| « | June 2008 | » | ||||
 |
||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
A few new caricatures: Stooges, Sex & the City, Rat Pack, and Stephen Colbert
Paris travelogue ©2008 Mick Cusimano
I met up with my friend Sho in Paris and we started out doing the traditional things..checking out the Louvre, the Mona Lisa, the painting of Napoleon's coronation..at 500 square feet it may be the largest painting in the world. That night we met my friend Maria who took us to an international party on the top floor of a Paris apartment. The host was an Australian guy who works for the United nations. There were people from Australia, Paris, Ireland, Russia, America, and a woman who couldn't remember where she was from.
As we drank more wine the group become more theatrical. This grad student sang her blues about the pressures of the academic world. One guy recited Shakespeare, another the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. I did a poem about the Sixties. Lydia sang a song in Russian, and Maria told us the story about how she danced at a festival in Marrakesh where they had her make her entrance riding on a camel.
Truly revved up we went out on the street near St. Michel but had to wait while a procession for an African saint walked by. We were off to an underground night club. Walking down the stairs into this cavern with no windows were 100 people jammed dancing and drinking. There we danced late to Israeli music.
One day Sho was visiting her cousin so I took my video camera to the Paris Zoo. There was a hill covered with several dozen baboons. Watching these animals fighting, grooming each other, and swinging on trees was so fascinating that I must have filmed them for half an hour. This one baby baboon was trying to keep up with the older ones. He would try to climb up a wall they easily mastered but he slide back down again and again. He was the Charlie Chaplin of hairy anthropoids. It would be ironic if they turned out to be the stars of my Paris movie.
Sho and I had lunch at a 100 year old restaurant from France's gilded age and visited the Picasso Museum. I climbed the Arch de triumph and looked over the bustling Champs Elysées .
I hooked up with Karine and Jacques from that New Surrealists art show we were in together back in 2003. We ate French chicken which gave us stamina to climb the 300 steps to the top of Sacre Cour.
That night was a vernissage and met up with Surrealist sculptor Jacky Kooken. It was a controversial show of Israeli and Arab art spread out on 5 floors. Lots of people coming through. Too bad no one in the US thought of having a show like that. Jacky invited me to join him at the Maata gallery near Gare D'Lyon.
There were some paintings, furniture, a collage of a naked woman walking across a roof, and some metal blinking spaceships. It was a smaller gallery and less ambitious than the first one. They served peanuts and whiskey at the reception table on the street. Once we partook of that Jacky seemed a bit uneasy. He didn't know anyone there. The situation looked sort of dismal so I had to do something. I saw this striking blonde woman standing next to us alone. I talked to her in my very deficient French. Her name was Cecile and was from out of town there waiting for a friend.
I introduced Jackie to her and he was quite taken by her. Then her friend one of the artists showed up and the four of us hung out much of the night. As I pulled out my video camera the scene unfolded as sort of a Fellini movie. One woman showed up with her baby. She was tall, had tattoos and was the spitting image of Amy Winehouse complete with gigantic beehive hair. Another guy was walking around wearing a dress. I don't think he was the father.
This other woman friend of Jacky's Milene showed up with this wild hair and wardrobe...a true eccentric artist.
She had a furniture piece in the show. Evidently Jacky knew her and has been pursuing her for a long time. I interviewed her about her art for my video. She also has some kind of barrel installation that she is showing in galleries in London, Paris, and Germany. She is some kind of famous award winning artist and engineer and she wants to show this barrel all over the world. She wants to find a gallery on the East coast to premiere her work in the US. Of course I suggested that she contact my friends at Out of the Blue in Cambridge.
Seeing me videotape this woman inspired all these different people to jump in and pose for my camera as they made speeches in French including Jacky and Cecile. When we were leaving Jacky gave her a book of his scuulpture and at and I gave here Underground Surrealist Magazine. She was so pleased she kissed both of us as we left. I can't remember when I saw anyone having as much fun as she did. She was just laughing all night. What do the French call it Joie de vivre the Joy of Life...or was it just something in the whiskey?
On the Metro back Jacky was also going to place D Clichy. He bought me a glass of wine at a bar called the Cave. He then did a handstand on a chair in a bar which freaked out some of the patrons. A useful skill he picked up in the circus. That was it. There was nothing that could top that on my last night in Paris. So I headed back to Boston hopefully with a little Joie de vivre.
Recently the movie Transiberian premiered at the Boston Independent Film Festival. The Russian detective in the movie Ben Kingsley was there for the event. He said it was a challenge playing such a dark figure in this Hitchcockian type thriller. Afterwards several of my friends came along to the film party. We met Sir Ben and other filmmakers.
One guy was doing a documentary about machine guns in Boston. This woman I met teaches film studies at a local College. There were other local filmmakers there who we know from the scene which is very active in Boston. Tomorrow there is a seminar on working on the local film industry and Sunday some of us are going to see Twelve: a collecton of shorts from Boston filmmakers.
The festival will be covered by Imagine Magazine which is a very important part of the resurgence in filmmaking in Massachusetts.
Vladimir Putin the new Czar of Russia gets picked as Time magazine's man of the year. Cheney is all set to invade Iran when the intelligence report comes out saying that Iran quit their nuclear waepons program years ago. Iran doesn't have weapons of mass destruction after all. Haven't we heard this story before? Japanese officials admit that UFOs exist. What a way to wind up the end of 2007.
In January and Feb. the Museum of Fine Arts singles nights draw the largest crowds of the year. One doctor suggests that this is because of all the people are there making their New Years resolutiuons to get out and meet new people.
What will the New Year bring? We won't know for another week.
