Ultra Cool

Doing some hand laundering today. Missing my cats

The Tiny Shrines Of Greece

The Tiny Shrines Of Greece

Sep 1 2013 @ 5:32pm

by Jessie Roberts

MessyNessy provides a virtual tour of the miniature roadside chapels of Greece:

Some are elaborate little things made of terracotta or even marble, plonked in the middle of nowhere, high up in the mountains; no village or houses for miles, and yet impossibly, most of them are faithfully maintained with a candle always burning inside.
There’s a number of reasons for these heartfelt shrines, some as old as the roads themselves. Placed by the roadside, an initial assumption is that they’re built to remember a victim of a traffic accident victim, and sometimes this is exactly the case. But just as often, shrines will be built by survivors of accidents, thanking a saint at the location of their ordeal. While each one might tell a different story, they all share the same purpose– to ultimately provide a passing traveler with a moment of rest and spiritual reflection.

What Is Art? Favorite Famous Definitions, from Antiquity to Today

by Maria Popova

“Art is not a thing — it is a way.”

After the recent omnibus of definitions of science by some of history’s greatest minds and definitions of philosophy by some of today’s most prominent philosophers, why not turn to an arguably even more nebulous domain of humanity? Gathered here are some of my favorite definitions of art, from antiquity to today.
Henry James in his short story The Middle Years:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Leo Tolstoy, in his essay “What Is Art?”:

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Frank Lloyd Wright, writing in 1957, as cited in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotations:

Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, one of 5 essential books on fear and the creative process:

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

Charles Eames, cited in the fantastic 100 Quotes by Charles Eames:

Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.

Elbert Hubbard in a 1908 volume of Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers:

Art is not a thing — it is a way.

Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Thomas Merton in No Man Is An Island:

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola in a recent interview:

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.

André Gide in Poétique:

Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

Friedrich Nietzsche, made famous all over again by Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing:

We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.

Michelangelo Pistoletto in Art’s Responsibility:

Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums — they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.

Federico Fellini in a December 1965 piece in The Atlantic, not currently online:

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity:

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.

The Greek philosopher Aristophanes, writing in the 4th century B.C.:

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

And, lastly, my own take in a recent piece I wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts:

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.

Rubber-Suit Monsters Fade. Tiny Tokyos Relax.

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

“Ultraman Ginga” is a rarity, made without digital graphics. More Photos »

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: September 1, 2013

CHOFU, Japan — Daisuke Terai plays one of the best-known characters in the history of science fiction, but few fans have ever seen the actor’s face. That is because Mr. Terai puts on a bright silver and red rubber suit before stepping onto a set made of miniature trees and buildings to do battle as the cosmic superhero Ultraman.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Behind the Scenes of ‘Ultraman Ginga’

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

The director, Yuichi Abe, said actors and models gave the film more realism than digital graphics could. More Photos »

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Terai’s character was locked in mortal combat to defend the Earth from a giant extraterrestrial dinosaur with glowing eyes and forked spikes called Grand King. When the cameras paused, a sweating Mr. Terai, 36, peeled off the top of his Ultraman suit, while stagehands removed Grand King’s foam spikes to reveal a zipper down the back of the 65-pound costume.

For decades, Japanese studios dazzled, terrified and tickled global audiences with monster movies and television shows featuring actors in rubber suits laying waste to scaled-down Tokyos, or dueling atop miniaturized Mt. Fujis. The genre, known here as “tokusatsu,” or “special filming,” helped take the Japanese film industry global by creating such fabled creatures as Godzilla and Mothra, pioneering the way for other fantasy genres like animé.

But now, in an era when lifelike digital effects have made the use of small models and suited actors look quaint and kitschy, tokusatsu is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The last Godzilla movie shot in this style, the aptly named “Godzilla Final Wars,” was released almost a decade ago, after a half-century span during which the creature appeared in 28 films, sometimes every year.

