Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
No, you aren’t going to Tibet. The latest self immolations by Buddhist sealed the fate, no more tourism which means less attention towards the injustice. Does this mean news orgs will be left out too? Tourism is a big part of making money there and now it’ll be cut off. How will the folks there make a buck? Government money? Fat chance. It’s a strategy of some sort for sure to keep the news out, keep attention out and bleed the place dry. (ABC – Tibet)
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(Time Magazine – Historic Places) (Old post I wrote on a visit to Terminal Island)
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A dock washes up in Oregon. For some reason, the corner casters? look too clean for it to have travelled across the pacific in a year, but then again, it also appears to have floated “wheels” up and it’s huge. There’s a metal placard on it, that mentions “service” but that’s all we can read from it. (KVAL – Dock)
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TOKYO ~ More than a thousand people crowded into Minato ward’s Zojoji Temple to pay their final respects Sunday to movie director and screenwriter Shindo Kaneto (photo left), who died of natural causes on May 29 at the age of 100. A sought-after art director and apprentice to Kenji Mizoguchi in the 1930s, Shindo made a name for himself in the 1940s as a prolific and popular screenwriter before working as assistant director to such iconic filmmakers as Kon Ichikawa and New Wave titans Seijun Suzuki and Yazuo Matsumoro. In 1950 Shindo formed one of Japan’s first independent production companies and began to direct politically outspoken features with a distinct class-consciousness, focused principally upon the struggle of the lower and working classes – an interest which would culminate in his extraordinary study of a rural 20th century peasantry The Naked Island, considered by many to be Shindo’s masterpiece. Children of Hiroshima ~ 1953 Shindo’s real cinematic breakthrough, however, may have come in 1953 with his controversial Gempatsu no Ko (Children of Hiroshima), the first and among the most powerful Japanese narrative films to depict the atomic bombing of Shindo’s hometown and its aftermath. Gempatsu no Ko starred his regular leading lady Otowa Nobuko as a young teacher who returns to several years after the bomb in search of her former students – was a critical success when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The powerful and controversial film was released in the United States only last year, in a retrospective of Shindo’s work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Hadaka no Shima (The Naked Island) ~ 1960 The Naked Island, released in 1960, is a stark, wordless drama, filmed in quasi-documentary style, about an impoverished farming family scraping out a living on a barren outcropping devoid of fresh water. The film, which has no dialogue, follows its characters’ lives of crushing toil on their daily pilgrimage to haul water by hand from the mainland. Shindo was also known for two critically praised horror films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). Both are set in Japan’s feudal era, a time of war, famine and lawlessness. Onibaba ~ 1968 In Onibaba, a woman and her daughter-in-law, desperate to survive, murder roaming samurai and sell their weapons and armor. In Kuroneko (The Black Cat), two peasant women, raped and killed by samurai, return as seductive, vengeful demons. [Japan Zone ~ RIP Shindo Kaneto] [The New York Times ~ Kaneto Shindo, Wide-Ranging Filmmaker, Dies at 100] [Harvard Film Archives ~ Masterworks by Kaneto Shindo]
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KOBE ~ A museum dedicated to the works of contemporary Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo will open this fall on Nov. 3 in this western Japan port city with more than 3,000 paintings, prints and other works donated or entrusted by the artist himself, the Hyogo prefectural government said Saturday. A prolific creative juggernaut, Yokoo, now 76, set the Japanese art world on fire beginning in the mid-1960s, and was widely recognized as Japan’s preeminent graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter. Yokoo unexpectedly “retired” from commercial work in 1981 and took up painting after seeing a Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). His career as a fine artist continues to this day with numerous exhibitions of his paintings every year, but alongside this he remains fully engaged and prolific as a graphic designer. Proclaimed the artist’s friend novelist Yukio Mishima in 1968: “Tadanori Yokoo’s works reveal all of the unbearable things which we Japanese have inside ourselves and they make people angry and frightened. He makes explosions with the frightening resemblance which lies between the vulgarity of billboards advertising variety shows during festivals at the shrine devoted to the war dead and the red containers of Coca Cola in American Pop Art, things which are in us but which we do not want to see.” The four-story Yokoo museum, to be housed in a renovated pavilion belonging to a prefectural museum, will have exhibition rooms on the second and third floors while the first or ground floor will be an open studio for events for children and the fourth floor a base for research and studies of Yokoo’s works, it said. Asaoka Ruriko in the Nude, 1971 A native of Nishiwaki city in the prefecture, Yokoo won fame when he was awarded the Grand Prize for Prints in 1969 at the 6th Paris Youth Biennale. He received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette in the spring of 2011 as one of Japan’s most successful graphic designers and artists. His works provided are estimated to be worth billions of yen combined, the local government said. [House of Japan ~ Yokoo Museum to Open in Kobe] [Art Tattler ~ The Quest and Arc of a Painter and Graphic Designer over 50 Years] [The Japan Times ~ Close Up: Tadanori Yokoo ~ An Artist By Design]
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