Sign Language

Classically white

2009-07-12T17:01:00.005+10:00

When we use the adjective 'classical', we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it's a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.

I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It's hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.

The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.

Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.

Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked "jewelled" and "busy". Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.

Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn't prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.

The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.

The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.

Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.

Ballard Street: Sparky's portraits

2009-07-08T17:09:00.003+10:00

From Jerry Van Amerongen's Ballard Street.

The ironic revolution

2009-07-08T08:47:00.003+10:00

It was socialists who saw the dangers of Communism first and most clearly. In 1918, at the dawn of the Soviet era, Karl Kautsky, who had personally known Marx and Engels in his youth, wrote a diatribe against Lenin's use of the vague Marxist term "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Kautsky insisted it had been meant metaphorically, and that genuine class struggle presupposed genuine democracy. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat "always leads to the dictatorship of a single man, or of a small knot of leaders" and to a situation where ordinary people "only become instruments for carrying out orders."

From Andrew O'Hehir's review of 'The Rise and Fall of Communism' by Archie Brown, in Salon.com.

One thing was not a historical fluke or accident, though: the fact that a political system based on some half-baked utopian musing by Marx and Engels, and their bogus claims of scientific certainty, was not going to work out well for anybody.

There's room for argument about whether it had to turn out quite as badly as it did, and plenty of room for discussing the continuing validity of Marx's insights into capitalism. But there's no denying that the works of a philosopher who championed human creativity became the basis for a social system devoted to crushing it. It's the platonic ideal of historical irony, to which other historical ironies can only aspire, and suggests some very dark possibilities about human nature.

Sculpture is in the eye of the beholder

2009-07-07T17:05:00.001+10:00

A piece of urban sculpture or just a heap of pallets left in the street?

Whatever. It's lovely nevertheless.

Seen outside a factory off Sydney Road, Brunswick.

Babytalking

2009-07-02T08:35:00.005+10:00

gibber /jibbr/ • v. speak rapidly and unintelligibly, typically through fear or shock. n. such speech or sound.
gibberish /jibbrish/ • n. unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing; nonsense.

My son Sweeney is walking around the house talking to himself and anything or anyone who will listen. He speaks a most incredibly fluent gibberish. I'm astonished at the sheer variety of sounds coming out of his mouth.

I've tried to imitate him but it's the aural equivalent of an adult trying to draw like a child: close, but somehow missing that special something that makes the original so fascinating.

This morning we speculated that he might have been speaking Russian all this time and we've never realised it.

Transformers: the cinema of spectacle

2009-06-30T17:08:00.001+10:00

A real zeitgeist piece in the New York Times:

Assembling the “Transformers” creative team took more convincing. Like [Director Michael] Bay the screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (“Star Trek”) were reluctant to be involved. “There’s no win in a screenwriter for this,” Mr. Orci said. “It’s going to be a giant toy commercial no matter what we do.”

You're not kidding, Roberto.

I admit I saw the first 'Transformers' movie on DVD with my son and I enjoyed it. I loathe Michael Bay films (like 'Pearl Harbor'), but here at least was a perfect meeting of sensibility and subject. Unlike, you know, history and stuff...

I hesitate to be too cynical about this kind of filmmaking, if only because I know that it's close in spirit to the motives of the Lumiere brothers and innumerable other showmen who came after them, who hawked the Cinematograph, the newest wonder of the age, around theatres, pubs and circus tents all over the world. Cinema as pure spectacle. Roll up, roll up! See the bearded lady, the snake man, Siamese twins - and pictures that move!

While I haven't seen the sequel, all reports so far indicate a non-stop collage of explosions and kinetic energy with non-existent plot or characterisation. In other words, a TV commercial.

Appropriately, the projects have largely been driven by toy manufacturer Hasbro.

Hasbro meanwhile is continuing to expand its presence in Hollywood. Last year it announced a deal with Universal in which at least four more of its best-known brands, including board games like Monopoly, Battleship and Candyland, would be turned into movies by industry heavyweights like Ridley Scott and Gore Verbinski. Under this same deal Mr. Bay’s company, Platinum Dunes, is developing a film based on Ouija, Hasbro’s ghost communication game, and Brian Grazer is producing a film about Stretch Armstrong, the company’s goop-filled, elastic-limbed superhero.

I can't wait. Yet more movies costing more than the GDP of several nations exploring the dramatic possibilities of board games. I look forward to the movie version of 'Tiddlywinks' directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Someone should put the idea to the English Tiddlywinks Association. They could be on to a winner.

