Crianças: aproveitem enquanto podem!! Na vida adulta isto é um luxo...

Força Interior

“Nem sempre a fraqueza que se sente quer dizer que não se é forte”.

Gabriel Pensador

Each month has its beauty ... Let's seize it!

Each month has its beauty ... Let's seize it! More important, seize the day!!...

Exposição "NonBiennale"_Carolina Quirino - 15 Out. 2011 / 8 Jan. 2012

NonBiennale - 15 Out. 2011 / 8 Jan. 2012_Exposição online

http://www.webartcenter.org/nonbiennale/non_exhibition/carolina_quirino.html

Another World(s), Photography, 2011

E & T & C & C

Dance scene_Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard)

Dance scene_Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard_1964). Odile, Arthur and Franz.

Geez!! What a voice...words...and feelings!! - Adele

Rolling in the Deep - Adele

Someone Like You - Adele

" 'The Tree of Life': Great Events and Ordinary People" by Adrian Martin

Grand Prix 2011 "The Tree of Life": Great Events and Ordinary People By Adrian Martin Cinema cannot escape its essence. It can achieve the eternal only by unreservedly searching for it in the exactitude of the instant. (André Bazin, April 15, 1944) Why should we be so scared of a cosmic or cosmological ambition in cinema? It has always been part of the potential — and destiny — of film to mix the smallest with the largest, the immediate everyday with the longue durée of grand history, the microscopic with the macroscopic. This drive has most often expressed itself — as in Murnau or Dovzhenko — in terms of an interplay between human affairs and the natural world: a meteorology of the emotions, a vast swirl of events grand and miniscule happening simultaneously but in different time-zones (temporalities, as we say today), at different speeds, projecting different worlds. Charles Laughton's sublime The Night of the Hunter (1955) — a film much admired by Terrence Malick, I gather — gives us an immortal image-thought about this, in its juxtaposition (within a single, magically tricked-up frame) of the two children floating down a river, escaping a malign destiny, and the frogs, owls and rabbits inhabiting the bank. Robert Bresson gave the image another, grimier kind of resolution in The Devil, Probably (1976), in which found footage of the planets (taken from experimental cinema) mixed with the barren lives of lost, beautiful teenagers. Jean Luc-Godard, especially in his work of the 1980s and '90s like Hail Mary (1985) and Puissance de la parole (1988) enthusiastically articulated and explored the micro/macro relation. Stan Brakhage (an enormous admirer of Malick) tackled it all in Dog Star Man and many other works; the avant-garde has frequently gravitated to it. Today, this ambition to mix the great events of the cosmos (or often large-scale History) with the everyday lives or ordinary people is everywhere in cinema. Sometimes the result has an avowed religious aura, and sometimes it does not — and the slippery zone of ambiguity between these two options on screen is what makes some of these films so captivating and intriguing, as it did decades ago in the work of Dreyer and what Jonathan Rosenbaum called his 'cinema of doubt' (in which there were, nonetheless, miracles). We find the trace of all this, in various ways and at various levels, in Bruno Dumont's Outside Satan, in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, in Patricio Guzman's Waiting for the Light, even in Mysteries of Lisbon by the much-mourned Raúl Ruiz. The Tree of Life is a veritable meteor in the sky of contemporary filmmaking. Many of the negative comments made about in the already thousands of pages devoted to it in print and on-line — alongside the often equally inarticulate reams of praise — are deadeningly normative. You just can't do that in a film, they cry! Do what? Mix the grand frame with the miniature vignette, the birth of the world with the birth of a child, the eons of time that attach to a scale of material becoming with the human time that attaches to the generations of a family. Mix the impersonal emanations of light and atoms with the painfully personal (indeed, nakedly autobiographical) fluctuations of feeling between three brothers and their parents in a house. Mix the historic dinosaurs with the toys and the lamps and the storybooks. Those dinosaurs. If you can't go with the dinosaurs, The Tree of Life is lost to you as an experience. Let's get this straight, right here and now. The scene is fantastic, and presents the entire movie (or at least the strata of it relating to interpersonal, intersubjective experience) in a microcosmic nutshell — here, more than even in Days of Heaven, Malick manages to make each fragment of the work a total encapsulation, a reflection or refraction or recreation of the whole. What do we see? A dinosaur, seeming pretty sure of itself, plods along until it sees a smaller, obviously weaker creature lying down. What does it do, what is its reflex? It stomps on the neighbour, his foot to its head! Then takes the foot away, but keeps it hovering. Some movement from the poor creature below. More gently — but still definitely — the foot gets put back on the head. Then, even more gently removed. It's established, finally: no real threat in this 'first contact' (we're back to The New World …), this encounter. The bigger dinosaur goes on its way. All interactions in the film rather like that: apprehension, doubt, fear, the ever-present hint or threat of violence; as well as some tenderness, consideration, maybe even compassion. Has this got anything much to do with a God, a deity of any kind watching over and planning out the moves? Not really. As has been observed, Malick has made a timely film that appears to bring both the wondrous 'first moment' of Creationism together with the wayward, hands-off, unregulated path of Evolution. Logic and Chaos combined. Because in Malick's universe, as in the philosophy of Simone Weil, a God may be in the deep background somewhere but he is a long, long way off, and not intervening at all. Not answering our prayers. And all we have in the Here and Now — which stretches to Infinity — is a cycle of suffering, inexplicable suffering. There are pockets of ambiguity in the telling of The Tree of Life that catch up its viewers and reviewers in intriguing ways (the same thing happens with Claire Denis' films). Like with the put-upon soldiers in The Thin Red Line, it's not always easy to tell who is who, whose voice we are hearing on the soundtrack, or be able to tell near look-alikes apart. That kid who dies swimming, is he one of the central three brothers? I immediately found myself straining to catch a glimpse of all three of them alive again, as the shots and the bodies flew past me. A terror or dread in this, which unfolds from end of the film to the other. And likewise, ambiguities in the shuffling of chronology, and in the quite frequent recourse to imaginary, dream-like images — visions of the purely possible (mother floating, boy in an open grave, a chair moving, the house full of water … ). Near the start, tragic news is delivered: the death of a beloved son. Then we go back and, for a long time, on my first viewing, I figured it was the particularly sullen kid, so prone to bad moods and inchoate rages, who was the one marked for death. Wrong. The mark of death, in the universe of this Distant God, hovers over all of us and picks its victims with a randomness that will never make any good sense. And most of the religious talk we hear snatches of in the film (church scenes, sermons, platitudes of faith and belief) is just the sum of what distracts us from this senselessness. Forget the 'way of grace and the way of nature'; Malick's films have always erected such binary categories only to demolish them, confound them, reveal their subterranean connections and complex interrelationships. The Tree of Life is about what the great filmmaker Ken Jacobs once called the 'mystery of personality': why does one person pull through the endless hard times that a lousy world bequeaths us while his/her brother or neighbour or best friend does not? Anyone — and not the one you necessarily expect — can take a wrong turn in this film, a swirl or an eddy amidst all those cosmic waves, be transformed by a mood, by a 'bad thought'. A Spinoza-ist film in this sense, like those of Philippe Grandrieux. Incredible scene of the father and son finding their way to playing music