Only two companies still use tokusatsu effects: Tsuburaya Productions, maker of Ultraman, and Toei, which produces “Kamen Rider” and “Super Sentai” (known in the United States as Power Rangers). All are low-budget television series for children that feature oversize superheroes. Tsuburaya also makes movies, with its newest film, “Ultraman Ginga,” to be released this month in Japan.

Now, when Hollywood makes tokusatsu-inspired films — like this summer’s “Pacific Rim,” with its giant robots, or a coming Godzilla movie — it relies on flashy computer graphics.

“One day, we looked around and realized that almost no one is making tokusatsu anymore,” said Shinji Higuchi, one of a handful of Japanese directors who still have experience in the genre, having directed three movies in the 1990s featuring the giant fire-breathing turtle Gamera. “We don’t want this technique to just quietly disappear without at least recognizing how indebted we are to it.”

In response, Mr. Higuchi is trying to, if not revive tokusatsu, at least chronicle it for younger generations. Last year, he helped organize the Tokusatsu Special Effects Museum, a traveling exhibition that presents the history of tokusatsu, going back to its origins in World War II-era propaganda films with flying model airplanes so realistic that American intelligence officers thought the films were actual combat footage.

The man who shot that footage, Eiji Tsuburaya, went on to create the original Godzilla in the 1954 black-and-white movie that became a worldwide hit and started the tokusatsu genre. The exhibition, which is doing a circuit of art museums in Japan, displays the movie camera of Mr. Tsuburaya, who also created Ultraman, as well as props including an enormous Godzilla foot, used to crush tiny buildings, and models of fanciful spaceships, submarines and ray guns used in dozens of superhero and monster movies.

“We had to improvise, and make it all look real on screen,” said Haruo Nakajima, the actor who played Godzilla in the original movie and in dozens of subsequent Godzilla films.

Now 84, he recalled how the creator of Godzilla, Mr. Tsuburaya, who died in 1970, had to scramble to find enough rubber, latex and cotton to make the costume during the shortages after the war. “You don’t learn this from a textbook,” he said, “but by doing. There is no chance to learn now.”

The central government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs helped pull together the exhibition by gathering the props and models from retired stagehands or studio closets. Tomonori Saiki, who heads research on movies at the agency, says that Japan has only belatedly come to appreciate the cultural significance of tokusatsu, which he calls a product of an era after defeat in the war, when a still-recovering Japan drew from its traditions of craftsmanship and working in miniature, seen in pot-size bonsai trees, to compete with bigger-budget American films.

“Our hope is that the exhibition will help younger generations find inspiration to take tokusatsu in a new direction,” Mr. Higuchi, 47, said.

Here on the set of “Ultraman Ginga,” the newest television variant of the half-century old hero, most workers were veterans in their 50s and 60s, who arranged tree branches on the set to look like a miniature forest, or placed firecracker-size explosives in Grand King’s foam costume to explode when shot by Ultraman.

The director, Yuichi Abe, said this use of real actors, models and even explosives gave tokusatsu a level of realism that is not possible with computer graphics, or C.G.

“C.G. can only do what the programmer tells them to do, so there are no surprises,” said Mr. Abe, 49, who has directed a half-dozen Ultraman movies and television series. “With tokusatsu, every take is different. You never know how it will turn out, just like in the real world.”

Still, Mr. Abe said he was also relying increasingly on computer effects, mixing them with tokusatsu scenes. One example was flying aircraft, which had previously been miniature models, but were now entirely digital.

One scene, in which Grand King hurls a gigantic robotic companion named Jan Nine into Ultraman, required putting a large mat behind the actors, just out of the camera’s view. As filming was about to begin, Mr. Terai, the actor, donned his silver face mask and struck a dramatic martial arts pose. Stage hands flicked a small switch on his costume to turn on a light on his chest.

“Ready!” yelled Mr. Abe, giving instructions in a mix of Japanese and English. “Start!”

On cue, the actor playing Jan Nine leapt into Mr. Terai, knocking both onto the gym mat.

“Cut!”

