Blaise Cendrars

'The devil plays piano
His gnarled fingers titillate all the women '



Still, I was an extremely bad poet
I didn't know how to go about it
I was hungry
And all the days and all the women in the cafés and all the glasses
I so wanted to drink them and break them
And all the houses and all the streets
And all the wheels of the carriages, twisting like cyclones
over the bad pavements
I would have liked to plunge them into an armorer's furnace
And I would have liked to smash all the bones
And tear out all the tongues
And liquify all those big bodies, unfamiliar and naked under garments
that made me crazy ...
I foresaw the coming the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution ...
And the sun was an ugly wound
Split open like glowing coals.

extract from La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France

Brilliant interview from the paris review

Ron Mueck: Hyper-Realist Sculptor

Fernand Leger

Soldier With a Pipe - Oil on Cavas - 1916


Nude on a Red Background - Oil on Canvas - 1927

Combining the classical with the modern, Léger's Nude on a Red Background (1927) depicts a monumental, expressionless woman, machinelike in form and color. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation.

The Builders with Ropes - Oil on Canvas - 1950

This painting shares the cubist motif of creating a not-figurative realism, however it is distinguished from the Montmartre artists by imposing not an intellectual, but a visual cubism. Its concern is not indeed to appear the totality of the object, but to distinguish each object in volume and plan within an ideal space. It practices, according to Louis Vauxcelles, the "tubisme". Uncoupled, geometrical volumes are not static any more and indissociable, but autonomous, creating between them a dynamic antagonism.

Engadget goes behind the Dolby logo

Have you ever wondered what the differences between Dolby Digital Plus, Pro Logic and TrueHD were? Still trying to get your head around the evolution of digital surround sound in the past ten years? Yeah, you're not the only one so the crew over at Engadget HD made the long haul to Dolby Laboratories to learn everything there is to know about modern surround sound and what makes it work. In other words, if you are even the least bit interested in being surrounded by sound when watching movies or playing games, head on over and check it out!

link, via engadget hd

Nicolas De Staël

Noon Landscape

Seaside Railway Line in the Setting Sun

De Staël's painting career spans roughly 15 years (from 1940) and produced more than a thousand paintings. His work shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso (especially Picasso in his Blue and Rose periods), Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Chaim Soutine, as well as of the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hercules Seghers. During the 1940s and beginning in representation (especially landscapes, but also still lifes, and portraits), de Staël moved further and further toward abstraction. Evolving his own highly distinctive and abstract style, which bears comparison with the near-contemporary American Abstract Expressionist movement, and French Tachisme, but which he developed independently of them. Typically his paintings contained block-like slabs of colour, emerging as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image.

De Staël 's work was quickly recognised within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. However, he moved away from abstraction in his later paintings, seeking a more "French" lyrical style, returning to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) at the end of his life. His return to imagery during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. His painting style is characterized by a thick impasto showing traces of the brush and the palette knife, and by a division of the canvas into numerous zones of color (especially blues, reds and whites). His most well-known late paintings of beaches and landscapes are dominated by the sky and effects of light.

Much of de Staël 's late work - in particular his thinned, and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s predicts Color field painting and Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël 's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop Art of the 1960s.

from wikipedia

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

The Librarian
Oil on canvas - 97 × 71 cm (38.18 × 27.95 in)

Following on from our previous 'book of the week' post, is an example of the amazingly interesting paintings from Arcimboldo.

The bizarre works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists like Salvidor Dali. The “The Arcimboldo Effect” exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) included numerous 'double meaning' paintings. Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, Istvan Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer.

His painting, Water, was used as the cover of the album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas. The 'soup genie' character Boldo in the 2008 animated film The Tale of Despereaux, is composed of vegetables.

(For full gallery and more information click the image)

Book Of The Week - 2666 by Roberto Bolañol

The choice for this week is 2666 (2004) and was the last novel written by Chilean-born novelist Roberto Bolaño.

Depicting the unsolved and still ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juarez (Santa Teresa in the novel), the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers, the apocalyptic 2666 explores 20th century degeneration through a wide array of characters, locations, time periods, and stories within stories, influenced by the imagery and surrealist imagination of Arcimboldo's paintings.

The novel is substantially concerned with violence and death. According to Levi Stahl, it "is another iteration of Bolaño's increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes", and within the novel "There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book's title, a date that is referred to in passing in Amulet as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."