Russia's President Vladimir Putin chairs a session of the State Council Presidium in Voronezh, August 5, 2014. Putin has ordered his government to prepare retaliatory measures against the latest round of Western sanctions, Russian news agencies reported on Tuesday.Obama's photo caption from ABC News says:
President Barack Obama gestures in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Aug. 28, 2014. Evan Vucci/AP PhotoI think it is more than a "summer suit." Obama is saying that he is still on vacation, no matter the world's situation.
You have the whole world watching, you have a week, two weeks of anticipation of what the United States is going to do and then for him to walk out – I'm not trying to be trivial here – but in a light suit, light tan suit, saying that first he wants to talk about what most Americans care about, and he said that's the vision of the second-quarter numbers on the economy.
This is a week after Jim Foley was beheaded, and he's trying to act like, you know, real Americans care about the economy, not about ISIS and not about terrorism. And then he goes on to say that he has no strategy!
Now you know, listen, you and I know that it is easy to mis-speak [inaudible]...you can say the wrong things. What this showed was, you know, you know there's always a few issues you're not overly familiar with, and you can find yourself saying the wrong thing or saying it in the wrong way. That's the way it struck me is that this is not, that foreign policy is not a major issue to him. It's something he has to talk about, he's not crazy about it, and he'd much rather talk about some social engineering or healthcare or whatever. And he doesn't even know how to..For a guy that's so articulate, he does not know how to express himself on this issue. He's not the --thoughest radar screen, he really isn't.
It was just a terrible performance by a commander-in-chief.
Forget that our allies are watching, forget that the American people are watching. ISIS is watching.
If you were the head of ISIS, if you were [ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi, or if you were any of the ISIS, anyone in the ISIS leadership, would you come away from yesterday afraid of the United States?" he asked. "Would you be afraid that the United States is going to use all its power to crush ISIS?
Or would you think, here's a person who's going to go out and do a few fundraisers over the Labor Day weekend? [More of the interview at Newsmax.com]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A Chinese J-11 fighter jet is seen flying near a U.S. Navy P-8 PoseidonChinese interceptions of U.S. military planes could intensify due to submarine base
about 215 km (135 miles) east of China's Hainan Island in this U.S. Department
of Defense handout photo taken August 19, 2014."We didn't give [the Americans] enough pressure (before)," Zhang* said... "A knife at the throat is the only deterrence. From now on, we must fly even closer to U.S. surveillance aircraft."----------------------------------------
* Zhang is Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong from the National Defense University in Beijing
Source, text and image: Reuters
Dear _____,Here is the response from my correspondent:
Sorry to get back to you late. I cannot "unsubscribe" you at the moment, but I'm looking up how to and hope to do so soon.
[...]
Yes, I had Bruce Elder. He was an odd fellow, and to be honest, not very artistic. I think that was partly his forceful presence in "experimental" film. He started out as a poet, but failed at that, then turned to film.
I was one of his protege's, but I left the group. I criticized him on several occasions, twice during speeches he was making at public lectures. He could never answer my basic question of "why was he trying to destroy the image." He would thoroughly disapprove of my "realist" approach to photography.
I also similarly criticized the big and formidable Stan [Brakhage] during one of his visits to Toronto, in Bruce's home, where I was a member of his "round table" group of students, faculty and artists (we met about once a week for drinks and discussions). My question to Stan [Brakhage] was similar in stance to the one I asked Bruce [Elder], of why he was destroying the image. Stan [Brakhage], for a few brief moments, didn't know what to say. I think he deflected the question and talked about something else.
Your photographs are wonderful. You have a beautiful family.
All the best,
Kidist
No rush. Thanks.I reply:
p.s. I must contact a friend who now lives in Montreal and tell him your thoughts on Bruce Elder. He'll smile. I had Bruce speak at an NPPA seminar once. I gave him a simple task, to talk about two television news reports, one American and one Canadian and both reporting on the same story. The news stories took two different views. The news was clearly biased in one or both countries. Bruce veered off into a very weird talk that literally emptied the auditorium. Hundreds fled his talk. I laugh now but I was the seminar chair and it was an awful moment.
Cheers!
Dear ____,-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have removed commenting functions from Reclaiming Beauty. It looks like people send spam email to those who comment, as one reader informed me.
Thanks for your patience.
Here is one really interesting piece of information proclaimed by The Great Bruce himself:"Years ago, I used to tell people, only half facetiously, that I was a film maker because I wasn't a creative artist."More at In Conversation with R. Bruce Elder on the "techniques" he developed to make his films (one of which, I should add, which he hasn't, is to stand clothless infront of the camera being "creative" with himself).
He got one other film student, a woman called Izabella Pruska, to take off her clothes and make her "films." Here she in all her non-glory posing for the Toronto Star.
Here is her [film] Garden of Earthly Delights, which is a clever erotica, a la Elder, where we see flashes of her "delights."
They have made porn, basically. The greatest of nudes in classical painting were never so explicit (or subversively explicit).
