Full Moons 2023

see and be seen

BAUHAUS band posters

Robert Mapplethorpe, Calla Lily, 1988.                 

shhhh

The Conference of the Birds, Persian Manuscript, circa 1600; Safavid Iran (Isfahan)

Elizabeth Glaessner

In a stormy day of 2007, Abbas Kiarostami decided to escape from Teheran: “I packed my bag without forgetting  my camera and digital video camera. The rain keeps falling from yesterday dotted by lightening, this will not change my decision”. Inside the car, the Iranian filmmaker takes shots of urban and rural landscapes. This series of pictures shows us throughout the flowing of rain on the windscreen, high silouettes of soacked trees, and the trembling lights of cars or a yellow wall of the street side. Coloured images in which greys and blacks predominate, like paintings. Filmmaker, photographer and poet, Abbas Kiarostami was born 22 June 1940 in Tehran, is known since the early 1990s as on of the most important director of contemporary cinema. Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 for “Tam-e gilas” (Taste of Cherry), two years later he received the Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for “Bad ma ra khahad bord” (The Wind Will Carry Us). His photos have been exhibited worldwide, including London, Victoria & Albert Museum and New York, MoMA, or, in 2007-2008, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in five Chinese cities. x

Henri Matisse, Greek Torso with Flowers, 1919. Oil on canvas

Illustrations of the Julius Zeyer’s Román o věrném přátelství Amise a Amila (1880) by Artuš Scheiner, part 1.

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.