together, a simple but lovely piano and guitar duet — but then the brooding brother, off to the side in the yard, excluded from the rapture. Moments of illumination can come, too, fleetingly, when it is least expected: out of nowhere — and epiphanies are always like this in Malick's cinema, never signalled or underlined or prepared for, easy to miss, in fact — the father speaks in his voice-over of having dishonoured it all, missed the glory … A lot of normative nonsense is declared about how the characters here lack detailed, three-dimensional psychology, how their rapport is as facile, stereotypical and predictable as in The Great Santini or somesuch. But films don't need those kinds of characters: not Malick films, anyhow. All that's required — it has been enough for Godard, Tarr, Carax, Bartas, Ferrara, Jancsó and so many others — is that a character be a figure and that the actor have some presence. Meaning: their role is, from the outset, known, a repetition, a type, an icon ('father, brother, mother': we hear this litany of names and roles frequently in Malick). Meaning: what the living performer brings to it, in contact with all the material properties of film on the move, is a constant transformation, constant metamorphosis. Who needs psychological backstory when you're so close to the raw affects of solitude, of pain, of desire? In this first Malick film to offer any kind of conscious, anthological recapitulation of his past work, there is the scene — the scene of first love, first desire, between boy and girl in the classroom — that takes us right back to Kit and Holly in the leafy, wide, suburban street in Badlands: always, Malick starts from what is larger than real life, 'eternal' in Bazin's sense, in order to immediately plunge right down into the tiniest world of sensations, of moment-to-moment identity-change. And The Tree of Life comes further into this realm of the microcosmic self than he has ever dared go before. The more I watch The Tree of Life, the more I am astounded by its tightly woven, poetic structure. It's an utterly free but also extremely controlled film. Poesis in cinema is not a matter of tasteful music selections or pretty cinematography (to which some have regularly tried to reduce Malick's work — too pretty by half, and what a mix-tape of modern classics!). Beyond the metaphors and symbols that act, here and there, as familiar anchors — birds in the sky, open doorways in a landscape, water, air — there is all the more elusive stuff. This is an astonishingly rapid film, never lingering, flying on and past so many years, so many feelings, so much experience. It takes on an entire developmental gamut from birth to adulthood, with every pot-hole in-between delicately mined. The enigma of the Other and the motif of Encounter, for example — as announced in the dinosaur scene — takes on many shapes and variations, from bewilderment to brotherly trust, from murderous or just plain callous cruelty (put your finger in this electric socket, or against the tip of my air gun) through to the disconcerting, social experience of the crippled or the dispossessed out along the town's main strip. I have heard and read many engaging, inventive attempts to say what The Tree of Life is fundamentally 'about' — not like a secret to be uncovered, more like a guiding thread to be discovered, somewhere in the weave. Curious details insist, and differently so on each new viewing, as if a slight alteration in one's own angle changes the perception of the whole (how the word 'experiment' comes up twice, in two different time-slices, for instance). It is (for instance) a film about running, about movement: Murnau with a Steadycam. It is a film about a house, or rather the metamorphosis of a house (a home) into many houses: filled, emptied, packed up, left behind, refilled, remade. Precisely the film of a domestic, familial interior that, so far, Malick has resisted shooting in his career, perhaps because (as Neil Young sang in 'Helpless') "all my changes were there".  Every individual open to the film finds — often in a delighted shock — some miniscule detail directly from their own young lives (for me, it's when Dad at the dinner table asks: "And what have you learnt today, my fine-feathered friend?"). What joy in the scene when the kids — suddenly free of the crankiness and forbidding ways of the Father — tear loose and run wildly from room to room, slamming doors, bringing in lizards, roping their mother (despite her civilised reluctance) into the infectious sense of abandon. Again, the whole film is summarised there, just as it everywhere: the superb editing that whisks us into and out of gestures and movements with hardly a second to register them, the overlay of Couperin's 'Les Barricades Mistérieuses', the physical improvisation (how many superbly unreadable gestures there are in this film, as if little Edmund from Germany, Year Zero had been resurrected, or indeed never died, and remained an inscrutable, solemn child, playing in the ruins, eternally). It's curious to me that some champions of the film try to tie it down to a schematic, reductive kind of sense, shape or form: it's all inside a guy's head, cosmic visions and all! Actually, there are clues to that feed such an interpretation (just as there is some evidence for the film being a kind of Owl Creek all-life-rushing-past-at-the moment-of-death vision), especially when a boy asks his mother something like: "Tell us a story of from before we can remember" – and, of course, The Tree of Life, in its totality, is something like that very story, a tale of origins and the effects spiralling out of from every small existence (the Butterfly Effect!). But why do we need such a frame to rein the film in and explain it? Movies should be made to get us out of heads (especially our own), not lock us inside one. Or, better: films should dwell and dance in what Raymond Bellour called (his example was Ritwik Ghatak, another micro-macro artist) the "ever-tested limit, so difficult to touch, between interior and exterior, realist image and mental image, perception and hallucination". Most articles on Malick (mine included) like to heavy-hit from the outset with a prefatory nod to a Great and Deep Philosopher: Heidegger, Plato, Weil, Cavell … Yet, while we know that Malick has swam in these waters, I wonder whether, with the years, he has also worked (this is pure speculation) to divest himself of some good deal of this apparatus of learning, this cultural and intellectual sophistication. In any rare report of public speech, he only wants to talk innocence, freshness, spontaneity, childhood perception. Like Brakhage or Grandrieux again: Eden before the animals were named, before our adult identities are fixed, badly congealed, inescapably neurotic. It is like reading Daniel Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant, with its system of 'emergent senses of self' all co-existing in the same growing child, and lurking around forever despite our best efforts at erasure and repression: those superimposed selves takes in the most abstract rushes and washes of affect all the way to the most powerfully symbolised moments of ethical choice and destiny-formation. Malick, it seems, always has a plan (some kind of launch-pad script) but the plan flies off. Like Wong Kar-wai he (as Cronenberg's composer Howard Shore once described the process) 'starts wide', explores all possibilities, then contracts, filters, shapes. It is as noble as any other way of working, and riskier than most of them. Industry-norm types like to mock directors who hack out whole streams of material in this manner or produce multiple cuts: they just don't know what they're after, what a waste of resources! But I like it that Malick names his film after a Miltonic Tree of Life that we see planted by Dad when one of his children is young (classic set-up for a Kazanian developmental narrative: A Tree Grows in Waco), but (as far as I've noticed) we never return to — just as Sean Penn's character's apparently crumbling marriage is no more than a bitter bedroom glance and a postural lassitude of the body. But why linger? The Mother-figure in Anne-Marie Miéville's twin-film to Hail Mary, Le Livre de Marie, said it well: "When a thing stops moving, it's dead". Adrian Martin © FIPRESCI September 2011 IN: Fipresci - Home Awards - Grand Prix,  http://fipresci.org/awards/texts/gp11_malick_amartin.htm

