Category: The Arts
The view from the back seat
Alicia Rius, a Spanish born photographer now living in Amsterdam, has produced a series of photographs on one of Contrarian’s favorite visual subjects: abandoned cars. What’s unusual is that all the photos were shot from inside the car, and from the vantage point of the back seat:
All ten images here. Maybe some Contrarian readers have similar photos they’d like to share from this side of the Atlantic.
H/T: Alison Nastasi
The man who lived on his bike
French born Guillaume Blanchet, now working as a copywriter for the Montreal advertising agency Bleublancrouge, rode his bike through the friendly streets of Montreal for 382 days, while filming himself from the handlebars, with this whimsical result:
My father is 64 years old. He’s been riding his bike more than 120,000 km. And he keeps going. I dedicate this film to him.
A.G. Bell-inspired flying art
Little Shining Man, a kite sculpture created by Heather and Ivan Morrison, takes flight from a beach at St. Aubin’s Bay, on the Bailiwick of Jersey.
Videography by James O’Garra. H/T John Hugh Edwards.
Dracula at Dalhousie: The mystery of the pilfered documents
Lauren Oostveen, Nova Scotia’s tweeting archivist, today unearthed a clipping from The 4th Estate, Halifax’s one-time alternative weekly, about a vampire conflab that took place at Dalhouse 39 years ago this month. The 4th Estate story is good, but the yarn Oostveen dug up to go with it is even better.
Organized by English Professor Devendra P. Varma, a renowned Dracula-lit buff, the goth-before-its-time conference boasted “the largest gathering of vampire experts ever presented in Canada,” and featured a screening of the classic 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.
The Himalayan-born Varma, who died in 1994, was apparently quite a character. According to Oostveen, he “had a tendency to believe in conspiracies, secret police, and other forces” who, he believed, harboured an unsavoury interest in his collection of vampire books and memorabilia. At his insistence, “the really important stuff” was kept in a locked cabinet at the departmental library.
Time passes, [and] the library periodically asks about his use of their space, does he really need this secure storage, and so on. He says yes, and the cabinet gets moved a few times as the library moves divisions and departments.
The Berlin wall falls, the world is more open, evil forces are in retreat, and Varma decides he can take home his trove of vampire documents and literature.
He comes to the library with the one and only key, and of course, it’s an empty cabinet.”
Oostveen professes not to know who to blame for the pilferage: Abraham van Helsing or Dracula. I suspect Cletus Hollohan had a hand in it.
2001 space quip: You can’t polish a…
Toronto Star movie critic Peter Howell is a 2001: A Space Odyssey fanatic who claims to have seen the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic more than 40 times. For the second holiday season in a row, Bell Lightbox, the Toronto International Film Festival’s modernistic movie showcase, is featuring a 70MM version of the film.
Critic Howell marked last year’s screenings with a column titled, “21 cool things about 2001: A Spacey Odyssey.” He reprised the column yesterday with “21 more cool things.” In this year’s instalment, Howell reports that when Kubrick was editing Space Odyssey, the comedian and filmmaker Jerry Lewis was down the hall making final cuts to one of his low-brow comedies. Late one night, Kubrick watched a frustrated Lewis struggle to make a scene work.
“You cannot polish a turd,” Lewis moaned.
“You can if you freeze it,” Kubrick replied.
The original trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey is, of course, on YouTube.
H/T: Kendra Barnes.
Animation and the non-epidemic of ADHD
I don’t normally post videos that already have five million hits, but this animated version of a talk by educator and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson underscores a point made by Sunni Brown in her TED talk about the merits of doodling. There is something about the combination of speech and visual note-taking that enhances comprehension, especially comprehension of irony and ideas in conflict.
Robinson’s talk is about education, but the animated nature of the talk the talk is as arresting as the content.
[Educators] are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past, and along the way they are alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school.
When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that of you worked hard and did wel and got a college degree, you would have a job. Our kids don’t believe that, and they’re right not to, by the way. You’re better having a degree than not, but it’s not a guarantee any more, and particularly not if the route to it marginalizes most of the things you think are important about yourself….
[ADHD] is not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis, and for the same reason: medical fashion.
Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the Earth. They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: Computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of channels. And we’re penalizing them for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff, at school, for the most part.
RSA Animate, produced by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, has a series of similar animated exhortational videos.
H/T: Doug MacKay
Coolest business card ever
The format of a standard business card is so inherently boring, it cries out for creative embellishment. In place of the usual 2×3-inch card, games inventer Will Wright (SimCity) hands out worthless paper currency stamped with his contact information.
This bill, which Wright recently gave The Atlantic’s technical editor Alexis Madrigal, happens to be from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Fittingly, it features electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. (That’s the blurred-out stamp on the right-hand side.)
Why didn’t we think of that, dear reader?
H/T: Alexis Madrigal
Truculent photo subject
The most unusual Steve Jobs obituary this week might be the one that appeared in PDN Pulse, the blog of Photo District News. Jobs, it seems, was a legendarily truculent photo subject. PDN Pulse recounted some of the legends.
“It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times.
In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine’s cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked over the setup, and leaned into Menuez’s face:
“This is the stupidest fucking idea that I’ve ever seen,” Jobs said.
“Right in my face, like 5 or 6 inches away,” Menuez says. “I felt like I was 10 years old. He went off on a tirade. He said, ‘You just want to sell magazines. ‘And I said, ‘And you want to sell computers.’
At that, Jobs said, ‘OK,’ and sat down.
Menuez concludes, “ I’ve been in war zones, but I like to say that I became a man learning how to stand my ground with Steve.”
When Albert Watson shot Jobs for a Fortune feature on CEOs, he insisted on having three hours to set up. PDN Pulse again:
“We were prepared,” Watson said. “We set up to make [every shoot] as greased lightning fast as possible for the [subject].” Watson had read “a massive amount of stuff” about Jobs to help him conceptualize the shoot, and converse intelligently with Jobs.
When Jobs walked in, his power, charisma, and genius were palpable.
“It was like when Clint Eastwood walks in to the room.”
Jobs didn’t look immediately at Watson, but looked instead at the set-up and then focused on Watson’s 4×5 camera “like it was something dinosauric,” Watson recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, you’re shooting film.”
“I said, ‘I don’t feel like digital is quite here yet.’ And he said, ‘I agree,’ then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘But we’ll get there.’”
Jobs gave Watson an hour, much more time than he generally allowed for portrait sessions.
“I had wanted to do the shot in a minimalistic way because I knew that was going to suit him very well. He said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said I would like 95 percent, almost 100 percent of eye contact with the camera, and I said, ‘Think about the next project you have on the table,’ and I asked him also to think about instances where people have challenged him.
“If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, that you knew this guy was smart,”
Apple cleared its home page Thursday to post that photograph, which, Watson heard, Jobs regarded as his his all-time favorite.”
H/T: Ashley Harding
I don’t know’s on third
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s playoff time.
H/T: Charlie Phillips
Another irrefutable argument for the serial comma
An anonymous cartoonist strikes a blow for virtuous punctuation:
When will newspaper style guides wake up to its obvious superiority?
H/T Lee Amme Gillan via David Rodenhiser. This has been cropping up on the net since mid-September. If anyone can devine the artist’s identity, I’ll update.
