Aesthetic Thursday: Surrealism in Film

Perhaps one of my favorite films of all time: Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty (1974). 
Interpret this nonsensical "dream sequence" however you want - I think it is pure brilliance. Compare this scene to Buñuel's other dream sequence in Los Olvidados (1950). Interesting, right? 

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Lower East Side, New York

A woman lights candles in a post Lunar New Year ritual.

A woman lights a candle outside of a temple in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Image Credit: Greig Roselli

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Aesthetic Thursday: Surrealist Drawing

Toyen, Tir VI / The Shooting Gallery, 1939-1940

Toyen (née Marie Cerminova) is the name of a Czech artist. This drawing is on exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York City as part of a series of surrealist drawings.

This particular piece is notable for its juxtaposition of childlike imagery against a stark pointillist dessert.

The exhibit is open from January 25 through April 21, 2013.

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New York City Subway 30 Day Metrocard Notebook

The MTA offers customers a 30-day
MetroCard; but, is it worth it?

Note to myself: Is my 30-day New York City Transit unlimited MetroCard worth it?

$104 Metrocard

Cost Per ride (with 7% discount): $2.09

Total Number of Rides: 64

List of rides with random notes made on a 30 day unlimited card purchased at the BMT 45th Street Station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn January 19, 2013. 

Subway List Graffito

1. $2.25
2. $2.25
3. $2.25
4. $2.25
5. $2.25
6. $2.25
7. $2.25
8. Tuesday aftn 01/22/2013 $2.25
8. $2.25 Wedy morning 01/23/2013
9. $2.25
10. $2.25
11. $2.25
Thursday afternoon after class.
12. $2.25 Friday night
13. $2.25
14. $2.25
15. $2.25 Saturday afternoon
16. $2.25 Saturday night
17. $2.25 Monday morning
18. $2.25 herald square Monday even
19. $2.25 Jay Street/Metro  Tuesday
20. $2.25 Tuesday afternoon jay
21. $2.25 Tuesday whitehall
22. $2.25 Wednesday morning (smoke on the track) 01/30/2013
23. $2.25 Wednesday night to 42nd
24. $2.25 Wednesday night home
25. $2.25 home
26. $2.25 Thursday morning
27. $2.25 Thursday evening jay
28. $2.25 Friday afternoon 45th street
29. $2.25 Friday at 33rd st.
30 $2.25 L train
31. $2.25 l train to the q then n
32. B63 bus
33. r train at bay ridge
34. Sunday afternoon 45 street
35. b63/Atlantic avenue Pacific street
36. 49th street night
37. 45 street R/N express
38. 42nd street times square
39. 45 street R local
40. Court Street R local
41. 45 street R Local evening
42. G at Bedford/nostrand
43. G at Nassau (church ave bound)
44. Atlantic/Pacific (I walked from the Fulton G station).
45. 36th street D express Thursday night
46. Union Square n/r Thursday night
47. 45 Street Friday afternoon
48. M1 fifth avenue
49. 47/50 Rockefeller center
50. 45 street Saturday afternoon
51. Astor Place Saturday afternoon
52. Grand Street Saturday afternoon
53. 36 street D train
54. E/M 53 street/6 51 street
55. 8th street NYU
56. 45 street
57. Q union square
58. 45 street ash wednesday
59. 42 street with melanie and Troy
60. Broadway/Lafayette Ave. D train night. I watched Lore tonight. I had butterfly shrimp with Melanie and Troy. I have $1.16 in my bank account.
61. 45 street waiting for Manhattan bound R train. Picked up money order at Western Union. Got a call back from a job. Transfer to the M3 bus

62. 14th Street Union Squre: Commute home

63. I gave my metrocard to a friend to use. I think she took the L train to Williamsburg and 64. came back home on the G (then a transfer to the R).

Metrocard expired.

Baby, it's worth it!

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Repost: People applauding commuters in Port Authority

Repost Link from Youtube

Aesthetic Thursday: Bradley Rubenstein

Bradley Rubenstein, Unititled (Girl with Puppy Dog Eyes), 1996

What Is The Gotcha! in This Photograph?
At first I see this image as a brash conceit. All art is a conceit - right? - but this image forces me to see the conceit, to see that it's a mash-up. Maybe I am troubled because I have this ontological conviction that a photograph tells me something about reality. Maybe so. But maybe the reality that I am seeing is not so conceitful as I first think. What is going on here? Through the use of digital manipulation puppy dog eyes are inserted into a girl's eyes.

I Like Images That Make Me Re-Think What I am Seeing
I like images that ask me to question the image, to make me consider its mode of production. How did the artist do this? What was his method? I suppose this is Rubenstein's point. By making me aware of how this particular image was produced I am struck by another possibility - the genetic manipulation that would be required to produce a real girl born with puppy dog eyes. Rubenstein is playing with conceit to alert us to the biogenetic possibility that what we see as conceit could become a reality. What if someone decided that little girls and little puppies are a desirable combination? Is what we see in the art an image of a possible future? 

Two Paragons of Cuteness: Kids and Puppies
On the placard, a museum curator has written this, "Merging two paragons of cuteness—kids and puppies—into unsettling hybrids, the artist offers an eerie forewarning of the transgressive potential of genetic manipulation." Where is the transgression? In imagining such mutations? Is the point that the degrees that separate the photoshop touch-up from the biogenetic not that far apart? Perhaps. Maybe the most unsettling aspect of Rubenstein's photographs is that he is telling us we have already arrived at this stage - we are just waiting for the biotechnology to catch up. I think I need to go watch Bladerunner and re-read Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans.

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Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Aesthetic Thursday: Matthew Jensen's "49 States"

Matthew Jensen, The 49 States, 2008-9

Google Streetview in Art
I am addicted to Google Street View. I am going to Philadelphia this weekend and I have already seen on Street View what the hotel will look like, what the front of a restaurant I want to have lunch at looks like — all as if I will have already "done" the trip before I even go. Someone else has already been there. Someone has already snapped a photograph. There is nothing new under the sun. But I like what Matthew Jensen has done in the Metropolitan Museum of Art display of his work — he has taken a collage of images from Google Street View and organized them alphabetically according to State (e.g., the fifty states of the United States).

Jensen's Work at the Met Reminds Me of the Iconic American Road Trip
Seeing Jensen's work at the Met, as part of an exhibit on contemporary photography, I think of travel, the association Americans have with the road trip and snapping pictures. What is a road trip without a camera? Now that we have Google to take our snapshots for us maybe the camera is dead on the road. *sad face*. The images Jensen has collected are absent individuals but it seems easy enough to insert a human being into each State's slot. Look, there is me in New York. There is me in Connecticut. I look at my home state of Louisiana and compare it to Wisconsin. They both seem the same — and taken as a whole the image captures a unity of sorts, the kind of unity I get when traveling on the interstate where every exit is the same as the ones that came before it and all the ones ahead will look the same and so on. Is this a new American flag? Maybe so.

Stray Observations:

• Why are there only forty-nine states in Jensen's collage? I did not have time to figure out what state is missing.
• Did Google allow Jensen to use their images?
• I feel like Jensen's work would be better if every picture in the series included a person whose face is blurred out.
• I want this piece to hang in a doctor's office.

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