A while back I picked up a book about drawing Dragons. It was pretty detailed considering that they are imaginary creatures. There's a difference between ferocious Europeen dragons and benign spiritual enlightened Chinese dragons. I needed to come up with one for an upcoming movie about Leonardo da Vinci and the Rennaisance. I did the drawing in pencil, scanned it in and edited it in Flash....You can watch it by clicking on the movie camera below. No roaring or sound effects yet.
The morning news is bleak. More endless war in Iraq, an Israeli Palestinian peace process that appears to be going nowhere. Bhutto a reformist returns to Pakistan and is greeted by bombs. The stock market is shaky. The world seems to be descending into apocalyptic doom yet people are dancing in the streets.
Yes the Red Sox, defying impossible odds, are back in the World Series. People in the streets and bars are exuberent. Humans are the only animals who are capable of dreaming and hoping for something better...the only species that can believe in magic.
Yes the players are overpaid milliionaires in their twenties playing a kid's game for other adults ridiculously willing to pay $100 or more for the experience.
But a home run at Fenway Park and all is right in the world...if even just for a while. Play ball!
Today I went to a Harvard Middle East seminar about the upcoming Palestianian - Israeli peace confererence that Condoleezza Rice is pushing to make happen. The guest speaker Henry Siegman Director of the U.S./Mideast project said right off that bat that there is practically no chance that it would succeed. He said that it willl fail because it is only an US-Israeli pretext for destroying Hamas. Siegman said that the two sides are too far apart to agree on anything and won't even reach a joint statement.
There was much discussion about the history of the establishment of Israel and how the Arabs origonally thought the Palestinians would get half the land. Now they have only 22% of it and he said that Israel demanding more was like trying to squeeze blood form a stone. Both sides see themselves as persecuted and oppressed.
Someone asked Siegman if any of the current presidential candidates had anything to say about the subject. Guliani says that the Palestinians shouldn't get a state. When Howard Dean announced last time that we should have an even handed approach in this issue his campaign was over.
Henry Siegman hopes that maybe a 3rd party ie: the UN can step in and try to get the 2 sides to negotiate.
But the bottom line for any eventual agreement is for both sides to put themselves in the other party's shoes...a quality that doesn't presently exist on either side of the proverbial fence. The seminar had very little optimism. The last seminar about the prospects in Iraq had no optimism whatsoever...not even a glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel.
Yesterday I went to a museum lecture about Rubens and Baroque art. This curator from Belgium talked about different drawings and paintings he did. Rubens is one of the best artists of all time I think. When I was in Paris in the Louvre I spent an hour in this rooom filled with his 50 foot paintings. the thing about his paintings aren't just that he drew nude women...it's that he is a master of drawing moving figures. other artists may be good at drawing someone standing still. Rubens figures are all writhing, grabbing, twisting, struggling, reaching.
No one draws people in motion with such gusto and liveliness. He is a caricaturist in a way. Not exaggerating the heads but caricaturing movement. This is the essence of baroque art: showing grand events, extreme emotions. You won't find any subtlety here.
Last week my movie Valley of the Kings played at an archaeological film festival in Italy...however I went to Reno Nevada instead. I only gambled a dollar on the slot machines. The reason for going to this place was to attend the National Caricaturist Network convention.
You've seen people at parties and theme parks draw caricatures of people. For many artists this is a full time or part time career. Over 200 caricaturists from the US, europe, England, and Japan came to this convention. For 4 days a large ballrooom was kept open 24 hours a day so that we could draw each other's exaggerated portraits. At the final banquet we gave people the drawings that we did of them. Over 20 people drew me...several portrayed me as a mad scientist. It was an enlightening experience to delve into a misunderstood artform.
Woodstock Museum Film Festival
©2007 mick cusimano
The Woodstock Museum Film held their 8th annual Film Festival on Labor Day weekend at Woodstock (NY) Town Hall.
As usual they had an eclectic mixture of films that you aren’t likely to see elsewhere. Gobi Women was a documentary of struggling Nomadic women living in the Mongolian desert. The Dalai Lama in Woodstock was a video of his recent visit preaching compassion and understanding.
The Woodstock museum was founded by Nathan Koenig and Shelli Lipton.(picture 3) Unlike the other 500,000 people who were at the 1969 Woodstock rock festival they didn’t go home but stayed in town to keep the spirit of the Woodstock Nation alive. They do this by traveling around the country showing slide shows and film about the Sixties. But they also keep a network going between other people with the same vision.
One of the themes this year was the 40th Anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival and the Summer of Love. Every year during the festival Nathan and Shellli have filmmakers and guests staying at the museum for Labor Day weekend. One of them Danny Eggink was the editor of The Oracle Magazine which was instrumental in bringing people to Haight Ashbury in the summer of 1967.
Eggink convinced Nathan and Shelli to take a trip with their video cameras to San Francisco weeks before the festival for the Summer of Love anniversary. During the festival videos were screened from these recent concerts which included Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, and Janis Joplin tribute bands. There was also footage of Barry McGuire (Eve of Destruction) and the Doors (with their new lead singer)
Another museum guest was Benny Zable. He had a small part in the documentary Nearly Norman Nimbin. Nimbin: Woodstock’s sister city is a commune begun in the 70s in rural Australia where Benny Zabel is a renouned ani-war and anti-nuclear activist. Zabel walked through Woodstock wearing his black costume and gas-mask which was well received by the weekly drum circle gathered in the park. He was rehearsing for a larger upcoming protest in New York City. The festival was well attended and included a live dance performance by the Diamond Dance Company. 
They got me a grant to teach a Flash animation workshop over the weekend and they showed my new dinosaur movie Human Park Sunday night.
The Woodstock Museum has film, music, and performance events throughout the year. For more information see
www.woodstockmuseum.org
