What do you want to do with your life? It’s a good question to ask any time. But particularly as you watch the very short film, “In The Fall,” by the inimitable Steve Cutts.
Enjoy. Reflect. Maybe make a change for the better.
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Photographer Nan Goldin’s celebrated series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency would likely have sent portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron reeling for her smelling salts, but the century that divides these two photographers’ active periods is less of a barrier than one might assume.
As Goldin notes in the above episode of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online series, The Artist Project, both made a habit of photographing people with whom they were intimately acquainted. (Cameron’s subjects included Virginia Woolf’s mother and Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.)
The trust between artist and subject is evident in both of their work.
And both were roundly criticized for their lack of technical prowess, though that didn’t stop either of them from pursuing their visions, in focus or not.
John Baldessari, who chafes at the “Conceptualist” label, has been a fan of Social Realist/Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston since high school, when he would tear images of early works from his parents’ Life magazines.
His admiration for Gustin’s nightmarish Stationary Figure reveals a major difference in attitude from museum goers sneering that their kids could have painted such a work. Baldessari sees both the big picture—the idea of death as a sort of cosmic joke—and the sophisticated brushwork.
Cartoonist Roz Chast chose to focus on Italian Renaissance painting in her episode, savoring those teeming canvases’ creators’ imperfect command of perspective and three dimensionality.
The maximalist approach helps her believe that what she’s looking at is “real,” even as she grants herself the freedom to interpret the narrative in the manner she finds most amusing, playfully suggesting that a UFO is responsible for The Conversion of Saint Paul.
…and the scabby steel fences/railings surrounding a number of South London housing estates?
These mesh-and-pipe barriers look utterly unremarkable until one hears their origin story—as emergency stretchers for bearing away civilian casualties from the rubble of Luftwaffe raids.
The no-frills design was intended less for patient comfort than easy clean up. Kinks in the long stretcher poles kept the injured off the ground, and allowed for easy pick up by volunteers from the Civil Defence Service.
Some 600,000 of these stretchers were produced in preparation for airborne attacks. The Blitz killed over 28,000 London civilians. The number of wounded was nearly as high. The manufacture of child-sized stretchers speaks to the citizens’ awareness that the human price would be ghastly indeed.
”I am almost glad we have been bombed,” Queen Elizabeth “the Queen Mum” told a friend after Buckingham Palace was strafed in 1940. ”Now I feel I can look the East End in the face.”
Few neighborhood residents, let alone tourists, seem aware of the fences’ history, as evidenced in the video above.
Perhaps the recently formed Stretcher Railing Society—for the promotion, protection and preservation of London’s Air Raid Protection Stretcher Railings—will change that, or at the very least, put up some plaques.
Back in 1990, Voyager 1 snapped a photo of planet Earth from a record distance – 3.7 billion miles away. And there we saw it, our home, Planet Earth, a small blue dot almost swallowed by the vastness of space. This image inspired the title of Carl Sagan’s 1994 book, The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which captivated millions of readers then, and still many more now.
A quarter century later, The Pale BlueDot continues to give creative inspiration to many, including filmmakers who have produced animations that sync with Sagan’s narration of a famous passage from his book. The latest animation comes from a class of students at the Ringling College of Art and Design, located in Sarasota, Florida. Give it a watch. It will help you put everything in perspective.
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As millions of women, men, and friends beyond the binary gear up for Women’s March events around the world this weekend, we can’t help but draw strength from the Venus of Willendorf in Graphics Interchange Format, above.
Like the pussy hats that became the most visible symbol of last year’s march, there’s a strong element of humor at play here.
Also respect for the female form.
As Dr. Bryan Zygmont notes in his Khan Academy essay on the Venus of Willendorf, her existence is evidence that “nomadic people living almost 25,000 years ago cared about making objects beautiful. And … that these Paleolithic people had an awareness of the importance of the women.”
Animator Nina Paley has taken up our Paleolithic ancestors’ baton by creating two dozen early goddess GIFs, including the Venus.
As further proof that sisterhood is powerful, Paley is sharing her unashamedly bouncy pantheon with the public. Visit her blog to download all 24 individual goddess GIFs. Disseminate them widely. Use them for good! No permission needed.
She’s also incredibly familiar with rights issues, following massive complications with some vintage recordings her Betty Boop-ish Sita lip-synchs in the film. (She had previously believed them to be in the public domain.) Unable to pay the huge sum the copyright holders demanded to license the tunes, Paley ultimately decided to relinquish all legal claims to her own film, placing Sita Sings the Blues in the public domain, to be freely shared, exhibited, or even remixed.
If Paley’s the poster child for copyright issues she’s also a shining example of deriving power from unlikely sources.
As she wrote on her website nearly ten years ago:
My personal experience confirms audiences are generous and want to support artists. Surely there’s a way for this to happen without centrally controlling every transaction. The old business model of coercion and extortion is failing. New models are emerging, and I’m happy to be part of that. But we’re still making this up as we go along. You are free to make money with the free content of Sita Sings the Blues, and you are free to share money with me. People have been making money in Free Software for years; it’s time for Free Culture to follow. I look forward to your innovations.
