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Ok, let's take a look at the Batis 2/40 CF again in detail. Everyone is of course interested about the optical performance so I thought I should 'address the need' and start to investigate it. The MTF-diagrams published by ZEISS is a good starting point as they provide lot's of data and are easily comparable (with other ZEISS lenses). So, here are the MTF-diagrams of the Batis 2/40 CF.
People always look first for the resolution so they are mostly interested about the 40 lp/mm line, but I think the 10 lp/mm important as well, because it describes the amount overall contrast and 'pop' the lens is able to achieve. Wide open at f/2 the Batis 2/40 CF achieves more than 90% throughout the frame with 10 lp/mm and decreases to 80% only at very end of the frame. Anything above 80 % is usually considered to be excellent, but with the over 90% the Batis 2/40 shows outstanding contrast performance. For a reference the Otus 1.4/55 achieves only about 2% or 3% more (but then again the Otus is also about outstanding optical correction).
Next, the 40 lp/mm line tells us something about the maximum resolution and definition the lens can achieve. Wide open at f/2 the resolution looks – again – outstanding at the center. There are lenses that achieve similar resolution only at stopped down to f/5.6 and achieving such as resolution already at f/2 is very good indeed. The maximum resolution drops a bit at midframe, but at 50-60% it is totally acceptable (let's remember the lens measured wide open here). In short, the wide open performance is very, very good.
When the lens is stopped down to f/4 the performance of course increases a bit. The large scale contrast (10 lp/mm) is very similar to wide open behavior which is actually a compliment to wide open performance: this lens pushes maximum contrast already at wide open. The maximum resolution (40 lp/mm) jumps up a bit as is spread out very evenly throughout the frame and the lens shows no field curvature. Tangential and sagittal lines differ a bit here, which means a slight astigmatism at the midframe, but this is really nitpicking as the lines are still very convergent as a whole (you should see some zoom lenses). In short, the MTF-diagrams shows outstanding optical performance for the Batis 2/40 CF. But to be honest, this was to be expected because it's designed by ZEISS and the competition in Sony Alpha ecosystem is very hard at the moment, so the crafty people at Oberkochen has to push the envelope even further.
One thing I should note here is that ZEISS always provides MTF-data measured with white light from real lenses. With the most other manufacturers this is not the common practice. With Sony, for example, you only see theoretical MTF-data and they don't even publish the 40 lp/mm precision (only 10 and 30 lp/mm), which of course makes the diagrams look good, but the truth is that you cannot trust them. Manufacturing tolerances as also properties of glass, proper alignment, etc. affects the lenses so that one never gets the theoretical performance. Therefore it's more fair and truthful to see the measurements from real lenses. Also, I should add that Sony isn't even that bad as some other manufacturers that regularly publish MTF-diagrams with lines peaking at 100% – only it's just that it is physically impossible due the diffraction limitations of optical systems. Kind of wrecks their credibility. ZEISS is a rare exception, because their MTF comes always from the real lenses.
What I always do when ZEISS announces a new lens is that I compare it to other lenses in their catalogue. This is a good way to position the new lens compared to others (and of course to speculate how good ZEISS has succeeded this time). So here's the Batis 2/40 CF compared to Batis 2/25 and Batis 1.8/85 which present the obvious peer group.
Wide open and at the center of the frame the Batis 2/40 CF is the best of these three lenses. The performance is very similar to Batis 1.8/85 which is a compliment to Batis 2/40 because being a moderately wide lens it is more difficult the design than the short tele lens. Being familiar with the Batis 1.8/85 performance I think this is great news as it is about the best lens I've ever tested regarding wide open performance. I'm also happy to see that wide open Batis 2/40 is clearly better than the Batis 2/25. Don't get me wrong, the Batis 2/25 is also one of best wide angles you can get for Sony Alpha cameras (the new Sony 1.4/24 might be better), but the center resolution is clearly better with the Batis 2/40. Stopping down to f/4 all three become very similar with each other. Those who are already familiar with the Batis performance should be very well home here with the new Batis 2/40 CF.
So, the Batis 2/40 CF seems to fit very nicely to Batis lens family, but what about the other ZEISS lenses, like some similar from the Milvus lens family. Okay, so here is Batis 2/40 CF compared to Milvus 1.4/35 and Milvus 1.4/50.
The Milvus lenses are one stop faster so it's a kind of unfair comparison because stopped down they would do better, but still one can only admire the wide open performance of the Batis 2/40: plenty of contrast and resolution. Stopped down to f/4 the Milvus 1.4/35 takes a winning position here as it should because it is a large and uncompromised lens weighting a whopping 1174 g (quite a difference compared to 361 g Batis). But then compared to Milvus 1.4/50 the Batis has a very similar performance.
Every now and then I hear people claiming that Otus & Milvus represent ZEISS's premium lenses while the autofocusing Batis and Touit are only 'almost-premium lenses' (to put it nicely). This comparison doesn't support it. Sure there are some different design limits with different lenses, but unlike other companies like Sony, Canon or Nikon, ZEISS doesn't categorize their lens families similar way. Everything they do represents the professional lenses because it's in their brand and they don't do separate product lines for consumer lenses. If in doubt, they a look at the Touit MTF-diagrams, very similar looking curves there.
Ok, that's about all I'm going to say about the Batis 2/40 CF MTF-diagrams, but how does the optical performance look like in practice, you might wonder? Come back tomorrow and I'll show you!
When the painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) agreed for the first time to create the stained glass windows of a cathedral, that of Metz in 1959, he was at the same time revealing a secret part of his art. Chagall also knew how to play admirably with the opposition of colors to bring out and oppose different worlds and stories. Each time, he knew how to use these strong oppositions by using different pigments to make us discover another reality. Thus, on the one hand, we discover the quasi-monochromy of yellow in the stained glass window of the Creation, this one corresponding more to solar representations.On the other hand, the midnight blue with the fiery red of the two bays of the interior ambulatory seem to be more associated with nocturnal, crepuscular, telluric but also lunar images. On the one hand, that of the stained glass window of the Creation which narrates the paradisiacal scenes where Eve and Adam evolve with the dominant yellow. And on the other hand, the other world, that of the aftermath of the fall, of the exit from Eden, according to the two bays of the interior ambulatory. These relate the history of the chosen people, with dark and violent colors such as night blue and fire red. All this to signify that we are no longer in the Edenic times but in those where humanity will know sin and death. At the same time, one will also notice that each stained glass window is crossed by an astonishing dynamism. This dynamism increases and always evolves in the same direction, from left to right. Thus we can follow the story of each representation always in the same direction.
The first stained glass window, that of the Creation, begins in the first lancet with the scene of the creation of the man Adam and finally ends in the last lancet with the expulsion of the couple Adam and Eve from paradise. At the same time, in the other two bays of the interior ambulatory, we see a long historical continuum that goes from the Sacrifice of Isaac to the deportation of the Jews to Babylon. It is worth noting that each time, the story told by the stained glass windows ends with a dramatic exit!
Finally, the deep source of this dynamism must be sought in Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement that strongly influenced Chagall. Most of the Israelites in Vitebsk were all Hasidim. For the Hasid, spontaneous emotion counts as much as the law or the rite. Hence the painter's insistence on often showing us festive scenes where everyone gives free rein to the expression of their spontaneous joy. Thus, often the Chagallian characters seem to be invaded by this enthusiasm inherited from Hasidism. This Russian painter succeeds in associating us with the vitality of the spectacle of human history to a more intense force that animates us. This mysterious divine energy, is it not ultimately what this artist wants to reveal to us with this other reality? To lead us in fact to fly always higher in the image of his Luftmensch?
This is not surprising, since the artist has always been a special case in modern painting. While abstraction appeared to many as the ultimate achievement of pictorial creation, he, on the contrary, always clung as fiercely to figuration. Not because of a concern for conformism or academicism, but rather because he considered it to be the most appropriate way to show another reality. Revealing notably by the magic of the representation and the color, the inaccessible, the unsuspected because this artist had always had the concern to reveal the most intimate and the most mysterious thing of the being. Father Couturier (1897-1954), who first encouraged him to work as a stained glass artist in the church of Assy in 1956-1957, had well grasped the soul of this painter by affirming that: "Chagall is not an explorer of the depths of the soul: he is a tree with deep roots whose fruits have the color of the Sun. But it is also thanks to his work on the Bible that the brush of this painter will allow other discoveries. The effect of the saving storm of the God of the Old Testament will indeed act powerfully on him. Hence the same impression that the visible reality of this painter becomes something else thanks to his palette. However, if his representations surprise by their sometimes irrational side, he is not for all that a surrealist painter, even if he makes us reach another world. Later, when he discovered at the age of 70 the possibilities offered by the technique of stained glass, it is also undeniable that this art of luminescence will stimulate his inspiration even more. The first cathedral of his career, the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Metz, will give him the opportunity to highlight certain facets of this other reality. First of all, to bring it out, he knew how to take advantage of a perfect use of the place. Indeed, his first stained glass windows often located in a relatively dark and secluded space will lead him to develop more than elsewhere his proximity to the painter Rembrandt, painter of the soul and chiaroscuro. Then, another complicity that we discover in this painter is that with Jacob, the patriarch of the Bible, with whom he will be able to emphasize his Luftmensch. Finally, he will play more than elsewhere with the partitions and polarities that underlie all his work. On this occasion also, he will be able to highlight with great mastery all the force that animates his stained glass work, which is totally subordinated to movement and dynamism. When he was offered to work for the cathedral of Metz, he was initially quite disappointed with the spaces he was given. Indeed, he was initially offered to practice his art in relatively secluded and dark areas of the cathedral, since they were located in the north apse, more precisely in the inner ambulatory. With the windows located at the beginning of the choir's perimeter and where the sun practically never appeared, his work might not benefit from maximum visibility and this had not escaped the painter. So he began with the window furthest back, the one with three lancets, and then the one further forward with four lancets. He called this three lancet window the "wounded stained glass window". Chagall called it that because the left side of the window was cut off when the turret was created, giving it a lame look. The median axis of the rose window is indeed off-center to the left of the current median axis of the lancets. As we will see later, Chagall knew perfectly how to illustrate his world by playing on partitions and polarities. Here, in these dark spaces, it will be the world of the night and the penumbra representing the lunar star opposed to the world of the day and the Sun. The solar world will be the one he will inaugurate some time later in the North transept with the stained glass window of the Creation. This is why, as a painter and to illuminate and "counterbalance" this world of night, he will use two dominant colors which are the dark blue associated with the aggressive red. He thus uses his proven technique of the preponderant color. This technique goes back to his very first years in painting, during his years spent in Saint Petersburg in 1906-1907. His master at the time, Leon Bakst, always advised him to limit the world of colors to better dominate them. During this same period, he also produced a number of paintings with scenes that took place mostly at night (The Birth, The Peasant Woman Eating, The Kermesse, The Procession, The Holy Family). His taste for tenebrism brings him closer to Caravaggio, but especially to Rembrandt. One can also explain his attraction for the half-light because, for lack of means, he worked at the time most often in a cramped room in St. Petersburg which was particularly dark. Thus, the affinities with the great Flemish painter will become more and more obvious. Firstly, in the use of chiaroscuro, which Chagall had to use in view of the places where he had to execute his work, in particular in the interior ambulatory of the cathedral in Metz. Then in the treatment itself of certain scenes. Indeed, we discover obvious similarities with a Rembrandt painting of 1635 when he tackles the first lancet of the four lancet stained glass window, in the scene of the Sacrifice of Isaac. We see the same strong chromatic opposition of contrasts between the dark blue in Chagall's work or the dark brown in Rembrandt's that invades the figure of Abraham and the whitish clarity of Isaac's body. We also detect an identical treatment in the softness and transparency of the half-tones. In these two painters, the same effects of light modulation are used to reveal the deep truth of the beings. Chagall, in this stained glass window, plays on the variation of blues, going from the most intense and darkest to the most luminous. In the same way, in these two artists, Isaac is violently illuminated while we never really see his eyes. We cannot see the victim's gaze because it is the gaze of God that we risk encountering. The work is here an unveiling. The artist then reveals another reality: the victim will be recognized by God and saved by him alone!.
