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Richard Mosse

Saddam in Stone

Richard Mosse

Profoundly ugly

Julian Sanchez provides some sanity on the Sotomayor Conservative controversy:

I’ll cop to sharing some of Yglesias’ irritation at the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor, and if Republicans are managing to get a rise out of my pallid ass, I can only imagine the kind of damage they’re doing to their brand among, you know, real Latinos.  For one, it is basically impossible for me to believe that anyone with two functioning brain cells could read the “wise Latina” speech in full and find the notion that it’s “racist” anything but laughable. It’s been done to death in a thousand other venues, but one more time for those who are just joining us now: Sotomayor is talking about different views of how identity affects judging, and in particular she’s focusing on cases the high courts have decided involving race or gender discrimination. She mentions a quotation attributed to Sandra Day O’Connor to the effect that a “wise old man” and a “wise old woman” will come to the same conclusion. And she wonder’s whether that’s true, because historically some very wise jurists handed down decisions that we now mostly recognize as bad ones. She’s suggesting that someone with the experience of living as a disfavored minority might not have fallen prey to some of their errors:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

This isn’t racist, or even particularly controversial.  It’s just obvious.

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From an iPhone!

From the NYT:

Mr. Colombo drew the June 1 cover scene, of a late-night gathering around a 42nd Street hot dog stand, entirely with the iPhone application Brushes. Because of the smears and washes of color required by the inexact medium, it comes off as dreamy, not sharp and technological.

“The best feature of it is that it doesn’t feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite,” said Françoise Mouly, the art editor for The New Yorker. “All too often the technology is directed in only one direction, which is to make things more tight, and this, what he did very well, is use this technology for something that is free flowing, and I think that’s what makes it so poetic and magical.”

Interview with a chef

Interview with Chef Jonnie Boer at Hub UK:

I see from your book that you use some unusual ingredients such as perch, eel and gurnard. How popular are these types of dishes with your customers compared to more commonly eaten foods? Do you charge a lower price for the unusual items?

The perch is the dish that has given me fame. It was born because we didn't have a lot of money to buy exclusive products. Now a lot of guests come and visit us for that type of dish, but we do use exclusive products as well but everybody likes to taste dishes with products from this region. We don't charge a lower price because our local lamb is almost as expensive as from France. The best thing about that is I can select it myself and give my guest more information - because I know everything about the lamb.

What was the most unusual item on your menu last year and what was the reaction from your guests?

Dover sole prepared in smoked butter with sweet and sour leeks stuffed with an oyster and a sauce of lemongrass. This is a dish that we are going to keep, everybody went crazy with the flavors.

Describe your cookbook - Puurder (more pure) . . .

Puurder is my follow up from Pure my first book, which was printed only in Dutch. The reason why I made Puurder (which is available in both Dutch and English) is because we have progressed - with our guests, our suppliers, our food - it's more pure now. The name reflects our steps forward. The next one will be called Purest.

Whose idea was it to insert the wine booklet into the front cover?

It was both of us (Jonnie and Thérèse). It's nice to have a book all about food but wine gives balance and can really give a dish that extra character. Wine can also destroy the concept of a dish. In the book you will find some simple wine ideas and how to handle it. It's written by my wife and is very easy to read, nothing difficult.

How well suited is the Dutch climate to the production of wine? What wine would Thérèse suggest compliments your cooking?

We do have a chateau in Holland, it's called the APOSTELHOEVE but that's really the only one. The reason we do not produce much wine is because in Holland we have too much rain, winters are cold and the summers do not offer enough sunlight. But 2000 was a good year for Dutch wines. Thérèse feels the wines which best compliment my style are red Spanish wines as they are full bodied and creamy and white Bourgognes with a bit of wood but not too much.

Anyone can start a band

 
Interview at earfarm.com with Northwest music group Starfucker:

EF: So I saw you guys at the Portland showcase last Friday and I was blown away, I thought you guys were amazing but noticed I spent half the time staring intently at your setup and trying to decipher…

JH: (laughs) What the hell is going on?

