▲ PARAGON ✚ ▲▲▲

MASKER

August 7th, 2011 | 0 comments

mask |mask|
noun
1 a covering for all or part of the face, in particular
• a covering worn as a disguise, or to amuse or terrify other people.
• a covering made of fiber or gauze and fitting over the nose and mouth to protect against dust or air pollutants, or made of sterile gauze and worn to prevent infection of the wearer or (in surgery) of the patient.
• a protective covering fitting over the whole face, worn in fencing, ice hockey, and other sports.
• a respirator used to filter inhaled air or to supply gas for inhalation.
• (also masque) a cosmetic preparation spread over the face and left for some time to cleanse and improve the skin.
• Entomology the enlarged lower lip of a dragonfly larva, which can be extended to seize prey.
2 a likeness of a person’s face in clay or wax, esp. one made by taking a mold from the face.
• a person’s face regarded as having set into a particular expression : his face was a mask of rage.
• a hollow model of a human head worn by ancient Greek and Roman actors.
• the face or head of an animal, esp. of a fox, as a hunting trophy.
• archaic a masked person.
3 figurative a disguise or pretense : she let her mask of moderate respectability slip.
4 Photography a piece of something, such as a card, used to cover a part of an image that is not required when exposing a print.
• Electronics a patterned metal film used in the manufacture of microcircuits to allow selective modification of the underlying material.
verb [ trans. ]
cover (the face) with a mask.
• conceal (something) from view : the poplars masked a factory.
• disguise or hide (a sensation or quality) : brandy did not completely mask the bitter taste.
• cover (an object or surface) so as to protect it from a process, esp. painting : mask off doors and cupboards with sheets of plastic.
DERIVATIVES
masked adjective
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from French masque, from Italian maschera, mascara, probably from medieval Latin masca [witch, specter,] but influenced by Arabic mas k ara ‘buffoon.’

Vivian Maier - Her Discovered Work

May 25th, 2011 | 0 comments

Thank you to my friend Waldo Muller for introducing me to this arcane photographer and enigma: Vivian Maier. Her work was hidden away in a locker for a very long time, her stark yet innocent but passionate eye observed line and form in the most ‘platonic’ and quite obscure way, but beautiful… just so seamlessley captivating… Her composition and subject matter grabs me, travels with me and wants me to want more… of that moment… I wish I could meet her. She could have been a good friend to Diane Arbus. Maybe they shared the streets ? Vivian you had a hungry heart, I hope we can but celebrate a single moment of you!

Here is more on this mysterious woman, a piece I quote from a website dedicated to her:
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks.

A free spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof.

Urbanism ˈridiˌkyoōl

May 21st, 2011 | 0 comments

“Ridiculous Urbanism” from dodeckahedron on Vimeo.

Collages made using abandoned urban studies slides found in St Philips (an LSE building about to be demolished). The sound is a collage of different lectures on architecture and urbanism. Exhibited in “Students, Patients, Paupers: the many lives of the St Philips building”, May 2011.

Arizona Dream {1993}

January 27th, 2011 | 1 comment

I stumbled upon this Gem the other night. Thank you DSTV & my parents house… This took me back to a time when I was still dreaming of marrying johnny Depp & writiing my way to a dream world quite accurately captured in this movie.

If Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusturica’s only film in English feels at times as if something must have been obscured in the translation, it’s no less memorable in its own way than his Balkan masterworks Underground, Time of the Gypsies, or Black Cat, White Cat. From the Eskimo dreams that bookend the picture to the tropical fish that periodically comes swimming through the air, Arizona Dream has a surreal quality that you accept on its own terms or not at all.

✝ ICE LAND

May 12th, 2010 — marcii goosen | 0 comments

ANDRI ÁSGRÍMSSON X MUNDI
The Icelandic musician Ásgrímsson soundtrack ‘Harmabót’, a Dazed Digital film featuring Mundi’s AW10/11 collection
DD: How old are you?
Þórður Ingi Jónsson: I’m 16 years old.

