An image or its apparition

.

An image
Or the apparition
Just after.

(Apologies to Wallace Stevens.)

The word apparition reminds me of Impressionist paintings, which to me capture the image seen not exactly as they are but like it would be remembered by the mind of the eye if it took a quick glance (a glance is always quick, I suppose... pardon the tautology) and then looked away and tried to capture via paint that which was seen. But it isn't exactly what was seen. .how can it be. ..not the image itself but an apparition.a reflection of what was seen. In fact i have come to see many Impressionist paintings as that which you would see as a reflection in water...the clouds and trees in Monet or Renoir painting look like .they all look in reflections in a lake or river. 

Claude Monet - La Grenouillere

Renoir - La Grenouillere

I recall that Ashbery's Self Portait in a Convex Mirror delves into the self and the image of the self but that is a whole other world of exploration that goes into philosophy also... but I will limit myself to the Imagists and the Impressionists for now. Both capture an image. .a moment. ..but it isn't the present. .it is a presence that lingers in the mind. Recollections of a past remembered. Proustian nostalgia for a moment passed.

Next week in ModPo, it time to meet Gertrude Stein and Picasso and view poetry through the Cubists mode of thinking  (though we already kinda met the Cubists (Juan Gris) with Williams' The Rose is Obsolete and this insightful post about that poem.

Poet for April 7, 2011 - Robert Lowell

Two poems today from one of the leading poets of the latter part of the 20th century, Robert Lowell -- a poet I have not read much of...yet! (His more famous poem is "Memories of West Street and Lepke" from his ground-breaking collection, Life Studies, and you can read more about it here.)

 

 

Robert Lowell (Born: 1 March 1917, Boston, MA - Died: 12 September 1977, NYC, NY)

“Is getting well ever an art / Or art a way to get well.”- Robert Lowell

Notice

The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm –
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression –
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”

The doctor is forgotten now
like a friend’s wife’s maiden-name.
I am free
to ride elbow to elbow on the rush-hour train
and copy on the back of a letter,
as if alone:
“When the trees close branches and redden,
their winter skeletons are hard to find—“
to know after long rest
and twenty miles of outlying city
that the much-heralded spring is here,
and say,
“Is this what you would call a blossom?”
Then home – I can walk it blindfold.
But we must notice –
we are designed for the moment. 
 

Epilogue*

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write   

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination*

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

* The poem Epilogue was printed as the last piece (excluding a few translations) in Lowell's last book, Day by Day (1977). 

* Vermeer's paintings are famous for the way he amazingly captured the play of light and shadows in his paintings. While his The Girl With The Pearl Earring is more popular lately due to the book and the movie by the same name, see this Vermeer painting of Girl With The Red Hat for the amazing play of light captured through by the Dutch master.

"It is amazing how you feel the room is full of light. In a way, light is the subject." 
- David Hockney

Of what we are and what we've let ourselves become

I loved reading Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms Other Wonders, which got rave reviews when it was published in 2009 but equally appealing was these lines by Junot Diaz about Mueenuddin's short story, 'A Spoiled Man', chosen in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories, 2010. (emphasis mine)

Cetaceans, I read recently, have muscles that allow them to shape the lenses of their eyes so they can see equally well above water as below. They can, in other words, see in two worlds. We humans are not so biologically fortunate. It is only art that can shape our eyes to see all our various worlds, only art that reminds us at times gently, at times forcefully, of what we are and what we've let ourselves become. Stories like "A Spoiled Man" are the subtle knife that cuts open the membranes that hold the worlds apart and allows us not only to see into our other worlds but for a moment to reside there as well. What more could we ask from art? From a short story? From a writer?

 It is a subtle knife indeed... which not everyone can yield well. But those that do, be it Alice Munro or Mueenuddin or Junot Diaz himself, leave us speechless, in awe in the amazing things they can do with words!

Despair

What an amazing picture - definitely worth a thousand words and more! 

© Erik de Castro / AP

A man takes a break from cleaning a house swamped by flash floods brought on by Typhoon Ketsana, in Marikina, The Philippines.

Renovating Virtues

This is one of the best quotes about the relationship of art to life....

The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give." - Wallace Stevens (Opus Posthumous, page 159)

I suppose the quote particularly vibed with me since I, being an athiest, have sought strength, solace, and the lovely company of music and poetry in a difficult period of my life. So, be it music, poetry, paintings, or any other art, I have seen that art that can connect and move you can rejuvenate you from the tedium of life. These are the renovating virtues through which "our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired" [1].

