ZAZ - Je veux

After Fall, Winter

Continuing the theme of intimacy deprivation and sexual indulgences vividly presented to us in "Shame", I could not pass on another film which trailer recently caught my eye. Stuck on a longish flight from SFO to JFK can be a torturous ordeal given the limited space, dry air and my distrust in  airplane's proper functioning. But paranoia aside, 6-hour flights are also an excellent opportunity to rent some movies on your iPad and ignore your talkative stranger-danger-seat-neighbor. So on my recent transcontinental travel, I watched "After Fall, Winter", new romantic tragi-comedy by Eric Schaeffer. What started out as a dark yet comical reflection on romance in the world where emotional disfunction has become a norm, slowly sunk into a disaster of blasse scenes and oversimplified characters and culminated into a snooze inducing Romeo-Juliette finale. 

Although I did find the film disappointing, its only redeeming quality was the choice of female heroine Sophie (Lizzie Brochere). Her playful sarcasm and dangerously sexy allure has salvaged what seemed unredeamable. Dominatrix role-play, terminal hospice, insecurity, loneliness, fear and longing for connection overlapped with comical nuances, resulting in one schizophrenic chaos ... and that, my friends just does not sit well with me, plot-wise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said...

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” 

Russia in Photographs

                               "Dashka" (Olga Moiseenko)

Just today I came upon a breathtakingly beautiful constellation of pictures under an ambitious name “Russia in Photographs.” The presented photographs, taken over the course of 2008-2011, are the winners of the national competition. Here are my favorites but, please, do take a look at all of them by clicking on the link at the end of the post : ) 

"Cheburashka" (Dmitriy Shamin)

"Up" (Vladimir Averin)

Link to the rest of the photographs: http://live-imho.livejournal.com/160261.html

SF MoMa

Attention art students, SFMoMA is complimentary to all those of you affiliated with SF art schools…so take your lazy bum-bums there and get inspired. Whenever I go to any art museum, I feel as if I am on some sort of yoga retreat in the Himalayas. Today I pondered yet again why the museum space makes me feel that way. I am not going to say anything profound as “ohhh myyyy, it surely does connect me to the eternal notions and quests for beauty and experiments with aesthetical proportions”…no, I will simply note that it the last standing place of peace and quiet except maybe for a cemetery or a church. And the last two are open to negotiation since I have often found myself in cathedrals mobbed with tourists snapping pictures and loudly commenting on their private notions on the everlasting. And don’t even let me get into the opera, ballet, serious film screenings and other spacial vessels holding culture … you seat-pushers and popcorn-chewers know who you are!!!! 

So back to the quiet meditative shrine that is SFMoMA, my refuge from the hum and buzz of the city outside. On the relatively sunny day, compared to the tropical rain downpour of the previous week, I found myself intrigued by the two exhibitions on display – “LESS AND MORE: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams” and “FRANCESCA WOODMAN” (both closing February 20). 

Dieter Rams, the famous industrial designer for Braun, opened my eyes to what I learned in art textbooks but never cared to explore further – Functionalist school of design that continued what Bauhaus introduced, i.e. simplicity, functionality, resourcefulness.

Rams’ famous principles of good design are the following:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is honest
6. Good design is unobstructive
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

 Francesca Woodman, an American photographer most noted for her nude auto-portraits in blurred black and white. Her photographs have painful, searching, ephemeral quality that is hard to separate from her suicide at the tender age of 22. It is devastating that her fame and recognition came post-mortem yet her artistry keeps inspiring and questioning what photography was and is today: intimate experience of the photographer overlapping with her search for identity, quest for divine, pondering on...that which we will never know... 

A few random works that also caught my attention:

"Lick and Lather" (Janine Antoni) are two busts, one made of chocolate and the other made of soap. The work is a metaphor for female identity traditionally comprised of the feminine notions of delicious seduction and pristine purity.

"The Air We Breathe" (Elliott Hundley) is a fascinating collage made out of pins, photographs, strings and other various objects kaleidoscopically combining  and resulting into a work of playful multidimensional quality and symbolic substance.