Engineer's Daughter

know the mark

It seems to be the week for vampires, first in Let the Right One In and now Blade 2.  It almost goes without saying that I still prefer the Swedish blood-suckers, but Blade 2 at least has solid direction by Guillermo del Toro, awesomely ridiculous special effects and set design, a dollop of Prague scenery, fight scenes choreographed by Donnie Yen and, last but definitely not least, Ron Perlman.  I was about half an hour in before I realized I'd never seen the first one, but in case I cared there was plenty of heavy-handed exposition.  Like I was paying attention to the plot anyway.

china: journey to the east

The year I lived in England I discovered very quickly how easy it was to pop on a train from where I was situated in Coventry and two hours later find myself in the midst of London.  My first stop always was (and still is) the British Museum, where it's possible to immerse yourself in your pick of any number of world cultures.  The Asian rooms have always been particular favorites of mine, chock full of images of serene bodhisattvas and fierce warriors, and now the better to reach those who live outside the capital the Museum has organized a touring show called China: Journey to the East that will make stops at venues around England for the next few years (including the Herbert near my old stomping grounds in Coventry).  The exhibition collects objects from 3000 years of Chinese history and seeks to give further insight into this country with its rich cultural history and current complex (and sometimes troubling) character.  You can see some highlights from the show here, and don't miss the delicately-painted shadow puppets estimated to be from somewhere between 1850 and 1950.  I want the tiger.

new york street artist poster boy: on the wall

As culture jams go, my favorites have always been the ones that make bold alterations to existing advertisements and billboards, taking the piss out of consumerism and Madison Avenue alike.  New York street artist Poster Boy has been brilliantly and anonymously tweaking subway ads for about a year now with little more than a razor and a wicked sense of humor.  And, unlike Banksy, he gives in-person interviews.  Ben Walters talked to him for the Guardian:

Witty and playful as it is, there's no missing the political edge of Poster Boy's work, rooted in indignation at what he calls "this mass advertising always attacking people. They don't have a choice: they're riding the subway, they already paid their two dollars. Why the fuck should they be force-fed this stuff?" As well as consumerism, his pieces have targeted racism, gentrification, gender inequality, US immigration and foreign policy (for Transporter read "Deported"; for Iron Man, read "Iran = Nam") and, recently, Israeli action in Gaza.

To see some examples of Poster Boy's adbusting, click through to the gallery here or check out his Flickr stream.  I love the ones where he pixelates posters using the grids formed by the subway tile as a sort of graph paper, and I also have to appreciate a street artist who can punnily reference Rauschenberg.  I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for his work when I'm in New York later this spring, that's for sure.

låt den rätte komma in

The screaming hordes can have Twilight; I say the best vampire movies of recent times have been made in other countries.  I'm thinking particularly of Night Watch (Russia) and now Let the Right One In (Sweden).  Aimee and I saw it at the Parkway tonight, and not only is the cinematography in this film spectacular, all snow and dark rooms and halos of light around street lamps, but the relationship between 12-year-olds Oskar and Eli is just downright adorable...even when she has to sneak off to satisfy the audible growl in her belly.  It does help if you have an appreciation for coal-black Scandinavian humor too.  But quick, go see it in Swedish before they remake it for America and completely ruin it.

teenage dirtbag

Last fall Edmund White published a biography of Arthur Rimbaud entitled Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, and the poet's story seems a natural fit for the author of such moving stories of homosexual awakening as A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty.  White distilled a snippet of Rimbaud's famous relationship with the older poet Paul Verlaine into a piece for the Guardian earlier this month, and anyone with overly romantic notions of the young Rimbaud need only read the following pull quote:

Rimbaud was an impossible guest. He took to nude sunbathing just outside the house. He turned his room into a squalid den. He mutilated an heirloom crucifix. He was proud of the lice infesting his long mane and even pretended he was encouraging the vermin to jump on to passers-by. Verlaine was delighted with Rimbaud's antisocial antics, which recalled to him his own younger excesses before his marriage. Verlaine introduced Rimbaud to his friends in the cafés where they congregated regularly. After the first encounter, one of Verlaine's friends, Léon Valade, wrote the next day to an absent member, "You missed a great deal by not being there. A most daring poet not yet 18 was introduced by Paul Verlaine, his inventor and in fact his John the Baptist. Big hands, big feet, a wholly babyish face like a child of 13, deep blue eyes! Such is this boy, whose character is more antisocial than timid and whose imagination combines great powers with unheard-of corruption and who has fascinated and terrified all our friends."