DD: Where were you born and where do you live?
Þórður Ingi Jónsson: I was born in Reykjavik and have lived on the west side, in 101 Reykjavík, since I was born, in the cold, harsh, volcanic wasteland of Iceland. It’s a hard-knock life what with all the passages to hell that spew toxic fumes and melt faces all day. We’re getting good at annoying Europe by means of economic terrorism and stopping flight traffic. Everything is going straight to hell over here, I predict full scale rioting and anarchy…
Original article |||HERE|||

This is iceland at its best… music, design and fashion combination, riding the after effects of volcanic wasteland. Im so ready for their hard-knock life.

Here is more on local fashion designers & the Reykjavik Fashion Festival |||HERE|||

The Iceland Design Center also organised a design event in Reykjavík called Design March, which covers all sides of Icelandic design (product, graphic, architecture, fashion etc.) You can read more about it here |||HERE|||

Poetry Dinner Party

April 29th, 2010 — marcii goosen | 1 comment

We(Myself & Mareli) are hosting a poetry dinner party at our house this friday. We have asked everyone to bring along a poem to share at the dinner party. Ill be sharing these with you later. For now here is the invitation I made.

Poetry by Candle light, what a delight.
Marcii Goose for Mariah & Andrew

Mareli Esterhuizen

Caleb Pedersen

Megan Blankendal

Andrew Breitenberg

Anton Viljoen

Mariah Breitenberg

Robin Scott

DIANE ARBUS

March 16th, 2010 | 0 comments

“Una fotografia és un secret sobre un secret.
A photograph is secret on secret.

Quantes més coses et diu, menys coses saps”

Diane Arbus

Jean-Michel Basquiat

March 9th, 2010 | 0 comments

I relate to this man too much it scares me, like he is living inside me somewhere… pure imaginative multiple genius… floating on a cloud of sadness…somewhere…

…this gentleman cannot be appreciated unless you see the scope of his work, within his brief moment of brilliance. he spoke without words, but through his art. yes he was flawed, like we all are, but in his short 27 years he created a presence that will outlast any who dare comment on his failings. color separation and characterizations of explicit concept, captured tragically and beautifully. like feeling multiple emotions at the same time.
comment by sholwa on youtube

Theo Van Doesburg

March 1st, 2010 — marcii goosen | 0 comments

Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World
4 February – 16 May 2010
Tate Modern, Level 4
www.tate.org.uk/modern

Keep reading →

YOU’RE by Sylvia Plath

February 21st, 2010 — marcii goosen | 0 comments

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark, as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools’ Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

Miso street art

January 9th, 2010 | 0 comments

Miso is really taken with the idea of art , and especially street art, as something which binds us as a community. It functions in a very old fashioned way, in that it becomes a way of telling and sharing stories and images, embedding them within the city. Like folk art, it comes to have a very particular, practical function. It brings us together as makers, viewers and consumers, finding new pieces and exploring the possibilities of our cities. In this sense, a lot of Miso’s work deals with telling stories. it is heavily inspired by the Ukranian folklore she grew up with, alongside sharing stories from Eastern Europe today, as well as from her new home in Melbourne.
Her work deals with passing on myths and folklore, as well as portraying everyday scenes – strangers in the street, portraits of friends. And in turn, these instances are pasted back onto the city from which they came, or exhibited in its galleries. This preoccupation is something that has led Miso to use relatively simple, if not altogether old fashioned materials. She borrows a lot from Ukranian folk and craft traditions, often reserved as womens’ work, as well as from street art – ultimately, a boys’ club.
Recent work sees her relaying between pen and ink, pencil, watercolour drawings, as well as paper cuts and embroidery. Across both gallery and street strands of her work, she uses mediums with their own stories in tow. Weathered wood panels, scraps of clothing, newsprint paper offcuts from industrial printers – as well as city walls, laden with tags, cleaned and weathered, rained on and cracked with time.
Miso is 20 years old, and lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she works with the MF artist collective, and shares a studio with her partner, Ghostpatrol.
miso (at) cityofreubens.com

Kitty, Daisy & Lewis

January 9th, 2010 | 0 comments

Kitty Daisy & Lewis are no ordinary band. The three siblings - now aged 15,18 and 17 first came together onstage at a country and rockabilly jam in a North London pub. Over five years later the 50s music, fashion and technology obsessed family have built a massive word of mouth audience through a stream of rapturously received gigs and festival appearances and are ready to release their first long player on Rob da Bank’s Sunday Best label on 28th July 2008.

