Leg: Judith, Angelina

Giorgione, Judith (1504)

Angelina Jolie at the Oscars ceremony (2012)

Spoted today by Jonathan Jones (The Guardian)

Amos Oz on Fanaticism

"The essence of fanaticism lies in the desire to force other people to change—the common inclination to improve your neighbor, mend your spouse, engineer your child, or straighten up your brother, rather than let them be. The fanatic is a most unselfish creature. The fanatic is a great altruist.

In fact, often the fanatic is more interested in you than in himself. He wants to save your soul, he wants to redeem you, he wants to liberate you from sin, from error, from smoking, from your faith or from your faithlessness, he wants to improve your eating habits, or to cure you of your drinking or voting habits. The fanatic cares a great deal for you; he is always either falling on your neck because he truly loves you or else he is at your throat in case you prove to be unredeemable. And, in any case, topographically speaking, falling on your neck and being at your throat are almost the same gesture.

One way or another, the fanatic is more interested in you than in himself, for the simple reason that the fanatic has very little self or no self at all."

Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic

(Via Luis Xavier López Farjeat, "Arrogancias dispares")

Pritzker 2012: Wang Who?

Wang Shu is getting this year the Pritzker Prize.

Wang Who?

This museum is cool. But, come on, the Pritzker? When prizes become politicised, it is a mess... A pitty!

On kitsch

For the last days I have been involved in a sort of discussion regarding "kitsch" after I suggested in a lecture that the kitsch could be somehow used in order to educate people in this violent country or, at least, to pacify them, due to its Konfliktlosigkeit, which T. Adorno adscribed to it. Somebody has denied that Mexican is a kitsch culture (it is terrrribly kitsch!), or that kitsch could be of any use. That's my hypothesis, still have to work on it.

But it was nice to read what Leon Wieseltier published today:

"In this sense one’s books are one’s biography. This subjective urgency bears no relation to the quality of the book: lives have been changed by kitsch, too."

 Baby Jesus dressed the Mexican way

Rein! Niki de Saint Phalle, František Drtikol

In German, "rein" means both "pure" as well as "enter".

 František Drtikol, Mother Earth (1931)

Niki de Saint Phalle, Hon (1968)

Prison and liberalism

"The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be slow-motion sins. We don’t stone the adulterer or hang the sodomite or massacre the restive inner-city residents. We allow the atmosphere to be filled with greenhouse gases; we allow the hypertrophic growth of inequality; we let the prison population grow to the size of a megalopolis. And the key is that there’s no particular moment when they happened, no single event to expose and decry. It’s the slow-motion violence of mass incarceration that enables it to elude our moral immune system. Prisons stop time. We need to find ways, from the outside, to accelerate our awareness."

Excerpt of "Notes on The Caging of America", an interesting piece on American jails, by Adam Gopnik.
Foto: Lizzie Sadin

Andy Warhol 25

Andy Warhol passed away 25 years ago.

Watch a very funny interview (he even is about to start laughing).

New Yorker 87

New Yorker magazine just turns 87 today. Awesome!

I just start getting it weekly in my mailbox and read the "Story of a Suicide" Sunday morning.

The current cover is a funny reinterpretation of the very first one.

Atrio de los gentiles

Estoy corrigiendo mi paper para mañana...

Con ocasión de la próxima visita de Benedicto XVI a México, Letras Libres y el Instituto de Investigaciones de la UNAM invitan al "Atrio de los Gentiles".

El Atrio de los Gentiles reunirá a un grupo de jóvenes intelectuales –filósofos y editores– para que conversen desde su perspectiva atea, agnóstica o religiosa acerca de las condiciones que existen actualmente en México para desarrollar una nueva era en el diálogo entre creyentes y no creyentes.

La discusión tendrá lugar el próximo miércoles 15 de febrero de 18 a 20 horas en la Casa de las Humanidades de la UNAM: Presidente Carranza 162, Villa Coyoacán, C.P. 04000, Coyoacán.

Eyes

Helmut Newton, A cure for a black eye (1974)

Abbas, A girl holds skulls over her eyes on Nov. 1, 1984 in Mexico City

Alex Veledzimovich

Esther Bubley, West Springfield (1944)

Richard Avedon, Penelope Tree (1966)

Richard Avedon, Maurizio Cattelan, artist, New York, July 8, 2004

George Melly, Brian Griffin (1990)

Lukas Dvorak, Eva Svobodovc (2007)

Daniel Gil Rodrigo, Sam (for Razormonkey 3) (2009)

Graciela Iturbide, Ojos para volar (1991)

Alexander Rodchenko, Portrait of mother (1924)

Le clown lyrique posted a similar collection of images some weeks ago, just after I had started working on this post. That blog is a must!

Adenda (October 2012):

Young Carl Lagerfeld

 Adenda (November 2012):

Rodney Smith

 Adenda (January 2013):

Jean Arp

Brassaï

Kiss: Klimt, Castañeda, Barter

Everybody knows Klimt's Kiss. It is truly impressive when you see it live in Vienna. I had to think about it when I saw Alfredo Castañeda's Nuestro amor. I sadly learned that he passed away... one year ago, and I wasn't informed about it till now. And coincidentally, Andy Barter images of kissing couples were published today by The Guardian.

