The Million Word Year

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Archive for category Arts

World : UN censors The Gun Sculpture

Jul 25

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, Canada, News, World | 1 Comment

There’s a brouhaha brewing over a fairly cool piece of art that’s been on display all over the world, but somehow got changed by someone when it came time to display it at the UN.

Click here for a fairly good picture of the work. I like it, myself. The idea of making an anti-violence statement by melting and fusing a lot of guns, landmines, and other death machines together is not startlingly original, but the execution is, I think, both effective and darkly attractive. The contrast between the cube shape and the dark uniform color with the extremely varied and mechanistic texture, and the way the melting, shredding, and fusion conveys the idea of terrible violence, yet the cube makes it seem like simple compacted trash, makes for a strong effect on the viewer. It manages to covey the feeling of “weapon”, “violence”, and “war” in a terrible and awe inspiring way.

It’s cool art.

But apparently, according to its Canadian sculptors (Edmonton’s Sandra Bromley and Wallis Kendal), the work is meant to be accompanied by 114 photo panels depicting victims of violence from all over the world. And that’s how it’s been displayed all over the world until now, when at some point after being put on display at the Academic Council of the United Nations in Vienna, the panels were taken down, leaving just the cube itself on display.

The artists are calling this “blatant censorship”, which it is, if uses the broadest possible definition of censorship. But it’s a loaded word and should not be throw around lightly or it begins to lose all meaning.

I’ve not seen the photo panels, but seeing as they depict victims of violence, I am guessing they are pretty unpleasant and depressing. The act of censorship may have been motivated by something as simple as someone at ACUN getting tired of looking at the undoubtedly bloody and horrifying things. That’s not the sort of thing that should happen in the world of art, where we’re all assumed to be grownups who can make up our own mind if we want to see upsetting and terrible things, but it’s not a nefarious attempt by shadowy forces to restrict freedom of speech and enforce a monolithic hegemony of conformity on a helpless and sheeplike public consciousness. It might have been a simple bit of editorializing by some mid-level ACUN flunkie who is now busily fading so hard into the woodwork they’re in danger of becoming wood stain and who is perfectly happy to have all these academic feathers flying as long as none of the blame lands on THEM.

It’s good that we maintain a healthy paranoia about censorship. As I see it, it’s better to be a little too worried about it than not quite worried enough. But I find it exceedingly tiresome when artists and writers shout CENSORSHIP like they’re being raped at gunpoint every time someone dares interfere with their works. We can’t go crying wolf every time we see a puppy. There has to be ways of solving these sorts of dispute without breaking out the big guns and invoking the spirit (if nto the specifics) of Godwin all the time.

Otherwise, when that wolf really does show up, people will just assume it must be just another puppy, and by the time they realize their error, it will be too late.

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Pictures : The Beard Hat

Jun 23

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, Captions, Links | 1 Comment

I love it when people abuse the power to knit.

Both manly and toasty warm!

With the sunglasses, it looks downright sinister, doesn’t it? Like this is the mask people would have been wearing at the end of the movie if V for Vendetta had been about the Unabomber.

I love how people are going crazy weird things with formerly staid and respectable home handicrafts. People are knitting all kinds of weird things, including starting vulva knitting circles, and some of them are even using knitting as a form of protest. Radicalized knitters. I love it.

Next : rug hooking used to make WMD’s!

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Art : “Play Me, I’m Yours”

Jun 22

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts | No Comments

One of those simple and wonderful public art projects that I love so much is underway in London and New York city. It’s the brainchild of British artist Luke Jerram, and the premise is simply. Take sixty pianos and put them in public places like parks and streets and plazas with a sign that says “Play Me, I’m Yours” and just leave them there for people to play. Film the results. Magic.

I love this kind of thing. So simple and yet so magical! Imagine you’re walking along the same streets you’ve walked on a thousand times, head down and thinking about nothing but getting from point A to point B, when you turn the corner and there’s a piano, just sitting there, with a sign on it encouraging you to use it, so you know it’s not just placed there while someone moves it or the like.

No, it’s just sitting there, inviting you to play it.

Or imagine you turn the corner, and there’s a ragged homeless guy sitting at a piano and playing an absolutely beautiful piece of music that you’ve never heard before, because it was a hit way back when he was a young man, and he never thought anyone would let him near a piano ever again.

