The screenplay refers to the Vienna Secession, the school of painting he led, without explaining it.

What unfolds on the screen is a fever dream that begins in a hospital where Klimt lies nearly comatose. He died of pneumonia shortly after suffering a stroke that paralyzed his right side. The life that passes before his eyes is the cinematic analogue to his paintings and drawings, with images glimpsed in mirrors, through camera lenses, microscopes and one-way glass. The angular visual distortions suggest the world reflected in shards of a shattered mirror that may be a metaphor for the crumbling Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I. Eventually Klimt’s memories give way to hallucinations.

Klimt was deeply influenced by the turn-of-the-century filmmaker Georges Méliès (Gunther Gillian), whom he meets in the 1900 Paris Expo where Klimt is awarded a gold medal for his work “Philosophy.” Méliès shows him a film clip of the dancer Lea de Castro (Saffron Burrows), who becomes Klimt’s muse and possibly his lover. Hovering throughout much of the movie is an unanswered question about the woman introduced to him as Lea. Is she really Lea or her double?

Throughout, Klimt is shadowed by a character called the Secretary (
Stephen Dillane), a puritanical censor and investigator into his murky finances, who declares late in the movie that too little beauty is preferable to too much. In Paris Klimt’s intensely erotic paintings are viewed as deliciously naughty; in Vienna they are scandalous. Klimt’s blasé attitude toward all this high-flown nonsense is expressed in a frequently iterated expletive.

The director’s vision of the artist as a monster at large in high society belongs to the genre popularized by Ken Russell that rejects the sentimental Hollywood depiction of the artist as bleeding-heart martyr. That doesn’t mean that its attitude toward art is any less romanticized. Saint or devil, Klimt is still larger than life.

KLIMT

Written and directed by Raúl Ruiz; director of photography, Ricardo Aronovich; edited by Valéria Sarmiento; music by Jorge Arriagada; production designers, Rudi Czettel and Katharina Wöppermann; produced by Dieter Pochlatko, Arno Ortmair, Matthew Justice and Andreas Schmid; released by Outsider Pictures. Running time: 97 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH:
John Malkovich (Klimt), Veronica Ferres (Midi), Stephen Dillane (Secretary), Saffron Burrows (Lea de Castro), Nikolai Kinski (Egon Schiele), Joachim Bissmeier (Hugo Moritz) and Georges Méliès (Gunther Gillian).