The single ‘Going Up The Country’ is a perfectly rounded summer holiday feel-good jam, full of harmonica solos, handclaps and lyrics about leaving the city smog for fairer country hills. Coming out on 7”, authentic 78rpm 10”, CD and download on 7th July 2008.

This video was directed by Alex Walker of Brickwall Films.

http://www.myspace.com/kittydaisyandlewis
http://www.sundaybest.net
http://www.recordstore.co.uk/sundaybest
http://www.brickwallfilms.co.uk

ASTRID KIRCHHERR

April 15th, 2009 — marcii goosen | 5 comments

I have always been fascinated by the movie ‘Backbeat’ but in fact more attracted to this lady called Astrid Kirchherr. I remember watching it over & over again while being very inspired by her approach to photography and her dark & moody style and ways. I dressed like her for a while even had my hair cut the same style as her.
I found out today that she is still alive and still living in Hamburg. I plan to visit her shop in december. More about her below. This is trying to paint the picture I saw about 12 years ago when I first watched the movie backbeat.

+stuart & astrid+
Astrid Kirchherr (born 20 May 1938) is a German photographer and artist and is well known for her association with the Beatles (along with her friends Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer) and her photographs of the Beatles from their Hamburg days.
Kirchherr met artist Stuart Sutcliffe in the Kaiserkeller bar in Hamburg in 1960 where he was playing bass with the Beatles and was later engaged to him before his untimely death in 1962.
Although Kirchherr admitted she has taken very few photographs since 1967 her early work has been exhibited in Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington DC, Tokyo, Vienna, and at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Kirchherr has published three limited edition books of photographs.

+the kiss+
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Kirchherr and her art school friends were involved in the European existentialist movement whose followers were nicknamed Exis by John Lennon.
In 1995 she told BBC Radio Merseyside:
“ Our philosophy then, because we were only little kids, was wearing black clothes and going around looking moody. Of course, we had a clue who Jean Paul Sartre was. We got inspired by all the French artists and writers, because that was the closest we could get. England was so far away, and America was out of the question. So France was the nearest. So we got all the information from France, and we tried to dress like the French existentialists. … We wanted to be free, we wanted to be different, and tried to be cool, as we call it now. ”
Kirchherr is credited with inventing the Beatles moptop haircut although she disagrees and is quoted in The Beatles Off The Record by Keith Badman as saying:
“ All that shit people said, that I created their hairstyle, that’s rubbish! Lots of German boys had that hairstyle. Stuart had it for a long while and the others copied it. I suppose the most important thing I contributed to them was friendship. ”
In 1995, Kirchherr told BBC Radio Merseyside:
“ All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of what you call Beatles haircut. And my boyfriend then, Klaus Voorman, had this hairstyle, and Stuart liked it very very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and asking me to cut his hair for him. Pete Best (the Beatles original drummer) has really curly hair and it wouldn’t work.
Kirchherr didn’t publish the photographs until 1995, in a book called Liverpool Days, which is a limited edition collection of black-and-white photographs.[8] In 1999, a companion book called Hamburg Days was published (a two-volume limited edition) containing a set of photographs by Kirchherr and “memory drawings” by Voormann. The drawings are recollections of places and situations that Voormann clearly remembers, but Kirchherr had never photographed, or had lost the photographs.[35]
Kirchherr described how difficult it was to be accepted as a female photographer in the 1960s:
“ Every magazine and newspaper wanted me to photograph the Beatles again. Or they wanted my old stuff, even if it was out of focus, whether they were nice or not. They wouldn’t look at my other work. It was very hard for a girl photographer in the 60s to be accepted. In the end I gave up. I’ve hardly taken a photo since 1967.[33] ”
Kirchherr was quoted as saying that When We Was Fab (Genesis Publications 2007) would be her last book of photographs:
“ I have decided it is time to create one book in which I am totally involved so that it contains the pictures I like most, printed the way I would print them, even down to the text and design…. This book is me and that is why it will be the last one. The very last one.

+self portrait+

LEBBEUS WOODS

March 31st, 2009 — marcii goosen | 0 comments

What makes home ‘home’ are the constants. When we go out into the world, especially when traveling, we want a measure of discovery, adventure, the unpredictable, the inconstant. But when we come home we want to find the familiar and the predictable, perhaps only to provide a frame of reference for considering all we did not know or understand from our experiences elsewhere. Home is a sanctuary, where we feel safe. We can express how we feel, confide our fears and dreams. In these same ways, a notebook is something like a home, and it can be taken anywhere. In other words, we can have it both ways: to stay comfortably at home and to adventurously travel out and into the world.

