one piece: November 2009

"The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" by Dominatrix is a New York favorite on Streetwise Records, which was played alongside New Order's "Confusion" and other goodies of the time. It's essentially Claudia Summers speaking (not singing) how "women beat their men..." over a sparse electronic beat.

The video was banned by MTV in 1984, which should come as no surprise.

The Dominatrix" was produced by DJ Ivan who was pretty active in New York circles during the mid 1980s.

28 November 2009

And yes, it is on my Christmas list.

Leica’s latest price-pumped promo comes in the form of the M7 Hermes Very Special Limited Edition, a calfskin-clad version of its M-series 35mm film camera. It will cost you £8550, or almost $14,400.

Just 200 will be made, in two colors. One, “etoupe”, is just brown and soft. The the other is orange. Make no mistake — these are collector’s cameras, and should never be removed from the box. As such they are labeled with a serial number between one and two hundred.

If you do dare to run a film through the camera, you can shoot with the supplied Leica Summilux-M 35 mm ƒ1.4 ASPH and ratchet the film through the gate at a teeth rattling pace with the Leicavit M rapid winder, a mechanism which clamps onto the bottom and lets you wind-on with a lever, and is also included in the kit.

A few other tweaks have been added, lest you think you’re not getting your money’s worth: the red logo is now black, to avoid unsightly color clashes, and the red “auto” on the control dial now matches the leather cladding. Finally, Leica has thrown in a matching leather strap and a lens hood to sweeten the deal.

link: Wired

27 November 2009

“I alter material by organizing it unchanged. Each work is an organized area of identical elements. Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.” – Peter Roehr

When the Frankfurt artist Peter Roehr died in 1968 at the young age of 23, he left behind several hundreds of works in which he pursued exclusively the idea of serial repetition. From found commonplace materials he created ever new montages of photographs, text, typography, objects, sound, and film probing the concept of redundancy.

Roehr abstained from both making a statement and sticking to an individual style. His formal repertory is deliberately reduced to the selection of an object, the definition of the number of its repetitions, and their arrangement. The element used is still recognizable, although it becomes absorbed in the series, so that the original form and color scheme are subjected to a potentiating effect.

Last year, the Städelsche Museums-Verein was able to acquire the artist’s ten Schwarze Tafeln (Black Panels) for the museum, a central work in which the method of a non-narrative serial arrangement of identical objects culminates.

Now that four decades have lapsed, the commonplace nature of Roehr’s works pushes to the fore even more vehemently. They become amazingly enhanced and turn into narrative formulations oscillating between ready-made and seriality, pop and minimal art, everyday life and abstraction.

The exhibition Peter Roehr illustrates that Roehr’s strict formalism is much more complex and eloquent than it seems to be at first glance.

link: Städel Museum

26 November 2009

The one that got away.

Happy Thanksgiving

25 November 2009

“Nothing is small when it comes to childhood.” ~ François Truffaut

“I Never Tire of filming with children,” François Truffaut once said. “All that a child does on-screen, he seems to do for the first time.” More than any of the director’s other works, Small Change (1976) is devoted to cataloguing these magically fresh exploratory acts and gestures.

Made in collaboration with the people of Thiers, a steep-sloped town in central France, Small Change was shot over a two-month school break during the summer of ’75. Truffaut’s workshop approach to filming a group of child nonactors brings to mind Laurent Cantet’s recent film The Class (2008), but unlike that timely docudrama on classroom politics, Truffaut’s film is an ode to the peculiar delicacy and resilience of youth.

24 November 2009

Vintage Posting

Original Pekarek's Tee

Valentin Zietara

link: International Poster Center

23 November 2009

"The Power of Art and Painting"

A picture of an artist's studio is an invitation to enter his private realm, to ponder his perception of the creative process and to marvel at the extent to which art, at its most profound, can transcend the limits of its historic moment and constructed space.

Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656)—marked by a massive scale, unremitting technical virtuosity and centuries of critical analysis—is a tour-de-force studio painting and one against which legions of later artists, including Goya and Picasso, have measured themselves. Countless writers have debated the work's seductive visual riddles: its transparent naturalism yet strangely inaccessible subject, its striking combination of a captured moment and staged studio portrait, its meticulously wrought but, in the end, ambiguous perspective.

Perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the Golden Age of Spanish art, it has been heralded as a summation of the painter's illustrious career and enduring quest for nobility in an age and culture that did not sufficiently esteem its native artists. In the waning decades of the Hapsburg empire in Spain, Velázquez's "Las Meninas" also offered a telling glimpse of the world of the aging Philip IV, where artifice and illusion often masked, to dazzling effect, an increasingly dismal reality.

link: The alluring enigmas of Velázquez's 'Las Meninas'

The Wall Street Journal

22 November 2009

"Stranger Than Paradise" Clip

Jim Jarmusch's debut feature Stranger Than Paradise seems both a throwback to the American independents of the '60s and '70s, and a harbinger of what was to come in the years following its release. The film stands as a link between the past and the future, a synthesis of the Cassavetes-Scorsese brand of streetwise naturalism, and the aloofness and wry humor that characterizes much of modern independent cinema (Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater's output, in particular).

At once artless and artful, dramatically unfocused yet layered throughout with unmistakable observations about mid-'80s American melancholia,Stranger Than Paradise displays all the strengths and weaknesses of Jarmusch's brand of cinema. While experiencing his stories, the viewer may suspect that, beneath the patina of captivating movie moments, the director has nothing particularly to say about, well, anything, but is simply creating images because he feels like it, and stringing them together with vintage jazz, rock, and world music selections. Just short of expressing any sense of purpose or point of view, at least conventionally speaking, a Jarmusch movie will peter out. The characters do not advance much, though each will have embarked on journeys, and shared moments of wry hilarity. But, spiritually, they remain near or exactly where they began.

21 November 2009

"Precious"

The movie Precious is the story of an overweight and abused Harlem single mother fighting to survive. The film came out of the Sundance Film Festival this year with the Audience and Grand Jury prizes, as well as Oprah Winfrey as a supporter.

Director Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer, The Woodsman, Monster's Ball) talks us through his journey.

Daniels reveals what attracted him to Precious, his preference for difficult subject matter, feeling an outsider in Hollywood and his conviction that there is a little bit of Precious in all of us.

He also discusses lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey's involvement in the film, the role of music, how the film's fantasy, humor and soundtrack help balance the harrowing elements, and his desire that African Americans not to be afraid of this film.

Listen here: The Treatment

Poster by Ignition.