Creed - Don't Stop Dancing

Art Clokey's 90th Birthday

‘Gumby’ creator Art Clokey, dead at 88, had an especially animated life

 

Art Clokey, the creator of the whimsical clay figure Gumby, died in his sleep Friday at his home in Los Osos, Calif., after battling repeated bladder infections, his son Joseph said. He was 88. (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 09, 2010)

Clokey and his wife, Ruth, invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art had finished film school at USC. After a successful debut on “The Howdy Doody Show,” Gumby soon became the star of its own hit television show, “The Adventures of Gumby,” the first to use clay animation on television.

(Here’s some video from the 1960s version of “Gumby”…)

After an initial run in the 1950s, Gumby enjoyed comebacks in the 1960s as a bendable children’s toy, in the 1980s after comedian Eddie Murphy parodied the kindly Gumby as a crass, cigar-in-the-mouth character in a skit for “Saturday Night Live” and again in the ’90s with the release of “Gumby the Movie.”

Today, Gumby is a cultural icon recognized around the world. It has more than 134,000 fans on Facebook. As successive generations discovered the curious green character, Gumby’s success came to define Clokey’s life, with its theme song reflecting Clokey’s simple message of love: “If you’ve got a heart, then Gumby’s a part of you.”

“The fact is that most people don’t know his name, but everybody knows Gumby,” said friend and animator David Scheve. “To have your life work touch so many people around the world is an amazing thing.”

 

Clokey was born Arthur Farrington in Detroit in October 1921 and grew up making mud figures on his grandparents’ Michigan farm. “He always had this in him,” his son, Joseph, recalled Friday.

At age 8, Clokey’s life took a tragic turn when his father was killed in a car accident soon after his parents divorced. The unusual shape of Gumby’s head would eventually be modeled after one of the few surviving photos of Clokey’s father, which shows him with a large wave of hair protruding from the right side of his head.

