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"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."

Buster Keaton did all of his own stunts. "The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail, (and) if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death."

I remember seeing a movie back in the early 1990's called "Buster's Bedroom" at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. The film is about a young woman who is obsessed with Buster Keaton and stays in the sanatorium where the actor was once a patient. The movie's director is Rebecca Horn who is a German installation artist -- and stars Geraldine Chaplin and Donald Sutherland.

Maison Tropicale On The Block

Next up on the auction block, the Maison Tropicale, a rare midcentury prefab by French designer, Jean Prouvé — one of only three ever built. Shipped all the way from its first home in Congo-Brazzaville, and immaculately restored in Paris, this lightweight steel and aluminum kit-of-parts structure and prefab archetype can be yours for the low, low price of $4 - $6 million!

Do we have a bidder?

We mentioned the Maison Tropicale last year when it was exhibitioned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as part of a larger Prouvé show. Now the nomadic house will settle down in Queens, according to the New York Times, as the home of the highest bidder at the Christie’s June 5 auction.

The Rain

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

~ Robert Creeley

War Bowl

I wanted to create a new material that would work on more levels than the usual qualities such as texture and functionality. My aim was to make a material that had a voice of it's own, not just a passive lifeless thing. I started with the idea of combining small objects in order to create something larger. I arrived at the idea of using toy soldiers as my ingredients. As found objects, they seemed to represent something of a paradox.

~ Dominic Wilcox

The Crochet Coral Reef

One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland, Australia in a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile monster that scientists now believe the reef may be dead in 30 years. In homage to the Great One, IFF co-directors Margaret and Christine Wertheim have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef. This woolly testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world celebrates also an unexpected intersection of feminine handicraft and a strange geometry that is realized throughout the oceanic realm.

“6 Billion Perps Held Hostage! Artists Address Global Warming”

The Andy Warhol Museum

March 11 – June 17, 2007

The Forecaster

Li Edelkoort is the founder and head of Trend Union, the Paris-based trend forecasting service, and president of Edelkoort Inc., the American consulting corporation. She is the art director and co-publisher of the magazines View on Colour and Bloom : A Horti-Cultural View. Li is director of the renowned Design Academy in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Dutch by birth, Parisienne by choice, international in outlook, futurist Li Edelkoort knows what the needs, lifestyles and choices of the global community will be two years from now and beyond. Leading manufacturers of products for the environment, automotive, home, office, garden, textile, fashion and beauty industries seek out her advice, creative ideas, and intuition in developing their own lines, services and marketing strategies.

Li Edelkoort / Trend Union invites you to a morning seminar at Parsons School of Design / Tishman Auditorium

May 15, 2007 from 9:30am - 12:45pm

Forever 41

The U.S. Postal Service's Forever stamp, will always be valid as First-Class postage on standard envelopes weighing one ounce or less, regardless of any subsequent increases in the First-Class rate.

The stamp art features the Liberty Bell by artist Tom Engeman. His past projects for USPS include Columbia University (2003), as well as the 2003 American Eagle definitive stamp, and the National World War II Memorial stamp issued in 2004.

USPS

Mama Roma

In Pier Paolo Pasolini's gripping slice of Mediterranean life, Mamma is saint from whore, respectability from ridicule, and determination from desolation. She is the essence of Italy, the soul of its shattered, segmented extremes. But she is also flawed, fatally connected to people—even family—who will only aim to defy and defeat her. She is her country. She is her city. She is the spirit of salvation mixed with the bitter taste of failure. She is maternity. She is womanhood. She is Mamma Roma.

Movie legend Anna Magnani grabs hold of the character of Mamma Roma and somehow manages to instill her very essence, her sensual, strong personality into every facet of this flawed heroine.

Ezawa's Edifying Animations

Kota Ezawa makes computer-generated animations of popular television, film and photographic images that are reminiscent of old-fashioned cartoons. Vibrantly colored and stylized, these animations are then presented as digital projections or films, or in slide shows.

What is novel about Mr. Ezawa's animations is that, for the most part, he does them by hand. Rather than simply filtering his source images through software technology to make them look like animations, he manually reconstructs them, frame by frame, along with all of the motions and movements on a computer using drawing software. It is very labor intensive, even sort of irrational.The subject matter of the images is diverse, ranging from politics and finance to the arts and sciences.

But Mr. Ezawa's best works deal with culturally charged events, like a 2002 animated remake of the handing down of the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial. The animation was based on television footage from inside the courtroom, overlaid with the original soundtrack.

Wasp Culture

Every so often the tribe called Wasp pokes its grosgrain headband into the popular imagination—the Princetonians of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the suburbanites of John Cheever, and Thurston Howell III of Gilligan's Island. Now comes Susanna Salk's A Privileged Life: Celebrating Wasp Style. In this coffee-table-book-cum-memoir, Salk attempts to codify the look of America's fading aristocracy. Unlike clever re-inventors of patrician elegance, such as Robert A. M. Stern or Ralph Lauren, Salk leaves the reader hankering for the real thing, namely Slim Aarons's A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life. The most iconic photos in Salk's book—such as C. Z. Guest at her Long Island estate and Babe Paley at Round Hill, in Jamaica—are from Aarons's picture book. And she admits to being disappointed by her inability to get modern chroniclers of Old Money—including the photographer Tina Barney and the playwright A. R. Gurney—to participate in A Privileged Life.