www.blelorraine.fr/2021/05/des-vitraux-de-chagall-a-la-ca...
untitled (searching)
2016_08_13
charcoal pastel and graphite on manila tagboard
12" x 12" (30.48 x 30.48)cm
Matt Niebuhr
West Branch Studio
This is what happens when an engineer runs out of electricity to power his domicile and is left with his dogged, stale imagination, a few self-made LED Throwies and a LED torch wrapped in violet sheath. The light on my face is triggered by pulse modulated LED illumination and the light trails are hand propagated with the torch previously mentioned.
The possessed guy standing in the middle is ME , by the way :D I had my earphones in my..err..ears constantly playing "Are We In Trouble Now"-by Mark Knopfler.
I was going to call this "When Poltergeists attack" and then thought "Something latin would be so much cooler."
...and oh, I'M BACK BITCHES! GOT MY STITCHES CUT TODAY.
Crazy Fact: I don't know why or when, but apparently I wrote "Fiat Lux" inside the flaps of my money bag sometime ago...possibly while pondering upon something composed by Abba.
# Taken with the Nikon D90
# Unedited , cropped in Adobe PS
# Taken in "The Bulwark of Bariwala Haroon"
.
Oh, almost forgot...Larger and denigrated...although, nothing too special this time.
Finally it is summer break. I have time to catch up with my painting.
I had a lot fun working on this still life. I tried to keep it as simple as possible and still it took three hours.
Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com
Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: rawpixel
Under cover of dusk, a dark knight enters the holding bays.
Only the blue glow of a semi-powered coupling hints at the new entry in the 2011 Podracer
Challenge.
In a separate bay a short 'skrit' sound alludes to the challenge for team rivals as they face the
days ahead.
Morning reveals that a new BatPodracer has joined the lineup and given it's updated design
characteristics, its pilots expectations run high.
The engines themselves are at the peak of earthly efficiency, front weighted with a core booster
surrounded by six gimble mounted subthrust assemblys (please note that the 2 and 11 o'clock
assemblies have been muffled to prevent support arm blast damage).
It is by mere coincidence that the mid-mount stabliser fins are adjustable to include all
Podracer heights and are basically ornamental in design though sloped backward to meet the
current sponser safety regulations.
In a Podracer first, the energy bindings modulation packs have been fitted with pivotal cover
fins for extra debris and elemental protection.
The Pod itself houses a single pilot and from the rear sprouts two sonar amplification receivers
to enable advanced recognition tactics.
Two pivoting side wing-shaped 'flaps' beat in time with the engine thrusts to create, along with
an aft spoiler, an almost weightless effect on the pod in times of extreme manouver to assist
navigation in the most challenging of circumstances.
The head of the module is enhanced with left and right 'ear brakes' in case of the need for a
speedy shutdown. When forced to full front they are able to slow the Pod to a halt in a fraction
of a khelter giving the pilot enough time to navigate whatever tragedy may have announced itself
in its path.
Well, two things about this build...
1. I didn't want to do Batman, I felt the competition on this theme would be rampart; so we shall
see...
2. I didn't want to use black...I don't like building in black; it's hard to see and even harder
to photograph.
But I'll be damned if this thing didn't keep building itself.
So please absorb and enjoy the BatPodRacer in all of its striking Black Beauty as she thrusts
herself into the official FBTB 2011 Podracer Challenge.
"Only her breathing was altered by each touch of my fingers, as though she were an instrument on which I was playing and from which I extracted modulations by drawing different notes from one after another of its strings."
--Marcel Proust
detail: untitled #2 (modulations)
2016_08_13
charcoal pastel and graphite on manila tagboard
12" x 12" (30.48 x 30.48)cm
Matt Niebuhr
West Branch Studio
I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait. Alfred Eisenstaedt
lford HP5 plus @ ASA320
The Recipe
5 mins pre soak
7.5 mins Ilford ID11 - Ilford Agitation Method
1 min Ilford Stop
5 mins Ilford Fixer
10 mins wash
wash aid
In my "glory days" I was pretty good at math. This was/is one of my all-time favorite books: Harry Van Trees' first volume on Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory. This is an old book: I wonder what book or books are used in the Universities now on this subject.
My kids don't really know that part of me.
90 mins of Trippy Techno set recorded live @ Music For The Soul
You can watch it on Youtube: youtu.be/Ycs6GN_m5h8
▼ Follow DIRTYANGEL Iwish:
[www.mixcloud.com/DIRTYANGEL/ MIXCLOUD]
[hearthis.at/dirtyangel-iwish/ HEARTHIS]
[www.facebook.com/DJ.DIRTYANGEL FACEBOOK]
[www.youtube.com/user/DIRTYANG... YOUTUBE]
[zeno.fm/dj-dirtiangel-radio/D... RADIO]
▼ Tracklist:
[0:00]Unclear - Mind
[4:50]Autechre - Foil
[7:11]Kryss Hypnowave - Cielo Stellato
[11:08]Animum - Astral
[16:16]Animum - Next Walking
[20:39]Anders Hellberg - Thriving Tribe (Doctrina Natura Remix)
[22:49]Violent - Rage For Order
[26:35]Basis Change - Taygeta
[30:16]Basis Change - Cease
[32:59]Anders Hellberg - Concomitant Modulation
[38:37]The Alchemical Theory - Esoteric
[40:45]NFEREE - Koppen
[45:21]Atis - Cradled
[48:40]One Release - Hela's Mjolnir
[54:22]Robin Kampschoer - Rattling Sticks
[57:03]Anders Hellberg - Unpredictable Event
[01:01:52]Mown - Patience (Floating Machine Remix)
[01:06:08]Rasser - Shape Position
[01:08:22]Vinicius Honorio - The Brotherhood of Shadow
[01:11:43]Ricardo Garduno - Resistencia
[01:14:13]MSDMNR - Saturn Crisis
[01:18:18]Black Lotus - Alienated Souls
[01:21:15]Aphex Twin - Digeridoo
Vintage postcard. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer.
German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.
Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.
Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.
However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Ok, I saw the new Transformers movie last week and thought I would share my thought on it with you guys.
For the most part it was a disappointment to me. It's a shame because I think there were some really good ideas in this movie, but they threw in all kinds of stupid things that detracted from it.
I'm breaking it down by what I considered to be "good" and "bad" about it.
The “Good”:
1)The Autobots have teamed with human soldiers who are part of a team called “NEST” (what the heck does that stand for? Does anyone know?). I thought this was a good idea which seems to have no precedent in other Transformers fiction. Hey, if they can’t give us a live action GI Joe/Transformers crossover, this is the next best thing. I like the idea of the Autobots having official human allies, although generally having too many human characters in the mix annoys me, this is an exception at least these guys serve a purpose and they did a nice job of portraying the bond between these soldiers and the Autobots.
2)Agent Simmons was used well in this film, I liked the idea that he saw himself as a patriot who was betrayed by his government when they shut down Sector 7, but was still willing to go to bat for his country when it needed him. I love the idea of this guy being a legend in his own mind. His dropping trou in every film seems to be a running gag. The Rail Gun he uses to destroy Devastator was a great homage to G2, where Megatron gets a rail gun to replace his fusion cannon.
3)There was a pretty cool shot through a hole in the wall of a building that Sam and Mikela are hiding in.
4)The battle where Prime was killed was excellent! Seeing Prime take on a bunch of ‘Cons al at once was awesome. Megatron only kills him by sneaking up on him from behind like a chump. Definitely one of the best ‘bot vs. ‘bot fights I’ve ever seen!
5)Ravage and Soundwave were both executed well. They might be the only toys from this movie I bother to buy. Sure, the fact that Soundwave lacked his characteristic voice modulation was a disappointment, but I still enjoyed him nonetheless. Having him be a communications satellite was an appropriate alt mode considering that Bay’s determination to avoid size-changing Transformers means we’ll never see him as a tape deck or Mp3 player on the big screen. Ravage was just awesome all around. If only they had worked Rumble into it somehow!
6)In general, I was happy with how the Decepticons were handled in this movie as compared to the last one. They had more lines (in English!) and had a lot more personality this time around. We got to see Megatron smacking Starscream around several times, as he should. Megatron looked better in this film; it’s nice to see him in his tank mode, although I wish he had a REALISTIC earth tank mode. At least he uses his arm cannon a lot in the film. I was also happy that the concept of switching sides was introduced in this film.
7)the plot of this movie was a bit more interesting than the last one.
8)The pretender who is disguised as a girl at Sam’s college was pretty cool. Although it scared the crap out of my 5 year old son! Oh well, maybe it’ll discourage him from tongue kissing girls anytime ion the near future!