Es-Presso

2009-06-26T20:46:00.005+10:00

Psychologists tell us that we unconsciously favour the physically attractive. Beautiful people earn more, are more likely to be employed in an interview, get better service in shops, are smiled at more than the rest of us, and generally preferred in innumerable ways every day of their blessed lives.

I have a similar prejudice about inanimate objects. I think beautiful things are going to be better, more efficient, easier to use than ugly things, and I want this to be true and will maintain it against all evidence to the contrary. (I seem to remember reading something along the lines that useful things are necessarily beautiful, but that's a different matter).

So it is that I want this to be the best coffee maker in the world.

I've never tasted a cup of coffee from this machine, but I want it to be perfect. The design is so starkly brilliant, so simple, in contrast to the overpriced contraptions that look more like Victorian steam organs than something that might make a decent cup of coffee, that I want it to be good.

It is called the Presso, and it was designed by Patrick Hunt, of design consultancy Therefore.

There are several nifty videos of it being demonstrated on youtube.

Can you tell I've been enjoying my coffee lately?

Coffee is a fresh food

2009-06-18T08:01:00.001+10:00

Freeman pointed out that coffee is a fresh food product. "We've forgotten about that in the past 50 years with the invention of instant coffee," he said. "You go to the supermarket and buy something with a three-year use-by date. But coffee really is a fresh food. So if you can get it recently roasted you're well on your way to getting great coffee. There's no comparison.

Andy Freeman, online coffee retailer and operator of the Coffeesnobs website (buy the best grinder you can afford, he suggested).

From Gordon Farrer of The Age.

The hand-made thing

2009-06-16T17:41:00.007+10:00

Almost all the time, the objects we use in daily life - the door handles we turn, the glasses we drink from, the pens we write with - were made by machines. At most, someone somewhere has simply screwed a few pieces together never touched by human hands.

Further down the scale of economic fortune, down to the bottom, where life is a daily struggle of subsistence as it was for our ancestors, the fewer machine-made objects you will find in their original state.

Down there among the people whose lives resemble the rag-pickers and mudlarks of Dickensian times more than they do yours or mine, the machine-made objects have already been used and discarded by others.

Lately I spent some time in our quirky local shop 'Just Planet' in Sunbury, created by my friends Lee and Norman. They sell all sorts of objects with an implicitly internationalist agenda: things like Fair Trade coffee and chocolate, toys for children, organic this-and-that, all in a happily cluttered space. But apart from the excellent coffee, I like to go there to see the large range of hand-made things.

Recently, my wife bought me a little tin guitar, only a few centimetres high, to go on my keyring. The strings are made of wire, the face of the guitar is from an aluminium drink can, while the clips holding it together and the sides and back of the guitar are made from an old sardine tin. I'm amazed how hardy it is. It will certainly last for years.

It is also ingeniously designed.

I'm sure no pencil ever touched paper, but it is design nevertheless. Done in the mind and the hand.

I've since bought a tin car, made from an insect repellant can, with working tin wheels, a steering wheel, seats, and even a transparent windscreen.

Appropriately it looks like a Volkswagon. I say appropriately because the VW spent the longest time in continuous production of any car. It will run on just about anything including banana skins (I saw it in a documentary), and it was for decades the car most likely to be owned by the working poor around the world.

Here's to hand-made things.

'The Front Page'

2009-06-02T17:18:00.005+10:00

An evocative opening montage to Billy Wilder’s film of ‘The Front Page’, the great play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Under the opening credits, a newspaper of 1929 is composed, set, printed and distributed. Men arrange lead type on scales, engravers engrave, compositors composit, enormous spools of paper are unloaded from trucks and set on huge industrial machinery that lurches into life.

As so many of the newspapers of the world breath their last and expire, I’m filled with nostalgia.

The production design is also spectacular, an evocation of a lost world, down to the candlestick telephones, desk spikes, industrial typewriters, dusty ceiling fans and heavy oak filing cabinets.

I will gladly spend a couple of hours, anyplace, anytime, in Wilderland.

Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer, a noted psychiatrist from Vienna (of course), is examining the putative cop-killer and communist Earl Williams, watched by Sherriff Hartman:

Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: Tell me, Mr. Williams, were you unhappy as a child?
Earl Williams: Not really. I had a perfectly normal childhood.
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: I see. You wanted to kill your father and sleep with your mother…
Earl Williams: [to Sheriff Hartman] If he's gonna talk dirty...
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: When you were in grammar school, did you practice self-abuse?
Earl Williams: No, sir. I don't believe in it. I would never abuse myself or anybody else. I love people. I love all people.
'Honest Pete' Hartman Sheriff of Clark County: I suppose that cop committed suicide!
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: Let us get back to masturbation. Did your father ever catch you in the act?
Earl Williams: Oh, my father was - was never home. He was a conductor on the Chicago-Northwestern.
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: Very significant. Your father wore a uniform, just like that policeman. And when he pulled out that gun, an obvious phallic symbol, you thought he was your father, and he was going to use it to hurt your mother.
Earl Williams: [to Sheriff Hartman] He's crazy!

