Picture yourself as a young ballerina, fresh out of the academy. Your head held high, your posture perfect, you feet turned out just so. The years of training, all those countless hours of acerbic critique, nights spent awake with debilitating foot pain, cold instructor hands twisting your ankle into the correct position on the barre, all those things are falling away behind you like a house of cards. No more Swan Lakes and Nutcrackers. It’s the 70s, you’re Czech, sassy, and your future is bright. So you join the The Ballet Company of the Czechoslovak Television. You’re gonna be famous.
A few months later, thousands watch in awe as you strut your shiny stuff across their TV screens. In your go-go boots, fancy hat, and chic shoulder pads you’re almost unrecognizable, moving in unison with your colleagues, merging into one unified body of DANCE. Now they see you as you truly are.
On a purely philosophical level I have never been down with the title of “Better Than Coffee”, for coffee holds a wondrous and special place in my heart; and anything that might replace coffee as a superior means of jolting me into stubborn wakefulness strikes me as decidedly unpleasant like a cattle prod to the groin, or opening your eyes to a dozen clowns surrounding your bed, leaning over to peer down at you, or looking in the mirror and discovering that sometime, while you slept, you had turned into Ann Coulter. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We are here, so to speak, so we should get this show on the road. Your usual host has come down with gnomes, which is unsurprising considering her current locale. We all warned her that, unlike chicken pox, you don’t get gnomes once and that’s it. Your body develops no tolerance to gnomes. Poor girl didn’t listen.
5 Second Films is a brilliant idea that harks back to the likes of Earnest Hemingway and his famous, six word story “For Sale: Baby Shoes – never used.” born from a society whose attention span has diminished to almost nothing. At a time of the day where my ability to concentrate is on par with my Jack Russell Terrier this sort of delivery is ideal and functions, in a way, to mirror my own creative process, in which I will oftentimes write short, nonsensical stories of no more than a sentence or two for random photographs I find on the internet in order to jump start my brain.
There are a few clunkers here, to be sure, but the ones that work, like “Never Switch a Switcher” are a testament to both brevity, and the hammy overacting that only helps to carry the story. Check out a few more after the jump.
Asgarda. Mountain-dwelling, scythe-wielding Amazonian cult? Paramilitary defenders of Our Dark Lady of the Orange Revolution? Exactly 37 new Asgarda fan clubs will pop up in Japan by the time I finish writing this post, and we still won’t be any closer to knowing who they really are.
Recently, a photo essay on Asgarda by Guillaume Herbaut in Planet Magazine captured imaginations all over the blogosphere. Coverage has ranged from cautious (Xeni: “sounds too awesome to be true in this cold, cruel world”) to shamelessly sensationalistic (English Russia: “A French explorer has found a group of amazons hiding in the woods”). Like most, I want there to be a legendary tribe of ass-kicking warrior princesses living in the mountains of Ukraine. I’m just surprised at how little fact-checking has gone into this tale, across the board. It’s worse than usual. For example, in their original article, Planet Mag writes, “in the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging.” Over at The Frisky,this statement quickly transforms to: “the women have seceded from society because sexual trafficking is rampant in Eastern European countries.” My old journalism professor would’ve pulled out fingernails for that one. On the other hand, there’s been a steady chorus of people calling “fake,” saying that this is a PR stunt for some movie, or that they’re just a bunch of Pennsylvanian LARPers who’ve taken it one step too far. This post is for them, too. Don’t be afraid to believe! Below, my humble attempts to separate the facts from the fiction about this all-female purported warrior tribe.
The photos are real. Herbaut is a gifted photographer who has captured enduring images from Chernobyl, Ciudad Juarez (harrowing & NSFW), the city of Auschwitz as it is today, and Hiroshima. He’s done fashion potraits of “trendy Mollahs” from Iran for Elle, and documented the victims of family vendettas is Albania. His objectivity as a photojournalist when it comes to Asgarda may be up for debate, but the man knows how to tell a story. Sixteen captioned images of Asgarda can be found on his page, under the title “Return of the Amazons.” More photos by Herbaut of Asgarda appear in the series Ukraine’s Cossacks.