Or instead, you find a group of people of all walks of life all gathered around the piano and singing along enthusiastically to the theme songs from their favorite sitcoms.

Or a small child tentatively creeping up and touching a few keys, then sitting down and touching a few more, transfixed by the magic of making such pretty sounds by just pushing a few keys. It’s like music, and he’s doing it. Amazing.

Or a staid businessman in a conservative suit sitting there with a wry smile on his face as he thinks back and tries to remember the piano lessons of a long-lost youth.

Such magical moments made possible by a simple inspiration and the faith (and resources) to put six pianos out there for the public to use.

The pianos each have a “piano buddy”, so they’re not entirely unsupervised. They’re brought in at night, and when the project is done after July 5, all the pianos will be donated to local schools.

So it’s pretty much pure magical karmic awesomeness all the way through.

Of course, they claim this is all a public art project, but I suspect it might actually be an elaborate attempt to contact the drunk but wily ghost of Dudley Moore.

“Oh look, a piano. ”

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Leonard Cohen : “Please stop covering Hallelujah”

Jun 20

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, Canada, Entertainment | 2 Comments

Tired of yet another version of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” popping up in yet another movie or television show when they need to go for cheap pathos? So is Leonard Cohen himself.

According to LeonardCohenFiles.com, there’s 181 separate and distinct cover versions of the song, from Cohen’s 1984 album, Various Positions, out there. And Cohen thinks that’s probably enough.

“I was reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said, ‘Can we please have a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’ in movies and television shows?’ and I kind of feel the same way,”

I love the song, it’s incredibly beautiful, and still, I felt the same way when I heard it in Watchmen. What, again? Give it a rest, people.

And besides, there’s already been one perfect, definitive cover that nobody is going to top, and it’s the one I feel started this whole thing : the Rufus Wainwright version.

Ignore the Spanish and just enjoy Rufus’ amazingly expressive and unique voice. You can’t top that.

Cohen says there’s a small element of revenge in the song’s new-found success.

“Sony wouldn’t put out” Various Positions, he said. “They didn’t think it was good enough. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart.”

Apparently, 181 people think it was good enough, Sony. So there!

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Movies : Sequel to “Manos : The Hands Of Fate” planned

Jun 13

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, News | 1 Comment

I’m serious. They’re planning a sequel to one of the best/worst movies ever to receive Mystery Science Theatre 3000′s loving treatment, “Manos : The Hands Of Fate”.

“They”, in this case, being a group headed by this odd fellow, by the name of Rupert Talbot Munch Senior, who apparently has taken to playing Torgo to the hilt, complete with a cane that continuously plays Torgo’s signature theme music.

Here’s this odd fellow making a rather funky groovy music video :

According to the story over at MST3Kinfo.com, Rupert plans on getting as much of the original cast, and their families, together as possible to make a sequel, which he says will be out some time in 2013.

I don’t blame him for his fascination with Torgo, because as far as I am concerned, Torgo is the movie. The rest of it is boring and lame and badly paced, except for a few of the scenes with The Master, but when Torgo is on screen, he just rocks you with the awesome over the top creepy weirdness factor. I’d go so far as to say Torgo is my favorite all-time B-movie character. Unlike practically everyone else in that movie, Torgo is fully there, fully committed, and fully freaking insane. He makes the screen come alive while he is on it. Torgo rocks.

And obviously, he had the same effect on the MST3K crew, judging by the number of times they got Mike Nelson to dress up and play him.

So I wish you luck, Rupert Talbot Munch Senior (wait… you have a kid? wow. ) in getting your sequel made. I’m kinda curious as to who is going to finance such a thing, but I am sure there are some hardcore MST3K nerds out there somewhere who can spare a few bucks for such a worthy goal.

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Arts : 75 “lost films” recovered in New Zealand

Jun 7

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, News | 1 Comment

This story is so awesome I feel like I could explode.

A historical and cultural treasure trove of American movies from the long-lost era of silent films has been discovered in, of all places, New Zealand.

Silent films thought to have been lost to the mists of time for decades have turned up in the New Zealand Film Archive, and seventy five of them have been chosen to be transported to the USA and added to the archives of the National Film Preservation Board.