As for Paley’s own plans for her goddesses, they’ll be a part of her upcoming animated musical, Seder-Masochism, noting that “all early peoples conceived the divine as female.”
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her on February 8 for Necromancers of the Public Domain, when a host of New York City-based performers and musicians will resurrect a long forgotten work from 1911 as a low budget, variety show. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Ikiru, one of several Akira Kurosawa films routinely described as a masterpiece, tells the story of Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged widower who, three decades into a dead-end bureaucratic career, finds out he has just one year to live. This sends him on an urgent eleventh-hour quest to find something to live for. The picture’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich-inspired script originally bore the title The Life of Kanji Watanabe, but Kurosawa chose to rename it for the Japanese verb meaning “to live” (生きる). And anyone who wants to truly ikiru needs an ikigai.
A combination of characters from the Japanese words for “living” and “effect” or “worth,” ikigai (生き甲斐) as a concept has recently come to attention in the West, not least because of last year’s bestseller Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. (Note: You can get the bestseller as a free audio book if you sign up for Audible’s 30-day free trial program. Get details on that here.)
“For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art,” Buettner says of one Okinawan in particular. “For this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week.” He notes that “the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you’re born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate it in their life, that’s worth about seven years of extra life expectancy.” This phenomenon has also come under scientific study: one paper published in Psychosomatic Medicine found, tracking a group of more than 40,000 Japanese adults over seven years, “subjects who did not find a sense of ikigai were associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality.”
We in the West have long looked to the traditional concepts of other cultures for guidance, but the Japanese themselves, a population among whom dissatisfaction with life is not unknown, have long scrutinized ikigai to draw out useful lessons. “There are many books in Japan devoted to ikigai, but one in particular is considered definitive: Ikigai-ni-tsuite (About Ikigai), published in 1966,” writes the BBC’s Yukari Mitsuhashi. “The book’s author, psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, explains that as a word, ikigai is similar to ‘happiness’ but has a subtle difference in its nuance. Ikigai is what allows you to look forward to the future even if you’re miserable right now.”
Akira Kurosawa, who painted his movies when he couldn’t find the money to shoot them, stands as a towering example of someone who found his ikigai in filmmaking, which he kept on doing it into his eighties. In Ikiru, he guides the bewildered Watanabe into an encounter with ikigai in the form of a young lady who quits her job in his office to make toy rabbits: more arduous work than the civil service, she admits, but it gives her a sense of satisfaction that feels like playing with every child in Japan. This inspires Watanabe to return to find his own ikigai, if only at the very end of his life, in campaigning for the construction of a neighborhood playground. But one year with ikigai, if you believe in the power of the concept, beats a century without it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Whether your New Year’s resolution involves taking up painting, managing stress, cultivating a more positive outlook, or building a business empire, the late television artist Bob Ross can help you stick it out.
Like Fred Rogers’ Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood, Ross’ long-running PBS show, The Joy of Painting, did not disappear from view following its creator’s demise. For over twenty years, new fans have continued to seek out the half-hour long instructional videos, along with its mesmerizingly mellow, easily spoofed host.
It’s said that 90% of the regular viewers tuning in to watch Ross crank out his signature “wet-on-wet” landscapes never took up a brush, despite his belief that, with a bit of encouragement, anyone can paint.
Perhaps they preferred sad clowns or big-eyed children to scenic landscapes of the sort that would not have looked out of place in a 1970’s motel.… Or perhaps Ross, himself, was the big draw.
Like Mister Rogers, Ross spoke softly, using direct address to create an impression of intimacy between himself and the viewer. Twenty years in the military had soured him on barked-out, rigid instructions. Instead, Ross reassured less experienced painters that the 16th-century ”Alla Prima” technique he brought to the masses could never result in mistakes, only “happy accidents.” He was patient and kind and he didn’t take his own abilities too seriously, though he seemed like he would certainly have taken pleasure in yours.
His devotees may be content just seeing “happy little trees” and “pretty little mountains” bloom on canvas, but in an interview with NPR, Ross’ business partner, Annette Kowalski, suggests that he would not have been.
The gentle, forest-and-cloud-loving host was also an ambitious and highly focused businessman, who used TV as the medium for his success. Every folksy comment was rehearsed before filming and he stuck with the permed hairdo he loathed, rather than scrapping what had become a highly visual brand identifier.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her resolution is to spend less time online, but you can still follow her @AyunHalliday.
Today, it’s 18 degrees in New York City, 4 degrees in Chicago, and 13 degrees in Boston. It’s damn cold, especially for the homeless.
Keep this in mind as you watch Rob Bliss’ short video above. In a poignant video, he points out how services offering the immediate delivery of products and services could easily help the homeless. While he uses Amazon Prime as an example, the same idea could be extended to services like DoorDash, GrubHub, and UberEats (which is apparently now outgrowing the taxi business in some cities).
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