EF: Yeah exactly. Do you use a bed of samples and stuff like that or what?

JH: Yeah, we used to just use this Roland loop station in which you can have a loop and build on top of it for live shows, it’s great but it only has a certain amount of memory and limited space so we started using iPods too, which I try to hide that because I know it’s kind of lame. I mean I’m not even an Apple person, but it’s super convenient. I just never want to use a laptop for anything, I don’t like how they look onstage…

EF: Yeah, that lends itself to being classified in a whole different genre, laptop rock ….

JH: Exactly. And we all have noise devices, Shawn has a tape machine in which he can mess with the pitch and he got all these weird tapes when we were in Japan, like Japanese children school songs, and Ryan has a bunch of different records, really weird stuff.

EF: One thing I was thinking while watching you guys was that the easy way out would be just to use a bunch of drum loops or samples but yet you guys insist on bringing not one but two kits to play. What was the reasoning?

JH: I don’t know, that just kind of happened, having two kits. I like electronic music but I really like when they add a live drummer, it adds a whole different organic element and a lot of energy, it just makes it all better.

EF: Have you ever had a nightmare scenario onstage where everything goes horribly out of sync between the loops and live beats?

JH: Nothing colossal I would say, there are some songs that are more free-form that build and have no real structure and we just go with it but other times it just doesn’t work, those are the ones we tend to fuck up the most. We don’t always play those ones live. We try to do as much as we can live, you know we don’t want like a huge band of 10 people all doing different things, so whatever we cant do we put on the loops.

EF: Well it’s also a testament to your musicianship that you guys don’t speed up or slow down to the point that it’s a huge factor.

JH: Yeah, whenever you play with loops and pre-recorded stuff, it’s the boss (laughs). You’re used to the drummer being the boss, but it’s the boss, and you have to just lock into it. But I really like doing it like this though.

EF: So when you guys are pulling up to a show and unloading the van and the sound guy sees two drumsets, turntables, samplers, does he kind of shit himself?

JH: (laughs) Yeah lots of times, but the thing is I actually do all the sound. I have a mixer onstage and everything gets thrown into that, all the mics, everything except the drums. The way our setup is, we have it so we can do house parties and we don’t really need anything from anybody. I have a huge cabinet and Shawn has a bass cabinet and everything runs through those and its loud enough to fill the room, so sometimes at a venue where there’s not many people we just end up playing on the floor. So it’s easy for the sound guy actually, they just take a line out from the mixer and mic the drums. And I mean, sound guys are so inconsistent it’s nice to have some control over it.

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Interview with Fellini

Toni Maraini interviews Fellini in Bright Lights Film Journal:

Interviewer-You don't like to give interviews and it's difficult for a journalist to get one. You should know I'm more a poet than a journalist.

Fellini-Splendid.

Here's something that will amuse you. Because of the anxiety I had about doing this interview, I woke up voiceless this morning, unable to make a sound!

Perfect. I love journalists who don't talk much.

I'm reluctant to give interviews because I believe we should avoid them and I'm trying to hold to this sane decision. But in certain cases I end up by accepting, because there are friends who insist I do interviews. Then there's the curiosity of meeting somebody new. Also it's flattering; so out of an indecent vanity and a shameless desire to prattle about myself, I consent.

I've given a lot of interviews; so, I don't trust what I say. I repeat myself. I try to remember what I've already said and what I still haven't said. For fear of repeating something I've already said, I invent other things.

You mistrust yourself, then?

Yes, that's right. I mistrust myself, not the journalist, even if for fifty years I've had the feeling that journalists asked me stupid questions.

An interview is a halfway point between a psychoanalytical sitting and a competitive examination. So, I experience a slight uneasiness about all the interviews I've given. I try to rethink myself rather than repeat myself. And besides, I have some embarrassing limits. Sometimes I don't have answers.