9)Nice homage to the comics to have Sam get the knowledge of the Allspark in his head, very similar to when Buster Witwicki had Prime put the knowledge of the Matrix in his mind in the Marvel series.
10)Good continuity to have Melaka’s criminal dad in one scene.
11) The Matrix! Even though it serves a different purpose, it‘s still nice to see a version of it in the movie continuity. Sam’s near death experience nicely echoes when Rodimus Prime enters the Matrix to consult with the wisdom of the spirits of Primes past!
12)The movie ‘bots DO run off of Energon as all proper Transformers should!
13)The Fallen is cool. I like the idea of bringing this character into the movie continuity. One can only hope that his evil is a result of being tainted by a movieverse Unicron. His pseudo-Egyptian look rocks!
14)Supermodes! Prime gets a “power up” from Jetfire and kicks much butt.
The Bad:
1)Characters from the first movie such as Ironhide and Ratchet only have a few lines and zero character development! New (to the movie franchise) characters that seem very cool like Sideswipe and Arcee similarly get barely any screen time.
2)The Twins!! They’re just awful! In his infinite wisdom, Bay has given us not just one, but TWO “Jar-Jars”! And just like Jar-Jar, they have been accused of being racist stereotypes, and I have to admit that this does seem a pretty valid charge. Sure there have been Transformers in the past that seem to be “black” like Jazz and Blaster, but these characters were never portrayed as being complete idiots “We don’t do much read’in!” – gimme a break! Obviously I don’t think the filmmakers intended for these characters to be perceived as racist, it was a misguided attempt to market to the very audience they are insulting. Most real life gangstas have at least more street-smarts than these characters do and are more useful in a fight, although I must admit that I actually enjoyed the scene where the twin that was “eaten” by Devastator busts out and smashes up his face from the inside – that was the ONLY cool thing any of them did in the entire movie. I was even happier when Bumblebee walks in and smashes them into each other and tosses them out of the room. One strange thing about this movie is that they seem to put in lots of characters who are deliberately annoying and even visibly annoy characters in the film (Sam’s roommate is another example) so that the audience will be happy when they get knocked out. I’m especially mad that the Twins get so many lines and screen time that other, better characters could be using. The only “Twins” I wanted to see in this movie were Sideswipe AND Sunstreaker. Instead, Sideswipe gets barely any screen time and Sunstreaker is completely absent. Instead of making up crappy new characters, they should’ve given us more movie versions of fan favorite characters like Wheeljack, or Perceptor, or Hot Rod, or Ultra Magnus or Prowl, or…I could go on and on! I’m sure many fans would’ve much rather seen any of these characters in the film than these ridiculous new characters.
3)Megan Fox is just eye candy. Sure she’s pretty, but her performance is pretty flat. I’d love to see an actress who can act in this role for a change, instead of a walking pin-up. There is no fire in her belly, no spark in her eye. She should’ve never been cast to begin with, but I guess we’re stuck with her now.
4)While I admit that most of the comedy in this film got at least a chuckle out of me, I think they overdid it. It’s like they have to turn every scene with the human characters into a comedy routine so we will tolerate the boringness of having all these fleshlings polluting a film that should mainly be about giant robots beating the tar out of each other. In doing so they run the danger of turning the whole thing into a giant farce. It was far too obvious that this film was written to appeal to 12 year olds and older people who are hopelessly mired in that mindset. It has all of the raunchiness of South Park, but lacks the brilliant social satire that redeems that show.
5)The language was much fouler than in the first film. I’m certainly no prude, but as the parent of a young child, it sucks to bring your kid to something like this and worry about hearing that your kid had been repeating lines from the movie in daycare or school. C’mon guys! It’s based on toys that are sold to children! You can find ways to make it seem more sophisticated and adult without resorting to such language so often – like maybe giving us a better story? Or decent character development? In the first movie the “bad” language was more natural, like the real reactions someone would have to seeing a car suddenly stand up and turn into a robot – but it’s more forced and pointless in this movie.
6)Lots of cornball moments in the movie. Did anyone really think that Sam was really dead? But the director milks that moment for all it’s worth (and then some!)even though you’d have to be brain dead to buy it. Excessive use of slow motion is a crime!
7)Megatron is The Fallen’s bitch? WHAAAAT??? Megatron is NOBODY’S servant or disciple! That is the main thing I like about the character! Even when faced with the ultimate bad guy, Unicron, he only accepts his overlordship at the last moment to preserve himself just long enough to figure out a way to betray him. I didn’t enjoy seeing Megs play second fiddle to The Fallen. He seemed genuinely crestfallen when The Fallen is killed, like he’d just lost his hero. Megatron is his own hero! He follows no one! That said, I did like his attempts to sway Optimus to his side during their battle by trying to persuade him that the future of their race depended on them exploiting the new energon source found on earth. This rang true to my perception of the character – that as evil as he appears to be, he actually does believe that he is doing the right thing for the survival of his race.
8)I don’t like the fact that so many characters in this film had wheels in place of legs. Sure, it makes some degree of sense in that one can imagine that they would move faster in ‘bot mode with wheels for legs, but only over normal terrain. There are many DISADVANTAGES to having a wheel instead of legs, like it makes it impossible to climb things and makes jumping very hard – and what on earth do they do when they get a flat? Plus I think it just looks bad. It makes it seem like the designers got bored halfway though creating the ‘bot mode of the characters. It makes me feel cheated somehow. Sure there is a precedent in Transformers lore (Hello, Beast Machines!) but it still sucks!
9)Devastator looked like a pile of trash.
10) Much of the action is too fast and choppy to properly follow upon a single viewing. This is a general problem with many modern action films.
The Just Plain Confusing (AKA food for thought):
1)Why couldn’t a bunch of Primes kill The Fallen? If “it takes a Prime to destroy The Fallen” (the equivalent of “fighting fire with fire” since The Fallen was once a “Prime”), surely 5 of them were up to the job! It seems stupid for them to sacrifice themselves to create a tomb to hide the Matrix in and leave someone so powerful and dangerous at large and leave nobody else around who is strong enough to take him on. And how did they go on to “father” Optimus if they all transformed into a tomb? Jetfire seems amazed that there is a “living Prime” around so obviously there wasn’t one( that he was aware of) around before he left Cybertron. So where the heck DOES Optimus come from exactly? I guess it makes SOME degree of sense if they couldn’t find The Fallen and were so terrified of the concept of him getting the Matrix and using it to make our sun go nova or whatever unless they locked it up good ASAP. It still seems like bad strategizing to me.
2) TFs reproduce sexually? Jetfire mentions having both a mother and a father! It’s not quite as silly as it seems since TFs seem to mimic most biological functions mechanically presumably using nanobots the same way we organics use cells. I just wish they would come out and clarify it already. Hey, it’s not as ridiculous as it seems, in G2 it was revealed that TFs once reproduced asexually in a process similar to cellular division.
Maybe that would explain the presence of female ‘bots in the movie – or in general? Why couldn’t ‘bots combine parts of their Sparks to forma unique new one, or their robotic equivalent of DNA (made up of nanobots) ? The background info for the first movie states that Megs and Prime are brothers (which Primes actually says in dialogue from the first movie, although he could’ve been speaking metaphorically) and that Megs killed their Father. So this info although not explicitly stared in the films themselves and therefore of dubious canocity, seems to back up this concept. Of course if this is true, why isn’t Megs “a Prime”?
2) What is up with those protoforms or whatever they are that the Decepticons are keeping in their ship? The ones Starscream says are too weak to mature without enough energon? Where did they come from? How did the Decepticons get them? Did the Allspark spit them out before it was launched into space? Or if Transformers do reproduce sexually as the movie implies, do they lay eggs (these things seem to be in some sort of transparent eggs)? If so, SOMEBODY had been getting a lot of action!
3) The Primes created the Allspark? The movie seems to imply that if they didn’t create it, then at the very least they kept it charged up with Energon extracted from suns. If they DID create it, it implies that the Primes are older than Cybertron since Optimus Prime says in the first movie that the Allspark is older than Cybertron. It also implies that the Primes created the rest of their race. Of course if you look at the Allspark Cube as just a physical artifact used to interface with a movieverse equivalent of Primus this makes sense. Perhaps Primus is the TRUE Allspark which as this movie states cannot really be destroyed, with the cube just being a man(or more accurately TF) made object used to access and channel his power. So maybe movieverse Primus makes the Primes and gives them the knowledge to create the Allspark Cube and keep it charged up? This is similar to the Beast Machines concept of the Allspark being a dimension that Primus resides in.
4) I still don’t get why the Allspark and its fragments only seems to create Decepticons, or at the very least Transformers whose first instinct upon birth is to shoot up everything in sight.
5) Optimus seems to know absolutely nothing about The Fallen when his name is first mentioned in the film. He claims that the Allspark held all the history of their race and when it was lost, so was that history. C’MON! Like being the leader of one half of the Transformer race means you can get away with having absolutely no knowledge for your own history? Who put Prime in charge if he is so damned ignorant? Every Decepticon in the film seems to be aware of the Fallen! You mean to say that even a rumor or legend of him was never been extracted from a single Decepticon in interrogation in all their countless years of battling each other? Yet once Optimus is revived by the Matrix he seems to be suddenly aware that the Primes were the brothers of The Fallen. Huh? Did the Matrix give him a sudden infusion of historical data? Did he have an awesome near death vision like Sam did that we were not privy to? WTF?
So overall what did I think of this movie? Well, I do feel that the first film was better, although there are many things in this movie that I think were improvements, there were just as many problems with it. I was entertained throughout, which after all is the goal of a movie such as this. While I am no great fan of Michael Bay (the only other movie of his I enjoyed was Independence Day, corny as it was), I do think he gets unfairly bashed. There is a reason why major studios keep on giving him millions of dollars to crank out movies like this. They are entertaining to a vast number of people! I think critics know this and can’t stands this fact because they know that he entertains primarily by playing to the lowest common denominator in human nature and they can’t stand this, or the fact that it is so consistently successful. It shatters their intellectual hubris that we are somehow progressing as a species and have evolved beyond the point of being still be entertained by stupid caveman humor and lots of explosions. It makes them realize that they are surrounded by “idiots” and they hate to be reminded of this - of how truly isolated they are from the general mindset of the great unwashed masses and makes them want to slink back into their intellectual ivory towers and hide there forever.