“This is one effect that you don’t get from C.G.,” said Mr. Terai afterward, rubbing his shoulder. “Real pain.”

Mr. Terai, who has played Ultraman for 16 years and watched the show as a child, said there was one other benefit from having a real actor: the ability to shake hands with his young fans.

“Children know a C.G. is fake,” he said. “They want a human Ultraman.”

But the lack of young workers on the set, besides the actors, points to a worrisome trend, said Mr. Abe and others. As they retire, there will be no one who has learned the skills of making the sets, miniature models and costumes to take their place.

Shinichi Oka, the president of Tsuburaya Productions, the company that Mr. Tsuburaya founded, said the digital revolution had made change inevitable, though use of models and miniatures would continue in a limited role. The biggest reason was a new generation of audiences, who have come to expect the dazzling digital effects of Hollywood.

“Sure, I would love to keep making tokusatsu, but the reality is that C.G. is now cheaper, faster and can do more,” said Mr. Oka, who worked as cameraman and then director on nine Ultraman movies. “If Eiji Tsuburaya were still alive, he would use C.G. We have no choice.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.

The Sight Of Music

The Sight Of Music

Sep 1 2013 @ 8:08pm

by Matt Sitman

Peter Reuell explains a study offering insight into the visual side of music:

In a study by Chia-Jung Tsay, who last year earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior with a secondary Ph.D. field in music, nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. The work was described in a paper published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s a very counterintuitive finding — there have been some interesting reactions from musicians,” Tsay said. “What this suggests is that there may be a way that visual information is prioritized over information from other modalities. In this case, it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.”

Alva Noē meditates on the way music is more than just “sound art”:

When we listen to music we listen to a performance, in the literal sense. We pay attention to what someone, or a group of people, is doing before us. Music is action.

This has has been obscured somewhat by recording, whose advent has influenced how we think about music. The idea that music is about sound, peeled off from its inherence in the tapping, plucking, smacking, stroking, blowing, fingering and vocal actions of real people, or, divorced from the thoughts, feelings and ideas of performers, seems somehow plausible in an era where you buy pieces of plastic, or download digital files, to get at music. In addition, electronic music has seemed, to some, to be the final blow to what may now come to seem a quaint idea: that music is an art of the body, an art of the analog transduction of physical energies.
And so we easily lose sight of the fact that what we care about, when we care about music, is not sound, but musicians and their use of movement, the body, and material instruments, to articulate significance.

Some Thoughts on Clement Greenberg and His Legacy

• by John Yau on September 1, 2013

In his introductory essay to Vitamin P, a survey of contemporary painting first published by Phaidon in 2002, the poet and critic Barry Schwabsky takes pains to point out the variety of stylistic positions available to a contemporary painter. In doing so, Schwabsky suggests that there is no single identifying characteristic that would disqualify a contemporary painting from critical consideration today. This state of openness was not always the case. In my opinion, however, the receptivity that Schwabsky claims for painting is not actually an accurate characterization of the current situation, where success is generally judged by an artist’s standing in the marketplace.
While there are many factors that have contributed to the current situation — where painting is marginalized in a variety of obvious and not-so-obvious ways — the roots of it go back to Clement Greenberg and his 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” With this text, Greenberg began to develop his brand of formalist theory regarding innovative modern art and to advance the concept of art’s historical progress. And while it is easy to say that Greenberg is no longer as relevant and that formalist theory and its doctrinaire condemnation of subjectivity, subject matter, relational composition, drawing, and spatiality are no longer regarded as dominant, it seems to me that his formulations continue to be a powerful presence in one guise or another.
Outlining the distinction between avant-garde (or high art) and kitsch (or middlebrow art), Greenberg made three points. First, Modernism is defined by self-criticality and a rethinking of mimesis. Second, in the search for its irreducible identity, advanced painting clarifies its essential uniqueness as a two dimensional, flat surface where the optical takes precedence over such traditional elements as subject and pictorial space. Third, abstraction is more advanced than representational art. In Greenberg’s view, it was Impressionism and, in particular, Claude Monet that advanced painting the furthest, and not Pablo Picasso and George Braque during their Cubist phase.
In his next important essay, “Toward a New Laocoon” (1940), Greenberg further details the historical progress of painting:

But most important of all, the picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas: where they lie side by side or interlocked or transparently imposed upon each other. Where the painter still tried to indicate real objects their shapes flatten and spread in the dense, two-dimensional atmosphere. A vibrating tension is set up as the objects struggle to maintain their volume against the tendency of the real picture plane to re-assert its material flatness and crush them to silhouettes.

In his desire to banish illusionism, which he felt was extraneous, from painting, Greenberg insisted “upon the real and material plane.” This insistence led directly to the literalism of Minimalism and to the literalist readings of Pop Art, particularly the “flag” paintings of Jasper Johns. Although Greenberg rejected Johns’ paintings, his followers did not, in part because they saw in Johns a way to distinguish their viewpoint from Greenberg’s while adhering to his model of historical progress.
According to Greenberg and those he influenced, painting could only be about itself — a viewpoint that artists as diverse as Frank Stella and Andy Warhol heeded, and which Johns seemed to do, in his early paintings. Certainly, Warhol — who relied on photographs for his subject matter — is acknowledging Greenberg’s insistence on painting’s flatness when he famously states:

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.

And Frank Stella’s position is not so far from Warhol when he states: “What you see is what you see.” Despite their avowed differences, here is a moment in the mid-1960s when Greenberg, Stella, and Warhol all agree with each other on a central issue: the flatness of the picture plane must be upheld.
Greenberg’s Formalist theory was understandably attractive to younger critics and art historians because he seemed to be turning art history into a scientific method, with a variety of materially verifiable ways by which one could evaluate art. In doing so, he is claiming to be objective rather than subjective. In such declarations and later developments — “the death of painting,” “de-skilling,” “appropriation is the only game in town” and “provisional painting” — one hears the echoes of Greenberg’s belief in historical progress.
In his essay, “Provisional Painting” (Art in America, May 2009), the poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, in his quest for something fresh and new, described a tendency among both young and seasoned contemporary artists to make work that “look[s] casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling.” It seems to me that in order to isolate these characteristics, he had to ignore one of modern art’s recurrent legacies, which is the need for each generation to make “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling” work in its rush to distinguish itself from what came before.
In his attempt to extend the shopworn formalist doctrine of historical progress, Rubinstein paradoxically chose an ahistorical argument that fails to recognize that the “unfinished” work of art — after being touted in one way or another for the past 150 years, since Claude Monet painted “Impression, Sunrise” (1872) – had long ago passed from being an innovative possibility to being the go-to standard. Haven’t such reactionary choices become predictable and constraining – a set of familiar, easily mimicked gestures? Are we now mimicking the first mimickers? Are Rubinstein’s mimickers imitating the first mimickers? Also, are these painters being placed into the historical context of Greenberg’s formalist strictures in order to make them a safer bet in the marketplace?
It seems to me that the current situation is not about available options, as Schwabsky suggests, which span a wide range of possibilities, or about a critic channeling Greenberg’s legacy and identifying the next viable tendency in art. Rather, it revolves around one fundamental question: how does an individual go about making work when a significant part of the art world believes that painting and drawing are dead? Or, to put it another way: after the death of the author, how does an individual reinstate the mantle of authorship and take responsibility for what he or she makes? Mimicking casualness or employing a machine or fabricators to make one’s work — as many critical darlings are busy doing — might be this generation’s way of shucking responsibility. Previous generations of artists, critics and curators bought into a constricted definition of what art could be, believing that history had brought them to an inevitable endgame and that any aesthetic alternative was spurious at best. But nothing, we should remind ourselves, is necessarily etched in stone. Greenberg’s theories were narrow and wrong, catastrophically so. The need to undo the damage and to learn to see for ourselves continues.