Television has become a mirror

“Television has become a mirror in which the public likes to recognize itself,” Pivot said. “The public either likes to see itself, or it likes something very far away, exoticism. Culture is neither of those.” Even when programs feature “popular” culture, rap musicians from the Paris suburbs, for example, the emphasis is not so much on what they perform as on how they got there, Pivot says, how they “made” it, so that the viewer can relate and dream how he might “make” it and be a celebrity too.

http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/04/02/pivot.t.php

A Cultural Icon Slams the Poverty of French TV

By Katherine Knorr

Published: THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 1998

Three sexes

In ”Palimpsest,” Mr. Vidal endorses the passage in Plato’s ”Symposium” where Aristophanes tells his dinner companions that there were once three sexes, people shaped like globes: male, female and hermaphrodite; they were divided by the king of the gods for behaving offensively and have ever after sought reunion, to make themselves whole again.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2D61139F93AA25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

No further signals have been received from the lander, the cause of this loss of communication is not known.

A miniature microphone was also be on board to record sounds on Mars. Attached to the lander spacecraft were a pair of small probes, the Deep Space 2 Mars Microprobes, which were to be deployed to fall and penetrate beneath the martian surface when the spacecraft reached Mars.

http://www.etsimo.uniovi.es/solar/eng/msur98.htm

Mars Polar Lander

The commissar vanishes

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

Few have been taught to any purpose

“Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.” Sir Joshua Reynolds - English painter

Hockney on Art

Hockney on Art (Paperback)
by David Hockney (Author)

Perspective is tyranny  a renaissance invention ( but seen in photography)?

But perspective is the least truthful - cos humans don’t see images that way - human eye engages emotionally. It remembers what the back of the object looks like. Single viewpoint is not the best view. Eye circles and spends time with objects.

Only painting can recreate this real way of seeing - cubism etc

Serge Gainsbourg on his stretcher

Just had a heart attack 1973.

In his hallway on a stretcher - refused to be moved until the ambulancemen changed the orange blanket they had put over him. He said that the colours clashed, said Jane Birkin.

His life a struggle. The best form of revenge is to live well.

Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti - Embroidery like a TV screen - I VEDENTI - the sighted.

Peace! Peace!

“Peace! Peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep. He hath awakened from the dream of life”

P B Shelley

Beuys

Beuys and power of his transformation.

Sean crampton - sculptor

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990723/ai_n14250878

Obituary: Sean Crampton
Independent, The (London), Jul 23, 1999 by Nick Dewey

Since his death the family have discovered among his papers a hand-written reminiscence of the action in which he won the MC that he entitled simply “Battlefield”. Its chief interest lies in Crampton’s vivid recollection of an intense inner experience that occurred in the heat of battle when the principal events of his past life came to him in a flash and he was overwhelmed by an indescribable joy accompanied by the certain conviction of his own immortality. It was this experience that initiated his long spiritual journey, of which he had written more recently (in a beautiful essay on the subject of landscape) that “on pilgrimage you become part of a shared and sacred path and are integrated with the earth made holy by its saints”.

Concordances. Obituary: Professor F. W. Clayton

Obituary: Professor F. W. Clayton
Independent, The (London), Dec 24, 1999 by T. P. Wiseman

“It was about 1950 when I first noticed in both Latin and English that there were curious apparent echoes of quotations, conscious or unconscious, inside a single author or between authors, based on associated ideas or words.” Two particular areas came to fascinate him: Horace’s use of astrology, and Shakespeare’s use of the Latin poets.

He worked obsessively with concordances, trying to prove, in those pre-computer days, that the collocations of word and phrase that leaped out at him were not merely random.

The savage satire of `1984′ still speaks to us today

The savage satire of `1984′ still speaks to us today
Independent, The (London), Jun 8, 1999 by Bernard Crick

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990608/ai_n14231422

“One could put them differently, but I see seven main satiric thrusts: the division of the world by the super states; the mass media as an agent of “prolerisation”; power-hunger in general and totalitarianism in particular; the betrayal by the intellectuals; the abuse and degradation of languages for purposes of control; the rewriting of history for political purposes; and the theses of James Burnam (who believed that the social systems of the seemingly totally antagonistic USA and USSR would come to converge in an authoritarian techno-managerial capitalism - perhaps like China today?). “

Who paid the piper? The CIA and the cultural cold war

 ”Through myriad projects, from cash- heavy prizes to magazines such as Encounter and international conferences, the beneficiaries included WH Auden, AA Milne, Nancy Mitford, Mary MacCarthy, Stephen Spender, Jackson Pollock, Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell.”

Monday Book: Intelligentsia and the CIA
Independent, The (London), Jun 28, 1999 by Julie Wheelwright

Who paid the piper? The CIA and the cultural cold war. - Stonor Saunders

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990628/ai_n14226234

Insight: John Walsh on Nic Roeg

 I’d asked if he’d ever had a terrible shock in his childhood. “No,” he said, “unless you count that business with my father.” His father had fought in the First World War and his face was partially disfigured. To young Nic (born in 1928) it was just his dad, and his face took on a kind of skewed beauty. Then one afternoon, he invited a schoolfriend home for tea. Afterwards, in the garden, the friend asked, “How long’s your dad been like that?” Like what? said Nic. “You know,” said the friend, “hideously disfigured like that.” Nic looked at his father’s face again, and was shocked by what he saw. And of course that moment - in which a loved and familiar face is horribly transformed - recurs in Roeg’s films: when the killer turns round in Don’t Look Now, when David Bowie shows his featureless face to Candy Clark in The Man Who Fell to Earth, when Mick Jagger is re- styled as a vicious greaser in Performance, when David Gulpilil’s trusted, protecting face is transformed by warpaint for a pubertal dance in Walkabout, when Theresa Russell (Mrs Roeg) is made over as King Zog in Aria and Amanda Donohoe’s gorgeous physiognomy gets progressively wasted in Castaway. Maybe all this doesn’t get us all that far in understanding the great visionary’s work. But I pass it on to the thunderstruck Film Crit world for what it’s worth. If ever there was an illustration of Wordsworth’s line about the child being father of the man …

John Walsh on Monday: The soul of Britain on a summer night
Independent, The (London), Jun 28, 1999 by John Walsh

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990628/ai_n14226332/pg_2