Sure it sucks! I’d rather see almost anyone else in charge of bringing the Transformers to the big screen, almost anyone would do a better job - but you also can’t deny that despite its many, many flaws, the final product is still pretty entertaining and is therefore still successful on some level. I am not so divorced from the passions of the “common man” (whatever the hell that means) to deny this. Parts of it will annoy you, but unless you’re a complete tool, you will be entertained which is the main reason we went to see movies the last time I checked. There are worse ways to spend a few hours. This is hardly a great piece of movie making but neither is it the steaming turd some critics would have you believe it is. It’s worth checking out for a laugh if you’re feeling bored. The Transformers franchise deserves better – but you knew that already when you saw the first film. If Hasbro itself doesn’t believe that – how do you think we’ll ever convince anyone else?
What do I know? I'm just some guy. Go see it for yourself and make up your own mind. Or don't. I don't care.
I'm now done talking about this- forever!
Small, British collectors card in the Film Stars series by Player's Cigarettes (John Player & Sons), Third Series, no. 39. Illustration: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.
Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.
Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.
However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
British postcard by Art Photo, no. 151. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.
German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.
Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.
Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.
However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
The Upanishads have said that all things are created and sustained by an infinite joy. To realise this principle of creation we have to start with a division--the division into the beautiful and the non-beautiful. Then the apprehension of beauty has to come to us with a vigorous blow to awaken our consciousness from its primitive lethargy, and it attains its object by the urgency of the contrast. Therefore our first acquaintance with beauty is in her dress of motley colours, that affects us with its stripes and feathers, nay, with its disfigurements. But as our acquaintance ripens, the apparent discords are resolved into modulations of rhythm. At first we detach beauty from its surroundings, we hold it apart from the rest, but at the end we realise its harmony with all. (Rabindranath Tagore)
Found this beautiful poppy next to a railway track near Gstaad train station, Switzerland.
Sample image taken with a Fujinon XF 56mm f1.2 R mounted on a Fujifilm XT1 body; each of these images is an out-of-camera JPEG with Lens Modulation Optimisation enabled. These samples and comparisons are part of my Fujinon XF 56mm f1.2 R review at:
cameralabs.com/reviews/Fujifilm_Fujinon_XF_56mm_f1-2_R/
Feel free to download the original image for evaluation on your own computer or printer, but please don't use it on another website or publication without permission from www.cameralabs.com/
Jpeg straight out of the camera, no photoshop, post processing or whathaveyou.
The bitmap being fed into the LED strip ought to have been rotated by 90 degrees, but it sort of worked out OK like this. A bit of pulsewidth modulation to make the yellow LEDs appear as dots seems to lend interesting texture, but I sort of feel it could have done with maybe a couple of stops down on the aperture to make everything a bit brighter.
In December and January the light can prove to be very testing for out-of-doors photographers and even more so when the sun shines brilliantly. Dark shadows and over-modulation are the most common difficulties and we have to pick our locations carefully for the shot to be successful. And just to make things even more complicated there are the usual issues of images that are moving and obstructions at the wrong moment.
In the heart of Links Links is Dennis Dart SLF, Plaxton Pointer SPD number 87 (SN53 AUX) on a Service 21. This bus is newly repainted and to mine eyes looks quite fabulous with its new coat of weinrot und weiss paint.
An 8-bit sythesizer made with arduino, with MIDI-in, audio output, can do sine, triangle and saw waves and bitwise modulation between them. Sounds nasty. See this blog post for more information.
Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com
Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: rawpixel
Cycles is a unique step sequencer for crafting complex and experimental percussion patterns on the iPad. This is a proof of concept in the early stages of development.
NOS - Purchased from a seller in Belarus. Here is part of the description provided by the seller - All-wave military radio with power from batteries or from a network of 220 volts. It is designed to receive broadcasts with amplitude modulation in the bands DV, SV and KV and frequency modulation in the UHF band. The radio receiver is efficient at ambient temperature from - 10 to + 50С and relative humidity up to 95% at 25С. Rated output power - 1 W.
“Claremont Road” has five Arduino UNO microcontrollers which control train movements along with PWM (servo adapted) points/turnouts, and signals according to pre-written programs or “sketches”. This is a completely different concept from DCC.
The master co-ordinating UNO gets feedback from the track through 14 enbedded infra-red proximity detectors,
Slaves 1-3 are UNO “train drivers”,
Slave 4 handles the display and lights. The orange display shows the current mode and commands being passed between the UNOs via a short-wire protocol known as I2C.
A nerdy challenge: how to portray the Servitors of the Outer Gods while avoiding their popular representation playing incongruous flutes. They emit high-pitched ululating sounds, according to Lovecraft, but I don't think he was referring to them being cosmic flutists and pipers. Initial stages of a work in progress: prior photo documentation and first sketches inspired by it, including details of the modulation of a wheezing respiratory system.
Yoko Ono
It was a sad and a little spooky to walk into the Dakota on this dark and rainy winter night, an evening not unlike the one on which John Lennon was killed here twelve years earlier. It seemed like no time had passed since I stood here in shocked silence with hundreds of others on the terrible day after, the old iron gate woven with flowers. And now I was back at that same gate, but this time with an appointment to go inside and talk to Yoko. To enter the old building, one passes through the bleak guard’s station, a gloomy room made more mournful by the recognition that this was where John staggered and fell, before being taken to the hospital.
But none of this gloom pervades the warm, elegant interior of Yoko’s apartment, with it’s enormous windows overlooking Central Park, the rainy streets below sparkling like glass. As you enter the apartment, you’re asked to take off your shoes in traditional Japanese style (having known this in advance I wore my best socks), and ushered by one of her assistants into the famous “white room,” with its giant white couch and tuxedo-white grand piano. It was at that keyboard that John was filmed performing “Imagine” as Yoko slowly opened up the blinds, letting in light.
Suddenly she arrived- she didn’t seem to walk in the room, but somehow simply appeared- and her gentle demeanour and warm smile instantly caused all nervousness to dissolve. As soon as I met Yoko, I understood why John loved her. She’s charming and beautiful, with a gentle smile in her eyes that photos never seem to reveal. Though she was a few months shy of 60 when we met, she looked younger and prettier than ever, especially without the dark aviator shades she wore like a veil through much of the last decade. In their place, she wore clear, round spectacles, the kind still commonly referred to as “John Lennon glasses.” She was barefoot, and in blue jeans, and nestled comfortably on the white couch.
Yoko’s speaking voice is soft and melodious, her accent bending English into musical, Japanese cadences. Contrary to the usual depictions of her in the press, she’s quite humorous, joking frequently and punctuating her comments with little bursts of laughter. She’s also quite humble about her work and her influence on John and other artists. “People can listen to the music,” she suggested softly, “and make their own judgement.”
“spring passes
and one remembers one’s innocence
summer passes
and one remembers one’s exuberance
autumn passes
and one remembers one’s reverence
winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance
there is a season that never passes
and that is the season of glass”
-Yoko Ono, 1981
She wrote this poem more than a decade ago now, a time she said “passed in high speed.” And like so many of the songs she wrote herself and with John, the truth in them remains constant, undiminished by passing time. In this verse she miraculously conveyed what millions around the world were feeling during those dark days following that darkest day in December of 1980 when John died. That this was a season that wouldn’t pass, a tragedy that wouldn’t be trivialized by time, a wound that wouldn’t heal. And in a way, we didn’t want it to.
But perhaps the one thing that has shifted since then is that the work of Yoko Ono can begin to be seen in a new light. Rykodisk Records released a six-CD set of Yoko’s recorded works call Onobox in 1992, and for the still uninitiated this collection serves well as a revelation about one of the world’s most famous yet still misunderstood songwriters.
Known for the high-pitched, passionate kind of “Cold Turkey” wailing she has employed through the years- what she refers to as “voice modulations”- in truth she sings the majority of her songs in clear and gentle tones, usually wrapped in rich layers of vocal harmonies. When her father discovered that Yoko as a teen wanted to be a composer, he objected and suggested instead that she become a professional singer. “I knew the whole world would laugh”, she said, cognizant of the common misconceptions about her music, “but I had a good voice.” She studied piano and music theory while growing up in Japan, and can both read and transcribe music- something none of the Beatles ever learned.
She’s a musician who worked in experimental music for years before she inspired and aided in the creation of “Revolution 9,” the most avant-garde track ever included on a Beatles’ album. In New York circa 1965, along with the composer John Cage and others, Yoko delved into areas of “imaginary music” and “invisible sounds,” concentrating on the creation of an unwritten music, a music that transcended our need to notate. “You can’t translate the more complex sounds into traditional notation,” she said. “I wanted to capture the sounds of birds singing in the woods…”
She put on concerts with great jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden in the years before John insisted she record her songs with some of his “friends,” an above-average assemblage of musicians that included George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman and Ringo Starr. Most of her work with this group were jams at first, musical improvisations based on her poems. But gradually she started crafting songs, composing melodies as eloquent as her poetry. And contrary to the idea that John arranged and produced her songs, Yoko always had a firm grasp on the translation of her inner visions into recorded music. “Though, of course, you do make little mistakes,” she admitted, laughing.
She’s known both dire poverty and great wealth in her life, and has boomeranged between the two. She was born in Tokyo into a wealthy banking family in March of 1933, the Year of the Bird. The descendant of a ninth century emperor, she was raised mostly by servants as her father was often away on business in America, and her mother tended to social obligations. When she was 11 in wartime 1945, much of Tokyo was being destroyed by American bombers, and her family were forced, in her father’s absence, to flee from their home. Yoko was sent by her mother with her brother and sister to a small village called Karuizawa. Until the end of the war they lived there in a little house on a cornfield, raising money by selling off kimonos and other possessions until they simply had to beg for food from door to door. Yoko and the other children were almost always hungry. After the war the family was able to gradually return to their wealthy lifestyle.
Yoko’s father decided to pursue business in America, and the family moved to suburban New York. Yoko attended Sarah Lawrence College in Scarsdale and began spending a lot of time in Manhattan. It was there that she met a young Japanese composer named Toshi Ichiyangi who was studying at Juilliard. In time she moved into a loft with Toshi and married him, much to her parent’s dismay, and the two experienced a repeat of the poverty Yoko knew as a child.
