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Painter of light artist Thomas Kinkade accused of DUI
06.17.2010
01:38 pm
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I’m not sure who made the smart-ass tweak to the truly puke-worthy “painter of light” artist and accused drunk driver Thomas Kinkade‘s work (above) but I would surely like to kiss them.
 
CHP: Painter Thomas Kinkade accused of DUI in Carmel (The Californian)
 
Thx Nicole Panter !

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.17.2010
01:38 pm
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Optical illusion: Scroll up and down
06.17.2010
11:53 am
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Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.17.2010
11:53 am
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James Joyce himself reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake
06.17.2010
01:10 am
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Image via Rodcorp
 
An actual recording of James Joyce himself reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Ulysses. Click here for audio. Via the awesome Ubuweb.

Recording James Joyce by Sylvia Beach

In 1924, 1 went to the office of His Master’s Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from Ulysses. I was sent to Piero Coppola, who was in charge of musical records, but His Master’s Voice would agree to record the Joyce reading only if it were done at my expense. The record would not have their label on it, nor would it be listed in their catalogue.

Some recordings of writers had been done in England and in France as far back as 1913. Guillaume Apollinaire had made some recordings which are preserved in the archives of the Musée de la Parole. But in 1924, as Coppola said, there was no demand for anything but music. I accepted the terms of His Master’s Voice: thirty copies of the recording to be paid for on delivery. And that was the long and the, short of it.

Joyce himself was anxious to have this record made, but the day I took him in a taxi to the factory in Billancourt, quite a distance from town, he was suffering with his eyes and very nervous. Luckily, he and Coppola were soon quite at home with each other, bursting into Italian to discuss music. But the recording was an ordeal for Joyce, and the first attempt was a failure. We went back and began again, and I think the Ulysses record is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved.

Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.

I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out-“he lifted his voice above it boldly”-it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.

The Ulysses recording was “very bad,” according to my friend C. K. Ogden. The Meaning of Meaning by Mr. Ogden and I. A. Richards was much in demand at my bookshop. I had Mr. Ogden’s little Basic English books, too, and sometimes saw the inventor of this strait jacket for the English language. He was doing some recording of Bernard Shaw and others at the studio of the Orthological Society in Cambridge and was interested in experimenting with writers, mainly, I suspect, for language reasons. (Shaw was on Ogden’s side, couldn’t see what Joyce was after when there were already more words in the English language than one knew what to do with.) Mr. Ogden boasted that he had the two biggest recording machines in the world at his Cambridge studio and told me to send Joyce over to him for a real recording. And Joyce went over to Cambridge for the recording of “Anna Livia Plurabelle.”

So I brought these two together, the man who was liberating and expanding the English language and the one who was condensing it to a vocabulary of five hundred words. Their experiments went in opposite directions, but that didn’t prevent them from finding each other’s ideas interesting. Joyce would have starved on five or six hundred words, but he was quite amused by the Basic English version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” that Ogden published in the review Psyche. I thought Ogden’s “translation” deprived the work of all its beauty; but Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards were the only persons I knew about whose interest in the English language equaled that of Joyce, and when the Black Sun Press published, the little volume Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, I suggested that C.K. Ogden be asked to do the preface.

How beautiful the “Anna Livia” recording is, and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue! This is a treasure we owe to C. K. Ogden and Basic English. Joyce, with his famous memory, must have known “Anna Livia” by heart. Nevertheless, he faltered at one place and, as in the Ulysses recording, they had to begin again.

Ogden gave me both the first and second versions. Joyce gave me the immense sheets on which Ogden had had “Anna Livia” printed in huge type so that the author-his sight was growing dimmer-could read it without effort. I wondered where Mr. Ogden had got hold of such big type, until my friend Maurice Saillet, examining it, told me that the corresponding pages in the book had been photographed and much enlarged. The “Anna Livia” recording was on both sides of the disc; the passage from Ulysses was contained on one. And it was the only recording from Ulysses that Joyce would consent to.

How I regret that, owing to my ignorance of everything pertaining to recording, I didn’t do something about preserving the “master.” This was the rule with such records, I was told, but for some reason the precious “master” of the recording from Ulysses was destroyed. Recording was done in a rather primitive manner in those days, at least at the Paris branch of His Master’s Voice, and Ogden was right, the Ulysses record was not a success technically. All the same, it is the only recording of Joyce himself reading from Ulysses, and it is my favorite of the two.

The Ulysses record was not at all a commercial venture. I handed over most of the thirty copies to Joyce for distribution among his family and friends, and sold none until, years later, when I was hard up, I did set and get a stiff price for one or two I had left.