I absolutely love this kind of thing. What a find! Priceless cultural artifacts snatched from oblivion and brought back into the light of history and posterity… it makes the archivist and historian in my want to do a little jig.

I hope they put these movies online for everyone to enjoy.

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Arts : Visual Composition and Fullmetal Alchemist

Jun 5

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, News | 1 Comment

You have to go read this incredible article over on Tumblr.

It’s interesting to read both because it provides very clear and easy to understand explanations of two potentially tricky terms, The Rule of Thirds and The 180 Rule, and because it uses as illustrative examples from the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist. (It’s really spelled like that. Bugs the crap out of me. )

I feel like after reading that article, I understand clearly what before I only understood hazily. For that, I am extremely grateful. One of the best things you can do for the world is to take existing information and restate it in a simpler, clearer, more mentally digestible way. It’s part of the great didactic chain, from the person whom comes up with the theory that only they understand, to the few people capable of understanding what the theorist meant, who in turn can explain it to a larger group of specialists, down through successive layers of refinement to the point where it can be taught in schools or even, in some rare cases, pass into the ether of the zeitgeist and become common knowledge.

And I love that it uses still from a popular anime series to illustrate its points. I’ve long held that learning the techniques and theoretical underpinnings of art of all sorts works equally well with art of any level of quality or pedigree, because all art, even the fairly bad, still has most of the basics within it. An episode of Gossip Girl has a plot, characters, and so on just as much as Shakespeare does. The most low-grade comic book still has to deal with issues of composition, light balance, and framing.

So why not use whatever it is the kids already enjoy in order to teach them the basics? The answer, it seems, would be that English teachers want to use the literature they like in order to teach these things. But an honest and dedicated educator does not shirk from using whatever works best with the students merely out of some literary squeamishness. You have to meet the students where they are, or they will simply tune you out as someone spewing information that is meaningless in the context of their lives, and then what have you accomplished? Besides the denigration in the mind of the students of the very subject you know and love?

Indeed, if you want them to know and appreciate the great art you love, the most effective method is to start with the art they love and teach them the basics, and leave it to them to realize how badly their favorite things do their job, and only then, when they have begun to ask “is there something better than this?”, give them examples of the same thing done well. Above all, don’t push. They have to come to these conclusions by themselves. If you mock the shows they love, do so gently, and with a light touch. Give examples of how that same show (or book or whatever) could have done the same thing better. That will reach them far more powerfully than simply flinging Shakespeare at them, knowing that for most of them, it will not stick.

As for the actual points made in the article, I think the article’s author goes a little overboard in his application of the rules he has learned. Neither of the screenshots he has chosen seem terribly badly composed to me. I don’t find myself confused as to where the center of the action is located. In both cases, there is a character who is clearly both foreground and center, and that is sufficient to draw the eye, at least in my case.

Indeed, I suspect his interpretation of the Rule of the Thirds might be a tad narrower than necessary. It’s less that everything important must be at the intersections of the lines that you must be aware that anything there WILL be focused upon, so don’t put unimportant things there.

But primarily, I enjoyed the article, and it makes me curious about the possibilities of Tumblr, which I signed up for but only so this blog could echo there. I actually don’t know much about it. But the article linked looks very professional and slick, and I am always looking for a way to improve this blog’s appearance to make it look less amateurish, so who knows? Perhaps Tumblr will become the top layer of the pyramid some day.

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Books : Twain’s Secret Memoirs Unlocked after 100 Years

May 24

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts, News | No Comments

This is such a fantastic story that it’s hard to believe it’s real…. but it’s 100 percent real, baby!

Seems Mark Twain spend the last decade or so of his life writing some 5,000 pages of his autobiography and memoirs, and when he died, he stipulated that they shouldn’t be published for around “a century or so”.

Well, Twain died in 1910, so guess what? They’re coming out of the vault!

I, like millions of others, am abuzz with anticipation. Twain was one of the most extraordinary writers ever, not simply for the books we’ve all heard of, but for being a unflinching, broad-minded learned, commentator on his time and the world in general. So I’m eager to find out what he had to say about what was going on in that last decade of his life, which just happened to be the first decade of the 20th century.

No doubt, a lot of it will not be pleasant.