In New York Yoko began to gradually establish a reputation for herself as an avant-garde performance artist. She put on a series of shows at the Carnegie Hall Recital Hall, performances such as the infamous “Cut Piece” in which she sat onstage in a black shroud holding scissors and invited the audience to step up and cut away portions of her gown, which they did, until she was nearly naked. She also wrote and published a book of instructions on how to see the world in new ways called Grapefruit, and launched a movement known as “Bagism” in which people would be invited to come onstage and get into large black bags with other people, their mysterious shapes creating an ever-moving art piece. She divorced Toshi around this time and married New York artist Tony Cox, with whom she had a daughter, Kyoko.
Yoko met John Lennon in London 1966 at the Indica Gallery. It was the ninth of November, the number nine always prominent in their lives. When they eventually came together, many months after that evening, they made art before they ever made love, collaborating on the experimental recording Two Virgins until sunrise.
For days before John died, he and Yoko had been busy in New York’s Hit Factory working on a song that surprised both of them for its fire and passion, Yoko’s amazing “Walking on Thin Ice.” Though they had released their dialogue of the heart, Double Fantasy, only weeks earlier and it was racing up the Top Ten, nothing on it matched the pure electric fury of this record. “It was as if we were both haunted by the song,” Yoko wrote in the liner notes for the single. “I remember I woke up in the morning and found John watching the sunrise and still listening to the song. He said I had to put it out right away as a single.”
The next music of Yoko’s we heard was the album she started working on just months after John’s death, Season of Glass. It’s a phenomenal work, expressing the sequence of emotions she experienced, passing through shock, denial, outrage, madness, horror, pure sadness, and ultimately unconditional, undying love. It’s an undeniable masterpiece of songwriting straight from the soul, and even critics who routinely attacked her music for years recognized in print the pure, naked power of this album.
Some of Yoko’s sweetest love songs are here, such as the Spanish-tinged “Mindweaver,” “Even When You’re Far Away,” and the irrepressible “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do.” It also contains recordings of found sounds that expressed this time in her life: gunshots, screams, and her son Sean’s voice. As always, she left no barriers between her life and her art, which is immediately apparent on the album’s cover. It’s a photograph she took in early morning with the skyline of Manhattan across Central Park looking purple and blurry in the background. In the forefront there’s a table top on which sits the clear-rimmed spectacles John was wearing the night he was shot, one half splattered with blood, reflected in the transparent surface of the table. Beside the spectacles is a glass halfway full of water.
As Yoko expected, many people were outraged by this image. But they missed the fact that she was simply revealing the actuality of her life in her art as she always has, refusing to hide the real horror she had to endure. “It was like I was underwater,” she confirmed. “Like I was covered in blood.”
People also missed the fact that on the back of the album Yoko included a sign of hope. She’s sitting beside the same table by this same window, and in the same spot where John’s glasses were now sits a potted geranium, happily reaching towards the trees and blue Manhattan sky. Next to that germanium is a glass of water. And the glass is full.
From the beginning of her career, Yoko Ono’s message has been a positive one. Though dark and negative motivations have consistently been attributed to her, any analysis of her songs reveals a dedicated optimist at work more than anything. A quick survey of titles makes this clear; “Give Peace A Chance” (written with John, of course), “It’s Alright,” “I See Rainbows,” “Hard Times Are Over,” “Goodbye Sadness,” and so on. When John first met Yoko at her art exhibit at London’s Indica Gallery on that legendary day in 1966, it was the fact that her message was positive, that there was a magnified “Yes” at the top of the ladder he climbed, that bought them together. And when I asked her about her hardships as a child during the war, she remembered the light in the darkness, “I fell in love with the sky during that period,” she said, “The sky was just beautiful in the countryside. The most beautiful thing about it.”
Through the eighties after John was gone, again and again her mission has been to give hope, and the exuberance of her music was reflected in this affirmation. It’s Alright, which followed Seasons of Glass, is one of the most hopeful and inspiring albums ever made.
Despite all of it, though, Yoko Ono has been subject to some of the most extreme and bitter criticism any songwriter has ever had to endure. For years, hordes have held on to the notorious notion that she “broke up the Beatles,” still refusing to give John Lennon credit for making his own choices. That John’s life, both personal and professional, was entirely transformed when he fell in love with this woman, was never Yoko’s fault. If anything, she deserves praise for her profound influence on his art. He felt reborn when he and Yoko came together, and his enthusiasm for artistic expression was renewed. “I was awake again,” he said. “[Yoko] inspired all this creation in me. It wasn’t that she inspired the songs. She inspired me.”
When the criticism came, though it wasn’t ever easy to abide, it was anything new for Yoko Ono. When she was a kid growing up in Japan, her writing was roundly rejected by schoolteachers who objected to the fact that it didn’t fit into existing forms and that she had no desire to make it fit. “It’s not that I consciously tried not to conform,” she explained, smiling, “I was just naturally out of the system.” Since that time she’s bravely made her art regardless of whether it was embraced or rejected by the critics of the world. “It cost me my dignity sometimes,” she recalled. “But who needs dignity?”
When did you first start writing songs?
I was sort of a closet writer [laughs]. I was writing in the style of atonal songs but with poetry on top of it. I liked to write poetry and I liked to make it into music, into songs. It was something I liked very much to do anyway.
And then in London I think I was writing a couple of songs before getting together with John. The songs were in quite an interesting style, really. I don’t know how to put it. Maybe there’s some tape that’s left.
It was some interesting stuff I was doing. It was mostly acapella, because I didn’t have any musicians with me in London. And doing a kind of mixture of Oriental rhythm & blues, I suppose [laughs].
I think “Remember Love” was the first so-called pop song that I wrote but before that, before I met John, I wrote a few songs and one of them was “Listen, The Snow is Falling.” I made that into a pop song later. “Remember Love” was probably the first one I wrote as a pop song from the beginning.
Do you generally have the same approach to writing songs?
I can’t stand being in a rut, so I sort of always jump around. That’s me.
[Laughs]
Do you write on piano?
Yes. I use the piano because I don’t know any other instrument, really. I tried the guitar once and it hurt my fingers so much and I didn’t like it. John said, “Try it” so I tried it in L.A., when we stayed in L.A. But I didn’t like it at all. So, I just naturally go to the piano.
If I’m not at the piano, I can write riding in the car. And I just write down the notes and bring it in to the piano later.
Do you find your songs come in a flash, or do they come from the result of a lot of work?
No, it’s always a flash. And if I don’t catch it [laughs] and write it down, or put in a tape [softly], it just goes. Never comes back. Isn’t that funny?
Can you control when that flash comes? Do you ever sit down to write a song?
No, I never did that. But I mean, the point is that sometimes words do come back. The words are a different thing. Sometimes I will forget to write the music down and I’ll have only the words. And then I’ll put it to music at the piano, and it becomes a totally different song, you know.
When you first me John, did you have much enthusiasm for rock music?
Well, I started to have an incredible enthusiasm. In the beginning when I was sitting in the Beatles’ sessions, I thought that it was so simplistic. Like a kind of classical musician, avant-garde snobbery. And then I suddenly thought, “This is great!” I just woke up. And then I really felt good about it.
There’s an incredible energy there. Like primitivism. And no wonder. It’s a very healthy thing an no wonder it’s like a heartbeat. It’s almost like the other music appealed to a head plane, like brain music, and then they forgot about the body.
[Softly] It’s a very difficult to go back to your body. You know that bit about without the body we don’t exist. You forget that! It’s almost like we can just live in our heads. And a lot of intellectual, academic people, they tend to be that.
So I thought, “This is great!” It’s a total music.
Then I realized what was wrong with the other music. It was removed from the body. It lost that kind of energy. And I thought, “No wonder I was just sort of wondering around. Okay, well, this is great.” I went back to my body. It’s true.
It seemed that you had a big effect on their music by being there. Even McCartney said that he felt that he had to be more avant-garde when you were around.
I don’t know. It might have affected them that way on a peripheral level, the fact that I was there. But I was just living my own world inside. Dream world. [Laughs] I was sitting there just thinking about all the stuff I’m doing in my head. So I was there and in a way I wasn’t there.
Some of your die-hard fans felt that being with John Lennon was detrimental to your art, while other have said that your work blossomed in a new way.
Probably it would have been easier for me, career-wise, if I didn’t get together with him. In a way, I lost respectability or dignity as an artist. But then, what is dignity and what is respectability? It’s a kind of thing that was a good lesson for me to lose it. What am I supposed to be doing, carrying respectability and dignity like a Grand Dame of the avant-garde for twenty years? That would have been… boring. [Laughs]
That was a kind of option that was open to me, you know, and [softly] I didn’t take it. It was quite more fun to go forward into a new world.
John’s famous song “Imagine” originated from an idea in one of your poems from Grapefruit about imagining a different world. Do you feel people ever understood the source?
No. A song like that, it’s a political statement in a way, and it’s about changing people’s heads. And I think that people don’t have to understand anything except the message of the song, and hopefully that will get to them.
With John, people have named his songs to get his response, but no one has done that with you. May I?
Oh, sure. Do you mind if I just get my cigarettes? I still can’t shake it, you know?
“Dogtown.”
I was in an apartment on Bank Street with John. It was early in the morning and John was still asleep in the other room. I was at the window and the window was in such a way that the front room was very dark. The room was a few steps down from the pavement so from the window you would kind of look at people walking. It was like that feeling. Early morning. It was just that. I lit my cigarette and listened to the early morning sounds. The song was almost like a diary, describing what I was doing.
I didn’t want to wake up John. I had an electric piano that you can tone down very very quiet, and you’re the only one who can hear it, you know? That’s how I made “Dogtown.” [Laughs]
So it started as a quiet song.
Well I wasn’t thinking quiet, I was just making sure that he couldn’t hear.
“Death of Samantha.”
Oh, yeah. I know that one. There was a certain instant and I felt like I was really sad, so that’s when it happened. Something terribly upsetting happened to me and then the next time we were at the studio, while the engineers were sort of putting the board in order, it flashed to me. So I just wrote it down.
This is funny because with “Death of Samantha,” while I was writing I sort of saw this graveyard. It’s not a graveyard, because when you think of a graveyard, you think of many, many gravestones. It’s just a kind of grey kind of day, grey scene, and grey people standing around like somebody has died. And after John’s death people said, “You were writing about his vigil, did you know that?” And I read the lyrics that they sent me from “Death of Samantha” and I just reread it and realized, oh, that’s true. Of course, I didn’t realize it then. So it’s very strange. You know, images come to me.
