Whistling in the dark

Fun day in Sunderland

Had a day off of work today.  Took the train to Sunderland to meet Richard. We started off going to Sunderland library home of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. There were a couple of exhibitions on. Giuseppe Davies: Vie is an interactive installation on until the 3rd of April.  It is a screen that responds to touch with lights and sound. It’s very pretty.  The larger exhibition on is  Think  Tank: A marketplace of ideas ending 13th of Feb so we are lucky we caught it. A bunch of ideas to reflect and improve society…Richard liked the We Not Me poster.  I liked the Institute of Economic Affairs map, simple, pretty and interesting – reminiscent of the Information Aesthetics Blog.

Then we went to Angelo’s Ristorante for excellent Italian food which  Richard got to order with a silly Italian accent – good fun.  For appetizers we had Formaggio di Capra e Rosti di Patate Croccante and Camembert. The main event was Ravioli alla Pizzaiola and Tagliatelle con Vedura e Zafferano.

For desert we went to Stardust which has a cute and crafty gift shop downstairs and a pretty cafe upstairs. Picked up the ring at left from the gift shop. Under £4 and a bit of fun. Upstairs, it’s a shame there weren’t more people there – the couches are the kind you sink into and the coffee and lemon cake were yummy. It seems like a perfect spot for students to camp out in with laptops and to just hang out.

I then attempted to recreate the artwork on the wall of Stardust, a photograph of a sculpture just outside.  It is a 2008 sculpture called Seachange by Laura Johnston.  It is meant to recall the hull of a ship and the shipbuilding heritage of the area as it transforms into something new. [Part of the Sunderland City Centre Public Art Trail]

Unfortunately it was raining so we didn’t want to spend too much time attempting to get the shot. You can see my few attempts on flickr.

I got distracted from the original mission of recreating the photo in the cafe because I loved the trees being reflected in the steel:

Seachange sculpture in Sunderland

To get out of the rain we headed into Primark and picked up some cheap and cheerful shiny, pretty things – a sparkly bracelet for £2 and some pillar candles for £1.75 each. The little charge you get from picking something up for £2 and £10 is really the same and lasts about the same amount of time (and £100 doesn’t really last ten times as long) – it’s a good thing to remember. We then stopped off at Richard’s to pick up the cute and stinky Florence and set off for Hartlepool.

I am a terrible navigator. Hopefully this will change when I learn how to drive. After a number of phone calls to Kev to set us back in the right direction we had a nice relaxed evening with some gewurztraminer from Chile via Morrisons and a quick sweet and sour chickeny bits with rice dish a la Kev.

Mostly it’s just the two of us but it was nice to have company too.  It’s easy to forget when you get into you routine.

Top Gear at mima in Middlesbrough

There is an exhibition of neat car-related / Top Gear related art on through Sunday the 29th. mima is open late on Thursday evening until 8. I recommend going to see it if you are in the area.

There are neat photos – old and new, sculptures made out of car parts and paintings made using remote control cars. There are design drawings for cars up as well as some actual cars in the gallery including an F1 car covered in UV Paint to illustrate the air flow on race cars and loads more items.

Some of the items mock  high concept “Modern Art” or the presenters or the show. It is a good mix of items and a fun way to spend an hour. It’s a shame there isn’t a program for this exhibition : )

If you do go be aware that mima has a ground floor gallery, go up two flights for another gallery and then up one more flight for a peak into the mind of the Stig.

Rating:
Missing that last 1/2 a star because of the noise accompanying what’s in the mind of the Stig.

Top Gear, the BBC and Middlesbrough Council and mima have been working on this for a while – apparently the footage they filmed in Middlesbrough will air on December 20 in this new Top Gear season according to the Middlesbrough Football Club website. The presenters were around this past Saturday and Sunday – 7,000 tickets were snapped up in less than a day and an additional few thousand were given away by the presenters in Riverside Stadium – Middlesbrough’s Football Ground.