After moving to California, Clokey was abandoned by his mother and her new husband and lived in a halfway house near Hollywood until age 11, when he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey. The renowned music teacher and composer at Pomona College taught him to draw, paint and shoot film and took him on journeys to Mexico and Canada. Art Clokey attended the Webb School in Claremont, whose annual fossil hunting expeditions also inspired a taste for adventure that stayed with him. “That’s why ‘The Adventures of Gumby’ were so adventurous,” his son said.

Clokey served in World War II, conducting photo reconnaissance over North Africa and France. Back in Hartford, Conn., after the war, he was studying to be an Episcopal minister when he met Ruth Parkander, the daughter of a minister. The two married and moved to California to pursue their true passion: filmmaking.

During the day, the Clokeys taught at the Harvard School for Boys in Studio City, now Harvard-Westlake. At night, Art Clokey studied film at USC under Slavko Vorkapich, a pioneer of modern montage techniques.

Clokey’s 1953 experimental film, “Gumbasia,” used stop-motion clay animation set to a lively jazz tempo. It became the inspiration for the subsequent Gumby TV show when Sam Engel, the president of 20th Century Fox and father of one of Clokey’s students, saw the film and asked Clokey to produce a children’s television show based on the idea.

In the 1960s, Clokey created and produced the Christian TV series “Davey and Goliath” and the credits for several feature films, including “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”

Gumby’s ability to enchant generations of children and adults had a mystical quality to it, said his son, and reflected his father’s spiritual quest. In the 1970s, Clokey studied Zen Buddhism, traveled to India to study with gurus and experimented with LSD and other drugs, though all of that came long after the creation of Gumby, his son said.

His second wife, Gloria, whom he married in 1976, was art director on Gumby projects in the 1980s and ’90s. She died in 1998. Besides his son Joseph, Clokey is survived by his stepdaughter, Holly Harman of Mendocino County; three grandchildren, Shasta, Sequoia and Sage Clokey; his sister, Arlene Cline of Phoenix; and his half-sister, Patricia Anderson of Atlanta.

Instead of flowers, the family suggests contributions in Gumby’s name to the Natural Resources Defense Council, of which Art Clokey was a longtime member. “Gumby was green because my dad cared about the environment,” his son said.

– Jason Felch

RECENT AND RELATED

The 15 geatest green characters: Where does Gumby rank?

Lloyd: Why”Gumby” is still special (and scary)

Gumby and greening of pop culture

ELSEWHERE: The official “Gumby” website

Gumby, wih his Maine-shaped head, endures

Photos: Top, Art Clokey gets a leg up on Gumby in a 1995 photo (Lacy Atkins/Associated Press). Middle, Gumby and his creator in 1985 (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)

In: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/01/09/art-clokey-the-creator-of-the-whimsical-clay-figure-gumby-died-in-his-sleep-friday-at-his-home-in-los-osos-calif-after-b/ 

Also see: http://www.premavision.com/

Alexander McQueen

A must see... Stunning!!_"Your pictures: Gardens"

Stunning photo album!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-15167092 :

and more!!!!

Steve Jobs, Apple 'visionary', dies aged 56... RIP Steve Jobs...

Steve Jobs, Apple 'visionary', dies aged 56_ October 5, 2011


BBC News US & Canada, 6 October 2011 Last updated at 11:59 GMT

Jobs introduced the iPod and the iPhone to the world

Steve Jobs

• What made Jobs unique?
• Obituary: Steve Jobs
• Jobs: In his own words
• Flowers and eulogies in London

Steve Jobs, co-founder and former chief executive of US technology giant Apple, has died at the age of 56.

Apple said he had been "the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives" and had made the world "immeasurably better".

Mr Jobs had announced he was suffering from pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Tributes have been made by technology company bosses and world leaders, with US President Barack Obama saying the world had "lost a visionary".

"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it," said Mr Obama.

A statement from Mr Jobs's family said they were with him when he died peacefully on Wednesday.

Continue reading the main story

• In pictures: Apple fans mourn Jobs
• Can Apple stay ahead without Jobs at its core?
• Steve Jobs: Photos of your tributes

"In his public life, Steve was known as a visionary; in his private life, he cherished his family," they said, requesting privacy and thanking those who had "shared their wishes and prayers" during his final year.

Apple said the company had "lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being".

Tim Cook, who was made Apple's CEO after Mr Jobs stood down in August, said his predecessor had left behind "a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple".

Flags are being flown at half mast outside the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, while fans of the company have left tributes outside Apple shops around the world.

"What he's done for us as a culture, it resonates uniquely in every person," said Cory Moll, an Apple employee in San Francisco.

"Even if they never use an Apple product, the impact they have had is so far-reaching."

At the company's Shanghai shop, customer Jin Yi said Mr Jobs had created gadgets which had "changed people's perceptions of machines".

Rivals' tributes

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will remember Mr Jobs for "knowing what made sense in a product"

The heads of other leading technology companies have also paid tribute, including Microsoft boss Bill Gates, who said Mr Jobs's "profound impact" on the world of technology would "be felt for many generations to come".

"For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honour. I will miss Steve immensely."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thanks Mr Jobs for "showing that what you build can change the world" while Sony Corp president and CEO Howard Stringer said: "The digital age has lost its leading light."