As the critic Robert Pack writes in the Introduction to his 1968 book on Wallace Stevens and his poetry and thought:

To say that all things are potentially beautiful, for there is nothing beyond the touch of the artist, may not be the last reach in the paradox of human understanding, but at least it indicates the kind of paradise that may be lost if the prophetic voice is right. This paradise, rich with the transformation the imagination makes of ordinary experience, is what Wallace Stevens envisions and evolves, it is the treasure most accessible to our modest lives, and for many it would define the sum of human loss were it to be relinquished.

Leave you with a lovely poem by Wallace Stevens titled "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour."

Light the first light of evening
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough. 

--
[1] The words "renovating virtues" I borrow from this lovely excerpt from William Wordsworth's The Prelude.

    There are in our existence spots of time,
    That with distinct pre-eminence retain
    A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
    By false opinion and contentious thought,
    Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
    In trivial occupations, and the round
    Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
    Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
    A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
    That penetrates, enables us to mount,
    When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

The inner life of the dead, held in suspension

I read poet Mark Doty's prose book, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon recently.

Luminous! Delectable! It is a book simultaneously full of the poignancy and joy of life! Even if you did not know who Doty is, reading it, you can tell this was written by a man with a vision of a poet! I ought to just buy this book and relive the experience from time to time through the remainder of my life!

I found myself wanting to mark or transcribe almost every line of the book. Paragraph after paragraph were worthy of being excerpted and blogged about. But then I realized, that like many poems, it could only be enjoyed in its whole. One cannot quote a paragraph out-of-context and try to convey the joyous experience of reading the book.

Despite this, I'll just leave you with an extended excerpt from the last page of the book... which tell you more about "Still Life" painting, poetry, and life itself than anything else you will have read recently.

Still life. The deep pun hidden within the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.

The darkness behind these gathered things - a living darkness, almost breathing, almost a pressure against us -- is the not-here, the not-now; what we can see are the illuminated things right before us, our good company. The space looming behind them is the unknown of everything else - is, in other words, a visible form of death, and therefore what stands before that darkness stands close together.

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.

It's the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weight, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry.

Part of what that poetry is, I think, the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

Ok...let me transcribe one more excerpt... randomly open the book and lo - there is something worth sharing!

Sometimes I think these paintings seem full of secrets, full of unvoiced presences. And surely one of their secrets - somewhere close to their essence - lies in a sense of space that is unique to them. These things exist up close, against a background of burnished darkness. No wide vistas open behind them, no far-flung landscapes, no airy vastness of heaven. This is the space of the body, the space of our arms' rach. There is nothing before us here we could not touch, were these things not made of paint. The essential quality of them is their nearness.  ........ these paintings reside in domestic, physical, fleshy space. ......... everything in this up-close, bodily space is delineated with such clarity. We're accustomed to not seeing what is so near to us; we do not need to look at things that are at hand, because they are at hand every day. ...... Novelty recedes, in the face of the daily, and we're free to relax, to drift, to focus inward. But in still life the familiar is limned with an almost hallucinatory clarity, nothing glanced over or elided, nothing subordinate to the impression of the whole.

....

All those painters, all their lives looking at reality with such scrupulous attention, attention pouring out and out, and what does it give us back but ourselves? What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing - the object infused with the subject. The eye moving over the world like a lover. And so the boundary between self and world is lelided, a bit, softened.

Go read the book in its entirety -- it is full of such gems! Even if you are a better appreciator of still life paintings than I am and have appreciated still life before, you will find a rare and unique joy in the book - a celebration of life, death, and the nostalgia of memory that is captured in "things". Experiencing a poet's words is, like experiencing a painting, a unique and redeeming experience! ;)

This is your new reality

Found this rather haunting picture in a series of photographs by blind photographers.. part of a spectacular new exhibit at the University of California, Riverside which "raises extraordinary questions about the nature of sight."

Kurt Weston, Mask

(c) by the artist, courtesy of UCR/California Museum of Photography

A gay man who lost his sight to AIDS in 1996, Weston's work explores the stigma of disease and decay. His daily battle to stay alive is transformed into an unflinching look at his (and our) mortality: "These photographs are about the realization of loss," he says. "About losing your facade. They say, 'This is your new reality. This is your strange new flesh. Let's take a look." 

Reminds me of this excerpt from a poem (Embrace) by Mark Doty:

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.  

Here's another great one from the series..

