Pierrot Lunaire *music video*, part 1 of 4

Can’t believe I had never seen this before. A few of the scenes are a bit grotesque (don’t watch the second song if you have a cockroach phobia). And don’t watch the 4th song with your little kids around if you don’t want them watching a gyrating female nude.

This is just the first of four parts. I’ll post the others in short order. Expressionism for our time.

good news for Deleuze fans

From the new Edinburgh catalog I see that a collection of 17 Dan Smith essays on Deleuze is coming out in book form, though not until 2012. The title: Essays on Deleuze.

Carnival Evening

Morton posted my favorite Henri Rousseau painting. Here it is again.

people now mouthing off against Qaddafi in Tripoli itself

A sign that the end is near if people feel able to speak like this inside the capital:

“One person waiting for gas volunteered that he blamed Colonel Qaddafi’s rule for the shortages. ‘Please, I want to say something to the world,’ another man said in a store nearby, pointing to a group of six men. ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, we all don’t like Colonel Qaddafi. We like Libyan freedom.'”

Green Party wins a plurality in Baden-Württemberg

Wow. The Greens will actually control a German state for the first time, I guess. HERE.

most dramatic tsunami footage yet?

This link comes courtesy of Michael Flower. It may be the most shocking video of the tusnami yet.

HERE.

“Amid Crisis, Syria Ruler to Speak”

“Government officials announced that the president, Bashar al-Assad, planned to address the nation on Sunday night.”

If anything has been uniformly ineffective during the current round of Arab uprisings, it is national leaders making televised speeches.

Another thing that hasn’t worked well is grooming apparently Western-leaning, ostensibly liberal sons to take over from dictatorial fathers.

That said, if I were betting on one regime in the region being able to succeed with a sheer brute-force crackdown, it would be Syria. I hope I’m wrong.

a weird fact about the Matisse/Picasso relationship

The other day I was watching that Matisse/Picasso video again.

Something not mentioned in the video is that even though Matisse was 12 years older, he actually started painting one year after Picasso: Matisse didn’t start as an artist until age 20, while Picasso had started at 7.

Matisse’s mother brought him some art supplies while he was recovering from appendicitis. A total amateur who made a vocation of it. Just think if you’d told the convalescent amateur artist at that point that he would one day be in friendly rivalry for the king of European art with a 7-year-old kid in Spain who already had a year’s head start on him.

It would be interesting to do a parallel biography of the two from about 1888 onward, continuing all the way until their first meeting. It would be a fascinating study in artistic education, with two subjects learning the craft at completely different stages of personal development.

September 15 at CUNY Graduate Center

This event:

“Speculative Realism: A Conversation with Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman”

Looking forward to it.

Anyone’s life is bound to contain a couple of nagging frustrations. One of my own is that, for all my travel history, I’ve been cruelly deprived of time in New York. I’ve spent a grand total of 7 days in that great city, but luckily I’ll have the chance to add another 10 or so days to that total in September.

distracted

After winning the African Cup of Nations a record three straight times, it looks as though Egypt, amazingly, MAY NOT QUALIFY AT ALL this time. The players seem distracted and not quite in form. They’ve had a lot on their minds, obviously.