3/18/12
1/16/11
10/30/10
10/24/10
9/20/10
9/13/10
8/22/10
8/19/10
two things that I'll never forget
light play: black white and grey, by Laszlo Moholy Nagy
...Moholy-Nagy's fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy. A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson's book Portrait of Eton and John Betjeman's Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.
But Moholy-Nagy was not totally cold-shouldered. He designed the publicity for Jack Pritchard's English modernist Isokon Furniture Company. One leaflet included a typically dreamlike small drawing of a figure floating in a bath, suggesting that a Breuer Long Chair gave a similar sensation. Imperial Airways commissioned him to design a mobile exhibition to tour the British empire in a railroad car, promoting the still-novel idea of air travel. He became display consultant for the menswear store Simpsons of Piccadilly, bemusing passersby with his abstract compositions of striped shirts and bowler hats. But these activities were desultory in relation to Moholy-Nagy's far-reaching design philosophy.
Is there anything this man didn't do? I really wonder how a conversation between hedi slimane and moholy nagy would play out.
8/7/10
7/3/10
6/20/10
6/19/10
recited from the tops of ladders
...most musicians can’t hear a single
sound, they listen only to the relationship between
two or more sounds. Music for them has nothing to
do with their powers of audition, but only to do
with their powers of observing relationships. In
order to do this, they have to ignore all the crying
babies, fire engines, telephone bells, coughs, that
happen to occur during their auditions. Actually,
if you run into people who are really interested in
hearing sounds, you’re apt to find them fascinated
by the quiet ones. “Did you hear that?” they will
say.
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