South Korea's Samsung, which is involved in an ongoing legal battle with Apple over patents, praised Mr Jobs for his "numerous revolutionary changes to the information technology industry".

Continue reading the main story

At the scene

Tom Burridge BBC News, Apple HQ, Cupertino, California

On the pavements outside the main Apple offices is a small, simple but very effective memorial to Steve Jobs - just like many of the products he designed.
"Jobs" - spelt out in small tea light candles alongside the Chinese symbol for Steve - and then the Apple logo. And inside the candlelit design, an iPad with Steve Jobs's photo on the screen.
Late into the night in America's Silicon Valley they are still arriving to take photos, lay candles and messages. One former employee described Steve Jobs as the John Lennon of technology. Another Taiwanese-born resident of Cupertino who has never bought an Apple product said he came down to pay respects to a man who changed the world.

"His innovative spirit and remarkable accomplishments will forever be remembered by people around the world," said chief executive officer Choi Gee-Sung.

Mr Jobs built a reputation as a forthright and demanding leader who could take niche technologies - such as the mouse and graphical user interface, using onscreen icons rather than text - and make them popular with the general public.

He introduced the colourful iMac computer, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad to the world. His death came just a day after Apple unveiled its latest iPhone 4S model.

With a market value estimated at $351bn (£227bn), Apple became the world's most valuable technology company.

'Face of Apple'

More than almost any other business leader, Mr Jobs was indistinguishable from his company, which he co-founded in the 1970s.

Continue reading the main story

Life of Steve Jobs

• Born in San Francisco in Feb 1955 to students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali - adopted by a Californian working class couple
• Had a summer job at Hewlett-Packard while at school - later worked at Atari
• Dropped out of college after six months and went travelling in India, where he became a Buddhist
• Launched Apple with school friend Steve Wozniak in 1976 - first Apple computer sold the same year
• Left Apple amid disputes in 1985 but returned in 1996 and became CEO in 1997
• Bought Pixar animation company in 1986 for $10m
• Married in a Buddhist ceremony in 1991 - has three children with his wife and a daughter from a previous relationship
• Had a personal wealth estimated at $8.3bn (£5.4bn) in 2010
• Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, and after three periods of sickness leave, resigns as Apple CEO in August 2011

• Obituary: Steve Jobs
• Career in pictures

As the face of Apple, he represented its dedication to high-end technology and fashionable design. And inside the company he exerted a level of influence unheard of in most businesses. In 2004, Mr Jobs announced that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. He had a liver transplant five years later. In January, he took medical leave, before resigning as CEO in August and handing over his duties to Mr Cook. In his resignation letter, Mr Jobs said: "I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role." However, Mr Jobs stayed on as Apple's chairman. Despite his high profile, he remained fiercely protective of his private life. He married his wife Laurene in 1991, and the couple had three children. Mr Jobs also leaves a daughter from a previous relationship, and as an adult he discovered that he had a biological sister, US novelist Mona Simpson.

Ron Mueck

on Mueck is an Australian sculptor who also utilize hyperrealist film special effects to create works of art. They are incredibly realistic, and if not the size of the sculptures would be easy to confuse them with people. Although highly detailed, these objects were often designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. However, Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures, perfect from every angle.

In 2002 his sculpture Pregnant Woman, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $ 800,000. Mueck was born in 1958 and grew up watching his parents build toys.

Aprender a viver - "Aprenda como se fosse viver para sempre. Viva como se fosse morrer amanhã." Gandhi

Aprender a viver - "Aprenda como se fosse viver para sempre. Viva como se fosse morrer amanhã."

Mahatma Gandhi

"The Big Group" - um grupo de amigos que me é muito querido... Bali, 2011

Ketut, Hassam, Luís Miguel (!) e Kadec. Gonçalo Costa, Madé, Filipa (!), Carolina Quirino, Ana Maria, Joana Quirino, Diana Costa, Joana Santiago, Pedro Gaspar, Lili Costa, Zé Costa e António Manuel 

Amei!!!! Obrigada amigos...

Villa Tugah, Bali, Indonesia, Setembro 2011

25 September 2011

Women in Saudi Arabia to vote and run in elections

Saudi women face severe restrictions in their working and personal lives

Related Stories

• Saudi woman in driving seat
• Saudi woman contests guardianship
• Saudi women turn to social media

Women in Saudi Arabia are to be given the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, King Abdullah has announced.

He said they would also have the right to be appointed to the consultative Shura Council.

The move was welcomed by activists who have called for greater rights for women in the kingdom, which enforces a strict version of Sunni Islamic law.

The changes will occur after municipal polls on Thursday, the king said.

King Abdullah announced the move in a speech at the opening of the new term of the Shura Council - the formal body advising the king, whose members are all appointed.

"Because we refuse to marginalise women in society in all roles that comply with sharia, we have decided, after deliberation with our senior clerics and others... to involve women in the Shura Council as members, starting from next term," he said.

"Women will be able to run as candidates in the municipal election and will even have a right to vote."

