MT | Milindo Taid

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Uzak

Mar 26

Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s ‘Uzak‘ (translated as ‘Distant’) from 2002 adds on to the growing pool of cinema of this century which is distinctly and necessarily in opposition to the mainstream commercial cinematic idiom, typified by the ‘stylized-pop-marketized’ fare out of the Los Angeles area in the USA. Ceylan’s cinema is a cinema of sounds and silences, of doors and windows (our separators from what lies outside, what stays in – who can walk through, who closes, who opens, for what). It is also a remarkably restrained cinema, especially when considering the cinematic excesses that one encounters in the everyday, in the there here and the now. But perhaps more importantly, Ceylan articulates the inevitability of human isolation, the ‘ephemerality’ of relationships (both desired and destructive at the same time), and the potential for urban dehumanization. Watch. (Update: Unfortunately, the full length film upload was taken down by the Tube. This is a trailer, and the ending scene, for you to have a glimpse. I will share the full length film as soon as it is available again.)

Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser. 1951

Mar 17

14 Straight No Chaser - Best of the Blue Note Years -Thelonious Monk

Watch this video on YouTube

Ronen Goldman: The Surrealistic Pillow

Mar 17

Tel Aviv based Israeli artist Ronen Goldman‘s work from the year 2012 onwards has caught the attention of visual art critics and commentators, and one can see why. Apart from showcasing his proficiency and considerable skills in generating extremely imaginative visualscapes through digital photo manipulations, Ronen’s work also has a streak of social satire and commentary infused with dream-nightmare states. Tapping into long traditions of 20th century surrealistic art and marrying it with 21st century digital tool sets, Ronen’s surrealistic pillow is a memorable and provocative statement. Take a look.

David Hume: Human nature and understanding

Mar 12

Australian historian of ideas and philosopher, the late John Passmore, reveals to us the important 18th century figure of David Hume, the Scottish skeptic who took John Locke’s empirical arguments to their logical conclusion (which Locke had neglected to do) and wound up doubting our ability to know anything at all! I personally enjoy Hume’s skepticism and his effective deflation of metaphysical pretensions – making philosophers quite nervous about their assumptions. According to Hume the ‘Age of Reason’ had clearly arrived at a dead end. His rigour, consistency, and, if I may add, his honesty has a lot of undeniable appeal in the 21st century as well.

PhD position: Ethnography of Northern Landscapes. Norway 2013

Mar 12

3 year full time PhD position on the ethnography of Northern landscapes, at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and the Barents Institute in Kirkenes

The position is associated to the Future North project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council within its SAMKUL Program. Future North aims to map and document the current Arctic and Subarctic landscapes through experimental interactive modes of mapping.

The team includes 4 researchers from architecture, landscape, design, media, and social sciences, as well as 3 PhD fellows.

Founded on a conception of landscape as a shared human experience, the PhD project should aim to bring to the foreground the voices of Northern residents -indigenous, non-indigenous, and new-comers. Eligible PhD-proposals should aim to develop strategies for mapping the landscapes of aspirations, disappointments, and desires as the Arctic advances headlong into massive industrialization, exploration for more resources, and speculative planning.

Sergei Vasiliev: Russian Criminal Tattoos 1989-1993

Feb 19

Former law enforcer and later ‘Vecherny Chelyabinsk’ staff photographer Sergei Vasiliev had the privilege of access to some of the most notorious and hardened criminals in Russian prisons and reform settlements across Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Perm and St Petersburg, from about 1989-1993. In these years he managed to document the unique visual code on the skin-canvas of these out-of-law men. It is important to note that these tattoos, in the closed circle of the Russian underworld of the early ’90s, were not fashionable embellishments to flaunt, but rather, they were personal histories marking the criminals’ route through the prison system, their ranks in the gangland hierarchy, successes and failures, promotions, demotions, kills, transfer of work, and so on. Unlike the more commercially pop and fairly visible Japanese yakuza tattoos, the visual code captured by Vasiliev maps a rather curious irony – that these notorious gangsters were honest in not running away from their past, never putting a tattoo which they had not earned, and always living up to what they have done and they might do, and inking it on their skins as daily reminders of who they are. And because of who they were, they are now long dead and gone.

Kiswah, Nabeela, Maharshi, Madhu: Collateral Damage

Feb 12

‘Collateral Damage‘ is a student documentary film, produced in 2012, by the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad, India. The film revisits the Kafkaesque policing and bureaucracies in the aftermath of the tragic May 2007 Mecca Masjid bomb blasts in Hyderabad, India, and it contains interview material that will never be aired over regional and national television. The bizarre rounding up, and subsequent arrest, abuse and torture of about two dozen Musalman young men under the unmentionable ‘guilty until proven innocent’ ‘course of law’, challenges the most fundamental assumptions of a constitutionally guided, democratic republic. Indeed, there are a million mutinies in India, and India appears to be constantly at war with itself. What this film does is to lay bare the farcical investigative and interrogative apparatus of the state police (look out for the first hand accounts of these), as well as put a red/black flag to the Indian news media circus, which, in a complex interlacing with corporate, governmental and religio-political vested interests, creates the essential enemy, the ‘Other’ – anyone who has a Musalman name and visits a Masjid.

Horace Silver: Sister Sadie. 1959

Feb 12

https://youtube.com/devicesupport

Watch this video on YouTube

Liu Bolin: Standing still, still Standing

Feb 08

Contemporary performance artist Beijing based Liu Bolin expresses himself by getting painted on his shoes, trousers, jacket, face and hair. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, Liu takes a stand, literally, against what he considers totalizing, unyielding forces, be it late capitalist, marketized consumerism or regimes of political command and control – the individual in each case is annihilated, symbolized by the corporeal evaporation of the one standing alone in Liu’s performance art. Liu is often misunderstood, not surprisingly, by those not familiar with his work – “He is the one who is standing only, and others are painting him with brushes in hand – how is HE the artist!?”. In each of Liu’s performances, he is in complete control, not the ones holding the brushes. He locates the site, directs them (almost cinematic here) to do what they have to do, is fully responsible for the paint used, and above all, presents his bodily self as the canvas. Yes, he stands still, hope he is still standing.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Pessimism and the Infraconscious Will

Jan 22

Eminent historian of Philosophy, the late Frederick Copleston discusses the cultured, pessimistic and if I may add, the arrogant, embittered and individualistic Arthur Schopenhauer (arguably a curiosity among western philosophers, for being one of the few pessimists in philosophy). ‘The World as Will and Idea’ (also known as ‘The World as Will and Representation)’, of course, is monumental. Believing that will was inherently evil, he argued that the best one could strive for was renunciation of desire, a temporary absence of pain through the contemplation of high art. Schopenhauer is therefore, probably also the artists philosopher! And yes, he spent a quarter of a century without talking to his mother, and probably one of the few westerners to find proximity in eastern Hinduism and Buddhism. His rejection of the action-minded, essentially bourgeois confidence of the 19th C presaged the individualistic despair of the 20th C. We do know individualistic despair, all of us.