Behind The Wall: The Battle for LA's Murals

Spanish Lesson

Piel Canela By Eydie Gormé & Trio Los Panchos

Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard!

creativity at it's best.

Never

 "They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bachatera

 

The Skin I Live In- Pedro Almodóvar

There’s an early decisive moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s exhilarating film “The Skin I Live In,” when Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon and madman played with soul weariness by Antonio Banderas, gazes at the image of a woman on the wall of his bedroom. She’s bigger than life, this woman, and more beautiful. He calls her Vera (Elena Anaya), and she’s stretched out in the classic recumbent pose of the odalisque: that exotic Turkish harem dweller and Orientalist fantasy painted by the likes of Goya, Ingres and Manet, and given opulent new life and reverberant meaning by Mr. Almodóvar, a master of his art. 
In paintings of odalisques, the often naked women lie across the image like unwrapped gifts, exquisitely available to the men who paint them and to the patrons who value such female voluptuaries. There’s something different about Vera, though it’s initially difficult to pinpoint what. Ledgard lives in a mansion brightened with paintings of big nudes and blooms, and when you first see him looking at Vera, it’s as if he were viewing another canvas or a photo, or peering into a window. Yet this is no ordinary image; rather, it’s a surveillance video, and Vera has just tried to kill herself. Ledgard won’t stand for that and rushes in to save her, patching up a body that’s the centerpiece in an intoxicating, lush mystery. NYT

This is the worst trailer for this movie but, I just saw this and it's the strangest story I've seen in a while. Classic Almodóvar- definitely worth checking out. It will stay with you.

La fugitiva - Natalia Lafourcade feat. Lila Downs

Heavy Hearted

Keys N Krates - "Treat Me Right"

mi más bonita casualidad

Jay Leno gas pump prank

And they roll with it. awesome.

Andy Freeberg

I found the guards as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over. In conversation they told me how much they like being among Russia’s great art. A woman in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery Museum said she often returns there on her day off to sit in front of a painting that reminds her of her childhood home. Another guard travels three hours each way to work, since at home she would just sit on her porch and complain about her illnesses, “as old women do.” Andy Freeberg

Anya Gallaccio

Anya Gallaccio is a Scotish artist who currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.  The piece above is Red on Green (2012).  The instillation is the life and death of 10,000 red roses.  It is a simple idea but so beautiful.

"A core aspect of her work is change and transformation. Both the ephemerality and site-specificity of all her work make it notoriously difficult to document. Gallaccio is careful to discard all the material related to an installation once it has closed and resists photographic documentation; in this sense her work is anti-monumental, unconcerned with a legacy outside the memories of those who witnessed it." Tate

Along the border

This is a photo of Sonora and Arizona in the 70's or so It shows a volleyball tournament with one team in Mexico and one team in the USA with the net along the border.

Janelle Monáe - Q.U.E.E.N. feat. Erykah Badu

Wangechi Mutu + Santigold - The End of eating Everything

Wangechi Mutu

Jenny Seville

 
Jenny Seville is a British artist, known for her larger than life nudes of women.  At the ripe age of 22 the very well known collector, Charles Saatchi, bought her whole senior show.  He then offered her an 18 month contract where he supported her while she made a whole new body of work for his gallery in London.  Her work was influenced by a time she spent in Ohio, when she received a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati.  She spent quite a bit of time looking at obese fleshy women in shopping malls. In the mid 90s she also spent hours watching plastic surgery operations in NewYork, which had an obvious effect on her work.
I was first introduced to her paintings when she was in the famous Sensation exhibit in New York. She has since deviated from strictly nude women to transgendered, trauma victims, deformity correction, and disease states.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, was born in Berlin, Germany.  At the age of sixteen his family settled in London to escape Nazism. He died just two years ago in 2011 at the age of 88 years old.  He was known as one of the most incredible Britsh artist of his time. His thick textured fleshy painted portraits are mesmerising. But I also love his early paintings of his first wife, Kitty Garman, with her enlarged eyes and wild stare.  He was also quite the womanizer and was said to have fathered around 40 children.  Though there are 14 that are known to be his, he seemed to be a distant father to all of them. There were a few of his children that actually got to know him, which usually was because they agreed to pose for him.  He definitely fits the stereo type of the male artist that sacrifices all connections to family and love for sex and his art.
      In 2008 "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" ( the last image above) sold for 33.6 millions dollars, which set a record for the high price paid for a living artist.