Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video is called Edvard Munch.

By Mike Marqusee in Britain, originally from The Hindu in India:

Munch’s very real phantoms

In celebration of the return of “The Scream” to museums, Mike Marqusee recounts the painting’s remarkable life, and that of its creator, Edvard Munch.

July 3, 2008

FOUR YEARS after it was stolen by masked gunmen in broad daylight, and two years after it was recovered in still undisclosed circumstances, “The Scream” has gone back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo. …

Part of Munch’s genius lies in his evocation of isolation; but though mentally embattled from an early age, he was not an entirely isolated genius. As a young man he was drawn into Oslo’s bohemian counter-culture, where he was exposed to anarchist and revolutionary ideas.

He enjoyed friendships with a wide range of contemporary Scandinavian and European artists and writers, who saw Munch’s work as part of a broader avant-garde challenge to a complacent establishment. An establishment that reacted accordingly, condemning the subject, tone and technique of Munch’s groundbreaking paintings of the 1890s. He was not accepted as the master he obviously was until he was past 40.

In 1937, the Nazis condemned Munch’s work as “degenerate” and sold off the scores of Munch paintings held in German museums. When they occupied Norway in 1940, Munch refused to have anything to do with them. He confessed to a friend that the “phantoms” that had haunted him for years had been put in the shade by the giant “phantom” at loose in the real world.

By Andy Newman in England:

ENGLAND AND THE DEATH OF NARNIA

Last weekend I took my oldest son and his friends to see the new Narnia film; “Prince Caspian”. They were entranced: this is a near-perfect movie for eight year old boys. And the story remains faithful to the spirit of the book, and even improves upon it.

As a child I loved the Narnia books. Though their deficiencies are obvious: there is a general distrust of women, a certain middle class priggishness and occasional racism. But the values of C. S. Lewis were typical for a man of his class and background at the time he wrote them; and the same attitudes were equally found in other children’s books of the period, like Frank Richards’ Bunter books or the Biggles books by W. E. Johns.

The difference is that the Narnia stories are so good that the books are still read, while childrens’ books by C.S Lewis’s contemporaries are not. This is of course something that Lewis shares with another great writer with outdated social attitudes, Rudyard Kipling.

Gore Vidal once wrote that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, was one of the most important influences upon him, because if children learn to dream of alternative and different worlds, then they learn to dream that our own world could be changed for the better. Narnia is a beautiful imaginary for children, where animals talk and magic is real.

The religious content of Narnia is very clear, reflecting Lewis’s devout Protestantism, but only in the weakest of the books, The Last Battle, does the religion become so pompous as to drown the story. Generally, the didactic content of the Narnia books is a discussion of ethics, questions of right and wrong, free will, temptation and redemption that are useful ideas for children, and go beyond Christianity. …

The Second World War that contextualised Narnia also saw the shift of popular national understanding of what England and Britain represents. The old Britain of Empire loyalism and Anglicanism was reimagined as a new Britain that defined itself by the war against fascism, and the promotion of egalitarianism, of Beveridge and comprehensive schools. Narnia was dead.

Also on the film: here. And here.

Polly Toynbee’s criticism of the first Narnia film: here.

SiCKO- Michael Moore Interview On Real Time With Bill Maher - More amazing videos are a click away

This is a Michael Moore interview on privatized medicine.

Here comes a poem about the tendencies of the Thatcherist-Blairist-Brownist British governments towards privatization of the National Health Service.

The Bevan! in the poem ia Aneurin Bevan, the British “Old” Labour minister, who founded the National Health Service in the 1940s.

The “should be living at this hour” line is borrowed from a poem by William Wordsworth:

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:

LONDON, 1802.

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters

This line has become standard in deploring the decline of British poetry; or, in this case, of British Labour ministers.

From London daily The Morning Star:

POETRY: Poem of the week

edited by John Rety

Poem of the week: For Aneurin Bevan by Danielle Hope.

Bevan! You should be living at this hour
the NHS has need of you. She is a shell
sapped of spirit, a disoriented hull
a revengeful return of the Mayflower.
Her decks brim with pristine shops and babble,
burble like a jaunty airport mall.
Her cargo strains with episodes, manpower
and medicines, each counted to cut costs.
Below she battles ageing, accidents and old super-bugs
that breed below adverts for tomorrow’s drugs.
Passengers please travel on for health care
you’ll find private dentists, stocks, shares
and lawyers on each turning of the stair.

About the poet

Danielle Hope was born in Lancashire but now lives in London. She has had three collections of poetry, Fairground of Madness, City Fox and The Stone Ship, published by Rockingham Press.

John Rety of Hearing Eye Press and Torriano Meeting House is a former editor of anarchist paper Freedom.

This video is about the temple of Horus in Edfu, Egypt.

From ScienceDaily:

Archaeologists Find Silos And Administration Center From Early Egyptian City

(July 1, 2008) — A University of Chicago expedition at Tell Edfu in southern Egypt has unearthed a large administration building and silos that provide fresh clues about the emergence of urban life. The discovery provides new information about a little understood aspect of ancient Egypt—the development of cities in a culture that is largely famous for its monumental architecture.

The archaeological work at Tell Edfu was initiated with the permission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, headed by Zahi Hawass, under the direction of Nadine Moeller, Assistant Professor at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Work late last year revealed details of seven silos, the largest grain bins found in ancient Egypt as well as an older columned hall that was an administration center.

Long fascinated with temples and monuments such as pyramids, scholars have traditionally spent little time exploring the residential communities of ancient Egypt. Due to intense farming and heavy settlement over the years, much of the record of urban civilization has been lost. So little archaeological evidence remains that some scholars believe Egypt did not have a highly developed urban culture, giving Mesopotamia the distinction of teaching people how to live in cities.

“The traditional view of ancient Egypt has been biased by the fact that most excavation work so far has focused on temples and tombs. The mounds which comprise the remains of Egyptian cities were either ignored, buried under modern towns, or else destroyed by modern agricultural activities.

A additional reason why archaeologists have often focused on temples and tombs is that Egyptian secular buildings, including even pharaoh’s palaces, were mainly built in mud bricks, which do not survive centuries as well as the stones of temples and tombs.

Edfu is one of the very few remaining city mounds that are accessible for scientific study,” said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute.

“The work at Edfu is important and innovative in that it finally allows us to examine ancient Egypt as an urban society, whose cities and towns housed bureaucrats, craft specialists, priests, and farmers. Nadine Moeller’s discovery of silos and local administrative buildings shows us how these cities actually functioned as places where the agricultural wealth of the Nile valley was mobilized for the state. Grain as currency provided the sinews of power for the pharoahs,” he added.

“Ancient Egyptian administration is mainly known from texts, but the full understanding of the institutions involved and their role within towns and cities has been so far difficult to grasp because of the lack of archaeological evidence with which textual data needs to be combined,” Moeller said.

At Tell Edfu, archaeologists have uncovered what amounts to a downtown area. The community, halfway between the modern cities of Aswan and Luxor, was a provincial capital an important regional center. Tell Edfu is also rare, in that almost 3,000 years of Egyptian history are preserved in the stratigraphy of a single mound.

The administrative building and silos were at the heart of the ancient community. Because grain was a form of currency, the silos functioned as a bank and a food source. The silos’ size indicates the community was apparently a prosperous urban center.

The grain bins are in a large silo courtyard of the 17th Dynasty (1630-1520 B.C.) and consist of at least seven round, mud-brick silos. With a diameter between 5.5 and 6.5 meters, they are the largest examples discovered within a town center.

The team unearthed an earlier building phase for the hall that predated the silos. In that phase, a mud-brick building with 16 wooden columns stood at the site. The pottery and seal impressions found in the hall date it to the early 13th Dynasty (1773-1650 B.C.). The building layout indicates that it may have been part of the governor’s palace, which was typical of provincial towns.

There is no exact parallel for such a columned hall being part of the administrative buildings. Scribes did accounting, opened and sealed containers, and received letters in the column hall. The ostraca, or inscribed pottery shards, list commodities written on them.

The administrative center was used when Egypt’s political unity was lost and a small kingdom developed at Thebes (modern Luxor) and controlled most of Upper Egypt.

“During this period, we can see an increase in connections between the provincial elite, such as the family of the governor, to the royal family at Thebes, who were keen on strengthening bonds through marriage, or by awarding important offices to these people,” Moeller said.

“It is exactly at this period when Edfu seems to have been very prosperous, which can now be confirmed further by archaeological discoveries such as this silo-court, a symbol for the wealth of the town,” she said.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Chicago.

See also here. And here.

This video is about the pyramids of Giza in Egypt (including Menkaure’s pyramid).

From Egyptology News:

An underwater robot will be used to search for the sarcophagus of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Menkaure of more than 4,500 years ago off the Spanish coasts, the Egyptian MENA news agency reported on Saturday.

Egyptian and Spanish archeologists will launch the search in the historical city of Cartagena at the depths of the sea with the help of the hi-tech equipped robot, Egyptian Secretary General of Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities, Zahi Hawwas, was quoted by MENA as saying.

The merchant ship Beatrice carrying the sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian king along with other antiquities sank off Cartagena in the early 19th century en route from Egypt to Britain, where some scientific studies were supposed to be conducted on them, Hawwas said.

Egypt and Spain will cooperate in a joint venture to locate the sarcophagus of Menkaure, the 5th king of the 4th Dynasty of Egypt who ruled from 2,551 BC to 2,523 BC.

Egyptology Resources: here.

This is a BBC video from Britain, about ancient Greek sculpture.

The antiquities museum says about one of its present non permanent exhibitions, Models of beauty. Masterpieces in plaster:

13 June through 16 November 2008

This exhibition shows beautiful 17th, 18th and 19th century plaster casts of the finest sculptures of Antiquity. The timeless beauty of classical sculpture is the focal point of this exhibition. Further attention is paid to the role played by plaster casts in science, art criticism and art education in the past four hundred years.

Today Dr Ruurd Halbertsma of the museum showed us around this exhibition.

He started with talking about Rome, as in that city, in the sixteenth century, were the origins of copying sculptures from antiquity. When, early in that century, visitors came to Rome, they might know from writings that during antiquity, there had been many sculptures in public places. However, when they visited the city, they saw only a few sculptures said to have survived from the Roman empire or earlier: the she-wolf of Capitol hill; the Marcus Aurelius statue; Trajan’s Column.

When, while building churches or other buildings in medieval Rome, sculptures or parts of them from antiquity had been found, they had been recycled as building material. After 1500, however, people found out that discoveries like these might add to knowledge about antique art. In this way, new sculptures which became famous, were found, like the Laocoön group and the Apollo of the Belvedere. They attracted many artists and other visitors from many European countries to Rome.

The popes and other elite people from the papal state sometimes, as a favour, started giving plaster copies of antique sculptures to princes in other countries. One example was Trajan’s column, a copy of which was given to King Louis XIV of France. In 1824, these plaster copies were found in a windmill in Leiden. the Netherlands. It is not known how they had ended up there. As, since the seventeenth century, in the open air of Rome, the original Trajan’s column has suffered much from pollution, these plaster copies are today valuable, as they show details which are no longer clear in the original.

In the exhibition are also cork models of ancient Roman buildings, which used to be sold to tourists. And reproductions of idealized paintings of ancient Roman remains, by the neo-classicist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1692 - 1765).

During the eighteenth century, drawing academies, based on neo-classicist views, arose in many countries. First, the students had to learn to draw skeletons and muscles for human anatomy. Then, they had to make drawings of Greek and Roman sculptures, considered as models of perfect human bodies. Only after that did they draw nude human models, with bodies not as perfect as antique sculptures.

Among the plaster copies often found in drawing academies were the Venus of Arles. And the “Borghese gladiator” which does not really depicts a gladiator, as gladiators did not fight while naked. The nude statue probably depicts a hero.

The Venus of Arles was considered the ideal female form, until 1820, when the Venus de Milo was discovered in Greece.

One of the drawings, depicting a statue of the Greek god Apollo, at the exhibition, is by nineteenth century drawing academy student, later famous painter, George Hendrik Breitner.

When female students had to draw plaster copies of statues, fig leaves were attached to prevent the women from seeing male genitalia.

Certainly since the 1960s in the Netherlands, neo-classicist ideas in art education became weaker. For the plaster copies, that often meant they were hidden away or even destroyed.

In the sixteenth century, mainly Roman sculpture and Roman copies of Greek sculpture had become known in western Europe. In the early nineteenth century, for the first time, classical Greek sculpture became widely known. Eg, after the Parthenon marbles arrived in London. People had difficulty in getting used to them. The poet John Keats was one of not very many people admiring the Marbles right from the start. While fellow poet Lord Byron attacked Lord Elgin for taking the sculpture from Athens.

When sculpture from the Aegina temple, still older than the Parthenon, became first known in Germany, famous author Goethe did not like it, as it did not conform to his preconceived ideas of what Greek art should be.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

This video (after, first, an advertisement) is about Egyptian animal mummies.

Today, to the museum of antiquities, where there is an animal mummies exhibition.

In ancient Egypt, various animals played a role in people’s lives, including in religion.

Just after leaving for the museum, I see a non mummified, still very much alive animal: a holly blue butterfly.

The museum has not only the animal mummy special exhibition, but also animals depicted in paint, sculpture, amulets, etc. in its permanent collection. I decide to look at these today and to come back for the mummy exhibition on some later day.

The first room in the permanent Egyptian exhibition is about prehistoric and early dynastic times.

One of the objects there is a Neolithic pot, with ostriches painted on it. That is special, according to the museum, as ostriches disappeared from Egypt about 5,000 years ago.

In the next room, about the Old Kingdom, many animals are depicted in the mastaba of Hetepherachet there.

Also from Old Kingdom times, a coiled snake, as a board for the mehen game.

After the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, the Asian Hyksos invaders ruled Egypt. From their epoch, fish-shaped and goose-shaped vases.

The Hyksos brought horses to Egypt for the first time. These were depicted in the tomb for General Horemheb. The Egyptian sculptors still were not really used to depicting these new animals then.

From the times of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, animal pictures from the tomb of Paatenemheb.

From a bit earlier New Kingdom times, the grave of the offiicial Merymery, also with many animal pictures.

In this cartoon video from the USA:

Vice President Cheney responds to the notion that Blackwater might be barred from Iraq.

By Anindya Bhattacharyya in Britain:

An Independent Line is a new book and exhibition at the Political Cartoon Gallery in London featuring cartoons by the Independent newspaper’s three editorial cartoonists – Dave Brown, Peter Schrank and Tim Sanders, whose work also graces this paper.

The exhibition covers the past 12 years and it’s striking how the earlier cartoons seem to come from a completely different era. Much of the humour concerns Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadillos, or former Tory leader William Hague’s bald head.

But 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq transform the tone of the exhibition. It also brings out the best in the cartoonists, as their outrage turns to focus on the lies, murder and torture doled out by George Bush and Tony Blair.

“The Iraq war is the overwhelming event of the century,” says Tim Sanders. “The world has become darker since then and cartoonists – who tend to be dark and twisted people – come into their own.

“Cartoons act as a wonderful historical record – you can look at them to see the world expressed in ink and bile on paper. It’s in black and white, a stark and violent expression appropriate to violent times.”

The theme of the war figures prominently. The cover of the book displays cartoons by all three artists of prominent figures in the “war on terror” such as Condoleezza Rice, Gordon Brown and Osama bin Laden – all with blood on their hands.

Part of the reason for this was the decision by the Independent to play a campaigning role against the Iraq war in 2003. Since then it has kept up its critical coverage of the “war on terror” with reports from journalists such as Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk.

Play about Abu Ghraib and the Iraq war: here.

The Imperialist Right Threatens Obama on Iraq: here.

Washington’s new alibi for a criminal war: the “surge has worked”: here.

This video says about itself:

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo

Italian divisionist painter (1868-1907)

music: André Gagnon - L’Amour rêve.

From British daily The Morning Star:

A living torrent

(Monday 23 June 2008)

EXHIBITION: Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910
National Gallery, London WC2

CHRISTINE LINDEY looks at a style of painting that caused shock waves throughout the Italian establishment at the end of the 19th century.

Fascinated by the analysis of colour and optics by scientists Chevreul and Rood, the French artist Seurat applied their theories to painting in the 1880s.

Small dots of colour juxtaposed onto a white surface would mix in the eye of the viewer when seen from a certain distance, so retaining the luminosity of natural or artificial light.

Differences of tone to convey the solidity of objects were created by adding dots of complementary colour. For example, yellow and red dots merge into orange, while adding blue dots created a darker orange without darkening the overall tonality of the painting. He called this method “divisionism,” but critics derided it as “pointillism” and the name stuck in France.

These ideas soon spread. They were brought to Italy by the dealer-critic-painter Grubicy. There, divisionists tended to prefer using threads or dashes of divided colour rather than dots. Never an organised movement, the Italian divisionists’ concerns lay within the opposing ideologies of socialism and mysticism.

The political situation in 1890s Italy was highly charged as the growth of the electoral franchise, literacy and industrialisation raised class consciousness. Challenging rural poverty and exploitation, the recently formed labour movement called for land redistribution and higher wages.

Those peasants who escaped the countryside to find building and domestic work in the fast-growing cities, notably Milan, found themselves poorly housed and underpaid. The ensuing well-supported strikes and demonstrations were broken up with fierce police and army brutality.

Socialist artists including Pellizza, Nomellini and Balla equated divisionism’s scientific, rational basis with a modernism which matched their political beliefs. Their paintings would be radical in form and subject.

When working on the Living Torrent (1895-6), Pellizza wrote: “I am attempting a social painting … a crowd of people, workers of the soil, who are intelligent, strong, robust, united, advance like a torrent, overwhelming every obstacle in its path, thirsty for justice.”

A massive painting, its life-size peasants march resolutely towards the viewer, the central figure suffused with light in a powerful representation of the might of organised political struggle.

Longoni’s The Orator of the Strike (1890-1) depicts an impassioned mason speaking high above the rally from a builder’s scaffolding. In the background, the army charges fleeing protesters with fixed bayonets.

Longini was at this outlawed May Day protest in Milan in 1890. The exhibition at which the painting was first shown opened on the following May Day, when another protest, also outlawed, took place.

The left-wing press reproduced and discussed such works, spreading their power beyond the walls of art museums and galleries. Some argued that they were over-didactic, others defended them as effective calls to arms.

Such fiercely topical works were seen as a threat by the authorities. Longini was put under police surveillance. So harsh was state repression that he and Pellizza later retreated into a vague symbolism.

Other divisionists exposed social injustice. Morbelli’s For Eighty Cents! (1893-5) shows a line of peasant women ankle-deep in the foetid water and stinking heat of rice fields. The title scoffs at their derisory pay. …

For the symbolists, divisionism was a means of conveying states of mind rather than a positivist engagement with realism. Previati’s and Segantini’s quasi-mystical paeans to the sanctity of motherhood belong to a conservative Catholic tradition which resisted political and social change.

Segantini’s well-fed, tranquil peasants are far removed from Pellizza’s angry, hungry living torrent. Portraying peasant life as reassuringly idyllic and unchanging, his works conveyed a conservative ideal.

Grubicy’s idealised landscapes, influenced by Japanese prints, represent the city dweller’s rose-coloured longing for nature unsullied by human habitation or intervention.

Divisionism was the first aesthetically radical manner to be widely known in Italy. Within a culturally provincial climate, its adoption symbolised the rejection of tradition in favour of modernity. As some divisionists were also socialists, aesthetic radicalism became associated with political radicalism in the public mind and the manner became doubly synonymous with all that was outrageous.

This has masked the fact that, by the 1890s, appreciating and collecting esoteric avant garde art signified sophistication and social superiority for a section of the haute bourgeoisie. …

However, the following generation of Italian divisionists boldly capitalised on the legacy of the pioneers. Balla’s, Boccioni’s and Carra’s paintings exploded into an uncompromising riot of modernist colour and expressive brush marks so genuinely radical that they had an international impact. They soon aligned themselves with Marinetti’s futurists which inherited and perpetuated the twinned antagonistic ideological roots of Italian divisionism.

This exhibition gives a clear account of these divergent tendencies and influences. It is a pleasure to see the socialist works of Balla, Nomellini, Pellizza and Longini. Arguably the most stunning room is the last one, in which we can see icons of modernism such as Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) and Balla’s spectacular Street Light (1910-11).

However, be prepared for the many works which were anything but radical too.

Exhibition shows until September 7 and costs £8 or £4 on Tuesday afternoons and Wednesdays 6-9 pm. Concessions £7-£4.

This music video, recorded in the USA, is called Massive Attack (Safe From Harm) at Nokia in Dallas Sept 2006.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Don’t ignore the war

(Friday 20 June 2008)

LIVE: Massive Attack
Royal Festival Hall, London SE1

MARK WAGER says that Bristolian trip-hop duo Massive Attack have come out of the shadows to deliver a political message.

During the first Gulf war, Massive Attack dropped the word “attack” from their name in order to distance themselves from the hostilities and to avoid implying that they supported the attack on Iraq.

Supported by Riz MC, who himself secured a radio ban on his single Post 911 Blues - “Bush and Blair sittin’ in a tree, K.I.L.L.I.N.G” - and introduced by the lawyer who campaigns for the human rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees Clive Stafford Smith, Massive Attack could now be happily accused of purposefully attracting attention to the second Gulf war.

Last Saturday’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown festival was aided by a fantastic light show centred around a large screen.

Their protest is presented on-screen through sobering facts and figures on the war displayed through a mesmerising display of light and dark.

It could be said that the current climate has become Massive Attack’s reason for coming out of the shadows and working on their first album since the disappointing 2003 release 100th Window. If this gig is anything to go by, they are clearly back on form.