Cautious reformer

Continue reading the main story

Analysis

Emily Buchanan BBC world affairs correspondent

Saudi Arabia is a conservative society which has been inching towards reform under the leadership of King Abdullah, himself a reformist.
About 10 years ago the king said women should be central to the Saudi economy. Since then, change has been gradual for fear of a religious backlash.
Steps have been taken to reduce segregation and give more respect to women. Now, allowing women to stand and vote in municipal elections is a big step towards political reform, even though the municipal councils have very little power.
The right for women to join the all- male Shura Council could turn out to be even more significant as it is the most influential political body in the country.

The BBC's world affairs correspondent Emily Buchanan says it is an extraordinary development for women in Saudi Arabia, who are not allowed to drive, or to leave the country unaccompanied.

She says there has been a big debate about the role of women in the kingdom and, although not everyone will welcome the decision, such a reform will ease some of the tension that has been growing over the issue.

Saudi writer Nimah Ismail Nawwab told the BBC: "This is something we have long waited for and long worked towards."

She said activists had been campaigning for 20 years on driving, guardianship and voting issues.

Another campaigner, Wajeha al-Huwaider, said the king's announcement was "great news".

"Now it is time to remove other barriers like not allowing women to drive cars and not being able to function, to live a normal life without male guardians," she told Reuters news agency.

Correspondents say King Abdullah has been cautiously pressing for political reforms, but in a country where conservative clerics and some members of the royal family resist change, liberalisation has been very gradual.

In May more than 60 intellectuals called for a boycott of Thursday's ballot saying "municipal councils lack the authority to effectively carry out their role".

Municipal elections are the only public polls in Saudi Arabia.

More than 5,000 men will compete in municipal elections on Thursday - the second-ever in the kingdom - to fill half the seats in local councils. The other half are appointed by the government.

The next municipal elections are due in four years' time.

"WOMEN in Saudi Arabia to vote and run in elections", in BBC News Middle East, 25 September 2011, 15:12. In http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15052030.

Bagoooooooose!!!!.....Bali

Sunset in Ku De Ta, Bali, Indonesia, 15th September 2011

I'll be back soon...

One day I'll try this...

Seize the day...

"A Ghost at Noon" by Adrian Martin

Raúl Ruiz died this week. Adrian Martin has written a personal, moving and illuminating tribute to him -- a 2,500-word piece that I'm posting below. Please also see Catherine Grant's large post of links on Ruiz's work at Film Studies for Free. Your thoughts on Ruiz's films -- and your favorites among his work? Please feel free to share them in the comments. -- Girish.

* * *

A GHOST AT NOON

"I try to remember that disparity exists. And that is a good way to remember death. Then death becomes something completely other than accommodating or resigning oneself to dying, something other than melancholia. On the contrary, it becomes a ‘working tool’."

- Raúl Ruiz, 1987

In the magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon (2011) – which is not, in fact, Raúl Ruiz’s final film (he subsequently shot La noche de enfrente in Chile), even if it is, happily, one of his most internationally successful – there is a scene in which the mysterious priest of the saga (superbly played by Adriano Luz) enters a private room in which we see, neatly arranged, the traces of all his other, previous identities. They are more than just disguises or costumes; they are his other selves. Ruiz’s camera makes a slow, elegant pan around this small, confined space of intrigue, coming to rest on the diminutive Father Dinis, simply reflecting, absorbing all these signs of the labyrinthine fiction of suffering and woe to which he has been a party, both player and puppet. It’s the kind of moment that – as in every great film – you don’t necessarily really see or take in on a first viewing, or even fifth viewing; but it’s there, waiting for you to catch up with it at last.

Another of the best Ruiz films, in my devoted opinion, is Three Lives and Only One Death(1996). It is among the many he made that reflect (in so many allegorical and metaphorical ways) on mortality. The movie seems to mark a somber limit: after living so many parallel lives, so many second chances, so many imaginary identities – each one spinning out its own world or universe – the main character (Marcello Mastroianni) discovers, as we discover, that the proliferating game comes to halt with the full stop of the mortal sentence: there is only one death and, beyond that, nothing (I believe Ruiz remained an atheist his entire life). But, in the immediate wake of the announcement of the director’s own passing at the age of 70, someone on Facebook turned this title around in a pleasing, triumphant way: one death, but so many lives.

And Ruiz did indeed lead so many lives, progressively as well as simultaneously. An astonishingly prolific artist who was unafraid to grab any production opportunity, no matter how small (“Give me ten thousand dollars or ten million dollars”, he once joked, “nothing in-between”), his career went through many phases. Although some commentators (including passionate supporters) tended to reduce every one of his works to the same ‘Ruizian’ wash of zany angles, coloured filters and narrative illogicalities – how he must have grown weary of that appellation, as Welles grew tired of Wellesian or Antonioni of Antonioniesque! – there are important differences, in scale, medium, strategy and level of achievement, between his very diverse productions. (He also disliked, by the way, the inevitable Frenchification of his Chilean first name into ‘Raoul’ – something I wish the New York Times and many French commentators had gotten up to speed with by now.)

I won’t attempt a synoptic sweep of his full career here – that will require a hefty book or three. Some highpoints that come immediately to mind, however: the first films made in Chile, 1960-1973, full of treasures unknown to many of us, such as No One Said Anything (1971) and Socialist Realism (1973) – what a blast, three years ago, to see in Valdivia the discovered and restored (by Ruiz himself, with a mouth-music sound accompaniment) inaugural short, La Maleta (The Suitcase, 1960). The wayward-lurchingLos Tres Tristes Tigres (1968), a hyper-realist bourgeois drama already way out the other side of Cassavetes, Dogme and Mumblecore combined – arch-surrealist Ado Kyrou knew the spark of genius straight away when he saw that one, just as Serge Daney would, four or five years later, when Raúl and his wife, director-editor Valeria Sarmiento, had hastily relocated in France in exile from the dire political situation in Chile.