Discouraged by the experts at the office of the successors to His Master’s Voice in Paris, and those of the B.B.C. in London, I gave up the attempt to have the record “re-pressed “-which I believe is the term. I gave my permission to the B.B.C. to make a recording of my record, the last I possessed, for the purpose of broadcasting it on W. R. Rodger’s Joyce program, in which Andrienne Monnier and I took part.

Anyone who wishes to hear the Ulysses record can do so at the Musée de la Parole in Paris, where, thanks to the suggestion of my California friend Philias Lalanne, Joyce’s reading is preserved among those of some of the great French writers.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.17.2010
01:10 am
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X-ray pinup calendar
06.16.2010
02:27 am
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Super saucy x-ray pinup calendar by Japanese monitor company EIZO.
 
See more striking images over at copyranter:
What German physicians will be spanking their stethoscopes to this year.
 
(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.16.2010
02:27 am
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History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow
06.15.2010
02:54 pm
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Seriously incredible typewriter sounds created by the “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects,” Michael Winslow.
 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.15.2010
02:54 pm
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A Colour Box : The early direct films of Len Lye
06.15.2010
01:13 pm
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Some stunning early films from the 1930s (!) by New Zealand “direct” film (generally camera-less; images painted and scratched directly onto the film itself) innovator, sculptor and “least boring person who ever lived” Len Lye. These films are pure enjoyment of color and composition and an obvious influence on Stan Brakhage‘s later amazing though far less fun work. Swinging the Lambeth Walk is particularly beautiful; in essence a music video for Django Reinhardt‘s tune of the same name.

 

 

 
Flip Sides of Len Lye: Direct Film (Senses of Cinema)
 
Len Lye - Composer of Motion

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.15.2010
01:13 pm
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Refait: Football as Everyday Life
06.15.2010
02:11 am
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In a stroke of pure Euro genius, France’s Pied La Biche art collective have produced Refait, a complete re-enactment of the 15-minute penalty phase of the 1982 World Cup semifinals between France and Germany in the setting of Villeurbane, just northeast of Lyon.

By mapping the grinding tension of an extended penalty across the wide spaces and casual attitude of a small industrial town, Pied provide an irreverent yet plaintive—and somewhat hypnotizing—perspective on the frailty of human achievement. Horst Hrubesch’s winning shot never seemed so enduring.

 

Refait from Pied La Biche on Vimeo.

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.15.2010
02:11 am
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Tarkovsky’s Polaroids
06.14.2010
03:58 pm
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Initially published in 2006, Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids revealed a selection of enigmatic shots taken in Italy and at Tarkovsky’s home, thick with atmosphere, that could easily pass for stills from his films. Follow the link below to the entire collection, recently scanned for a Russian site.
 
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Las Polaroid de Tarkovsky (Poemas del río Wang)
 
АНДРЕЙ ТАРКОВСКИЙ СВЕТОПИСЬ Полароиды (complete Tarkovsky Polaroids)
 
thx Kurt Ralske !

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.14.2010
03:58 pm
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The Lunar Museum of Modern Art
06.14.2010
03:26 pm
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(MOMA on a moon chip: clockwise, from top left: Warhol, Rauschenberg, Novros, Chamberlain, Oldenburg and Myers)
 
The PBS series History Detectives kicks off next week, and its season premiere explores the possibility that in November of ‘69, the Apollo 12 lunar module carried with it a ceramic chip covered with original sketches by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, and Forrest Myers.

According to the series clip below, sculptor Myers (best know, perhaps, for SOHO’s Wall Piece) was the man behind the “moon museum” chip, and the clandestine effort to stash it somewhere within the module:

Going to the moon was the biggest thing in our generation.  It’s hard to explain that to the kids today…My idea was to get six great artists together and make a tiny little museum that would be on the moon.

Anywhere from 20 to 40 of the chips were fabricated, and, given the chip’s dimensions, the artists involved were forced to make a maximum statement in a minimum space.  Rauschenberg sketched a straight line, while Warhol cheekily offered up his “initials.”  But is is the chip really there?

Since no one can confirm it back on Earth, it’s going to take a future moon walker-slash-art aficionado to say for sure.

 
(via HyperAllergic)

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.14.2010
03:26 pm
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Charlotte Moorman’s answering machine message tape
06.11.2010
02:51 pm
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A voyeuristic and mesmerizing tribute to key Fluxus player and muse to Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, the experimental cellist Charlotte Moorman. Listen to personal phone messages to Moorman from the likes of John and Yoko, John Cage, Paik and others and drink in that good old-timey analog tape phone machine atmosphere.

 
A Trove of Archival Performances by Charlotte Moorman (UBUWEB)

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.11.2010
02:51 pm
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