And here is Pruska's latest: This Town of Toronto, with the Elder imprint of layered images that are difficult to decipher, repetitive, and which I call "destruction of the image." And Brakhage's imprint of flowers as erotica. Also, using old (or found) footage is another lazy way out of making films and photographs, as I write here in my recent post Art Thieves.
The film was shown at a Ryerson University Symposium in 2013: Electric Visions: How DADA and Surrealism Anticipated the Later Avant-Garde.
Pruska also had funding from Canada Council to make this 3-minute piece. They never think to fund their own films. Pruska is married to a well-positioned pharmaceutical researcher, at INC Research, who I have no doubt has enough money to pay for his wife's "experiments" - (the Elder crowd calls itself "experimental film makers").
Pruska, and MacDonell (subject of Art Thieves) both teach at Ryerson now. The "legacy" lives on.
Macdonell never took off her clothes, but her Masters thesis, which went into the "festival" circuit, was based on the "found" images of a "burlesque dancer" as she calls it, which is another way of saying "a stripper."
Better label for these film makers might be "Subversive porn film makers."
Those that Elder couldn't get to declothe, he got them to shoot him in his exposed glory. One woman who filmed him in his many naked works, never worked in film after that. She is now a manager (or producer, or a freelancer) at some video production company.
Elder tried to get me to film him as well, but that was one of the last straws which convinced me to quit his program. I left without finishing my degree at Ryerson (with only one more year to go!).
But, I got my films exhibited around Toronto [and in Europe], as well as my photographs.
I do not miss those days. As Elder said, there was nothing creative about it. I actually call it 'evil." His aim is to get at your "subconscious," and more precisely, your sexual/Freudian subconscious.
[Stan] Brakhage [an American filmmaker] also worked at this "subliminal" level, and essentially destroyed or distorted the image to make his films. But he was [more] clever than Elder. He made "imageless" films by coloring on the film itself. He is really akin to the abstract expressionists, who "splashed" paint all over the canvass, a la Jackson Pollock.
Here is a link to his "method" and aim.
Elder has a new book out (he is a prolific writer, or re-writer I should say), on Dada and surrealism. Both these movements are dead and gone (probably how their founders would have wanted it), but Elder keeps on churning out the Dada and the Surreal.
Here is the link to Dada, Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect, which came out in 2013. Same old, same old. Elder gets grants from the Canada Council and other government agencies to make his films and write his books. He has convinced them such that he can do whatever he feels like, and they give him the money for it.
Here is a google books link if you want to read large excerpts from the book.
This Dada book was funded by:
- The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Canada Council for the Arts
- Ontario Arts Council
etc.
The links below are from my old website, Camera Lucida, so images are missing, but here are a couple of posts I did on Elder when his film The Young Prince came out.
New Books on Art: Beauty, Dissent and Wreckage (April 14, 2009)
The Destruction of Art by Artists: Comments on Bruce Elder's Film "The Young Prince" (April 25, 2009)
I hope I haven't bored you!
Best,
Kidist
"The images in this series are scans of found 35mm slides. I came across a box of them next to the trash a few months ago. They were unlabeled, undated, and unsourced. I’ve put together a selection of 15, which now form a slideshow you can click through on your computer monitor. Maybe you will recognize some of the images. Others you may not recognize specifically, but you will certainly be familiar with their sources – art monographs, fashion magazines, notebooks and textbooks, technical manuals." [Annie MacDonell, Interview in Either/And] on her work Split Screen
The slides were produced on a copy stand which, before the flatbed scanner, was the simplest means of reproducing images. Each one contains an interruption of the image by the spine of the book in which it originally appeared. The visibility of the spine is what attracts me to them. It marks only one of the many transformations these images have undergone since they were produced by the original photographer or artist. But in doing so, it places the histories and genealogies of these images in the foreground. The slides were shot for pedagogical purposes, to be projected large in front of a classroom and discussed as a group. Before that, they were published in books and magazines, to be purchased and leafed through by individuals. And before that they were, perhaps, images matted and framed behind glass on a wall. Now we may be browsing effortlessly through them, each on our slick backlit monitors. But the spine’s interruption of the image reminds us of where they came from in the first place, and how our ways of encountering them continue to shift along with the technology that delivers them to us.That is a lot of words for simply showing pictures from magazines which spread across two pages (split by the spine of the book).
This conceptual landscape by Annie MacDonell references the 1967 book, To Everything There is a Season, Roloff Beny in Canada. Beny, a world travelling artist/socialite obsessed with natural beauty sought to mythologize the Canadian landscape in a year that marked the country's centennial anniversary of confederation. MacDonell's interventions fracture and reconstruct Beny's mystical photographs, giving the soft, poetic imagery threatening edges that redress parallel social histories that existed (and still exist) in our society. Deceptively straightforward, these prints of reconfigured photographs layer our contemporary concerns on top of perspectives and sensibilities of past eras.
Who do you say that this is?