This begins the period via which most of us encountered Ruiz in the English-speaking world, usually belatedly: from Suspended Vocation (1977) and Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) through to The Roof of the Whale (1981) and City of Pirates (1983) – an extraordinary run of dazzling, neo-baroque explosions, many emanating from the B movie-type conditions of television commission. Ruiz took his working-method inspiration on these projects from Edgar Ulmer or Buñuel in Mexico; the speed and improvisational gifts he evolved there meant, many years later, that he could sustain the elaborate mise en scène of Mysteries of Lisbon over an entire six episodes – something the HBO/Canal+ crowd cannot quite do.

Some of Ruiz’s champions tend to stall around here, fixating on these works and the apotheosis of their wild techniques in Treasure Island (1985) or Life is a Dream (1986). But Ruiz, far from exhausted, had a long way to go yet. The Blind Owl (1987), an adaptation of a classic Iranian modernist novel by Sadegh Hedayat, is among the summits of his career, as is the too-little-seen series Manoel on the Island of Marvels(1985), which crept out, unannounced but subtitled, at midnights on Australian television in the ‘90s. Dark at Noon (1992) looked like a turn into the ‘genre mainstream’ (horror-mystery), but when that didn’t pan out, Ruiz – as always – continued on with his low- or no-budget works, and essayistic videos like Mirror of Tunisia (1993) in collaboration with Abdelwahab Meddeb.

The long-nurtured partnership with Portuguese producer/entrepreneur Paulo Branco led to another kind of upswing in the mid ‘90s, with glamorous stars inside the labyrinthine plots of Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and, later, That Day (2003). The film that really made the difference for Ruiz, film-industry wise, in the 21st Century was Time Regained(1999) – and whoever first had the crazy idea to get him to helm this classic of French literature must be eternally thanked. This gave Ruiz the ability to keep lavish, high-profile projects (the ten million dollar ones), like the underrated art biopic Klimt (2005), going.

The works kept flowing forth, on all levels – the English language productions (genre turf, again) of Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010), as well as the advanced hermetics of free experiments such as Love Torn in Dream (2000) with its multiple, arithmetically arranged, interconnecting plots across different historical times and spaces, or the heady Lost Domain (2005), or La maison Nucingen (2008). He worked in gallery installation and in theatre, a real multimedia guy, giving rise to pure experiments with actors and language like Agathopedia (2008) – every kind of actor loved Ruiz – and the tribute-in-process Responso: Homage to Huub Bals (2004), which had a special poignancy for its Rotterdam audience.

Ruiz was so often ahead of the curve: we hear a lot about mind-games and puzzle-films these days, as if Christopher Nolan is doing something new and innovative, but the real mind-games were laid out by Ruiz in Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982), The Comedy of Innocence (2001) and Three Lives and Only One Death. And then – once more obscured in the West – the return to Chile as both its Prodigal Son and Revered Master (national pride over him is more than palpable there): starting with the TV Dante (1992) and going right through Días de campo (2004) and two elaborate TV series (La recta provincia[2007] and Litoral [2008]), ending with the yet-unseen La noche de enfrente – and, in between, the groundbreaking long-form ‘digital essay’, between documentary and fiction, of the Chilean Rhapsody (2002-3), a marvel of exploration and inquisition.

Like every filmmaker, Ruiz always had many projects. He seemed to work on the principle once well described by Joseph Losey: have five films on the go, and you’ll get to make the sixth. And, because Ruiz wrote assiduously most days of his young-adult and adult life, deft writing without much need for redrafting, these were not mere sketches; he had a well-developed script in his drawer for most of them. But he almost never expressed regret for this or that unmade baby; as he once proclaimed, “it’s stupid to make only one at a time: you have to create a dozen or twenty in one” – so traces of phantom projects managed to find their way into every crevice, every opportunity.

Ruiz was a gifted teacher of filmmaking; several of his features, including The Golden Boat (1990) and Vertigo of the Blank Page (2003) emerged from ultra-low-budget classroom exercises. He always believed, pedagogically, in the rigorous union of doing and reflecting, in serene, morning/afternoon alternation; theory and practice were never split apart for him, although he would always add that, in his own work, he was able to carry out only a fraction of the experiments he conceived. Experimentation was, indeed, his watchword: in the last years of his life at University of Aberdeen in Scotland, he speculated about the possibility of marrying cinema theory with neuroscience via experiments on the brain and its strange force-field ‘aura’; this followed on from his interests in all things mathematical and scientific. He was a mind-bogglingly well-read person (while scoffing at the academic pedantry of precise bibliographic citation – he once tossed me a rare manuscript by someone who had crossed his path, saying: “If I need to refer to it, well, I know you’ve got it”) – and only Valeria could have the faintest clue, now, of all the rare and obscure texts he acquired (he was an avid antique book collector) and pored over in his lifetime.