Blood: Alejandro Magallanes, Belgian magazine Focus

 

No more blood

Design for an indie peace campaign by cool Alejandro Magallanes

The dark side of love

Belgian edition of Focus for February

Accumulations: Alan Grant, Gundrun

Every now and then, I have been thinking this week about Arman. Beyond the typical "chorus" of pop songs, he made us all conscious about the artistic power of patterns and repetitions.

Putting forward this idea in the world of staged photography is a great idea, beyond the classical patterns of nature, a construction and so on.

Here two cool examples.

Alan Grant, Jayne Mansfield (1957)

 

 Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Dresden (1986)

David Bowie's first

Here is David Bowie's first letter to his first fan in USA. He was 20 years old. A masterpiece!

Click to enlarge, if needed...

Beauty of...

You need to be an artist, preferably a phhotographer, to be able to discover beauty in a piece of steel, trash from the ocean or sun reflecting on a wall. Three shots which have cheered up my day.

Julia Zimmerman, Steel

(published on FAZ yesterday)

Mandy Barker, Soup (debris from the Pacific Ocean)

Marcus (Finding Berlin), Reflection

Esther Bubley, Eddie Adams

The iconic picture of Eddie Adams changed the perception of Vietnam War in the late 1960s. But it was preceded 25 years by this image by Esther Bubley. 

Also check a very well documented collection of images and art pieces done after Saigon Execution. It's worth!

Esther Bubley, Playtime. Small Boys Watching the Woodrow Wilson High School Cadets (1943)

Eddie Adams, Saigon Execution (1968)

Morris Lessmore

This animation video was, earlier this week, nominated for the Oscar. It is a wonderful work about the life of a writer/reader, Morris Lessmore, who loves books and discovers a fairy house full of alive, flying books.

Enjoy it!

Update (Feb. 10, 2012): Letras Libres just published my post on Morris Lessmore today.

Life's small pleasures

This morning I woke up and finished Haruki Murakami's What I talk about when I talk about running. Reading early in the morning in bed and finishing a book is one of those small pleasures of life.

I was enjoying my reading, when I found this short story on the last page:

"In the 1980s I used to jog every morning in Tokyo and often passed a very attractive young woman. We passed each other jogging for several years and got to recognize each other by sight and smile a greeting each time we passed. I never spoke to her (I'm too shy), and of course don't even know her name. But seeing her face every morning as I ran was one of life's small pleasures. Without pleasures like that, it's pretty hard to get up and go jogging every morning".

Hilary Rhoda works out in TriBeCa

Hoper

Tom Firestone made a clip out of Hoper's iconic "Nighthawks". Enjoy!

How to be(come) a cool guy

I think this is awesome cool. Girls find it sexy.

Flat: Table Mountain, Eisberg in Weddell Sea

Shipwrecks

People are talking these days about the shipwreck off to Tuscany. I was reading the memoirs of a German entrepreneur, August Santleben, who established the first international diligence between USA (Texas) and Mexico. His book begins with the story of an accident off to Galveston, in which many passengers lost their lives:

The city of Galveston, Texas, was sighted about the middle of July, 1845, after making a safe voyage of seven weeks' duration, but many  of those who greeted the land of their adoption with joyful expectations were destined to a watery grave when entering the harbor. I do not know what brought about the catastrophe, but my parents, who gave me this information, said that the ship was stranded when passing through the channel leading into Galveston Bay, about half a mile from shore, where it was broken to pieces, and the wreck could be seen as late as 1885. Only thirty-five of the passengers were saved, and they were rescued by a life-boat that was sent from the shore. Among them was an infant  boy, about two years of age, who was thrown to my parents after they entered the boat, by some one on the vessel, under the impression that the child belonged to our family.

There is this amazing picture by Eugenio Espino Barros. I haven't been able to gather more information, but I guess it was taken in Veracruz.

Eugenio Espino Barros

 Costa Concordia (2012)

Montaigne on Women

Foto: Annie Lee

Two excerpts of Michel de Montaigne's Essays on women.

On Friendship

"To compare the affection toward women unto it, although it proceed from our owne free choice, a man cannot, nor may it be placed in this ranke: Her fire, I confesse it to be more active, more fervent, and more sharpe. But it is a rash and wavering fire, waving and divers: the fire of an ague subject to fits and stints, and that hath but slender hold-fast of us."

Apology for Raymond de Sebonde

"The Mexicans esteem a low forehead a great beauty, and though they shave all other parts, they nourish hair on the forehead and increase it by art, and have great breasts in so great reputation that they affect to give their children suck over their shoulders."

And he sharply adds: "We should paint deformity so."

Female Christs

Édouard Charton, Le crucifix de Combapata (1863)

Félicien Rops, La tentation de Saint Antoine (1878)

Félicien Rops, La tentation de Saint Antoine - Studie (1878)

Albert von Keller, Im Mondschein (1894)

Jeanne Mammen, Woman at cross (1908)

 

 Frantisek Drtikol, Untitled (Crucified woman) (1913-1914)

  Frantisek Drtikol, Untitled (Crucified woman) (1913-1914)

Frantisek Drtikol, Étude de la Crucifixion (1914)

Bjorn Iooss, Christ (200?)

Sabine Picalle, Ecce Homo (2008)

Eduardo Salles, Jesús murió por tus vacaciones (2011)

PS. Le Clown Lyrique posted also his collection of female Christs