Dorothy Iannone's Innocent and Aware
Dorothy Iannone, "Innocent and Aware", 8 March 2013 - 5 May 2013, Camden Arts Centre in London.
"Iannone's portrayals of male and female sexuality celebrate the joy of her most intimate relationships while subverting traditional gender stereotypes of dominance and control. Through graphic paintings, sculptures and video boxes her works depict partly-clothed and naked figures on bright psychedelic backgrounds of flora, mandalas and biomorphic patterns. Recalling classical Indian erotic art, Egyptian frescoes and Byzantine mosaics, Iannone's intricate work communicates a personal narrative, passionate love affairs and lifetime pursuit of 'ecstatic unity' through transcendence and spirituality."
(Camden Arts Centre, 2013)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Last Picture Show: ode to a Texan small town
"It's hard to overestimate the influence of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) ... on all those other elegiac movies about lost youth and crumbling dreams in small American towns that followed it in such huge numbers. We know the storylines, which never vary much. Boy meets girl. They fall in love and think their relationship will last forever but war/adulthood/pregnancy intervenes. Old school friends spend a last summer of high jinks together. They vow eternal loyalty to one another but then the autumn rolls in and their lives drag them off in very different directions. The visual clichés are familiar, too: by the final reel, the once teeming street is empty, with wind blowing the dust, or the old café where the friends used to meet is boarded up. ...
When Bogdanovich revisited Thalia with a belated sequel, Texasville, in 1990, the results were mixed at best. What had made the original so distinctive was the youth of the characters played by Shepherd, Bottoms and Bridges - their curiosity, innocence and their sense of yearning. Witnessing their travails in middle age simply didn't have the same impact. The real follow-up to The Last Picture Show wasn't Texasville but the films that were made - and are still being made today - in its mould."
(The Independent, 18 March 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Dara Ó Briain's Science Club: The Story of Inheritance
"This first episode in a new six-part science series presented by Dara Ó Briain takes a look at the weird and wonderful world of reproduction and inheritance.
Dara chats to leading biologist Professor Steve Jones and finds out how the bicycle did more to improve the human immune system than any other invention, comedian Ed Byrne discovers just how closely related he is to a Neanderthal and materials scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik creates a DNA cocktail with the help of some strong Polish vodka.
Dara is also joined by neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who explores the cutting-edge science of epigenetics and reveals how exercise can change your DNA. Science journalist Alok Jha asks if the human genome project was oversold and the studio audience are put to the test in the elusive search for attraction.
Combining lively and in-depth studio discussion with exploratory films and on-the-spot reports, Dara Ó Briain's Science Club takes a single subject each week and examines it from lots of different and unexpected angles, from sex to extinction, Einstein to space exploration and brain chemistry to music. It brings some of the world's foremost thinkers together to share their ideas on everything, from how to avoid asteroid impact to whether or not we are still evolving."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 1 or 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 6 November at 9pm on BBC Two, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 5 Nov 2012 by BBC.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Blue Velvet: the dark underside of America's collective fantasies
"Blue Velvet begins with the lily-white small town of America's collective fantasies and shows us its dark underside: drugs, violence, sex, and particularly sexual perversion. Our hero, Jeffrey, hiding in the dark, peers through the slats of Dorothy Vallens' closet at Dorothy getting undressed and Frank's strange sadomasochistic sex with her. Jeffrey stands for all of us American filmgoers peering (voyeuristically!) at Evil in traditional American films. Lynch clues us as to how we should read his film when he shows us a cluster of ants under the Beaumonts' pretty lawn. This is Tennyson's nature red in tooth and claw-the underside of cutesy Lumberton with its free enterprise propensity for cutting down trees."
(Norman N. Holland)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Monkey Magazine: a new publishing vernacular?
"In the future, as depicted in the 2002 film Minority Report, our periodicals will create interactive, hybrid reading/viewing experiences-with built-in sound and motion-based commercials rather than static advertisements, incorporating news footage with pages that dissolve and re-form to reflect breaking stories. Despite minute gestures in that direction, such as the Amazon Kindle and G24, The Guardian’s PDF newspaper that’s updated throughout the day, that vision of media-if there’s really a market for it-is a long way off. ...
Nevertheless, something ... is now available weekly from Dennis Publishing, the company that gave the world The Week, Maxim and several other British 'lad magazines' as well as launched their American spin-offs. Monkey is proportioned like a glossy, has an interface that mimics the turning of pages and even has a magazine-like layout: margins, a basic two-column grid, images combined with text and print-like pacing. The difference is that Monkey’s text sparkles (literally, if not figuratively), dances and slides onto the page. Many of the photos will turn into movies or slideshows (some rather naughty) when clicked, and on some spreads users can shuffle page elements, substituting one image for another. The format also changes to serve its content. A small mini-magazine with short reviews is digitally 'stitched' into the 'middle' of each issue. Additionally, most advertisements come alive, thanks either to Flash, streaming video or some combination, showing previews of movies or commercials for products framed by the equivalent of a full-page ad.
To be sure, Monkey does nothing that isn’t done on other websites, and it has formal predecessors for its page interface-the arty This Is a Magazine, for one, and the webified versions of print glossies from Zinio for another. But unlike the wider web-which has evolved its own vocabulary and conventions for storytelling-and other web magazine predecessors-for which the turn-the-page interface seems a formal conceit-Monkey truly blends old and new media design conventions in a way that is both appalling and appealing."
(Jandos Rothstein, 29 January 2008)
Fig.1 Monkey Magazine, 2011. Dennis Publishing, Issue 183, pp.8,9.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