Notice that I did not ask whom this icon depicts. I asked who it *is.* And you answered correctly, right?
You can’t get an image that works properly as such unless the image and the thing to which it refers both participate to some extent in the same Form.
Consider a triangle, scribed on the page before you. Is it a triangle, at all? Is it the *least bit* triangular? If so, this can only be because it *truly* re-presents the Form of the Triangle. But as presenting that Form, it is a very instance of that Form. The Form of the Triangle is really, concretely present in the triangle on the page, albeit imperfectly.
Thus if an icon makes a part of the form of Christ present, then Christ is really present, at least in part. As with any sacrament, the signification operates by being itself participant in the thing signified.
Remembrance, then, is just such an imaginative re-presentation; in any memorial, the form of the substantial being we remember must be somehow present in our own, informing and shaping us, or else the phantasm we apprehend could not function for us as a memory. In that case, the phenomenon could not work to bring anything definite to mind; it could not generate a noumenon. We can remember only reals; and we can remember them only by making them again really present in our experience, or rather by admitting them thereto.
When we see an inscription of a triangle, we do not act as if it were a squiggle, signifying nothing. On the contrary, we order ourselves in relation to the inscription precisely in terms of its triangularity.
Reverence in the presence of an icon, then – a church, a cross, a Bible, a gathering of two or three in the Name, a saint – is at least good manners; is at least prudential.
But not worship, of course. There is in the notion that Christ is somehow present in an icon no tincture of idolatry. It should hardly be controversial to say that the Logos of the world, who expresses himself in every creature, and is therefore in all of them more or less immanent, is present also in an intentionally devised image of his perfect worldly instantiation. He is, of course. Nevertheless it is a foolish error to worship a creaturely image, rather than the One whose presence it indicates; for this is to confuse the term with its terminus. In like fashion, one does not take the measure of an actual triangle as straightforward demonstration of the eternal truths of trigonometry, but rather only as the manifestation thereof; nor does one try to journey from Phoenix to Flagstaff by walking across a map of Arizona.
Consider then that every man and woman you see is created in and by the Image of the Father; each is an icon. [End of article]
The word Pantocrator is of Greek origin meaning "ruler of all". Christ Pantocrator is an icon of Christ represented full or half-length and full-faced. He holds the book of the Gospels in his left hand and blesses with his right hand.Here is more on the script on the icon:
The icon portrays Christ as the Righteous Judge and the Lover of Mankind, both at the same time. The Gospel is the book by which we are judged, and the blessing proclaims God's loving kindness toward us, showing us that he is giving us his forgiveness. [Source: OrthoWiki]
[O]n each side of the halo are Greek letters: IC and XC. Christ's fingers are depicted in a pose that represents the letters IC, X and C, thereby making the Christogram ICXC (for "Jesus Christ"). The IC represents the Greek characters Iota (Ι) and Sigma (Σ, ς)—the first and last letters of Jesus (Ιησους). The letters XC represent Chi (Χ) and Sigma (ς)—the first and last letters of Christ (Χριστος). [Source: Wikipedia]
The Menologion of Basil II (also called Menologium of Basil II, Menology of Basil II) is an illuminated manuscript designed as a church calendar or Eastern Orthodox Church service book (Menologion) that was compiled c. 1000 AD, for the Byzantine Emperor Basil II (r. 976–1025). It includes 430 miniature paintings by eight artists. It was unusual for a menologion from that era to be so richly painted. It currently resides in the Vatican Library (Ms. Vat. gr. 1613). A full facsimile was produced in 1907. [Source: Wikipedia]
Menologium (from the Greek menológion, from mén "a month"; Latin menologium), also written menology, and menologe, is a service-book used in the Eastern Orthodox Church and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Rite of Constantinople.The argument on icons is a quintessentially Christian one. I won't go into the historical, cultural, and religious battles that ensued from the disagreements, but I agree with Kristor. We are mere humans. We need signs, sinners and potential unbelievers that we are. And I think God (and Christ) provide them for us, in a manner that we can understand and relate to. Through these mediums, we can finally turn to him.
From its derivation, menologium means "month-set"; in other words, a book arranged according to the months. Like a good many other liturgical terms (e.g. lectionary), the word has been used in several quite distinct senses. [Source: Wikipedia]
It's difficult to criticize a person's appearance. I feel uncomfortable doing it, so I keep it to a minimum. Lawrence Auster did it all the time, and sometimes I felt he went much too far, attributing an entire gamut of psychological traits to a person based on one photo.I have to disagree. There are certainly many uncontrollable elements when one's photo is taken, but we still have control over a lot. We decide what to wear, how to pose, whether to smile or to scowl, how we groom ourselves (make-up, hairstyle), and we can even control with whom we have the photo taken. The ultimate decision is ours, unless we live in some kind of totalitarian gulag. If we don't like the photo, we can ask to have it removed from a public posting, and if that is not possible, write a statement that it wasn't our decision to have that (unflattering) photo taken in the first place.