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Translation for my American friends:

Top Gear is a funny series about cars on the BBC with 3 presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May (who is also doing an awesome series about toys at the moment). It is also on BBC America I believe.

mima is the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art , Middlesbrough is where I work – it is in the north east of England in Tees Valley. It is a half hour from Durham-Tees Valley airport, two hours by train from Newcastle. It is also about to be the latest home of a Big Wheel in centre square, if you go to mima you can go see it being constructed.

Experimental writing and November is for writing

“Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels – and it means “beautiful thinking”. It is also the title of Canadian poet Christian Bök’s book of fiction in which each chapter uses only one vowel.”

This came up on my feed reader today. Click on the quote above to get to the BBC article with excerpts from the book – it’s really poetry. There was a great bio of him online with the full text of eunoia but the link is broken now. There’s a pretty flash version of chapter E here. You can hear readings of it here or watch a video of Christian Bök reading excerpts here. Christian Bök also created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. You can hear an interview with him on CBC here and more at PennSound here. There are links to other works here.

Learned a great new word and began a random search for other examples of arbitrary restrictions in book writing and ended up finding all kinds of neat examples of constrained writing. Whoo hoo wikipedia (and google).

There are additional lipograms. A lipogram is constrained writing consisting of writing in which a particular letter or group of letters is missing. See the wikipedia entry for a number of examples including Gadsby, a novel written without the use of the letter E, which can be read online here and here. (Letter frequencies here; E is the most frequent letter in the English language.)

Another novel that didn’t the letter E is Georges Perec’s French novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969). E is the most common letter in French as well as English. The neat thing with this one is that the English translation titled “A Void,” also did not use the letter E, and a Spanish translation instead omits the letter A, since it is the most common letter in Spanish. The wikipedia entry includes a summary of the book – it looks like an interesting read.

Perec was a member of group of French authors called Oulipo who used a variety of constraints in their work. Lipograms, Palindromes, N+7 and the Snowball.

Never Again is a novel by Doug Nufer in which no word is used more than once. From amazon.com “it is the story of a gambler who narrates how he set out to avoid the mistakes of his past by doing (and saying) nothing he ever did (or said) before.” He also wrote Negativeland, a novel where every sentence contains a negative. There is a good interview with him here.

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish is constrained in the following way – “the first chapter contains only words starting with the letter a, the second chapter only words starting with a or b, etc.; each subsequent chapter adds the next letter in the alphabet to the set of allowed word beginnings. This continues for the first 26 chapters…In the second half of the book, chapters 27 through 52, letters are removed in the reverse order that they were added. Thus, z words disappear in chapter 28, y, in chapter 29, etc.”

Here is an article about a french novel with no verbs. The author sounds like an ass but it might be fun to read in translation.

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham when his publisher challenged him to write a story with fewer than 50 words. At fiftywords.com a new fifty-word story is posted Monday through Friday.

Haiku, Limericks and Acrostics are examples of constrained writing in poetry which isn’t really focused on in this post because it is standard for established forms of poetry to have constraints. I bring them up because I wanted to post an online dictionary that uses limericks to illustrate definitions.

There’s also this interesting poetry example – an Italian poem and a Hebrew poem that sound identical and both make sense in their respective languages done by Dr. Ghil’ad Zuckermann. He has a fantastic quote by Thomas Paine on the page that could describe this whole post “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.” (The Age of Reason, Part 2: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, London: Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1796, p. 20).

Some writing experiments you can try can be found here and here and here. Confiction.org is an online community for people interested in constrained writing. Their challenges can be found here.

Ernest Hemingway once said his best work was a story he wrote in just six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The Guardian challenged famous authors to write six-word stories in this article. There is a website where you can submit your own started by Smith magazine. There is an interview with the editor here. You can also join the Six Word Story group on flickr by posting photos with a six-word-story title. (Does the photo count as 1000 additional words?). There is also onesentence.org where you can submit true stories told in one sentence.