Good thing the boy could write.  White is a such a great storyteller that even though I have already read Graham Robb's excellent (and comprehensive) biography of Rimbaud I'll probably give this new one a shot too.  And I need to hit up Moe's for some volumes of gently-used poetry while I'm at it.

screen actors guild: how the statuettes are made

Anyone who has ever wanted to take a class at the Crucible needs to see this excellent gallery of photos that captures how the statuettes for the upcoming Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony are created.  The talented folks at the Fine Arts Foundry use the same "lost wax" process the ancient Romans perfected to make the bronze figures, and then coat them in a chemical called Patina that, you guessed it, creates a lovely faux patina.  I dig the awesome space suits the artisans have to wear while pouring the metal to protect themselves from hot bronze, and also the shot of one of the statuettes getting a bum buff.

syncretic

Rodney Graham: production still from A Reverie Interrupted by the Police, 2003 (Canada).  In Graham's video piece the artist plays a handcuffed man who is shown trying to create music on a piano while his guard looks on, in a sort of cross between John Cage and Buster Keaton.  The black and white stripes of the convict's cliched prison garb quickly communicate his status to the viewer, the colors echoed again in the piano keys, but his relationship to his guard and to his audience remains a little more uncertain.  I see his performance as a punishment made to fit some bizarre crime, and the only thing that would make this picture better for me on this most happiest of days is if the prisoner's cap had a "43" on it instead.  For more images of Graham's diverse body of work, which also includes photography, sculpture and painting, please click here.

jan kaplický (1937-2009)

We lost way too many awesome people last week: McGoohan, Montalban, Mortimer and, architect of my dreams, Jan Kaplický.  Born in Czechoslovakia, Kaplický fled the country after the Prague Spring and settled in London where he worked with Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster.  He founded the firm Future Systems in 1982 and then together with his partner and eventual wife Amanda Levete proceeded to design buildings and objects that are the absolute definition of futurism like the recent Selfridges building in Birmingham, the metal-clad exterior of which is pictured here.  Steve Rose says the world will be a more boring place without Kaplický's singular vision in it:

Where Rogers, Foster and Piano tempered high-tech to the demands of the commercial market, Kaplický arguably remained "out there", dreaming up wonderfully fanciful projects that were closer to science fiction than dreary 1970s Britain: movable houses that perched on slender steel legs like insects, or rose out of the ground like giant sandworms, not to mention concept cars and homeware that wouldn't have looked out of place on the set of Kubrick's 2001. Where Rogers and Foster were hard-edged and pragmatic, Kaplický was fluid and organic, curvaceous and sensual. His designs might have been more wildly unfeasible than the others, but they were equally influential, and usually more interesting.

Robert Booth reveals that the stress from the still-unresolved struggle over whether Kaplický's plan for the new national library in Prague will be realized might have contributed to his death, and it certainly will be a damn shame if they don't build it now.  For pictures of that design (and other amazing structures by Kaplický) please click here, and also don't miss the lovely obituary by Deyan Sudjic.

a whole nation at his feet

Right now PFA is running a Josef von Sternberg series called "Eros and Abstraction" that is full of tasty goodness, so I hurried back to their theater for the second night in a row (after yesterday's Orson Welles rarities) to see the screening of Sternberg's 1928 silent The Last Command.  Masterfully accompanied tonight by Judith Rosenberg live on piano, the film features a killer cast including Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent and the Thin Man himself William Powell.  Jannings breaks your heart from the moment he first appears onscreen as a frail former Russian general who has been reduced to seeking extra work in Hollywood ten years after the Revolution.  The director of his current film is insistent about having him play a particular role, and as we flash back to Czarist Russian we soon figure out why.  Sternberg draws bold parallels between the Hollywood studio system and the reign of Nicholas II as he draws the viewer further into the story, and when the camera slowly pulled out during the final shot I had a genuine lump in my throat.  I strongly suspect I will be going back for more films in the series.  Everything that has Marlene Dietrich in it, for instance.

beat the winter blues with jmw turner's watercolours

Thanks to the crazy sunny weather we've been experiencing in the Bay Area for the last week my regularly-scheduled winter blues are temporarily on hold.  The Sunday night blues, however, are creeping up on me already this afternoon, so I'm attempting to combat them with some gorgeous Turner watercolours from the National Galleries of Scotland's permanent collection, like his rendering of Loch Coriusk pictured here.  Every January for the last century the museum has displayed the 38 paintings bequeathed to them by one Henry Vaughan who decreed they only be shown in this month where the sun barely makes it above the horizon in Scotland.  While his intention might have been to save the work from light damage, a happy side effect of his stipulation is that the paintings provide a much-needed injection of patented Turner color and light here in the darkest month of the year.  It was in the UK that I first encountered Turner, at the Tate Gallery, and it was there that I learned how his paintings reveal themselves to you slowly as you stand in front of them.  Two years ago the Tate managed to raise almost 5 million pounds in a mere five weeks to keep Turner's The Blue Rigi in Britain, and the description of the piece by Charlotte Riggins is exquisite:

The Blue Rigi depicts the moment when the night fades into a soft, yellowish dawn. Venus, the morning star, is still visible. Though it appears at first glance to be a scene of utter stillness, a gunshot has sent up a flock of waterbirds, and a pair of gundogs piles out of the boat on the right in pursuit of the game. The bold, freeform composition, and the limpid translucence of its soft grey-blues, make it a remarkably beautiful, almost transcendent work.

To see more of the paintings from the Scotland exhibit and cure whatever brand of blues you happen to be encountering at this time, please click here.