Your answers are already in your films, by having created them.

That's right. The author's most important answer is the work itself, and in my work people have found the few things I tried to say. Despite that, the author generally is the least suited to talk about his work.

Those who see the film want to ask questions, and, after all, this need is stimulated by creation. In order to try to understand your last film, for example, I reread some paragraphs from Krishnamurti, whom you know as a thinker.

Yes, yes. In which book did you find these paragraphs? I'd like to see them.

Nevertheless, I don't think that an author, when he creates, poses "others" problems. Really, when I'm working, I don't think of others. Certainly, the author is conscious of the, as we say, "craft" side of his own creation, of the how to express what he wants to say. But I don't think he worries too much about the problem of why and who to tell.

Yet, even if you don't tell it "to others," like every creator you tell it to yourself. In this self-telling, doesn't reevaluation go on, a gradual, revelatory consciousness of self?

As in life generally, the experience of working brings a greater mastery at the technical level, and, therefore, better reasoning about choices and how to carry them out. But in the deeper sense of knowing to which you alluded, the idea that through my work I may have a greater knowledge of myself, I will tell you I don't think there has been an evolution. On my last birthday, a friend asked me what it meant for me to be seventy, and my spontaneous response was, "Seventy? It seems to me I've always been seventy!"

So you see, my answer reflects my true feeling. For me, at seventy, I'm not much different from what I was at forty, thirty-five, twenty-five, or even earlier.

This doesn't so much mean you've always had the feeling of being seventy, but rather — if I understand you — that reaching this age and looking back you have the feeling of always having had the same age from youth on.

Yes, the adolescent age. Exactly. It's totally an adolescent age. Whoever has created knows this state that I would call "motionless time."

But it's precisely this state of pure consciousness and spontaneity that anyone who creates tries to conquer or rather to safeguard.

You're referring still to our Krishnamurti!

Yes, and to the importance of existential time, so typical of your film creations, in contrast with time understood as a historical, straight, linear sequence in which facts, chronologies, and so forth pile up.

It's true. Unfortunately, because of our goal-oriented training, we Westerners have a vision of ourselves living through a continuous time line that requires steps, changes, conclusions, and a goal one must reach.

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Bangkok Market

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - workplace dues

One of hemingway's last interviews

George Plimpton interviews Hemingway for the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER:

Who would you say are your literary forebears - those you have learned the most from?

HEMINGWAY:

Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora - it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious

INTERVIEWER:

Did you even play a musical instrument?

HEMINGWAY:

I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent. We played chamber music - someone came in to play the violin; my sister played the viola, and mother the piano. That cello - I played it worse than anyone on earth. Of course, that year I was out doing other things too.

INTERVIEWER:

Do you reread the authors of your list? Twain, for instance?

HEMINGWAY:

You have to wait two or three years with Twain. You remember too well. I read some Shakespeare every year, Lear always. Cheers you up if you read that.

INTERVIEWER:

Reading, then, is a constant occupation and pleasure.

HEMINGWAY:

I’m always reading books - as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever read manuscripts?

HEMINGWAY:

You can get into trouble doing that unless you know the author personally. Some years ago I was sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed that I’d lifted For Whom the Bell Tolls from an unpublished screen scenario he’d written. He’d read this scenario at some Hollywood party. I was there, he said, at least there was a fellow called ‘Ernie’ there listening to the reading, and that was enough for him to sue for a million dollars. At the same time he sued the producers of the motion pictures Northwest Mounted Police and the Cisco Kid, claiming that these, as well, had been stolen from that same unpublished scenario. We went to court and, of course, won the case. The man turned out to be insolvent.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, could we go back to that list and take one of the painters - Hieronymus Bosch, for instance? The nightmare symbolic quality of his work seems so far removed from your own.

HEMINGWAY:

I have the nightmares and know about the ones other people have. But you do not have to write them down. Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show. When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.

In the air, in the sky

Vallejo Nocturno 2009