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Entries categorized as ‘art’
That TIE Fighter’s Dusting Crops Where There Ain’t No Crops
August 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment
(Via.)
Categories: Cary Grant · art · movies
Columbia and Cuba
May 5, 2009 · 2 Comments
Kenyon Cox, COLUMBIA & CUBA - MAGAZINE COVER - NUDE STUDY (1898)
“Besides connoting the stronger/weaker sister relationship, the drawing plays on an older/younger sister or mother/daughter relationship. It suggests a scenario in which the older sister/mother (Columbia) has just finished disciplining the younger siter/daughter (Cuba) and is standing proudly while Cuba clings contritely to Columbia who wields a big stick, paddle, or bat. … images like this one need no support from male representatives of American power because such militantly masculinized images incorporate them already. However, Columbia’s muscular, mannish are leading down to the hand which grips the phallic stick may also be interpreted as leading back to these male representatives. The club is a clear reminder of the long arm of Uncle Sam and the ‘big-stick policy’ articulated by Theodore Roosevelt. Both the Columbia and Cuba of Cox’s study gaze out at the viewer. One might imagine that this veiwer coule be a ‘New Woman’ herself, a suffragette for whom such an image of female power, however imperialistic, might still have had emancipatory appeal. Nonetheless, the point to which the figure’s look is directed might just as easily be Uncle Sam’s controlling gaze. Columbia’s posture is remindful of that of a soldier standing at attention before this gaze which in the cartoon is not embodied by a corresponding cartoon character, but rather transparently conscripts the viewer.”
Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, p. 107
Categories: art
Bankruptcy of Purse or Bankruptcy of Life?
March 31, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Winslow Homer, Incoming Tide, Scarboro Maine, 1883, watercolor on paper.
To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea—“cruising,” it is called.
Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it,” some men say. What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security.” And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine, and before we know it our lives are gone.
What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in, and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all in the material sense, and we know it.
But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by, the dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?
—Sterling Hayden, Wanderer
Categories: art · masculinity · quotes · work
Olly Moss’s Movie Poster Remakes
January 16, 2009 · 1 Comment
Late Bloomers
October 20, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Paul Cézanne, The Card Players
Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.
Categories: art · articles · quotes · work
Tagged: Malcolm Gladwell
