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"Song of the Witches"

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,

Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon's blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

By William Shakespeare

 The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983)

Photograph: Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Halloween, Chicago 1950s

 

Strike a Pose

 Without photography, would Elvis and his gyrating hips have shocked America? Can you talk about Grace Jones without thinking of the Island Life cover? The photographers who collaborated with rock 'n' roll musicians injected the genre with glamour, grit, and sex appeal, and even today, one photograph has the power to catapult a musician to stardom. The Brooklyn Museum is now curating the first major museum exhibition devoted exclusively to rock photography: Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, opens today, featuring 175 works from 105 photographers. The massive collection covers a range of media, from album covers to slideshows to music videos—don't miss your chance to check out some rare and never-before-seen images, like a Rolling Stones photograph by Philip Townsend or four Beatles portraits by Richard Avedon.

via: The Village Voice

"My Manhattan"

 Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward--step aside. We've got John Wallowitch, composer and cabaret performer extraordinaire. And in this wonderful cd, he sings his songs of love for the greatest city in the world.

"While Noel Coward is no longer around to set the standards for a certain kind of sophisticated songwriting sensibility, John Wallowitch nimbly carries the torch."--Stephen Holden, NY Times

Available at: moss

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

So 80's

Neil Winokur: 1980's Portraits at:

Janet Borden

“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective”

 Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century.

This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape.

What’s surprising about the Philadelphia show, though, is how much it feels of a piece, even if it doesn’t look like it. Stylistically, eclecticism rules as you move from Gorky playing Cézanne, to Gorky doing Cubism, to Gorky the Surrealist. Constant throughout, though, is an impression, as strong and invisible as a force field, of physical and psychic concentration.

via: "From Mimic to Master of Invention" By Holland Cotter - The New York Times

Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799)

 The first comprehensive exhibition of Luo Ping’s paintings ever presented in America, Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) on view at Metropolitan Museum of Art, will bring together nearly 60 works, including many Chinese “National Treasures,” by one of the most celebrated painters in 18th-century China. Complemented by 27 pieces from American collections, this momentous international-loan exhibition will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist’s vision as well as his place among his peers. Highlights of the exhibition will include the sensational handscroll Ghost Amusements (ca. 1766)—one of the best known paintings in the late imperial China—depicting the world of ghosts that, he claimed, he had seen with his own eyes. The youngest of the so-called “Eight Eccentrics,” a group of highly individualistic artists active in the prosperous metropolis of Yanzhou, Luo Ping was an extraordinary artist, whose works influenced the course of later Chinese painting.

“Luo Ping was very much a man of his times,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, “And, being labeled an eccentric suggests that he exhibited the kind of individuality that we associate with western artists today. Luo faced issues of artistic integrity and patronage not so different from what contemporary artists must grapple with. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to get to know a Chinese artist in all his complexity.” 

via: The Beat

"New York by Line: From Broadway to the Battery"

In 1967, a German illustrator going by the single name Robinson published a collection of pen-and-ink drawings called New York. Like so many non-natives before and after him—Hart Crane, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe—Robinson, whose given name was Werner Kruse, was able to see the city with uncommon clarity, and a single page of his book contains more detail than most of us process in a day.

Revealed in a new edition from Universe Publishing—New York: Line by Line, From Broadway to the Battery—the drawings most obviously evoke Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker work, particularly when Robinson’s whimsical skeins of pedestrians march across our streets. But Steinberg was a fabulist, creating a city of swooping giant calligraphies and anthropomorphic traffic. Robinson, by contrast, was giving us an ultracrisp experience of the overwhelming muchness of New York. His buildings are scrupulously accurate, down to the tiny tripartite cornices on the brownstones. The zigzaggy edges of the city mass and pile up until they practically spring out of the binding.

via: "Drawn to New York", New York Magazine

Cut Off

 Slash: Paper Under the Knife is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series,

 which examines the renaissance of traditional handicraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

"Big Fan"

Films without end have been made about the heroes of sport, but who speaks for the fans, the fervent admirers and supporters no team can exist without? Who especially speaks not for the weekend dabbler but for the hard-core fanatic, the zealot who devotes an entire life to a team with the single-minded intensity of a monk meditating in a cave? "Big Fan" does, and it does it exceptionally well.

Written and directed by Robert Siegel and starring an ideally cast Patton Oswalt in the title role, "Big Fan" is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans. Its situations can be outrageous, its dialogue is often scabrous, but its sense of the core reality it describes is impeccable.

Read more here