Imagine a dog, a really smart dog
but still a dog
who buries a steaming
hot bowl of porridge
in summer thinking
he’ll dig it up to warm him
in winter
not quite smart enough to understand
warm and cold don’t stay that way…
~ Harry Calhoun @ Yippee
In Latvia they have a special museum for those who would like to dive into the now not present world of the Soviet exotics. Every visitor has to wear Soviet Russian prisoners cloths and when enters is being humiliated by the staff dressed as Soviet army soldiers. They yell on and almost beat all the visitors, force them to do things, wear gas masks, run distances and many many more things to do. Hard times he experiences there until this guided tour is ended.
@ English Russia
Doesn’t sound like much fun as a vacation outing, but I’m reminded of a comment Jeremy Deller makes in the documentary about his reenacted Battle of Orgreave, that historical wounds can’t be healed by an art project like his but it can create space in which people start talking about what happened to them in the past.
One guy in a suit on the sidewalk told the other guy in a suit on the sidewalk, “He should be banished from the bathroom for, like, two weeks.” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.
Arguably, the movies are as entertaining as ever. With a little help from holiday comedies like “Yes Man” with Jim Carrey and “Bedtime Stories” with Adam Sandler, the domestic motion picture box office appears poised to match last year’s gross revenues of $9.7 billion, a record.
But Mr. Kirkpatrick and company are not alone in their belief that Hollywood’s ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.
~ “Saving the Story” @ NY Times
The problem here isn’t Guitar Hero, it’s confusing Jim Carrey movies with “meaningful stories.”
Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape[...] opens the next chapter in the landscape tradition, addressing contemporary ideas of exploration, population of the wilderness, land usage, environmental politics and the relativity of aesthetic beauty. Badlands comes at this critical time, an era when the world is more ecologically aware yet more desperately in need of solutions than ever before. The artists in this exhibition share this collective anxiety some turn to the past to see how their predecessors negotiated the terrain of the landscape while some propose entirely new ideas. While deeply aware of the legacy of the landscape, each of these artist reinvents the genre to produce works that look beyond vast beauty to address current environmental issues.
Hermine had far to go to her school in the city. One evening when she came home, they all sat at table in the dusk; they were saving electricity. Hermine went to throw her schoolbag where it belonged, after a long day at school. On her third step towards the dark corner came a pitiful squeak from underfoot. Working in the field that day, they had caught a little hare. It must have been a pretty one, for now they set upon Hermine without mercy. She was deeply sorry for the accident, and said so. One sister had just come from the nearest town, where she had bought a little bottle with a nipple, since they themselves had no more little ones about the place. “All for nothing on account of blind-as-a-bat! Money thrown away because of the clod!” Those were some of the names they called her. For once, however, Father came to Hermine’s aid. “Nobody has ever yet succeeded in raising a wild hare from a baby.” Hermine knew, of course, that he took her part mainly because now the hare would drink up no more milk. All the same she was grateful to him.
~ from Hermine by Maria Beig
In the least accessible place on the surface of this infested earth
A statue of Lenin protrudes from snow,
Abandoned camp below him,
Face toward Moscow,
Endless sky.
How far does he see though that peerless clear air?
Has news yet reached him of capitalism’s chaotic collapse?
I dream of his face, frozen in a grim smile.
~ Ed Webb
(via Infocult)
The Whale in the Blue Washing Machine
There are depths even in a household
where a whale can live. . . .
His warm bulk swims from room
to room, floating by on the stairway,
searching the drafts, the cold
currents of water and liberation
He comes to the surface hungry,
sniffs at the table,
and sinks, his wake rocking the chairs.
His pulsebeat sounds at night
when the washer spins and the dryer
clanks on stray buttons. . . .
Alone in the kitchen darkness,
looking through steamy windows
at the streets draining away in fog;
watching and listening
for the wail of an unchained buoy,
the steep fall of his wave.
~ John Haines