Blog – Page 14 – A life in general.

Lawrence Lessig on Barack Obama

Watch it or Read it and spread the word if you are so inclined.

Click the image below to watch the Video or click here for the Transcript.

So I want you to shut your eyes and imagine what it will seem like to a young man in Iraq or in Iran, who wakes up on January 21st, 2009, and sees the picture of this man as the president of the United States. A man who opposed the war at the beginning, a man who worked his way up from almost nothing, a man who came from a mother and a father of mixed cultures and mixed societies, who came from a broken home to overcome all of that to become the leader in his class, at the Harvard Law Review, and an extraordinary success as a politician. How can they see us when they see us as having chosen this man as our president?

There can be no clearer way that we could say, that we could say that the United States could say, that we have changed, than by electing this man. There is no way we could more clearly move on toward peace than this. He represents the very best of who we are, the best of character, of integrity and ideals. And someone who opposed the war from the start.

February 5, 2008/by Chopi

Caligula in Color

Identity

“God’s in Color” is an ongoing exhibit at Harvard’s Sackler museum, displaying Greek and Roman statues in full color–as they would have appeared in their age. It’s the technicolor version of the ancient world, vibrant colors and wonderfully cartoony–like the recently retouched Sistine Chapel. Here’s Caligula, before and after, to read further: Archeology’s online magazine.

From the museum website: The color reconstructions—based on close examination and scientific analysis of the scarce traces of paint remaining on the surfaces of the originals—include a number of well-known masterpieces, such as the Peplos Kore from the Athenian Acrop-olis, pedimental sculpture from the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina, and the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus. The reconstructions are juxtaposed in the galleries with ancient statues and reliefs from the Art Museums’ own collection in their current, colorless state of preservation. The exhibition opens up a world of richly attired deities, proud warriors, and barbarians in dazzling costume and dispels a popular misconception of Western art: the white marble statue of classical antiquity.

Here’s the Peplos Kore, the original statue–ghostly, poised yet alluring and the painted version–the vivid color, garish yet captivating, reminiscent of a Victorian carnival display?

This has to be one of the more interesting ones: It’s called “Head of Youth” from the Museum Brochure. Perhaps it should be called “Marilyn Manson goes Greek.”

January 12, 2008/by Chopi

All I’ve got is a photograph…..

Identity

It’s interesting to see what creativity sparks from a single photograph; Tom Stoppard wrote Rock “n” Roll based on a photo he saw of an aged Syd barrett (co-founder of Pink Floyd) at age 60, riding his bike in London, carrying groceries in the baskets. Struck by the dichotomy of Barrett’s photos from the 60s, which show him at the height of his popularity and beauty, the strong contrast of the icon to the ordinary was overwhelming and he had to write about it. “I could see and hear the ghost of a play set in a suburban semi (which in England means half a house in a street of houses halved as symmetrically as Rorschach blots and occupied by people who are definitely not rock gods), and here, in my play, the reclusive middle-aged “crazy diamond” would … er, do what, exactly?” The article in Vanity Fair is great.

Before Richard Powers became a novelist, he was working in Boston as a computer programmer. One day while strolling in the museum he was so struck by the August Sander photograph, “Three Farmers” he quit his job, took two years and wrote Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance”…. his first novel about the men in the photograph and a man who studies the photograph. “One Saturday, I went to see a show of a German photographer whom I thought I had never heard of before. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I remember very vividly walking into the exhibition room and bearing to my left and seeing this photograph on the wall that instantly seemed recognizable to me. Three young men in Sunday suits, looking out over their shoulders as if they had been waiting there for seventy years for me to return their gaze. I leaned forward to read the caption, and the picture was named, “Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914.” The words went right up my spine. I knew instantly not only that they were on their way to a different dance than they thought they were, but that I was on the way to a dance that I hadn’t anticipated until then. All of my previous year’s random reading just consolidated and converged on this one moment, this image, which seemed to me to be the birth photograph of the twentieth century. This was a Saturday morning, as I said, and I went down on Monday and gave two weeks’ notice on my job. I can’t say that the book that emerged was exactly the book that appeared to me in that moment of recognition, but it was close. It certainly had its genotype intact. This quote is from an interview with Jefferey Williams in 1998.

Harun Forocki, the great German documentary filmmaker was struck by the a photograph of a woman in WWII, if you block out the figures around her, she could be an everyday woman simply on her way running errands, yet if you see the photograph in it’s entirety, she is in a concentration camp, next to a line of men with yellow stars being interrogated by an SS officer. His film Images of the World and the Inscription of War addresses how the brain absorbs visual information and how it processes images, recognizing and/or developing misconceptions.

Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, has an interesting blog at the NY Times, about photography. Rather obsessive and sometimes a bit too analytical it is nevertheless very interesting at times. “I have beliefs about the photographs I see. Often – when they appear in books or newspapers – there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text. And even where there are no explicit captions on the page, there are captions in my mind. What I think I’m looking at. What I think the photograph is about.”

January 11, 2008/by Chopi