Ben Hecht, for whom the word ‘legendary’ seems barely adequate, worked as a Chicago newspaperman in the early century. His reminiscences were published in ‘Gaily, Gaily: Memoirs of a cub reporter in the world’s wildest city’, which is a pretty good description of the contents. I believe it’s out of print, but I found my battered paperback copy at a church fete.

Together with Charles MacArthur, he wrote a play set in this world called ‘The Front Page’, which was wildly successful on Broadway in 1928. It was made into a screwball comedy in 1931 with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and again in 1940, when it was transformed into ‘His Girl Friday’ with Cary Grant and the original male character’s part taken by Rosalind Russell.

Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond went back to Hecht and MacArthur’s play and made the film of ‘The Front Page’ and set it back in 1929, when the newspaper was arguably at the height of its influence.

When dialogue between Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon actually name-drops Ben Hecht, we are in an intertextual forest:

Walter Burns: Kid, I woulda thrown you a little farewell party...
Hildy Johnson: Oh, no, no, no! I know your farewell parties! When Ben Hecht was leaving for Hollywood, you slipped a micky in his gin fizz. It took four of us to get him on the California Limited.

Awkward family classics

2009-05-15T17:26:00.005+10:00

Sometimes, words just aren't enough.

There's plenty of room on the couch.

From the joyous awkwardfamilyphotos.com.

Daily Telegraph story on Awkward Family Photos.

Madness & Modernity

2009-05-06T17:26:00.001+10:00

'Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900' is an exhibition curated by Leslie Topp and Gemma Blackshaw at the Wellcome Collection in London.

It is not your usual art gallery, but has several exhibition spaces concentrating on matters medical and mental.

'Portrait of Heinrich Mann' by Max Oppenheimer, 1910.

Max Oppenheimer seriously rivalled Kokoschka as a portrait-painter. In 1911, rows erupted between the two artists over who could lay claim to the invention of the ‘psychological portrait’. Oppenheimer’s depiction of the German novelist Heinrich Mann in a state of nervous enervation, with flickering eyelids, rigid limbs and splayed fingers, was declared a ‘Kokoschka-copy’. Heinrich was Thomas Mann's brother, who continually engaged with themes of mental illness, incarceration and freedom in his fiction.

There is an interesting video discussion with the curators on the website.

Artists At Work

2009-02-26T08:37:00.001+11:00

Move along. Artists at work. Nothing to see here...

Parliament House, Canberra.

Freehand wall drawing

2009-02-16T08:52:00.003+11:00

I was diverted by this freehand drawing on a wall of a lane off Gertrude Street recently.

I was struck by how rarely you see a freehand drawing on a wall, as opposed to the kind of rarified, cultish typography that usually constitutes 'graffiti art', at least in Melbourne.

It isn't rare elsewhere, though. Thanks to the Wooster Collective website, I see that everyone is not a wannabe rapper, least of all in Europe, where stunning public art of an original and even provincial kind is being made.

This is by David de la Mano.

This is by the Canadian artist OTHER.

Inferno

2009-02-10T08:18:00.000+11:00

Last Saturday was the hottest temperature I have ever experienced. At our house, it reached 47 degrees, which I see is over 116 degrees in the old fahrenheit scale.

In the afternoon, after abandoning the house when it hit 30 degrees inside, we walked a hundred metres from the car to the entrance of a shopping centre looking for shelter from the heat, and I covered my little boy as if radiation was falling from the sky, which it was. Hot wind like a blast-furnace swirled around empty carparks. The sky was yellow and we could smell smoke. I had an intimation of armageddon.

Looking at the images of Marysville and Kinglake, armageddon is about right.

I have been preoccupied by thoughts about the effect of these public disasters and my reaction to them. I've been working in the federal Parliament this week, and the sense of despair has been overwhelming as the sheer size of the destruction and the number of lives lost rolls out over the media across several days.

I'm not one to emote very much when the public join in with these festivals of mourning over some dead celebrity, or even when lives are lost in natural disasters. Mostly, I've thought my reaction was reasonable and civilised, as these events are part of a larger picture of birth and death, creation and destruction, and a long way from me. And it's true, they are, but sometimes I have cause to doubt the self-satisfied veneer of my response.

