Zürich, Switzerland
I heard from Reto Carduff of PiXiU films this week about the soon-to-be-released movie on the great graphic designer Herbert Matter… I’m very much looking forward to seeing it when it launches in early 2010.
See more of the inspiring collage work (like the poster above) of Cristiana Couceiro here.
(Thanks Matt!)
Warsaw, Poland
Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980, aka Maria Gorska) was a Polish painter known for the “soft cubism” by which she epitomized the sensual side of the Art Deco movement (her renderings of stylishly sexy, bedroom-eyed women remain unmatched to this day). Tamara attended boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland before moving to St. Petersburg, Russia (where she experienced the Bolshevik Revolution)— then on to her own bohemian twenties in Paris during the Roaring 20s, where she quickly became the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation (especially among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy who both criticized and admired her “perverse Ingrism.”)
Images above: Lempicka’s iconic Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti and Saint Moritz from 1929, Young Lady with Gloves from 1930, and The Refugees from 1931 (drawn from an impressive online collection of 149 works, here).
Be present. I would encourage you with all my heart—just to be present. Be present and open to the moment that is unfolding before you. Because, ultimately, your life is made of moments. So don’t miss them by being lost in the past or anticipating the future.
Don’t be absent from your own life. You will find that life is not governed by will or intention. It is ultimately the collection of these sense memories stored in our nerves, built up in our cells. Simple things: a certain slant of light coming through a window on a winter’s afternoon. The sound of spring peepers at twilight. The taste of a strawberry still warm from the sun. Your child’s laughter. Your mother’s voice.
—Jessica Lange’s 2008 commencement address to the graduates of Sarah Lawrence College
(photo: Ernest Hemingway kicks a can…)
Silver Spring, Maryland
Born in Cork, Ireland in the 1830s, the prominent socialist and community organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones lost her husband and four children to a yellow fever epidemic in Tennessee in 1867, and then lost her home in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She then spent the rest of her life fighting for worker’s rights as an activist and tireless labor organizer.
Frequently imprisoned for subversive speech and inciting “riots,” Mother Jones was hailed by her critics as the “most dangerous woman in America” and was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as “the grandmother of all agitators,” a moniker she seemed to favour—the feisty matriarch also liked to refer to herself as a “hellraiser.”
Since 1976, her name has graced the masthead of the award-winning magazine Mother Jones, known for its independent stance and investigative reporting. You can listen to The Autobiography of Mother Jones on LibriVox, here.
Image: a portrait of Mother Jones by Robert Shetterly from his series Americans Who Tell The Truth.
“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France
Philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—his massive volume Essais (translated literally as “Attempts”) contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written.
Montaigne’s humanist traits evolved as a direct result of his early education (and in spite of having been born into wealth and privilege). Soon after his birth, he was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, “in order to,” according to his father, “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help.” Following these first spartan years, he was brought back to the family Château where he was taught Latin as his first language, accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation (he was apparently familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than books).
In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author—eventually, however, he would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?) and remains remarkably modern even to readers today.
Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, including Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Isaac Asimov, Eric Hoffer, and possibly even William Shakespeare. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling.
A few of the (many) lines of profundity and wisdom he left us:
+ + +
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare,
and I dare a little more as I grow older.
My trade and art is to live.
The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.
A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
The clatter of arms drowns the voice of law.
Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs.
And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
A straight oar looks bent in the water.
What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
No man is a hero to his own valet.
Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command
shows that his reason is weak.
How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith
which today we tell as fables.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat
as your cat knows about you.
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not
amusing herself with me more than I with her.
It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
We can be knowledgable with other men’s knowledge
but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.
Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in,
and those inside equally desperate to get out.
There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.*
+ + +
*Might Montaigne perchance be referring to blogs and bloggers here? :-/
East Berlin, the 1950s…
Some remarkably frugal examples of industrial design from (the former) East Germany… many more here in a nice Flickr set of pics taken by Bruce Sterling at the Gogbot Festival, Eschede, Netherlands (from a show curated by critic Günter Höhne).
Not much frivolity or filigree on display here—no doubt once again there’s a case to be made for “less is more.” (These really take me back to growing up in [the capitalist West] Germany as a kid in the 1950s—primary difference being, products available to us were occasionally available in colours other than grey or khaki).
Thanks to photographer friend Ian McCausland for the link.