Another pretty site to get you going is oneword.com. You see one word at the top of the site and you get sixty seconds to write about it. There is a progress bar to illustrate time passing that starts off green and becomes red. There is a ding at the end of the minute. You can have your writing emailed to you or you can just have it deleted. More about the purpose of the site here. There is also a related flickr group that uses the one word as a prompt for taking a picture within 24 hours. I couldn’t remember this site and the fantastic ask.mefi got me a response in 11 minutes.

As for November, National Novel Writing Month starts in two days. I’ll be taking part in National Blog Posting Month instead. For people who can’t commit to writing a 50,000 word novel, you just have to write a blog post every day for a month.

Magnum Photographer Patrick Zachmann at the Hartlepool Art Gallery

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing the new exhibition at the Hartlepool Art Gallery. Patrick Zachmann’s “Eye of the Long Nose” is on display for the first time in the UK as part of the Tees Valley Photography Festival.

Based in Paris, Patrick Zachmann has been a freelance photographer since 1976 and focuses on “long-term projects on the cultural identity, memory and immigration of different communities.” The exhibition at the Hartlepool Art Gallery focuses on China from within and in its diaspora.

There are larger, moody, black and white photographs inspired by Chinese cinema of the 30s. There are also smaller postcard-like color photos full of smiles. As he described it last night, one set (the black and white) exposes the seedier face of China that which they do not want shown. The mafia, prostitutes and drug dealers, protesters in 1989 Tiananmen Square all feature in eye-opening, visually stunning photographs. The other set (color photos) feature the public face of China and it’s communities in the diaspora. These are glossy photos of proud moments and cultural celebrations. They are his vision as a “Long Nose” an old nickname for Westerners in the region.

He seemed pleased and somewhat bemused that the exhibition was hung in a (former) church. His work deals with reality and illusions and facades and he felt it appropriate to the setting.

He shared that he worked on this project from 1987-1995. He spent 6 years shooting the photographs and 2 years working on the book of the exhibition and the show. It was shown in 10 countries in Asia, though not in China.

He traveled to China for the first time as a journalist wanting to write a story on 1930s Chinese cinema. During that visit his interest in the region grew. He was determined to return through unofficial channels in a private exploration of what lay to the side of the spotlight the country shines on it’s achievements and was able to do so with the assistance of a man with underworld ties whom he refers to as W.

I asked him if he ever felt in danger while taking some of the photos. At first he responded in the negative but after giving it a few moments of consideration could think of at least 4 or 5 dicey situations he had been in that should be classed as dangerous. The resulting photos are an amazing document.

He is currently working on another project dealing with China called Chinese Confusions. He feels that people feel lost at this moment. Older people feel lost as older districts are razed to make way for modernity. Younger people feel lost as society moves so very quickly, and while feeling an attraction toward Western models, still maintaining a Chinese identity and a duty to their traditions.

Ying Zhu, Ph.D describes the cinema that intrigued him initially as follows, “If China today is in the midst of a massive and massively ambivalent transformation, it is not the first time. In the 1920s and 30s, China was similarly engaged in a great identity crisis, and Shanghai was at its forefront. Shanghai was the city where Western influences were most keenly felt even as anti-Western (anti-imperialist) nationalism also thrived, and where China’s richest and poorest people lived side by side…Shanghai came to symbolize the allure of modernity and cosmopolism [sic]… Shanghai ushered in Chinese cinema’s first golden era, producing many of the Chinese classics, including Goddess (1934), Song of the Fishermen (1934), Street Angel (1937), and New Women (1934). The Shanghai depicted in these films was corrupt and promising at the same time.”

The China and Chinese depicted in Patrick Zachmann’s photographs can be described similarly.

