Month: August 2018

Alsarah and the Nubatones, “Wad Alnuba”

Alsarah and the Nubatones, “Wad Alnuba”, from the Album “Captain Planet Presents: Through the Wire”, 2015

Producer Captain Planet has become well known in the house & tropical bass scene for his original productions and equally his wide and prolific remixing skills and Bastard Jazz Recordings has compiled up a double LP and digital release of the Captain’s finest remixes of the last three years in one place for maximum dancefloor potential.

As is the Captain Planet style, the remixes touch on all corners of the globe – hitting Middle Eastern/Nubian vibes (Alsarah & The Nubatones’ “Wad Alnuba”), Sub Saharn Africa (Saran’s “Tounkan”), Cumbia (Buyepongo’s “Maestros”), Dub Reggae (La Yegros “Viene Di Mi”), Centeral American Folklore (Los Folkloristas “El Coco”), Afrobeat (London Afrobeat Collective’s “Prime Minister”) and many more.

Jeffrey Milstein

Jeffrey Milstein, Five Photographs from His Series LANY: Aerial Photographs of Los Angeles and New York, Published by Thomas & Hudson,

Using the highest-resolution cameras available mounted to a stabilizing gyro, Milstein leans out of helicopters and does steep circles in small airplanes over Los Angeles where he grew up and over New York where he now lives, looking for shapes and patterns of culture from above, continually awed by the difference between the aerial view and the view on the ground.

Millstein emphasizes the abstraction of pattern and reveals aspects of urban design and planning of both cities at the same time as he offers an intensification of detail and an abundance of information. He composes his images so that the viewer is still vividly aware of the human scale.

Please credit photographer when reblogging. Thanks.

Calendar: August 24

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of August

The Lone Butterfly

August 24, 1957 is the birthdate of comedian and actor Stephen John Fry.

Stephen Fry’s television career began with the 1982 broadcast of “The Cellar Tapes”, a revue written by Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Tony Slattery. This caught the attention of the ITV Granada television studio which  hired Fry, Laurie, and Thompson for the 1982 sketch comedy show, “There is Nothing to Worry About!”.  A second series, retitles “Alfresco”, helped establish Fry and Laurie’s reputation as a comedy double act.

The BBC in 1986 commissioned a sketch show that became “A Bit of Fry and Laurie”, which ran for 26 episodes and spanned four successful series between 1986 and 1995. During this time period, Fry starred in “Blackadder II” as Lord Melchett, made a guest appearance in “Blackadder the Third”, and then starred in “Blackadder Goes Forth” as General Melchett again. Between 1990 and 1993, Fry starred as Jeeves, alongside Hugh Laurie’s Bertie Wooster character, in “Jeeves and Wooster”, 23 hour-long adaptions of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels.

Stephen Fry has appeared in a number of BBC adaptions of plays and books. He played the lead role and was the executive producer for the legal drama “Kingdom”, which ran for three series. Fry also took up the recurring role of doctor /chief Gordon Wyatt on the popular televison drama “Bones. The 2011 Monty Python film “Holy Flying Circus” saw Stephen Fry in the role of God.

Starting in 2006, Stephen Fry began appearing in documentaries and other fact-based programs. His first was the Emmy Award-winning 2006 “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive”. The same year, he appeared on the BBC’s genealogy series “Who Do You Think You Are?”.  In 2007, Fry presented a documentary on the subject of HIV and AIDS entitled “HIV and Me”. He followed these up with many nature series, a six-part travel series through each section of the United States, a two-part documentary on people’s attitudes to gay people in different parts of the world, and portrayed Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film “Wilde”, earning a nomination for a Golden Globe Best Actor in a Drama.

Stephen Fry married his partner, comedian Elliott Spencer on January 17, 2015, in the town of Dereham in Norfolk, England. Throughout his life, Fry has been and still is very active in social issues; he was listed number two in 2016 and number twelve in 2017 on the World Pride Power list. In August 2013, Fry published an “Open Letter to David Cameron and the IOC” calling for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, due to concerns over the state-sanctioned persecution of LGBT people in Russia. Along with Gina Carter and Sandi Toksvig, he is a co-owner of Sprout Pictures, an independent film and television company which works across all genres.

Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré, “Death of Eleazer”,1866, Engraving for the La Sainte Bible

According tothe Bible, during the Battle of Beit Zechariah, Eleazar identified a war elephant that he believed to carry the Seleucid King Antiochus V, due to the special armor the elephant wore. He decided to endanger his life by attacking the elephant and thrusting a spear into its belly. The dead elephant then collapsed upon Eleazar, killing him as well.

Eleazar’s death was a popular subject for art in the Middle Ages, where it was given significance as prefiguring Christ’s sacrifice of himself for mankind. This illustration by Gustave Doré is from the 1866 La Sainte Bible.

Christopher Fowler: “Filled with Mistifying Figures”

Phtographers Unknown, A Collection: Faces of Eleven Man

“It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.”

― Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase 

Mathieu Lauffray

Mathieu Lauffray, “Long John Silver”, 2015, Acrylic on Panel

Born in Paris in February 1970, Mathieu Lauffray immediately showed a strong interest in drawing. After graduating from high school, he entered a prestigious art school in Paris, the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. In 1995, for his thesis, Lauffray completed “Le Serment de l’Ambre” with fellow student Frédéric Contremarche. The comic book would go on to be published by Delcourt the same year.

The following year, Lauffray was given the unique opportunity of illustrating the covers of Olivier Vatine’s comic book adaptation of “Star Wars”, published by Dark Horse. Lauffray would go on to create nearly 30 covers for the series, in parallel with illustration and design work for the press, video games, and various role-playing games. In 1999, two years after a first attempt at a feature-length animated film that never came together, Lauffray went to work on “Le Pacte des Loups”, another animation project with Christophe Gans, working on numerous designs and storyboards.

Finally, in 2000, Lauffray returned to comic books alongside Xavier Dorison, creating the “Prophet” series, published by Humanoïdes Associés. Two more volumes would come out before Lauffray and Dorison began work on “Long John Silver” in 2006, this time with the publisher Dargaud. This swashbuckling series, reaching four volumes in 2013, renewed the pirate genre with its strong storytelling and rich characters. In 2017, a collaborative effort by Lauffray and Wilfrid Lupano entitiled “Shingouzlooz Inc.”, a spin-off of the Valerian series, was published by Darguad.

Calendar: August 23

A Year: Day to Day Men: 23rd of August

The Aquamarine Armchair

August 23, 1846 was the birthdate of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder.

Alexander Calder, the third-generation of artists in the Calder family, is widely considered to be one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic.

Calder enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1915 to study engineering and excelled in mathematics. He received his degree in 1919 and worked as a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. After several years of traveling the country and working in various jobs, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, and John Sloan.

In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Adademie de la Grand Chaumiere, and established a studio in the Montparnasse Quarter. While in Paris, he met and became friends with local avant-garde artists, including Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Leger. At this time Calder created his wire sculptures, or drawings in space, and had his first solo show of these sculptures at Galerie Billiet in Paris. A visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio later in 1930 influenced him into fully embracing abstract art.

It was the mixture of Calder’s experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and motors, that would become his signature artworks. Calder’s kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors.

Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both “motion” and “motive.“ Calder found that the motorized works sometimes became monotonous in their prescribed movements. His solution, arrived at by 1932, was hanging sculptures that derived their motion from touch or air currents. They were followed in 1934 by outdoor pieces which were set in motion by the open air. The wind mobiles featured abstract shapes delicately balanced on pivoting rods that moved with the slightest current of air, allowing for a freer, more natural, shifting play of forms and spatial relationships.

In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals. As Calder’s sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the early 1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion.

Mitch Cullen

Mitch Cullin, Title Unknown, (Tiger’s Roar)

Born and raised in the American Southwest, Mitch Cullin is an artist based in Los Angeles. His books have been published internationally, including the novels “A Slight Trick of the Mind” and “Tideland”, both of which were brought to the screen by directors Bill Condon and Terry Gilliam, respectively. With his photographs having appeared as artwork on several book covers, his images have also been exhibited in both New Mexico and Texas.

Having turned his full attention back to photography, Mitch Cullin is currently putting together a series of photo essays that have been developed over the past years, among them “Man Facing Away” and a return to his earlier images from “West Texas Footnotes”. He also continues to work on projects with his partner, the mixed media artist Peter I. Chang.

Reblogged with thanks to https://www.mcullin.com                                     Please credit photographer when reblogging. Thanks.