Yesterday, on the plane, I felt an uncontrollable welling in me, a heaviness in the heart that I had to struggle to control. On the video screen, a shot from a helicopter of a large area of burned out grassland, then following a car's tyre tracks clearly discernable against the black earth. Pulling out to a wider view, a white car, pathetically abandoned at the very edge of a large dam still full of water. It was not known, said the voiceover, whether the person in the car had survived.

The last few days have been spent with the constant din of the television and radio news, cycling and recycling the same stories and bits of information that really aren't information at all. It's hard not be cynical as the commercial stations mine this disaster like a seam of gold, as they interview anyone with a story to tell or just an anecdote that will become worn with age and repetition, an emblem of an experience.

I haven't read anything as thoughtful as David Tiley's contribution, so I will link to it here.

Barista: 'We lived again but life was different.'

The curious case of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

2009-01-14T17:45:00.000+11:00

Photography, direction, art direction, special effects: 'crafted' to within an inch of its life. CGI will do a lot, but it is no replacement for creative makeup and a solid performance. Which is not to say that the makeup is not astonishing in places. The aged Cate Blanchett is completely convincing, but the attempt to make a forty year old actress appear twenty by Photoshopping out the wrinkles in real time makes her face look like a mask.

The film is deeply unsatisfying in the end. Every emotional point is flagged, so it doesn't give the audience's imagination anywhere else to go. And the character of Benjamin gets emptier and more irritating longer the film goes on, which is very long indeed. I knew the film was too long because errant thoughts kept popping into my head. Like, does anyone else notice how the old Benjamin looks exactly like an aged Robert Redford?

Brad Pitt, an actor I like, simply doesn't have enough to do. His requirements amount to standing around looking gormless. If someone had said "Life is like a box of chocolates", I wouldn't have been in the least surprised. I suppose it's no accident, as the film has the same scriptwriter as 'Forrest Gump'.

I'm most disappointed by the fact that a film which put all sorts of thoughts into my mind about mortality, death, time, memory, how much I miss friends who are gone, simply didn't deserve the emotional attention it wrought from me. I resented the film for that.

And now, predictably, there are Oscar nominations in the offing, including Best Picture. It just goes to show (switching to Grumpy Old Man mode) how low critics' expectations can be, and even more depressing, how apparently low is the standard of film culture at present.

W's tragic combination

2009-01-05T08:38:00.000+11:00

Luke Davies anticipates a new Oliver Stone film and in asking whether he would give us some insight into George W's character, manages to answer himself in a way I found strangely compelling:

"Would [Stone] give us some insight into a man known, in personality at least, only through his comportment at press conferences? I had always thought that anyone with a competently functioning human radar would spot in Bush, in any given press conference, that unmistakeable mixture of feckless arrogance and happy-go-lucky thickness that would be priceless, were it no so tragic."

From "Big Thoughts, Empire Burlesque: Luke Davies on Oliver Stone’s 'W'" in The Monthly, December 2008.

A modern tulip mania

2008-12-22T21:44:00.007+11:00

Like the tulip mania of the Seventeenth Century, the contemporary art market, as it has come to be in recent decades, has lost connection with whatever set of aesthetic or cultural values that might create a lasting sense of value.

Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford writing in Prospect, think the end is near for another galloping, unregulated form of financial speculation that has jumped the fence and headed for the horizon. Put the nag down, is what I say.

"Over the winter of 1636, the tulip mania reached its peak. One kind of bulb sold for 900 guilders (three times the price of a small town house), up from 95 a year before. The peak prices of Dutch tulips were achieved when the bulbs were snug in the ground, and were based on futures contracts—a form of leverage that allowed investors to place an enormous price on a bulb without actually laying down the cash. On 3rd February 1637, the tulip market crashed. There was no particular reason for the panic—except that spring was nearing and, on its arrival, the bulbs would be dug up, cash settlement sought for futures and the game would be up.

"We have surely reached the same point in the world of contemporary art. One of the emotions that has driven its boom is the narcissistic belief of the rich in the greatness of the age in which they are living. They thought they were buying masterpieces. But like the Dutch merchants and their tulips, the obsession of the new rich with contemporary art is likely to be remembered as the epitome of the vanity and folly of the age. The bulbs are still in the ground but the spades are poised."

Never take a bad picture again!

2008-11-24T08:26:00.001+11:00

Something about the more things change? George Eastman pitched the first small portable camera to the world in 1888 with the slogan "you press the button, we do the rest". It was given the onomatopoeic name 'Kodak'.