Many of your songs told future things.
It’s scary in a way.
Why do you think that is?
I don’t know what it is. So I’m very careful about what I say or what I think or do. Cause it could mean something later.
“Yang Yang.”
Oh, “Yang Yang” was based on a chord change. I like to use, kind of an ascending harmonic change. I showed it to John that instead of ascending by half-notes, you can ascend by whole notes, and that gives a kind of vital power that is interesting. And “Yang Yang” is the first thing that came to me with those chords.
That song is in E minor and a lot of songs from this period are also in that key. Do keys have different significances for you?
Yeah. Each chord has a difference significance astrologically. I use F# a lot, and E minor too. And I’m thinking why, and it seems like it’s agreeable to my astrology.
I was also thinking why I sometimes use the key of C [major] because C is so simplistic, most composers probably avoid it. But I don’t avoid it. Why not? Why do I do that? C s a key of communication, I understand. So I used it in a song I had to communicate. The kind of songs that I wrote in the key of C or rewrote in the key of C, like “Give Peace a Chance” or that sort of thing, it’s all to do with communication, of course. The widest communication you want, so you go back to the simplest key, which is C.
That’s interesting. I’ve noticed that TV commercials are often in C, probably for the same reason.
Oh, yeah. It’s fascinating. And I think that most writers instinctively go for something simple to communicate.
Your song “Silver Horse” is in C major.
Yeah. [Laughs] You know what it was? “Silver Horse” is like a fairy-tale. It’s like a story that you tell your child. It just happened, you know. It’s that kind of nursery rhyme feeling I was trying to give.
I love the spoken part on that song when you say, “I came to realize the horse had no wings,” and then you ask yourself, “No wings?”
[Laughter] Oh, by the way, John loved that song. Yeah. He kept saying, “Oh, that’s a great song” because he liked the fact that I say, “It wasn’t so bad, you know.” [Laughs]
I know John also loved your song, “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do,” which has a wonderful chord progression.
Yeah, he liked the chord sequence. It’s a chord sequence that is probably pretty prevalent in country music but you don’t use that much in rock.
That’s one of your happiest songs, and yet you bring in the sadness in the line, “The feeling of loneliness hangs over like a curse…”
We’re all complex people, you know. You can’t just sort of be happy all the time, you know, like zombies. [Laughs]
Another one of your happiest songs, which was also on the It’s Alright album, is “My Man.”
You like that?
Very Much.
I wanted to make a real pop one, you know? A lot of people think that wasn’t artistic, like it’s sort of silly or something. Which is true: “Bab-a-lou, bab-a-lou.” I liked that. [Laughs] Dumb but nice, you know?
On “Woman of Salem,” you used the year 1692 without knowing that was the actual year of the witch trials?
Isn’t it amazing that I didn’t know that year? After I finished Salem, you know, I just thought of it. It’s incredible. It’s uncanny, isn’t it?
Yes. Any explanation?
No. [Laughs] I went to see her house and I was nearly crying. I mean, you talk about witches and it’s not a witch at all. It’s a sensible doctor’s house, you know? Very intellectual, artistic kind of person living there, you just know it.
It makes me think of your song, “Yes, I’m A Witch” in which you say “I don’t care what you say, my voice is real and speaking truth.”
Yeah, I know. That’s me.
“A Story.”
Okay., “Story.” That, again, is like a nursery rhyme. It’s a simple story, you know? I think it was in C, wasn’t it?
One of the songs I’ve been especially loving on Onobox is “Yume O Moto” which you sing in Japanese.
That’s nice, isn’t it?
Very. What does it mean?
Let’s have a dream. Yume o moto.
Do you find that it’s more natural or pleasing to sing in Japanese than in English?
I don’t think so. I don’t feel that way.
The author Vladimir Nabokov said that English is like a blank canvas, that it doesn’t have an inherent beauty the way other languages do. Do you find that?
I don’t find that. I think English is a very beautiful language. All languages are beautiful, really.
Do you think in English?
Sometimes I think in Japanese, sometimes I think in English. But mainly in English at this point, you know. I mean, when I’m talking in English, of course I think in English.
Do you dream in English?
Yeah!
“Yume O Moto” was from an album called A Story which you recorded in 1973 during your separation from John, what you both called your “lost weekend.” You decided not to release it at the time, and have included it here as the final disk of the Onobox. There are so many great songs on it, hearing it now it’s surprising that you didn’t want to put it out.
Well, you know, there are many things that I just chucked, you know, or shelved, you know. Like from my early days, like the stories that I wrote, that it was just in the course of going from one country to another or one relationship to another. Something I lost or whatever. It was one of those things. I didn’t think that much about it.
John recorded Walls and Bridges during that time and he released it.
I know, John can do it, I can’t right? There’s a difference.
Many of your best songs, such as “Loneliness” and “Dogtown” came from that album. Had you released it, do you think people might have recognized you as a songwriter earlier in your career?
Well, I couldn’t put it out then, anyway. Let’s put it that way.
Why not?
Well, I don’t know, it’s just… Look. Listen to Feeling the Space. That’s a pretty good album. There’s some good songs in there too, you know that, right? So? That was out there but nobody cared. It’s the same thing. Now you say that people might have known I was a songwriter. At the time, putting out Feel the Space, people should have know, or putting out Approximately Infinite Universe, people should have known that I’m a songwriter, and they didn’t, so what are we talking about? You know, one more album is not going to help, you know?
In a way, it’s good that came out now. You get it? Then if people hear it, without kind of the Yoko-bashing… I didn’t think so. I thought it was going to be bashed again. But obviously they’re taking it differently now. I don’t know why. Let’s put it that way. I’m very lucky because I could have died without hearing about it.
I think there’s a small group of hardcore fans who had to literally go through the same bashing that I went through just because they like my music. So I’m doing it for them, too, this box. I felt I really had to make sure that every note was right. For them.
I’ve been surprised by some of the resistance to your work, especially when Season of Glass came out, because it was such a meaningful album.
I wasn’t too aware of what was going on then, but it seems that it’s easy to concentrate on the kind of things that I was doing, it was easier to concentrate on that than to go into the outside world.
“It’s Alright.”
Oh, that was so difficult. It was a very difficult one to make, really. But I loved it. That was after John’s death and everything and I was really trying to get into music. So it was like getting into harmony, and putting in all the harmonies. There were many things that I wanted to get in, so I intentionally made it so that there were holes in it. And I filled those in with different kinds of little choruses. It was like a collage, and it was a big production. A big production with not many people, not many musicians. In other words, all those sort of overdub things that I did.
“Mindweaver.”
Oh, “Mindweaver,” oh… [Pause] I wanted to make it like a duet with the guitar and my voice. And I was thinking of basically making it like a Spanish mourning song. It has that kind of dignity.
“It Happened.”
Oh, “It Happened” was actually composed in 1973 and at the time it had to do with moving away from each other. But then, when John died, I thought, “Oh, that’s what it was about” [laughs] and I put it on the back of “Walking on Thin Ice.”
I look at that period of separation like a rehearsal.
A rehearsal for what?
For the big separation that I didn’t know would happen. It was very good that I had that rehearsal in terms of moving along. That helped me later.
“Cape Clear.”
“Cape Clear” was first called “Teddy Bear.” [Laughs] I was writing at the piano. I was writing at this piano in The Dakota and in Cold Spring Harbour. In those days I still had Cold Spring Harbour. And it was just one of those songs. Central Park gave me that inspiration, you get it? Like the girls are sitting in the park and the clouds passing by, you know? I was looking over Central Park and I was thinking, “Oh. I could be sitting there.” It sort of flashed in my mind.
How about “Walking on Thin Ice”?
Oh. [Laughs] “Walking on Thin Ice.” What about it?
It’s such a powerful songs, both musically and lyrically. Do you recall where it came from, or how you wrote it?
I was thinking of Lake Michigan. I went to Chicago. And Lake Michigan is so big that you don’t know the end of it when you look at it. I was visualizing Lake Michigan. I was just thinking of this woman that is walking Lake Michigan when it is totally frozen, and is walking and walking but not knowing that it’s that huge. [A siren sound starts from outside, getting louder.] I’m like one of those people. “Oh it’s ice but I can walk on it.” I walk like that in life.
That song is about yourself?
Yes. I think so. The spoken part, “I knew a girl…” and all that, that feeling came to me after we recorded it. But I wasn’t sure about it. I just knew it had something to do with a girl who is walking. Then I sang the song, and I was still sitting in the chair by the mike, waiting for them to change the tape. That’s when it just came. So I just wrote it down quickly. I said, “I got it!” And I told them I was just going to do something after the singing, and I just did it.
Where do you think those kinds of thoughts come from?
No idea. It’s very interesting because it could be something that came totally from somewhere else. But, of course, it’s about me, and that’s how I was looking at it. But then, I don’t know. I didn’t think it was about me, really. I was just looking at this girl who is walking, you know.
It seems like a visual message. You see, in my mind, sound and visual is all very closely connected. It’s mixed almost. So when I hear sound, I almost hear it in colour as well.
When you listen to something like “What a Bastard the World Is,” or something, you probably see something, some filmic image.
Many of your songs are very visual.
Yes. Because that’s how I see it and I hear it. Seeing and hearing is very closely connected.
When I said, “I knew a girrrl…,’ that I thought was to accentuate certain syllables that it’s odd to accentuate. And that was like Alban Berg. Let’s do like Alban Berg.
That’s some of John’s most passionate guitar playing.
Oh, incredible. He did great guitar playing on “Woman Power” and “She Hits Back.” Very good. But also, not talking about those normal ones, what did you think about “Why”? He’s so good, isn’t he?
Yes. On something like that or on “Walking On Thin Ice” did you give him the kind of sound or direction that you heard in your head?
Kind of, yeah. I mean, we’d talk about it. Like I would say, “I’m going to go like this, you go like this.” I don’t mean “go like this” in terms of notes, but just the mood of it.
It depends. On “Cambridge” he wanted to know how to do it, so I kind of explained it to him before we went to Cambridge. With “Why” I was talking about the kind of dialogue we could do in terms of my voice and his guitar. But it’s not like telling him what note to play.
Speaking of a dialogue, you also wrote songs in dialogue on Double Fantasy.