The importance of Ruiz as a theorist of film has, I believe, been criminally underrated and overlooked. In many essays throughout his life (such as those given to Positif), in the brilliant Poetics of Cinema book series for Dis Voir (alas, now unfinished), and especially in his manifesto-like “The Six Functions of the Shot”, Ruiz probed, with infinite care and patience, the mysteries and possibilities of every linkage and liaison in cinema: cuts, camera movements, sounds, gestures, shadows, narrative and non-narrative events … And no less important, on this level, were his more obviously creative pieces (film, play and radio scripts, novels, the ‘notes for actors’ that he provided on all his later projects, and the literally hundreds of in-depth interviews he gave in many languages): Ruiz never ceased elaborating, teasing out, refining and extending his often extraordinary (and only seemingly whimsical) ideas. His life was one continuous ‘thought experiment’, as the logicians say.

I feel honoured and privileged to have known Raúl a little, between his visit to Australia in 1993 and his death. He was a marvellous, generous, endlessly hospitable guy (as all who ever visited his home in Belleville will testify), and his lifelong relationship with Valeria was something wondrous to behold. His mischievous sense of fun and laughter, once you had his trust, was truly infectious. Hanging out with him was always a delight, and brought unexpected revelations at every turn in the road, or in the conversation: from his sudden confession to me that “the great secret to good filmmaking is this: you must always cook for your cast and crew!”, to the reluctant admission that the reason he doesn’t figure much in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books (and he absolutely should) is that he and the philosopher once got into a raging fistfight after a hot intellectual disagreement.

A rarity among filmmakers, Raúl actually liked critics, and encouraged their creative drive (as with Benoît Peeters and Pascal Bonitzer) – although he was also sensitive to their capacity for fickleness, and easily hurt when he felt he had been unceremoniously ‘dumped’ by them (“dumped for Kiarostami!”, he once privately opined). Partly because of this, he developed, at least from the ‘80s on, a droll sense of cultural fashion: “Every five years, I am embraced for being a player of games”, he drily told me, “and then, for the next five years, I am castigated as being unserious and irrelevant. Then we start over again”. Ruiz knew how to bide his time, ride the waves, and stick to what mattered to him: serious playfulness, playful seriousness. Nobody in cinema worked that dialectic better than him.

But if I had to pick one anecdote (among so many) that best characterised the warmth and genuinely democratic, open spirit of Raúl, it would be from his International Rotterdam Film Festival retrospective of 2004, when I was standing next to him in a crowded foyer. Suddenly, he spotted and waved to a distant guy; they approached each other, warmly embraced, briefly chatted and parted ways in the throng. Who was he (I asked), an actor, a producer from one of his films? No: “He projected my films here in Rotterdam twenty years ago”. For Raúl, a good projectionist was just as important, just as valuable as anyone who contributed to his work, no less than a Malkovich or a Deneuve, a Jorge Arriagada (composer) or a Sacha Vierney (cinematographer). What a memory he had – and what a profoundly ethical sense, right where it most matters, in everyday life, and in the lived history of that everyday.

I first met Raúl when he was 52 years old – which is the age I am about to reach now. (I am instantly reminded of the beautiful sentence in Poetics of Cinema to the effect that his “astonishment” at Hollywood’s bizarre rules of storytelling “is as young today as I was then” when he first encountered them in a scriptwriting manual of the 1950s.) At that time, he was starting to feel an anxiety that I can only fully relate to at this point: a sense that his life’s work had been scattered, much of it lost, and out of his control or reach. He was looking for someone who could be both an archivist and a booking agent for his work in all media. There was a desperation in his voice and his eyes when he spoke about this – and that was an uncharacteristic symptom coming from this always elegant, controlled, outwardly modest man (“chaste”, he would say with a smile).

Mercifully, the coming history of technology turned to his assistance: on DVD – which I believe Raúl came to regard as his archive – so many works, unseen for decades, have come back: The Territory (1981), Point de fuite (1984), key shorts … and with a brisk trade in less legal restorations downloadable on-line. There remains so much more to cover and explore in Ruiz’s œuvre; most accounts barely scrape the tip of the iceberg.

In the whole time I knew him, and also frequently in his writings, Raúl would return to a peculiarly Chilean experience that fascinated him, the phenomenon of the ‘noonday ghost’. He would retell this typical, iterative tale with the utmost conviction and sincerity: walking in a Chilean street, he would see an old friend from 40 years ago. They would speak of banalities: the traffic light not working, the rising price of milk, the hole in the nearby bridge. Then they would saunter apart – with Raúl realising, some minutes later, that his friend had been dead for some long time already. This is the noonday ghost, Raúl explained: nothing like the Gothic ghost of shadows who avenges wrongs, returns the repressed or haunts the living with a malign force. The noonday ghost looks just like you or me, in the bright daylight, and is just as boring. This ghost is a figure for the other key dialectic in Ruiz’s cinema: the interplay of mystery and ministry, as he described it – sublime things that inevitably become dead ordinary, and ordinary things that become suddenly, strangely sublime.

I hope to bump into Raúl Ruiz, ghost at noon, someday in the street, or in a crowded cinema foyer. He will once again be walking calmly, hands clasped behind his back. And he will be saying, as he so often did, and will again: “Dying is no big thing”.

© Adrian Martin, 20 August 2011

Martin, Adrian, "A Ghost at Noon", in Girish. In http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2011/08/ghost-at-noon-by-adrian-martin.html, 21st August 2011, 09.55 a.m.