Gerardo Nigenda, Entre lo invisible y lo tangible, llegando a la homeostasis emocional

 (c) by the artist, courtesy of UCR/California Museum of Photography

Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, the 42-year-old Nigenda calls his images "Fotos cruzados," or "intersecting photographs." As he shoots, he stays aware of sounds, memories, and other sensations. Then he uses a Braille writer to punch texts expressing those the things he felt directly into the photo. The work invokes an elegant double blindness: Nigenda needs a sighted person to describe the photo, but the sighted rely on him to read the Braille. The title of this work translates roughly to: "Between the invisible and the tangible, reaching an emotional homeostasis."

Lots more gems at the link. Do go and enjoy the visions of these blind people. Like one of them (Pete Eckert) says: 'If you can't see, it's because your vision is getting in the way."

The Taliban in Pakistan

This is what the Taliban is doing to Pakistan!

© Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press

Collecting furniture from the rubble of a police station in Buner, 60 miles from Islamabad, that Pakistani officials said the Taliban destroyed Thursday.

Beautiful picture this! Reminds me of Steve McCurry's famous NG award-winning picture!

© Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

A relief camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, where thousands have fled fighting between troops and Taliban in the North-West Frontier Province.

Both of the above pictures from NYT article this morning which tells us that finally... Now, U.S. sees Pakistan as a cause distinct from Afghanistan 

Also, through a tweet by Prem Panicker, I learn that the National Magazine Awards were announced last night. (Above link contains links to many award winning articles. More need-to-read-later articles to bookmark!).. but note that the REPORTING award went to The New York Times Magazine for an article about the Taliban in Pakistan. 

“Whose side is Pakistan really on?” asks Dexter Filkins in his thorough, evocative piece on the Taliban’s presence in Pakistan, a key U.S. ally.

Related Reading from last couple weeks:

• The Roots of Pakistan’s Taliban Problem 

• U.S. Questions Pakistan’s Will to Stop Taliban

An elusive reality

Fascinating article in NYT about "Baroque". Good lesson in art history for me!

Baroque is one of those glibly used words that describe an elusive reality. ... here never was one Baroque style. The qualifier was first used of art in a derogatory sense, meaning bizarre or fanciful as Mr. Snodin points out. Here, Baroque serves as a fit-all label covering unrelated works of art of every description and place, from Europe to Goa and Brazil. Out of this mass, which at times is disorientating, a fascinating message eventually emerges. For the first time in European history, a deep rift appeared in art, opposing those who clung to the classical heritage as interpreted by the Renaissance, and others who fled into unbridled fantasy in reaction against the established aesthetic order. 

In parts of Europe, the classical order inherited from Greek and Roman antiquity reigned with greater clarity than ever. The French sense of balance and proportion reached an apex in the 17th century, inspiring some of the greatest masterpieces of European monumental art. Such is the east facade of the Louvre palace conceived under Louis XIV by the king’s physician, Claude Perrault, and erected between 1667 and 1674.

More at the article. 

It seems:

The word has a long, complex and controversial history (it possibly derived from a Portuguese word for a misshapen pearl, and until the late 19th century it was used mainly as a synonym for `absurd' or `grotesque'), but in English it is now current with three principal meanings.

• Primarily, it designates the dominant style of European art between Mannerism and Rococo. This style originated in Rome and is associated with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, its salient characteristics--overt rhetoric and dynamic movement--being well suited to expressing the self-confidence and proselytizing spirit of the reinvigorated Catholic Church. It is by no means exclusively associated with religious art, however, and aspects of the Baroque can be seen even in works that have nothing to do with emotional display--for example in the dynamic lines of certain Dutch still-life paintings.
• Secondly, it is used as a general label for the period when this style flourished, broadly speaking, the 17th century and in certain areas much of the 18th century. Hence thus phrases as `the age of Baroque', `Baroque politics', `Baroque science', and so on.
• Thirdly, the term `Baroque' (often written without the initial capital) is applied to art of any time or place that shows the qualities of vigorous movement and emotional intensity associated with Baroque art in its primary meaning. Much Hellenistic sculpture could therefore be described as `baroque'.

The older meaning of the word, as a synonym for `capricious', `overwrought' or `florid', still has some currency, but not in serious criticism.

Also lots of info online about baroque art and also baroque

music.

 

One Man, Multiple Facets

Pulitzer Prize Winner for Feature Photography
Damon Winter, The New York Times - Awarded for his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Above picture: Barack Obama campaigning during a rainstorm in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2008.

(Other than the Obamas,  all heart-breaking pictures from Haiti, Kenya, and Indonesia in that series of award winning pics. Phew!)