Some excellent detective work by Ghoul Next Door has uncovered the origins of this 101-year-old photo. The stunning image was brought to our attention by guest blogger Angeliska, who writes, “I’ve become totally obsessed with this carte de visite depicting Maria Germanova of the Moscow Arts Theatre, costumed for her role [as the fairy] in Blue Bird. She is my perfect style icon, now and forever.”
Unfortunately, the photographs of the actors are all that remain of this 1908 premiere of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, produced by Stanislavsky. A descriptive play-by-play of the performance can be found in the 1920 book The Russian Theater Under the Revolution by Oliver Sayler (thanks, Google book search!), but all other images of this art noveau-inspired production have been lost to time, despite Sayler’s valiant attempts to preserve more for posterity, recounted in the book:
I asked Stanislavsky eagerly for photographs of scenes from “The Blue Bird” or else for the original designs of the scenic artist so that I might have them copied… the photographs, I was told, were not available – except those of the players themselves – for the originals had been made by Fischer, a German, and had been destroyed in the pogrom at the beginning of the war in 1914. And in the difficult times Russia has undergone since then, no others have been made. When I pressed my point and asked about the orignal designs, the firm, square but kindly face of my host carried a passing glance of embarassed modesty and then admitted that there were no designs. He had conceived them himself and had personally directed the artist, V. E. Yevgenoff, in the execution of the settings.
Yep, 1908 is definitely going to the top of my “If I Had a Time Machine” list. Craving more images after discovering Germanova’s fairy, I did a bit of searching on the Russian web and uncovered the images below (from an Ogonyok article about Blue Bird). After the jump, a full-body shot of Germanova looking like a pre-Raphaelite sorceress.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand you’re done. Sitting back in your chair you take in the magnificent sight before you, satisfied that you have accomplished something today. Yep, no one can look at these perfectly symmetrical rows of paper clips, organized by size, and claim that you don’t do anything. No, you are a model of efficiency. Now, no matter what size paper clip a situation might require, you will be able to reach in your drawer and pluck it from it’s resting place, held by the smallest dab of adhesive from your glue stick. Truly this has been a stellar day; but what to do now? Well, why don’t you take a load off and feast your eyes on some toothsome filmage?
Today, the FAM presents master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jō (literally Spider Web Castle) known here as Throne of Blood, a retelling of William Shakespeare’s MacBeth set in feudal Japan, starring the legendary Toshirō Mifune as Washizu Taketoki. Throne of Blood is considered one of Kurasawa’s best films and Mifune gives a standout performance, though his Taketoki comes across as less malevolent than Shakespeare’s MacBeth. An interesting fact to note is that Mifune’s death scene at the end of the film, in which his own archer’s riddle him with arrows, was filmed using real arrows. As he waves his arms in fear he is also signaling to the archers, telling them which direction he is going to move. If you’ve never watched a Kurosawa film, you owe it to yourself to take a look, it’s a brilliant piece of cinema from a man who made a career of producing some of the finest movies from Japan, or anywhere else for that matter.
MMMNNGGHPH. Browns, why must you insist upon torturing a grubby, low-rent gal like me with that ridiculous price tag?!
Related anecdote: A snarky acquaintance of mine back in NYC used to enjoy cornering club-going trustifarians who dared to don the “Unknown Pleasures” tee and making them squirm by demanding that they explain the image they were wearing. If their answer wasn’t knowledgeable enough to his liking, he’d trap them against the DJ booth and deliver lengthy lectures on pulsar theory, the film Stroszeck, or cocaine-in-a-condom drug mule death statistics.
This has been on the web for a couple of weeks but it bears mention here. “COMBO” is the newest animated graffiti film from Blu, capsule whose previous work “MUTO” became a YouTube sensation. This time he has collaborated with fellow artist David Ellis. There is something really fantastic about these films taking, salve as they do, shop traditional street art and, with the help of some video-assisted time manipulation, using it to create cartoons; treating buildings and courtyards as animation cels.
