"Think of a creative way to get around your problem..."--Richard Rodriguez

 

via Good


Thanks for this post Good...I am not a filmmaker but I really love the freedom of limitations and this little video is a great example. It was made by Richard Rodriguez to explain how he made "El Mariachi" for $7000.00. I really like that he has so much fun making the movie and that he encourages film makers to come up with creative solutions to a filmmaking/prop/etc challenge and not to forget to have fun. I guess there is also efficiency to doing everything yourself. It is in three parts. Enjoy.

 

Biographical Blip: Rockaway Taco, A Selby Film

Rockaway Taco, A Selby Film from the selby on Vimeo.


Really a cool, strangely relaxing video on a place that I did not really know existed. Definitely plan to visit on my next summer trip to NYC.

Wabi-Sabi from emmas design blog

Image via Wikipedia

I love the idea of Wabi Sabi. Emma Fexeus of emmasblog put together a great piece on wabi-sabi and a list of resources. Thanks emma!
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from emma's design blog 2008-12-30 @ 23:20:50
Wabi Sabi, a little more background

“Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered but don’t sterilize” says Leonard Koren, author of Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. That would be exactly what I think defines good interior design. And that is the reason why I am so drawn to the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi, and would like to share some of what I've found out lately.

More...

Are women writers undervalued because of what they write or how we read?

via bookforum...

Scribblers of America, Unite! Are women writers undervalued because of what they write or how we read?

By Katha Pollitt

Posted Monday, March 9, 2009, at 6:48 AM ET

A Jury of Her Peers.Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Bronte to Lessing (1977) changed the way we read fiction by women by showing female writers in historical, political, and literary relation to one another, and doing it in prose that was energetic, enjoyable, and blessedly free of academic jargon. At the time, this was a controversial project. The previous year, Ellen Moers' brilliant (and, sadly, out of print) Literary Women was attacked by Anne Tyler for arguing that great women writers like Dickinson, Collette, and Woolf shared something like a literary tradition with lesser writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fanny Fern. You can see why Tyler bridled: After all, it was the misogynists who usually grouped women writers together, the better to dismiss them all—Nathaniel Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women," churning out their hypersensitive derivative poems, their narrow, pedestrian domestic fiction. Women writers, the good ones, anyway, tended not to want to be put on the bookshelf next to the other women writers. More...

Art Parties

This is such a cool idea. My first thought was "Rirkrit Tiravanija - Thai artist who cooks meals as installation art". Although I think that artists have always been interested in food. They have historically bartered food for artwork and often are keen gardeners and cooks. Cooking is creative and artists are usually on a budget. Frank Fedele has written about artists and food in The Artists' Palate: Cooking with the World's Great Artists. Here is an excerpt. Evidentally the YBA's are good cooks too...Ok, but back to the art parties. Locally there is Jamie's Area in Toronto's Kensington Market (more...) but I really like this one (via flavorwire) in the Bronx called the Bronx Blue Bedroom Project started by Blanka Amezkua especially because Blanka asks artists to offer a workshop in the local community or cook a dinner for guests...Another take is by Salon Adelphi also in NYC

Thinking about...

From Reading Toronto...

2005 05 29
Urban Hieroglyphics
The marks that decorate the Toronto landscape are at once intriguing and annoying. On the street, barely aware, we fail to notice their spontaneous energy. Are they telling us something or are they merely vestiges of delinquent nonchalance?

When I look closely at these markings, some of them vigorously beautiful in form, I see them as ancient expressions. They speak of the relationship of the self with the city, of the need to stake territory and claim ownership of a landscape that can be anonymous and remote. They tell a very personal story - of the mark maker and their impulse to claim that surface at that particular moment, in that particular way.

These marks contain the character of urban experience that is at once internal and external. An instance is captured and recorded for collective consumption to fascinate or enrage us. This expressive chronology ties us to the immediacy and history of the city and in doing so, broadens our perceptions of ourselves.

Disappearing Artists...

via apartment therapy...





























Emma Hack's work reminds me a lot of my friend Anne Polashenski's work...

The first two images are Emma's and the last two are Anne's. What is so interesting about Emma's work is that she is using body paint to camouflage her models where as Anne used the computer.

The idea is kind of beautiful in a scary way...the idea of disappearing--social wallflowers--and yet camouflage has a protective function in nature and war.

Reminds me of the scene in Le Pèrè Noël est une Ordure by Jean-Marie Poiré where the neurotic main character (I cannot remember his name...) is wearing a suit which matches the sofa that he is sitting on--although the pattern is no where near as dramatic as Anne and Emma's...Will have to rent that movie again since I haven't seen it since the 1980's...though still interesting that it is a male character who "disappears"...

Michael Bierut: 26 Years, 85 Notebooks

via Kim Werker:

I never thought that I would follow so many designers but something has happened to my thinking and I think that this post from Michael Bierut goes for anyone who takes notes/makes drawings...

Kim Werker is my hero of the day after listening to her on Sister Diane's recent podcast and looking at her booklist on Amazon.com