Also see this collection of photographs from the rotating collection at the White House. Click here to read a slide-show essay about a collection of photographs selected from the walls of the White House.

Photograph by Pete Souza/White House

These two are my favorites... I mean the pictures, not the Obamas. :)

 

Photograph by Pete Souza/White House

Michelle Obama waits as the president, background, signs the guest book upon their arrival to Prague Castle, April 5, 2009, in the Czech Republic. Photograph by Pete Souza/White House

Words maketh the man..

.. but actions speak louder than words!

Anyways, I found this here and HAD to have it for my Obama series! :)

More typographical portraits here.

Happy Easter!

 

 A polar bear bites a mock Easter Bunny stuffed with food at the Buenos Aires Zoo

© REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian

Ok..that's just in jst - a funny picture I thought worth sharing! But here's a more traditional one -- stunningly beautiful Easter eggs.

Traditionally hand painted Easter eggs are on display for sale in the eastern German village of Schleife, April 8, 2009. A goose feather is used to decorate the eggs with wax, which are then dipped into colour dye several times in this traditional painting method by members of the Slavic ethnic minority community of Sorbs. Each colour that is applied takes one hour. (© REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz)

Now the streets are empty

“Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty.” - Helen Levitt

So true! Was one of the things that boggled my mind when I first came to this country. No kids! In fact, no people on the streets in most towns of the US.

Photographer Helen Levitt, famous for her photos of children playing in the streets of New York, died last week.

Bubbles capture the attention of four girls in a photograph by Helen Levitt © Estate of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

Beautiful! Just reading about it makes me admire its beauty! Now you know why I put photographs also under the "Art" label at this blog. Photography can be art, poetry, and sometimes a still image can more than the moving image (movies) too.

Walk on Water

What a beautiful picture!

Walk on Water
© Hayden Carlyon (Fort Collins, CO)
Photographed January 2008, Uyuni, Bolivia 

That's one of many amazing pictures submitted to the Smithsonian Magazine's 6th annual Readers Choice Photo Contest. You can go and see the pictures and vote here.

An acetate window

This is couple months old but I found the idea of holding up an acetate window intriguing... 
We are at a crossroads. It is the beginning of a new administration and the end of an old one. There are those who would like to forget the last eight years. It’s the magic-slate idea. As if you could lift up an acetate window and those eight years would suddenly vanish.

Photographs make this somewhat more difficult. They are a partial record of who we were and how we imagined ourselves. They remind us that we have a past and that we are the sum of our past experiences. They reassert that unassailable fact.

Btw, that's from a post by Errol Morris, a filmmaker whose movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004.

You should go read the entire post as it is a neat photographic coverage of George W. Bush in the last week of his Presidency.

The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration.

My favorite picture is this one:

UNITED STATES, Washington : US president-elect Barack Obama (R) waves while walking with President George W. Bush after arriving at the White House November 10, 2008 in Washington. Obama is visiting the White House at the invitation of Bush ahead of his January 20, 2009 inauguration as the next president. (Tim Sloan/Agence France-Presse)

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Why do you like the picture so much?
VINCENT AMALVY: We don’t understand what is going on. Why does the shadow appear? I suppose it’s a shadow of somebody else beyond the corner. But the picture is only of two guys walking. It’s a profile of George Bush and Barack Obama. And he’s near the Rose Garden of the White House. And so in the back is a shadow of somebody who says, “Bye-bye.” And it is looking like a joke, but it is amazing.

Indeed! Bye-Bye, Bush!

The hybrids are here

No.. not hybrid cars. Hybrid animals! :)

A froppotamus; a frogodile; a cat-cow (does it go meow-moo?) (All photographs are © BNPS.co.uk).

Note that these are just flights of fancy - thanks to Photoshop - and were entries to an online competition.

But these "new" animals are for real: a striped gecko and three frogs - including one with a loud ringing call.

Scientists have discovered dozens of new species of animals and plants in a remote 'Lost World' in the dense forests of Papua New Guinea, an island north of Australia. Among them are 50 new types of spider, a striped gecko and three frogs - including one with a loud ringing call. The unique creatures, which have never been documented before, were found by a team of scientists with Conservation International, who made the discoveries during a four-week expedition to the country's unexplored Kaijende highlands and Hewa wilderness 

   Litoria frog © Steve Richards/CI/Reuters

Obama Nation - 5

I am filing this under Obama Nation, even if this is not in celebration of Obama ( but more a mark of protest against the US) nor is it an entry about life in the US in the Obama era, since I thought this was worth sharing.

