one piece

"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.

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"Dress Codes" at ICP

 

The Third Triennial will mark the closing cycle of ICP's 2009 Year of Fashion,

A series of projects that critically examine fashion and its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena.

The theme of fashion encompasses a diverse range of practices and ideas, including explorations of identity and affiliation; the production, distribution, and consumption of images and goods; contemporaneity; age; gender; and global industry. 

The themes of the Triennial express the exuberance, wit, and astute social observation taking place within contemporary image-making. These artists variously explore fashion—whether in everyday dress, haute couture, street fashion, or uniforms—as a celebration of individuality, personal identity, and self-expression, and as cultural, religious, social, and political statements.

Jim Carroll 1949-2009

Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. 

He was 60.As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan .

“I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.”

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"Metropolitan Forecast"

     D8 L THE NEW YORK TIMES TUESDAY, 

          SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Metropolitan Forecast

         TODAY 

Less humid, sunny. High 79.

 Noticeably less humid air will filter into the metropolitan region on. 

Brisk winds from the northwest. 

High pressure building east from the Great Lakes will promote mainly sunny skies. 

Daytime readings will peak in the lower 80’s.

      TONIGHT

 Clear, lighter winds Low 62. 

Skies will be clear overnight as high pressure crests near the Middle Atlantic Coast. 

Humidity will remain low, and temperatures will fall to around 60 degrees in many spots.

      TOMORROW

     Mainly sunny High 76.

 Sunshine and just a few clouds will fill the sky. 

Breezes will turn and blow from the south ahead of a cold front approaching from Canada.

Excerpt from

"Two Poems from 

"The Day" 

By Kenneth Goldsmith

Body Parts

Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets features thirty-five representations of individual body parts from the Brooklyn Museum’s ancient Egyptian collection, many of which will be displayed for the first time.

 This special exhibition will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 19, 2009, through October 2, 2011. 

This exhibition uses objects created as distinct body parts, as well as fragments of sculpture, to highlight the realistic portrayal of individual body parts in canonical Egyptian sculpture. The ancient Egyptians carefully depicted each part of the human body, respecting the significance of every element. When viewed individually these sculptures and fragments reveal the ancient notions of body and pose, as well as details of workmanship frequently unnoticed in more complete sculptures. To better explain each of these elements, the exhibition will make connections to specific objects in the Museum’s Egyptian collection and to Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

Extensive Antony Gormley Exhibition

San Idelfonso College presents an exhibition of work by British sculptor Antony Gormley, bringing together installations, free standing sculptures, and works on paper from throughout Gormley’s career in what will be the most extensive presentation to date of his work. 

Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalized the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations. Gormley’s recent work increasingly engages with energy systems, fields and vectors, rather than mass and defined volume.

The body as a point of departure has been the basis of the work of Antony Gormley for over thirty years. For the artist, one springboard for his sculpture is the relationship between physical sensations and the surroundings. Gormley sees the body as a receptacle, a place for energy to move about, thoughts.

via: artdaily

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." William Blake

Drawn from the Morgan's extensive holdings of works by William Blake (1757–1827), this exhibition is the museum's first in more than twenty years devoted to the breadth of his literary accomplishments and artistic influence. Blake is equally renowned as poet and artist, printmaker and engraver.

The Morgan holds one of the most important Blake collections in this country. William Blake's World: "A New Heaven is Begun" includes major examples of Blake's illuminated works and engravings as well as single drawings. It will also feature the complete watercolors of The Book of Job and Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, all of which represent the peak of Blake's artistry.

Storefront Churches: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara

In the early 1970s, Camilo José Vergara was struck by the number and variety of houses of worship he encountered—both in buildings originally designed for other purposes, and in abandoned traditional churches. He recalls, "I quickly understood churches to be crucial to my project, and a separate study of them began to develop." Intrigued by Christ's ethnicity or color at a particular church, Vergara asked church elders about His representation; curious about the proper setting for worship, he queried pastors about their building plans; surprised by parishioners "drunk in the spirit," he followed them. 

Vergara and his camera have been an eye witness to worship in some of the nation's most distressed communities, including areas of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York.  "In poor neighborhoods, houses of worship are plentiful and each has a unique identity.

link: National Building Museum

Ian Frazier on Siberia

This week in The New Yorker, Ian Frazier writes about his journey across Siberia. In his audio slide show, Frazier explains why he kept a sketchbook during the trip and shares some of his images of the Siberian landscape.

True Blood's Killer Main Title Opener -- By Digital Kitchen