Samsung are trying the same message, taken to the most extreme, unbelievable lengths with their latest lines of digital cameras. We are informed that the NV100HD contains a feature called 'Beauty Shot':

Make every photo perfect. Improve the way you look - without surgery. The quick and easy way for a better-looking you. The Beauty Shot feature is like having your own make-up artist-right in your camera. It automatically identifies imperfections such as blemishes and dark spots on the face, and retouches them so that faces appear brighter and smooth. And with different level settings, you can control the amount of retouching that takes place - it's that simple!

History according to Life

2008-11-20T08:55:00.001+11:00

"Soldier holding tattered flag of the Eighth PA Infantry, during Civil War, 1864."

An enormous archive of Life magazine photographs has gone online at a certain famous search engine. They are available to view by decade, but I couldn't go past the 1860s; surely the most remarkable decade in the history of the United States.

We are told that the collection contains images dating back to the 1750s. I suppose they would be drawings and etchings, since the invention of photography was only announced to the world in 1839.

Errol Morris for Obama

2008-10-29T08:44:00.000+11:00

This is a very recent ad by the film maker Errol Morris for Barack Obama. You might know Morris as the genius behind films like 'Vernon, Florida', 'The Thin Blue Line', 'The Fog of War', 'Standard Operating Procedure' and so many others.

This ad again uses Morris' unique method of shooting through plate glass, which in concert with a large mirror, allows his subjects to be looking directly at him, while also looking directly at the camera.

Economic irrationalism at Radio National

2008-10-16T17:44:00.000+11:00

Nine’s ‘Sunday’ program axed, Fairfax cutting staff, one university after another announcing staff cuts and cuts of subjects, the latest: La Trobe University.

It reminds me of the counterintuitive line pedalled by several of the major banks years ago when they started cutting suburban branch numbers, informing us that it was to “improve customer service.”

I am further depressed by the news that the same dead hand is hovering over important programs on Radio National, including the Media Report. Without doubt, the best current affairs commentary to be found in this country is on Radio National’s World Today, AM and particularly, PM programs.

As Andrew Dodd, the Media Report’s founding presenter, wrote in Crikey today:

The Media Report has popped up in Hansard, the indexes of books, the curricula of university courses and the ipods of listeners. It has kept on keeping on for fifteen years with informed intelligent debate about the state of the nation’s media.

Not bad for a half hour show that’s staffed by one and a half people and costs much less to produce over a year than just one episode of almost any TV program you’d care to mention.

He concludes:

We are looking for media that starts where current affairs reporters finish and which challenges us with new ways of thinking about issues or which introduces us to ideas that we’d never thought to consider. These wonderful Radio National programs did this regularly and their loss is a huge blow to the diversity of our media.

It's rare that I agree with The Australian's editorial writer about anything, but I concur with every sentence of today's piece, except one:

The paradox of this media-abundant age is that the thirst for quality has never been greater, as the growing circulation of newspapers such as The Australian shows.

Yyyeeeeesssss.......

Head of skate

2008-10-16T17:22:00.000+11:00

Say it ain't so!

Cliche of the day

2008-10-13T17:34:00.001+11:00

A cliche that lives in our media at the moment, like an infestation of vermin, is "going forward" when the speaker simply means "in the future".

It nests in ordinary speech, especially when an otherwise sensible person has a microphone in the vicinity.

Signalman

2008-10-13T08:05:00.001+11:00

Driving back from Adelaide last week, we stopped to feed a hungry baby at the truck-stop town of Tailem Bend, on the Princes Highway. This is the first time I've ever been there when it wasn't 40 degrees*, which was nice.

Highlights of Tailem Bend include a magnificent bakery. I particularly enjoy eating whatever I've bought there while sitting in the park and admiring Tailem Bend railway station. This time it was open and I saw that it included a little 'museum', which was a room dedicated to a collection of objects straight out of the dowdy world, when railway stations were objects of civic pride. I can't begin to describe the architectural style of this building. It seems to occupy some Edwardian category all its own.

I tried to pick a favourite object, and my heart beat with desire when I clapped eyes on this lovely signalman's cap. Most of all I was touched by the beauty and pathos of its crest. I'm not sure what a signalman actually did. I suppose he was an important man, but this was a time when even council street sweepers wore crisp uniforms and peaked caps.

What a beautiful thing that crest is. What an object of enduring style. It signifies pride in one's job and position, no matter how lowly. It has the flourish of fine copperplate handwriting; official but not stuffy in the least. The opposite of stuffy, it's almost jaunty.

*For international readers, forty degrees is very hot.