Recently in Arts Category

Very clever time-lapse shot in Tokyo. To see the video in full HD, check out this link. Or you can click below to watch a smaller version from YouTube. To learn more about how the video was shot, go to the Laughing Squid.

I've actually been thinking more and more about leaving the US. I mean: for good. I find myself so disillusioned with what is happening in my native land.

My country forces education reform that is destroying creativity, problem solving, deep thinking, and analysis of knowledge to inform carefully considered long term solution-making for the immediacy of factionalized curriculum memorization. My country will not move beyond prejudice and discrimination. My country is squandering our national (as well as international) resources. My country is flinging privacy and personal freedom as fast as it escalates fear. My country cares more about greed, money, and possessing things than it does about people and their basic wellbeing. My country is removing the separation of church and state and forcing people to live by tenets of religion in which they may not personally believe. My country allows business, built on greed and outsourcing, to become so large they can not fail and must receive tax payer's money to keep the executes rolling in fat bonuses with shameless abandon. My nation's government is bought and sold by transglobal corporations and makes divisiveness its core ethic.

I can do little of nothing to stop or change any of this.

I wonder if this is a natural part of getting older--seeing the world through more jaded eyes. But I see other nations, not without their faults to be sure, at least maintaining some more moderate and productive sense of balance. I just think the US government is fundamentally broken and inept.

I shared last night at dinner that I actually don't think the US will be able to move to a better place within my lifetime. This saddens me greatly.

I've supported Lawrence Lessig's work for some time. I've had his "Change Congress" link on my site for some time. In this video he sums up things, and, unlike my dismal state of disillusion, offers a ray of hope. He doesn't frame the problem as conservative versus liberal or Republican versus Democrat. He is insightful and brilliant.

Yesterday afternoon I abandoned routine and went to see Avatar. This was the first time I have ever seen a 3D IMAX movie.

I had heard good things about Avatar in 3D IMAX but really really wasn't expecting much. After all, I've seen a 3D movie before, years ago. I just wasn't all that impressed with it. In fact, it was so lackluster, I don't even recall what the movie was. I'd also been to (seen?) Terminator, a 3D experience at Disney's EPCOT, which, while great fun, was obviously less than a deep 3D immersive experience.

Avatar is in a whole new class of immersive 3D experiences. I had adjusted to the 3D glasses within 15 - 20 seconds of watching the first 3D preview and quickly got past the fact that I was wearing them.

Within a few minutes, I was "into" the movie. I mean, I literally lost the fact I was watching this movie on a 2D flat screen. The sense of real physical depth is convincing.

I actually caught myself, at one point fairly early in the movie, physically moving my body/head to see around an object in the movie so I could better see what was behind it! Such a thing is, of course, impossible. I was still watching a 3D image projected on a flat 2D screen. But my mind, my sense of perception, was so realistically convinced by the 3D technology that I perceived an actual 3D space. Intuitively I "knew" that I should be able to see behind an object if I just moved.

Amazing!

I fear that I am now "of an age" that doesn't thrill so easily from a movie-going experience. This was different. The artistic direction, the imaginative, creative visual design, the seamless and invisible integration of CGI were all compellingly presented in a truly artistic and visually stunning encounter.

Seeing Avatar in 3D IMAX is a must. This movie, in 3D IMAX, has forever changed what the movies are destined to become as an art form.

Another 3D movie was advertised in the previews that I will have to go see: NASA's 3D IMAX about repairing the Hubble Telescope. The trailer said NASA filmed the actual repair with a 3D IMAX camera. The clarity, detail, and 3D reality of the trailer placed me right there loosely tethered in outer space. I really felt as though I could reach out in front of me and touch the image. It seemed that real.

What will be next? When will our capacity to capture and display massive amounts of visual information become so great that we will be able to literally walk around in a movie projection, seeing it from all sides? (I would hate to be the camera director for that kind of project!) While interacting physically with the image, like on the Holodeck in StarTrek, currently seems impossible, or maybe not, perhaps a more complete sense of 3D projection is not.

We all know shoplifting is illegal. But what about shopdropping?

In shoplifting, the thief takes something from the marketplace without paying for it. In shopdropping, the person, in this case an artist, places items in the store inventory for people to purchase and makes no money from the sale.

