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Watch war criminal Donald Rumsfeld being heckled by protesters during today's Congressional hearing. Pretty gratifying.
Opie - Our Greatest Installation Artist
Screen grabs from Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind. In the depths of paranoid schizophrenia, mathematician Russell Crowe sees patterns in newspaper and magazine clippings and sets out to "break the code." Twice (that we see) he fills a room with printed matter and scrawls numbers and diagrams all over everything--above is the second episode, in the tool shed. Of course, the art world is full of people doing this kind of thing, from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg to Thomas Hirschhorn (see below). Director Howard hired some pretty good people to channel this activity as simulated madness. Instead of the Modernist paradigm of "artists taking inspiration from the insane" this is the reverse process, sort of, bringing the visual vocabulary of the art elite (Hirschhorn at Barbara Gladstone) to a mass audience. Hence, the title of this post.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Plan Moi
From ionarts:
Twice in [Kill Bill: Vol. 2] characters use the phrase "coup de grâce" but pronounce it without the final S sound ("coup de gra"): in French, that would give you the phrase "coup de gras" (S not pronounced), which I guess is the heart attack one would get from eating too much triple-cream St. André (a "blow of fat").I also learned that Tarantino thinks Gibson's Passion "is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I've seen since the talkies—as far as telling a story via pictures." I agree with ionarts' Charles T. Downey that Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was better than 2 (except for that turgid anime), but it's a moot point because they now begin their life as a single film. Will they be watchable in one sitting as a DVD? Or will all the yacking in Vol. 2 grow tedious, as the spectacular Crazy 88 sequence recedes in memory? I went to see Vol. 1 twice (mostly for the densely-layered music) but haven't felt the urge with Vol. 2, much as I enjoyed it.