I asked him what he thought of the Olympics. He was very against China hosting the Olympics. It seems to him like China has won in every respect. Not only is China an economic superpower the Olympics has allowed them to win hearts and minds in the international community. Additionally, with support from Asia Societies in the U.S. many schools, from elementary schools to universities, are now teaching Chinese in language curricula (1, 2, 3) Also see this Beijing Evening News summary of a NY Times article on the Olympics. As the blogger who did the side-by-side comparisons of the article puts it, “every single statement that could possibly be seen as negative – and there’s quite a lot – has been expunged from the Beijing Evening News article, and almost every nuanced phrase that carries any negative connotations has been turned into one of unqualified praise.” It would be the equivalent of looking at only the glossy photos in Patrick Zachmann’s exhibition.

While walking through the exhibit my overwhelming sense was of the universality of the issues he is dealing with in his photography. Migration, wanting to build better lives for families and how we are perceived as individuals and communities are struggles common to the human endeavor. If you are in the Northeast this exhibition is definitely worth a special trip.

Patrick Zachmann’s Eye of the Long Nose is on at the Hartlepool Art Gallery 13 September – 9 November, 2008.

R.I.P. – Chris Schwarz – 1948-2007

I am sad to write that Chris Schwarz, the founder and director of the Galicia Jewish Museum passed away this week from prostate cancer.

I had the privilege to meet Chris Schwarz through my work. He was an extraordinary human being. If you are ever in Krakow, go to the Galicia Jewish Museum to see his amazing, life’s work.

From the Galicia Jewish Museum website, a description of the museum and their permanent exhibition. [The catalogue of the permanent exhibition Photographing Traces of Memory is beautifully produced in English and Polish and is highly recommended.] :

The Galicia Jewish Museum exists to celebrate the Jewish culture of Galicia and to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, presenting Jewish history from a new perspective.

The permanent exhibition, Traces of Memory, is a contemporary look at the Jewish past in Poland.

The exhibition features the work of photographer Chris Schwarz, with texts by Prof. Jonathan Webber (UNESCO Chair of Jewish and Interfaith Studies, University of Birmingham, UK). Over a period of twelve years, they traveled together town by town and village by village, gathering material that offers a completely new way of looking at the Jewish past that was destroyed in Poland. The exhibition pieces together a picture of the relics of Jewish life and culture in Polish Galicia that can still be seen today, interpreting these traces in a manner which is informative, accessible, and thought-provoking.

The exhibition is divided into five sections, corresponding to the different ways in which the subject can be approached:

Section 1 is entitled Jewish Life in Ruins, with all the sadness of confronting the past.
Section 2, Jewish Culture as it Once Was , displays remaining signs of the original culture.
Section 3, Sites of Massacre and Destruction shows the horror of the Holocaust.
Section 4, How the Past is Being Remembered recognizes the efforts to preserve the traces of memory, and
Section 5, People Making Memory Today, shows people involved in recreating the memory of the Jewish past in Poland today.

A talented photographer, Chris came to Poland on an unrelated job, filming a documentary. He noted that the remains of Jewish life in Galicia were going undocumented. He was concerned that the existing iconography of the Holocaust and Jewish life [in Poland] were very limited. He then proceeded to make it his life’s work to rectify the situation.

In addition to producing and hosting high quality exhibitions and housing an excellent bookstore, the gallery has since become a center of community life, with concerts and classes, and a newsletter that chronicles local Jewish activities and culture.

I hope they continue to go from strength to strength in fitting tribute to Chris.

Chris Schwarz went about his chosen path in a thoughtful, humble way, with a sense of humor and irony, a clear purpose, and a wonderful, sensitive way with people. He was a special human being. He will be greatly missed.

Found an old website of his which describes work he has done.

Update: From the August Newsletter of the Galicia Jewish Museum:

Messages of condolences can be sent to
info@galiciajewishmuseum.org
from where they will be taken and placed in the official Book of Condolence at the Museum.

Obituary from The Times Online

Obituary from The Boston Globe (NY Times News Service)