“There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn’t such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he’d never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile.”

Regrettable but understandable. He was a very old and no doubt very ill man by then, and in a lot of pain, and that makes people cranky, no matter how intelligent or eloquent they are. I think that for any of us, the things we write as we approach Death should be taken with a certain reserve, and not too seriously. No doubt, Twain was not a happy man when he died. Few people are, really.

Being a fan of Nietzsche, I’m already familiar with this idea. By the time he died, Nietzsche’s writings had become so vitriolic as to be, frankly, embarrassing to read. To make any sort of peace with Nietzsche, it is necessary to learn to accept that it is possible to admire and appreciate someone without having to endorse everything they ever said as the golden gospel truth. It is necessary because within his lifetime body of writing, he contradicts himself so many times and in so many ways that it is simply impossible to believe all of it at the same time. You have to pick and choose or the whole program crashes.

I imagine the Twain memoirs will amount to more or less the same. There will, no doubt, be much of extraordinary worth and great historical insight and value. But it will be the product not of a talented writer with a prodigious mind and phenomenal grasp of the world who labored over every word till it was all gleaming spotless verbal perfection. It is the product of an old, tired, cranky man who dictated every word to a stenographer and never looked back. It is unedited, unexpurgated, and no doubt unlovely in parts.

But he’s Mark Twain. Even his mistakes are more interesting that most people’s successes.

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Arts : Banksy gets defaced

May 18

Posted by MegaWordMan in Arts | 2 Comments

In a fairly predictable (at least in hindsight) move, other people have started defacing Banksy’s most excellent graffiti, thus taking graffiti to the next level of commentary. It’s meta-graffiti now.

It’s a natural progression. Banksy’s work is so famous now that art galleries try to buy the buildings he defaces or just out and out steal whole walls just to try to get in on the action. It makes sense that graffiti artists would want to comment on the insanity of that, or more cynically, just piggyback their way into fame and recognition on his coat-tails.

I’m a Banksy fan, like millions of others. I admire the spirit of graffiti artists who use the medium to send a message or making something boring like a dull brown wall into something interesting and beautiful. To me, that’s a wonderful thing. And what I like about Banksy is how he makes beautiful art that is also extremely effective and powerful satire. To me, it’s Banksy the satirist who is the big deal. The fact that he does it through unauthorized guerilla art is a very important part of the satire, of course. It makes such a powerful statement to stamp your commentary directly onto the everyday world of building and signs and advertising. But to me, the satire is the focus. That’s the Banksy I love.

And so it’s no surprise that, in a world that is desperately trying to catch up to him, where every time he puts up a new piece people are tramping one another to take pictures and put it in their magazines and on their websites and where the sites of his works become tourist traps for art lovers, some people are taking the next logical step and adding their own comments to his work.

I’m sure a lot of people are going to get really angry about it. But these people aren’t “defacing” the art or “dissing” Banksy. They are participating. You can’t deface graffiti. It’s a contradiction in terms. Part of the inherent risk of unauthorized art is that there is nobody authorized to protect it. Your art is as helpless and vulnerable as the wall you defaced in the first place. It would be the height of hypocrisy to complain about someone defacing YOUR precious perfect art when you had no problem with defacing someone else’s wall.

Were I Banksy, as long as there was plenty of pictures of the art as I originally intended it floating out in the world, I’d be quite happy that others were participating. After all, it’s not about fame or immortality, it’s about commentary, and that’s inherently dialectic.

Some of my favorite all time graffiti has been the kind on the bathroom stall walls, where an actual asynchronous conversation between total strangers springs up. Someone comments on a sports team or a politician, another person counters it, others join in… it’s like a real-world forum comprised of random dudes who needed to take a piss.

In all honestly, I would LOVE to be Banksy, or rather, I’d love to have the sort of art skills and balls it takes to do satire on that level. I could come up with the idea for the image, but I couldn’t execute it. That’s too bad. I specifically would love to deface some of the more insulting and inane public advertising that saturates our modern urban world. If they’re going to work so hard to capture our overtaxed attention, I see no problem with giving them something worth looking at now and then.

I guess I’ll have to content myself with keeping my satirical commentary in the realm of text.

Now hand me my spray paint and jumbo stencils….

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