The most important constant is the size of the notebook. It must always be the same. Also the paper, and the pen used to draw and write. It must be a pen and not a pencil, because a pencil smudges with the many openings and closings of the notebook, and it would soon become a mass of blurs. Perhaps that is the nature of memories, but the notebook is not about memories. It is work, sometimes joyful, often difficult, and we want it to last as long as it can. Also, the pen—a cheap but reliable instrument that can be bought anywhere, but has real ink, not dyes that fade—makes precise lines that cannot be altered once drawn. The images and words placed on the pages are not tentative, but definite. They are built up a line at a time, without preliminaries, and thus they are an accurate record of ideas and the process of thought that brought them into being. Each line, each word, brings an idea closer to realization, to completion. In this sense, the contents of the notebook are not ‘sketches,’ preliminary attempts that will be finished later, but finished works in themselves.

The writer D. H. Lawrence once wrote, in his Apocalypse, about the difference between the idea of completeness in the ancient world and today. Comparing today’s ‘rational’ process of thought to the dragging of an endless, linear ‘logical chain,’ he said that ancient thinkers would take a more circular or spiral approach. They would concentrate on a thought, following it deeper and deeper, until it reached a point of ‘fullness.’ Both modes of thought have their virtues and the possibility of fusing them in some way informs the notebooks shown here.

LW

NIETZSCHE

March 30th, 2009 — marcii goosen | 0 comments

Schreibkugel ist ein Ding gleich mir: von Eisen
Und doch leicht zu verdreh’n zumal auf Reisen.
Geduld und Takt muss reichlich man besitzen
Und feine Fingerchen, ums zu benützen.
Or in English:
The Writing Ball is a thing like me: of iron
Yet twisted easily – especially on journeys.
Patience and tact must be had in abundance
As well as fine [little] fingers to use it.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhəlm ˈniːtʃə]) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor and aphorism. Nietzsche’s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition, and to a lesser extent in analytic philosophy. His key ideas include the interpretation of tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence (which numerous commentators have re-interpreted), a rejection of Platonism, and a repudiation of both Christianity and egalitarianism (especially in the form of democracy and socialism).

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual ever to have held this position),[1] but resigned in 1879 because of health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of insanity, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.
Nietzsche’s typewriter - a Hansen Writing Ball

1878 model of the Hansen Writing Ball.
In 1881, when he had serious problems with his sight, Nietzsche wanted to buy a typewriter to enable him to continue his writing, and from letters to his sister it is known that he personally was in contact with “the inventor of the typewriter, Mr Malling-Hansen from Copenhagen”. He mentioned to his sister that he had received letters and also a typewritten postcard as an example. Nietzsche received his writing ball in 1882 directly from the inventor in Copenhagen, Denmark, Rasmus Malling-Hansen. It was the newest model, the portable tall one with a color ribbon, serial number 125, and several typescripts are known to have been written by him on this writing ball (approximately 60). It is known that Nietzsche was also familiar with the newest model from E. Remington and Sons (model 2), but he wanted to buy a portable typewriter so he chose to buy the Malling-Hansen writing ball, as this model was lightweight and easy to carry — one might characterize it as the ‘laptop’ of the day. Unfortunately Nietzsche wasn’t totally satisfied with his purchase and never really mastered the use of the instrument. A number of theories have been advanced to explain why Nietzsche did not make more use of it.[80] New research indicates Nietzsche was not aware that his trouble in using the machine had been caused by damage to it during transportation to Genoa in Italy, where he lived at the time.[81] And when he turned to a mechanic who had no typewriter repair skills, the man managed to damage the writing ball even more. Nietzsche claimed that his thoughts were influenced by his use of a typewriter (“Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts”, 1882).[82] As one researcher has noted, “Nietzsche’s interest in rhetoric and his experience of the typewriter framed his understanding of language in a highly symbolic way: the traditions of the philosophy of language versus the scientific and technological conditions of knowledge.”[83] On February 16, 1882 he even made a poem about his writing ball: