June 22

Do you recall the presidential campaigns of comedian Pat Paulsen? How about Screaming Lord Sutch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party standing for several British offices? Neither man ever won nomination or office, although they sometimes got more votes than you might expect. But Icelandic comedian Jon Gnarr has succeeded where they failed, winning the mayoralty of Reykjavik:

In his acceptance speech he tried to calm the fears of the other [voters]. “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party,” he said, “because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/world/europe/26iceland.html

(Hat tip to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)

The series Heritage Heroes on BBC World News, which I discovered yesterday on Korean cable television, has taken on the attractive mission of demonstrating

...how, in the midst of the rush to modernise and expand our urban landscape, individuals, neighbourhoods and organisations have managed to salvage a part of our endangered built inheritance. The seven-part series shows how people from all walks of life – from princes to prime ministers, archivists to activists – have succeeded in carving out a place for the past in our increasingly urbanised present.

http://www.heritageheroes.org/ 

The program I watched yesterday included a very interesting segment on the High Line park in Manhattan, the story of which is also well told in this visual/verbal essay by Faith and John Stern:

http://www.beautyofnyc.org/HighLine/index.html

Manhattan is scarcely a city lacking in "signatures," but the High Line is clearly a new one. Sydney's signature, of course, is the famous Opera House designed by Jorn Utzon, re-visited here by ArchDaily:

http://www.archdaily.com/65218/ad-classics-sydney-opera-house-j%C3%B8rn-utzon/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House

Utzon, who fell out with his Australian sponsors during the costly and protracted construction of the Opera House, is not a one-building architect by any means. The Kuwaiti National Assembly is a noble structure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B8rn_Utzon

A.O. Scott at the New York Times welcomes a reissue of Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 silent film I Was Born, But..., about two young brothers who challenge the patience of their salaryman father:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/movies/25iwas.html

Both this film and its loose 1959 sound and color remake, Good Morning, are humane masterpieces of the highest order -- and very funny besides. When I showed Good Morning at the Green Bay Film Society, I had a chance to see just what a crowd-pleaser it is with an audience.

The Toledo Museum of Art is gassing Ohio with an exhibit of classic psychedelic rock posters:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38651

http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/the-psychedelic-60s-posters-from-the-rock-era

Cimenatographer and photographer Frederick Schroeder captures the neon-noir glitter of night-time Los Angeles:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/the-owls-three-by-frederick-schroeder.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Erich Maria Remarque and H. Rider Haggard, science fiction novelist Octavia Butler, philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, sociologist Norbert Elias, biologist Julian Huxley, politician Dianne Feinstein, baseball player Carl Hubbell, badman John Dillinger, tenor Peter Pears, singer/songwriters Jimmy Somerville, Todd Rundgren, and Cyndi Lauper, dancer/choreographer Gower Champion, artist Gordon Matta-Clark, film producer Mike Todd, theatrical producer Joseph Papp, film directors Billy Wilder and Abbas Kiarostami, fashion designer Bill Blass, broadcasters Ed Bradley and Carson Daly, voice actor Paul Frees, and actors Kris Kristofferson, Prunella Scales, Meryl Streep, Bruce Campbell, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Lerner, and Emmanuelle Seigner. I first became familiar with he great conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark at a Bay Area exhibition in the late Eighties, by which time he had already been gone for a decade; he died of cancer at 35, in 1978. It seems to me that the quality of a conceptual artist's thought must be very high, since thoughts are their basic materials; the manifestations can't much outstrip the concepts behind them. Matta-Clark, born into a family of distinguished artists -- his father was the Chilean painter Roberto Matta -- had an extraordinary mind, and my initial encounter with his work practically blew me into the Pacific Ocean. There is so much to him, but the famous and provocative "building cuts" are an excellent place to start:

http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/collection/31-gordon-matta-clark-archive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Matta-Clark