On Black Friday, an artist, Michele Pred, did this very thing at IKEA. She took 10 of her paintings into the store with IKEA with "IKEA price tags" and placed them on the sales rack. They all sold that weekend.

The painting itself is a barcode that reads, "You are what you buy."

Funny!

This was fascinating. I had no idea!

"This week a story at NPR discusses the extent to which Norman Rockwell used photography to capture images of models; he then traced these photographs onto canvas as an early step in the creation of his famous paintings.

Rockwell used photos, taken by a rotating cast of photographers, to make his illustrations… Rockwell never kept it a secret, but for some reason this little fact has been neglected in recent decades. Although he may not have clicked the shutter, Rockwell directed every facet of every composition.

A newly published book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera (Little, Brown and Company, 2009), and an exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum provide further insight into this process and offer acknowledgement to the photographers involved in the process.

Those who feel the lack of freehand drawing somehow diminishes Rockwell’s status as an artist should be reminded that painters as famous as Vermeer and Caravaggio are thought to have used the camera obscura to compose their works.

NPR link, via Photo District News, via (ovo).  Photo credit Norman Rockwell Museum."

(Via: Neatorama)

These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September 2009 on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

~Chris Jordan, October 2009

Chris' creative work on trash and the 21st century has been eye opening. I've followed it now for a couple of years. He has enlightened my perspective on the impact the consumptive culture in which we live is having on our world and its animals.

I didn't realize that our plastic is in fact an oil-based product.  In fact, last summer I read a post in which the writer concluded that a single bottled water should be seen as two-thirds water and one-third oil, because that's how much oil is required to manufacture the plastic and transport it to market.

The, I came across this TED presentation.

Sufficient superlatives simply do not exist. Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto in c Minor is just glorious! And, well, then there's the 3rd one as well! But his second is among my most favorite musical works of all time.

I've been consumed by lust ever since I was at university and had the opportunity to practice on the Bӧsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, you know, the one with 97 keys keys instead of the standard 88. I spent about 6 hours a day with my love. Words can not express the depths of intimacy!

I've wanted one ever since. But they, like the objects of all lust, are unspeakably expensive, and I but a lowly civil servant. It was never meant to be. Or so I thought.

Through a twist of good fortune, my Bӧsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand was delivered here to the house yesterday! The richness of the tone! The deep, full-bodied resonance! The capacity to craft the finest and most delicate nuance!

But don't read, have a listen for yourself!

I must confess to having a difficult time deciding between the Bӧsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, the Steinway and the Yamaha, so I decided to get all three as a set. Ahhh! Bliss.

Photo credit: Bass by High End Piano Guy @ Flickr

Well, as little as I watched it, I shouldn't have a dawg in this fight, oh... that's Randy Jackson's line: "Yo, Dawg, now listen up." But I hated to see Paula Abdul not return to the show. Even though she appeared to be "heavily medicated" at times, for her back pain, I'm sure, she was nice to the contestants--unlike Simon Fuller, whose remarks could be a bit caustic, if not always on the mark.

I will miss classic lines from Paula, like: "I really liked your second performance tonight so much better than your first.", when none of the contestants had sung a second number yet.

But, even with all of her issues, I still liked Paula. In fact, I'm with a friend of mine: I want Paula on my Death Panel.

But Ellen DeGeneres will be a nice replacement for Paula. She's pretty and comes across as kind and sensible. Perhaps she also takes less "medication."

He makes the claim the people around the world are more alike than they are different. His musical demonstration is nothing short of brilliant. He speaks very little in this audience participation, and I had never heard his speaking voice before. I was actually really shocked! But don't worry, be happy.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Amazon's mp3 store has another one of those deals today where you can get hours and hours of classical musics for pennies a song: 99 Bach masterpieces (8+ hours!) for $2.99. Even though Bach's works preceded copyright protection, this is a good example of how our culture benefits from sensible copyright term limits: eight hours of some of the finest music ever composed for about the price of a Happy Meal. More good classical music mp3 deals here.

via kottke.org

I've actually been thinking about the horrid outcome of making beauty nothing more than vacuous atmosphere requiring no cognitive interaction whatsoever, just vague mindless awareness devoid of the rich attention of soul deserved. Then when I read Jason's comment about 99 works of Bach, arguably the greatest composer to ever have walked the face of the earth, for the cost of a happy meal, I laughed out loud--a laugh of sadness.