Yes. We sort of vaguely had this idea about doing a dialogue album. But some of the songs, like “I’m Moving On,” were written before. In putting together an album, I’d bring out a song and say, “What about this then?” When you do ‘I’m Losing You’ I’ll do this.” That part of the dialogue was a conscious sequence.
“Sisters O Sisters.”
“Sisters O Sisters” was written for a rally in Michigan for John Sinclair in 1971. When we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the concert, John said, “She’s got something, Yoko’s got something,” I said, “This is for the sisters of Ann Arbour, Michigan.” And we sung it, and that was the premiere. [Laughs] And afterwards I didn’t think much of it until we were making Sometime in New York City, which probably was in ’72. At the time we did that, we did it in the recording studio for the first time with Phil Spector. And the way I’m singing in Ann Arbour, Michigan is very different from the way I sung in the Phil Spector version. And I think Phil Spector version is a good one.
Seasons of Glass was such a powerful record, and so meaningful at that time for so many people.
When I made Season of Glass, I felt like I was still like walking underwater or something, so I didn’t really know people’s reaction.
In that poem you wrote, “There is a season that never passes, and that is the season of glass.” Which echoed the way so many felt after John’s death, that this is a time that won’t pass. Do you feel that we’re still in the season of glass?
I don’t know, because I may have been talking about something more than John’s death in a way. At the time, of course, I was talking about my private experience. But I’m doing a piece right now for a gallery show which is about a family that is sitting in the park at meltdown time, and I was thinking in terms of the meltdown of the human race and the endangered species. And somebody said that it looked like genocide as well.
So it’s like the season of glass is still here in terms of the whole world. We’re still not reaching a point of not having… bloody glasses.
A very positive message you put out that I think people have missed is that on Season of Glass, on the back cover, the glass of waster that was half-full on the front is now full.
Yeah, Oh, you mean you noticed it? Very few people noticed that.
Do you think your positive messages often were overlooked?
Well, some people got them and some didn’t. It depends on the person, too. I mean, you noticed something, you know? [Laughs] But most people didn’t notice it.
So many of your songs are positive. Does an artist have an obligation to have a positive message?
No. Some artists are writing depressive songs and killing themselves, you know? [Laughs] It depends on the artist. There are some depressive moments in my work, but, yeah, generally I try to fight back.
John was attracted to the word “Yes” in your art show when you first met.
Yeah. Well, we just have to, you know? It’s not like I don’t know that the world has various negative aspects. But writing about that is not going to help anybody.
Would it be okay if I asked you your response to some of John’s songs?
Sure.
“Strawberry Fields.”
I love it. You know what it is? That was the first John Lennon song that I encountered. And there was a party at the editor of the Art Magazine’s house in London. And I went to that, and I think I was a bit earlier than the others and I was in the house and the editor said, “Oh, listen to this, Yoko. When a pop song comes to this point, what do you think?”
And he played “Strawberry Fields,” in London. And I thought, “Hmmmmm…” Because there were some dissonant sounds and I thought it was pretty good. For a pop song. [Laugh]
It thought it was cute. I thought it was some cute stuff. Because I was making songs with all dissonant sounds. It impressed me. I was surprised a pop song could be that way.
I like the song. Musically, it was very terrific. And there’s a lot of connections about it. I mean, I think of John as an artist, a songwriter, a fellow artist. But also, he was my husband, you know. And I remember all his pain as a child, sort of looking at Strawberry Fields, which was an orphanage, you know. He always told me about his Aunt Mimi saying, whenever he was out of hand, Mimi would say, “You can go there. You’re lucky you’re not there, John.” So, Strawberry Fields to him was connected with this strange kind of fear and love, love for the kind of children that were very close to his condition. John was in a better position. So there’s that love and that strange fear for it.
It’s very strong thing for him. That sort of painful memory that he had of Strawberry Fields, he transferred that into a song. And made it positive. And that song was transferred into a park. [Laughs] It’s a very strong thing that I witnessed. So it means a lot to me.
“Come Together.”
Oh. Oh, that’s a beautiful song. Well, that’s very John. That’s a very John song. And a lot of people came together to his music. It’s like a symbol of that, you know?
“Starting Over.”
Well… that’s a nice song, isn’t it? [Laughs]
Yeah. It’s very happy.
Like me and him, right? [Laughs]
“Across the Universe.”
Oh, “Across the Universe.” That’s beautiful poetry. And also, “Across the Universe,” the kind of melody and rhythm and all that, reminds me of the beginning of the so-called New Music.
“Bless You.”
Oh, “Bless You,” of course. I have a special emotional thing about it, don’t I? I remember when he first came and played it to me.
“Julia.”
Well, that’s very beautiful. I was there when he wrote it. I think it’s such a strong melody.
He wrote so many beautiful melodies, yet McCartney has the reputation for being the melody writer.
No, no, no, no. It’s not true at all. John was a great melody writer.
Is it true that “Because” was based on “The Moonlight Sonata” which he asked you to play backwards?
When you really listen to it, you see that he did play the chords backwards at one point but I think eventually it cleaned up a bit into a pop format. So he didn’t use all the chords. But that was the initial inspiration.
There were many songs he wrote with your name in it, such as “Dear Yoko,” “Oh Yoko,” “The Ballad of John & Yoko” in which you became almost a folk hero…
Well, I don’t know about that. I think that from where I come from, in the art world, Picasso’s always painting the wife, or Modigliani only had one model, who was his wife, so that kind of thing is normal. So it didn’t strike me as anything unusual.
Did you and John ever discuss songwriting?
For me, it’s so natural to use so many different chords. Because in classical music, you just do this. The kind of thing he would show me was that instead of using so many different chords, just use two chords. It’s funkier. That’s a great trick. That’s the kind of thing that classical musicians or composers lost, of course.
Do you have a favourite song that John wrote?
“In My Life” is a pretty good one, isn’t it?
McCartney’s son “Get Back” seemed to be directed at you.
We thought that.
Did you have any inner response to that?
No. I don’t know. That’s another thing that is the strength of an artist, probably. Artists always think, “Oh, maybe they’re trying to hurt me,” or whatever. You think that but in the next minute you’re thinking about your own songs, your own art or sculpture or films or whatever. So by doing that, you shake it off. So it doesn’t stick so much.
You’ve had a lot of tragedy in your life. Do you feel that tragedy helps an artist to open up in any way?
I think that tragedy comes in all forms. No one should encourage artists to pursue tragedy so that they might become a good artist. I wouldn’t encourage that. You don’t have to have tragedy to create, really.
Was there ever a feeling on your part that you would want to leave the Dakota, and live elsewhere?
Not really. It was the spot that my husband died, you know? It was… like you don’t want to leave there, you know?
These days this place represents teenagers, Sean and Sean’s friends. It’s quite a different scene, and it’s very nice.
Early in your career you worked with John Cage and you called “imaginary music” and music that can’t be notated. Later you said you felt that the pop song was more powerful because it could reach more people. What do you think now?
I still feel that there’s kind of an extra-sensory perception kind of area where you can pursue that sort of communication and sound vibration on that level, et cetera. But, yes, I really think the pop song, or rock, is a very good means of communication.
Do you think the songform is restrictive?
Yes.
You once said that you felt songs were like haikus.
Yes, definitely. But also it’s either way. Even when it’s twenty minutes or an hour, in the context of the big world, it’s very small [laughs], you know what I mean? It’s all very relative, you know.
Was it difficult for you to continually create in the face of people’s negative energy? Even when you were a little girl, your teachers were harsh with your writing, yet you always had the bravery to do your art regardless.
In a sense because of that I lost many writings. Because they would discourage me so I would keep on writing, but I wouldn’t hold onto them. And the same with the tapes. A lot of tapes I did, like “London Jam” kind of things with John, it’s a pity that they’re lost. And the reason why they were lost was because there was so much antagonism about it.
I would insist on going on and doing something, but I wouldn’t keep them. It’s not like I would intentionally destroy them. But it’s like easy to let it slip out of your hands. That’s how it’s manifest.
In looking back at all this work, do you have a favourite song?
That’s a difficult question, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know. The other day I was listening and I thought, “What Did I Do” was one I liked very much. But that’s just in passing. I did like, “No, No, No” a lot but now I don’t feel like listening to it. It’s like different times, you know, something fixes in your head. Of course, I did like “Walking on Thin Ice” but [laughs] how long can you like “Walking on Thin Ice”? I got over it.
The number nine has been significant in your life, and we’re in the nineties. Are you optimistic about these times, and times to come?
Yeah, I think that we’re going back to a good age. The 1980s were hard because it was a material age and people were just into materialism, I think. But I always liked it that I didn’t go into that expansion thing. I think that this decade people are going to start to sober up a bit, and start to really understand or appreciate the value of real things. So you can’t just con them with a bit of commercial music. People are going to be more interested in real music. Genuine emotion.
Do you think songwriters can still write real songs?
We have to strive to be real, that’s all. Being real is not something that just happens to you. You have to sort of keep at it.
In “Dogtown” you write about “the true song I never finished writing all my life.” Do you feel that you have finished yet or are you still working on it?
I’m still working [laughs]
Do you feel that songs are timeless, and that they can last?
Oh, sure. I think that if you’re really communicating on a basic level, you’re going to be communicating all the time. Once it’s there. Once a song becomes a song, it has its own fate.
Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com
Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.
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Having only seen the sculpture in it's various bronze incarnations this cast was a surprise. The more subtile modulations of the surface are more apparent without the applied highlighting of a patina that shifts greatly from cast to cast.
Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com
Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.
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The bottom drawer contains the forgotten artifacts of the past. Infrequent searches through the contents can become prolonged walk though distant memories.
Created for IP268 with elements:
1. a list (radio modulations and coding)
2. something with a strap, or straps (my childhood watch)
3. artificial light (old mag-lite torch)
These contents were actually found in the bottom drawer.
Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com
Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: rawpixel
Nectar-bearing information is carried by members of the earth and water elementals, while vibrational-information is conveyed by the elementals of air. The thought energies transferred by the fire elementals, because of the energy’s upward and lightweight composition, are predominantly relayed by means of photosynthesis. All of these energy centers of communication are maintained by the universal astral light which nourishes the elementals who inhabit various parts of nature. The residue left by the scorched wings of the Angels of Light left a harmonic pitch which carries information between the elementals. This modulation is maintained in crystal transceivers within the earth, and relayed by the vibrations between earth’s magnetic poles. The elementals serve as the nerves of the planet using this crystalline harmonic communication to form a candid, botanical parrhesia in which to disseminate the expressions of Gaia.
www.elephantjournal.com/2020/12/some-notes-on-nature-spir...