Note: Picture is from the Brazilian carnival and has what can be deemed as nudity. So, NSFW and not being excerpted here. Do not blame me if you get into trouble!

Party time ... Brazilian carnival queen Viviane Castro parades with an image depicting President Barack Obama painted on her left leg during carnival celebrations in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Castro's stomach reads in Portuguese "for sale", a message she said represented the sale of Brazil's Amazon to the US.

BUT I can include this picture, from the same gallery. :)

An entertainer performs as US President Barack Obama on top of a float and greets almost a million of people in the parade of the Cordao do Bola Preta

Cover Art

I saw this on Facebook too and thought it was a fun cool thing to indulge in for a few minutes.

A new viral meme is currently infecting Facebook – the Make Your Own Album Cover game. The game has four simple steps:

• Get a band name! Simply use the title of a randomly-generated Wikipedia article. 
• Get an album title! Use the last four or five words from the last quote on a page of random quotations.
• Get some album art! Use the image thrown up using this Flickr tool, which generates random images without copyright restrictions.
• Make it look nice! Using Photoshop, Paint, or whatever graphics software you have, fiddle your band logo and album title into some kind of visually-pleasing assemblage.
  

The Guardian has some examples here and here.

For the record, this was what I arrived at the first time I tried it when I saw it on Facebook:

1. Chiefs of McGhie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiefs_of_McGhie
2. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy)
3. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tupzu/3296574637 Hmm! They seem happy, not unhappy! ;)

I just realized that the first time I tried it in Facebook, it asked to pick the last picture on the page with Flickr's last 7 days page, with no consideration for copyright issues. The Guardian article (first link above) links to the random tool to come up with an image without copyright restrictions. Hence, I tried it again just now using that tool and here are the results:

1. N. Padmalochanan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Padmalochanan
2. I've always been insufferable. (Fran Howitzer)
3. http://flickr.com/photos/7634307@N02/3319589347 Hmmm...would make for nice cover art!

And much as I hate taking on the name of someone else even in jest, let alone that of a commie politician from Kerala, that's the luck of the draw in this random game... and so, here it is:

 

P. S. I have no idea who N. Padmalochanan is as today is the first time I am hearing of him... but the commies in India are insufferable indeed. Always have been! But that's for another thread some other day but for now I leave you with this blog post by Amit Varma about "a series of historic blunders"

Let a thousand windows bloom!

Microsoft should buy this building!

A new office block being built in China is believed to have the most windows of any building of its size in the world.

The nine-storey building, designed by Japanese architect Sako Keiichiro, has close to a 1,000 windows. None of the rooms in the building are completely square or rectangular, corridors wind around and between rooms, and each floor features a mini garden. "It's like a maze inside," said one construction worker, who added that it was the most difficult and time-consuming project he had ever worked on.

P.S. I wondered what labels to give this post. Oddball, I thought. Then, I figured this kind of architecture is in fact art! :)

Obama Nation - 4

Aah...the mind boggles at the possibilities. :)

The main issue in the legal battle between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey, the artist who made the iconic poster of Barack Obama which “quoted from” a photograph the Associated Press says it owns, is whether there really is a Web-given right to remix copyrighted images to create new works of art.

A remix of a remix. 

Anyone who wants to get involved directly in the debate can now turn to the Web site Obamicon.me, which greets users with an invitation to “make your own ‘Obamicon’ — your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster.” The site makes it easy to upload an image, click a button and produce an auto-generated mash-up in the style of Mr. Fairey’s iconic Obama poster. Then you can order posters, T-shirts, stamps or a range of other products featuring the new image you’ve created. Since the software allows users to upload not just snapshots of themselves, their children and their pets, but any image, screen-grab or photograph that can be pulled onto a desktop, the hundreds of thousands of Obamicons already created and archived on the site include a large number that obviously quote from copyrighted images, of everyone from Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and Stephen Colbert (at right) to Sarah Palin and Yoda (below).

Browsing through the gallery of Obamicons, it is clear that the vast majority are made from snapshots people have taken themselves. But the most inspired work so far has been done with images that might be off-limits if the A.P.’s lawyers somehow manage to defeat Mr. Fairey’s fair-use argument, and force him to pay for the use of the photograph.
In reality, though, what the Obamicons quote from is not any one photograph, copyrighted or not, but rather the way that Mr. Fairey reworks the images he finds. So if anyone would have a case for shutting the site down, it might be Mr. Fairey — who is obviously unlikely to make that argument.