It's outrageously sad that such beauty is so unappreciated, that so many people living today, in a time when they have access to so such of the earth's beauty don't see, hear, or sense it in any way.

Odd, actually. I just happened to be at UCLA today when Michael Jackson died. The receptionist in the building where I was, reading her cell phone, gasped as she exclaimed his death. She had just been texted by a friend of hers working in the medical complex where Jackson had just been pronounced dead.

I've always liked most of Jackson's music, but I've also always thought him to be a tortured soul, never having known happiness in his life. All of the money he sunk into recreating his physical appearance. I just don't think he was ever happy with the fact that he was a black man. I think that's really sad.

I've always thought he was most likely a pedophile and got off because of his money and influence. I also think that the parents of the child he was alleged to have abused were just as complicit as he may well have been as they knew full well of the previous allegations made against Jackson and allowed their son to be placed in a situation from which no good could have ever come, only lots of money. I find their conduct despicable.

All in all, a tragic life that had amazing talent. Maybe he will now have the peace he lacked in life.

Beautiful design with paper by Yulia Brodskaya

Amazing that lines can create a sense of depth.

For his Lexington, Kentucky rec room, Charlie Kratzer used $10 worth of Sharpie pens. Read more about Kratzer's hands-on project, including the various sources of his artistic inspiration (from Star Wars to Sherlock Holmes)

Source: Bad Banana

This is an interesting aggregation of who is commenting about what music.

Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public.

[Source: BBC - What is the Sound Index?]

Want to know what's hot and who is getting the buzz? Check out their top 100. Clever idea. You can also create your own tracking list to keep up with who is saying what about your favorite music.

I'm not so much into the "hip" music scene any more--too old for that really. I rather enjoy melody coupled with rich traditional harmonic textures that have a sense of development versus constant techno-based repetitions. But this would be an interesting way to keep current on what is going on in that scene without my having to be immersed in it.

The clothespin as form, as art, as iconography.

Source: Designboom

I played with Legos when I was a young thing. I certainly was in no was as creative with them as Nathan Sawaya is! He has turned Lego into an art medium. In fact, he has rightfully trademarked "The Art of the Brick." Check out his online gallery and this story about his work at CNN. Amazing!

Few things can be as exciting, as uplifting, a cause for a savoring pause as the sweeping beauty of a glorious melody. I spend much too little time feeding my soul with classical music which I so love! But, with the holidays at hand, I went to my iTunes collection and did a search for Пётр Ильич Чайкoвский. Ok, ok... so I typed it in English: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Out from the speakers popped the Berlin Symphony Orchestra's performance of Pas de deaux from the Nutcracker. Dear god that's just so plangent it's astoundingly brilliant, beautiful melodic composition! [Yes, remember, you can double click on any word on my blog for its definition.]

Another set of these is making the rounds on the internet. I love this guy's work!! I've posted about it before.

To see others, click the link to continue reading this post or this link to the source site where you can see many more.

But, I was always told not to play with my food!

Source: Hemmy.net

Source: 6emeia

(CNN) -- Famed opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who appeared on stage with singers as varied as opera star Dame Joan Sutherland, U2's Bono and Liza Minnelli, died Thursday after suffering from pancreatic cancer, his manager Terri Robson said in a statement. He was 71.

"The great tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, died today at 5:00 a.m. at his home in Modena, the city of his birth," according to Robson.

"The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life. In fitting with the approach that characterized his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness."

Source: Tenor Luciano Pavarotti dead at 71 - CNN.com

Celebrate his great artistry by clicking on the video below.

This photo collection of VW bugs is indicative of just how much the bug has endeared itself to the world--despite its origin.

This is an interesting post from Hemmy.net. I wonder what the animators' union thinks about this? The post at Hemmy has several pictured examples.

Disney reuses its animation but this is hard to spot unless pictures are put side by side for comparison. Here are pairs of pictures to be spotted for animation reuse. 24 more pics after the jump.

Seems this picture of satellite city in Amsterdam is circulating the net. The prevailing opinion is that the hooks over the apartments are to hoist furniture up that will not fit in the stairs. I'm not exactly sure what I think about it. Ugly? Interesting? Making the best of a mess? I'll settle for unique. I'm glad I saw it. I'm glad I don't live there.