Recently composed this. It's a bare bones version, and uses a chip tune soundfont. May change it up later.
For now, enjoy! ;3
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ7TjQsCGkE&feature=youtube_g...
How many notes does it have? Enough. :p
156 W. 44th Street, New York
Continuous Entertainment
Four Little White Pianos
Lumitone
CAPA-002959
Mailed from New York, New York to George L. Jones at Radio Store in Hazardville, Connecticut on October 22, 1945:
Monday Morning 10-22
Dear George: Last nite from my driveway, I worked Jim King - he said I had a very heavy carrier, but my modulation was so down he could barely read me, in fact, we had to sign. I heard him working KZU later. Do you think it's the mike or what?
Regards, Ernie
A Place to Bury Strangers graces us with their presence once again. I'm still surprised this avant garde experimental band comes to St. Louis. The crowd, though not large, understands and appreciates this unique band. You have to see them to understand their artistry and power.
The subtitle of this series is the "madness of photographing in stobe lights". I asked Oliver Ackermann before they played if they were going to have strobes likes the first time I saw them. I just wanted to be ready for them. He laughed and, "Maybe." Oh yes there were strobes and they were even more intense than last time. It was a smaller more independent venue this time and maybe that made it easier to put on the show they REALLY wanted to. Though 60% of my shots were black, I managed to get a few.
#amy buxton
#Fall
#St. Louis
#A Place to Bury Strangers
#band
#music
#noise manipulation
#Off Broadway
#wave modulation
#Death By Audio
#Dion Lunadon
#Oliver Ackermann
#experimental rock
#space rock
#strobe light
#strobe
#concert
Or: How to change your mind, with psychedelics and optogenetics.
Genevieve introduced the closing keynote for the PSFC Summit today: Karl Deisseroth is the pioneer of the mind-reading and writing tool (optogenetics.org at Stanford) that allows for individual neuron targeting and manipulation, and his new work looks at the effects of mind-altering drugs on brain function in detail.
For a sense of the power of his methods: he can take a pair of mice than were just mating happily, and with a flip of a switch, they become violent to each other. He made a mouse walk in an infinite left turn loop when a fiber optic is flipped on in the motor cortex (with no apparent awareness or distress at being controlled this way). Another team selectively turned on subsets of parenting behavior (like bringing wandering young back to the nest or grooming behaviors). They can also probe three different sub-states of anxiety that we only experience as a bundle.
How does this work? Before the plant kingdom evolved chlorophyll to harvest energy from sunlight, the more ancient bacteria used rhodopsins in a membrane-bound proton-pump to do the same. The rhodopsins captured a swath of the sun’s spectrum, tilting the algae to the leftover parts of the spectrum not yet absorbed, and this is why plants are green. Karl introduced these bacterial light-triggered elements into neurons of interest using a viral vector to the brain. He can then trigger neuronal firing optically, as the rhodopsin pump supplements the ion channels in the neuron. He can also trigger reporter molecules from the bacterial world to read out brain activity as the brain is functioning.
So, for example, he has observed a 3 Hz cycling in the retrosplenial cortex of a mouse brain on ketamine, and he has been able to reproduce the effects with optogenetic stimulation to achieve similar effects. He has also found that the dissociative drugs (ketamine and PCP) allow for reflexes to pain (e.g., heat on paw or puff of air to eyes) to continue normally, while the protective cognitive reactions (licking the paws after heat or squinting in anticipation of the next puff) disappear, a disassociation of mind and body reflexes.
He is diving deeper into the brain to investigate how this works, finding that the various subregions of the thalamus are regulated by disassociative drugs by overpowering the voting circuits with a pulsing 3 Hz modulation of the ketamine-enhanced circuits. The other nodes in the thalamus are operating as before, but do not achieve as powerful a consensus. The thalamus regulates where we spend our attention and conscious focus, to avoid doing everything we might be tempted to do simultaneously, and thereby not really doing any of them well.
In his latest work, he has found that MDMA operates very differently than Ketamine (work to be published later this year).
The implications of this level of understanding are enormous. The questions we can now ask using optogenetics will transform how we understand mental disorders and also call into question some deep philosophical questions surrounding consciousness and free will. It may also unveil the mysteries about how psychedelics operate in the brain, allowing us to optimize the use cases for testing in human clinical trials. Exciting work is going on with psilocybin for alcohol use disorder, extreme OCD and the eating disorders (which are also a disassociation of mind from body).
“Claremont Road” has five Arduino UNO microcontrollers which control train movements along with PWM (servo adapted) points/turnouts, and signals according to pre-written programs or “sketches”. This is a completely different concept from DCC.
The master co-ordinating UNO gets feedback from the track through 14 enbedded infra-red proximity detectors,
Slaves 1-3 are UNO “train drivers”,
Slave 4 handles the display and lights. The orange display shows the current mode and commands being passed between the UNOs via a short-wire protocol known as I2C.
Location: Olaiya Street, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
About: Geometrical shapes is one of the important features in the Modern Architecture... For More info. if you are interested about Modernism Movement Wikipedia
Software: Lightroom
Explore:#74 on Monday, October 26, 2009
This moving lens test features a long water-trough that sides the start of the main street in the village of Gistain in the Haut-Aragon of Spain. The trough is fed by a natural open tap from a network of deep mountain limestone fissures. I was filming the cold water as it released back into the sun, when the clang of sheep bells turned from a background soundtrack to a chance encounter. The long water-trough took stage for a mixed herd of goats and sheep, stopping in the village for their 'pause for thought', a metaphorical 'cup of coffee' before they continued to the valley... The shepherd asked us to be patient and pointed to alternative paths, but, as with the villagers and some small children, we had stopped and were both watching and listening to the herd's clickle-clackle. As they passed from one mountain meadow to another, they ate anything that was green, so weeds from back corners and geraniums (and some pots) all had to say a goodbye.
Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don't sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above
Although the lyrics of this song describe an asymmetry of affection in an affair, they may also align to a relation with an elemental 'mother earth'. The woman of the song perhaps has the qualities of a realistic mother earth. Mother earth guarding the spirit of life (the moving animate) over death (inanimate), with the liaison between mineral and life-force perhaps occurring in apt landscape features, for example natural 'venus hills' in the configuration of a resting lady.
The vast majority of plants and animals from the earth's 'life force' seem to know or subscribe to a narrative of their own... and 'to the stars above'. And as a shepherd looks out over the seasons and the night stars, the blooms of flowers and the insects and birds, he understands that they are alive with him, but not necessarily loyal to him.
As the lyrics unfold, the narrative follows a vignette of a wandering lifestyle, a father and generations of ways of being. Dylan sings with his face dusted white (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujgqOgMIwfA) - a gesture recognisable in many native cultures. He wears hand-made and elements of nature that go beyond the freak fantasies of earlier hippy subsets and into a perceived 1970's authenticity of the gypsy and the pastoral. With this performance, Dylan's voice has the oscillation of Iberian moor (audable here with the example of Manolo Caracol www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZMEzU4OxY) and general comparisons can be found with Hendrix's desire for authenticity with his 'Band of Gypsy's' from five years prior and Stevi Nick's work with Fleetwood Mac from around the same period - a 1970s belief in a deep spirituality and authenticity from rural areas and their deep traditions. For another take, Allen Ginsberg's exalted sleeve notes from the original LP talks of ancient blood singing...".
Whilst there are no direct references to pastoralism in the song "One more cup of coffee", Dylan has addressed 'mountain sheep' in the track "Ring them bells". My own feeling is that both the footage and the song from the LP 'Desire' grow wider from being set side-by-side.
The Live 'Rolling Thunder review' years are documented in this box set: ASIN: B01JT73FYM. The LP version of the same song appeared a year later in 1976, and whilst the violin sound is perhaps improved, I favour this earlier live performance due to the astonishing artful modulations in Dylan's vocal delivery. His sense of the visual seems to open up the very words he sings, presenting their component phonemes as elemental 'objects' to watch and follow.
AJM 19.12.19
Press play and then 'L' and even f11. Escape and f11 a second time to return.
I took this picture for #flickrfriday with the theme #repetition
This LP is "BAD" from Michael Jackson released in 1987. I love this album, every single track!
To take the picture I used my 100mm macro lens and a speedlite 430ex ii. The whole vinyl macro session was about four hours.
British Real Photograph postcard, no. 145. Photo: MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).
German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.
Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.
Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.
However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
JIM DRAIN AND ARA PETERSON
B: 1975, 1973
LW: Miami, FL; Providence, RI
Jim and Ara met at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) at the end of the 20th century and did their first collaboration as part of Forcefield with Mat Brinkman and Leif Goldberg.
Years later, the two joined forces again to create a universe of conceptual abstraction titled Hypnogoogia. Twelve-foot geodesic sphere paintings rotated on the floor and from the ceiling; a huge handmade kaleidoscope created the illusion of an additional sphere, this one exploding with reflected video modulations; a twelve-foot rotating divan paved the way to their basement full of quietly spinning pinwheels, featured here.
These pinwheels capture one very important component of Jim and Ara’s work: that they are of very simple construction—foam core, paint, and electric fan—but as artworks achieve maximum visceral effect. KG
Jim e Ara si sono conosciuti alla Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) alla fine del XX secolo e hanno collaborato per la prima volta nel collettivo Forcefield insieme a Mat Brinkman e Leif Goldberg. Anni dopo, i due hanno nuovamente unito le loro forze per creare un universo di astrazione concettuale chiamato Hypnogoogia. Sono qui presentati dipinti sferici geodetici di tre metri e mezzo, ruotati sul pavimento e appesi al soffitto; un enorme caleidoscopio fatto a mano che crea l’illusione di un’ulteriore sfera che esplode in modulazioni video riflesse; un divano rotante di tre metri e mezzo che spiana la strada alla base, piena di girandole roteanti.
Queste girandole descrivono una componente molto importante del lavoro di Jim e Ara: cioè il fatto che si tratta di semplicissime costruzioni – polistirolo, pittura e ventilatori – le quali però, come opere d’arte, raggiungono il massimo effetto viscerale. KG