In 2011 I watched a movie on cable TV called Sisters. It’s a very early (1973) Brian DePalma thriller/murder-mystery about a local Staten Island journalist (played by Jennifer Salt) who sees a murder from her apartment window—my apartment window! Well, my apartment window or the window of one of the other five apartments directly above [...]
Archive for the ‘Beyond Borders’ Category
Brian DePalma filmed in my apartment?
Posted in Beyond Borders, border conflicts, Films, Popular Culture, tagged apartment, Brian De Palma, film, movie, real, Sisters, suspense thriller, time-space, twins, unreal on February 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Skin
Posted in Beyond Borders, border conflicts, Border Violations, identity, movies, politics, race, tagged Afrikaner, Apartheid, race classifcations, Sandra Laing, South Africa on August 11, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve just seen the 2008 movie “Skin,” based on the life of South African Sandra Laing. And what a life she has lived! Born in 1955 to two apparently Caucasian parents in Apartheid South Africa, Sandra has decidedly non-white features and a skin color several shades darker than her Afrikaner parents. At a time when [...]
A Mobile Garden Grows…Everywhere
Posted in Beyond Borders, Urban planning, tagged guerrilla gardening, mobile gardening, urban greening on May 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Mobile gardens are here, there and everywhere! On Staten Island, artist activist Tattfoo Tan is hosting a mobile garden “expo” where people can bring their mobile gardens to “ooooh” and “ahhhh” at the ingenuity and beauty of each other’s work, and then wheel their creations a few blocks to the St. George Ferry Terminal where [...]
Sebastian Brajkovic: Digital Furniture
Posted in Beyond Borders, Design, New Media, Old Media, tagged digital design, furniture design, Sebastian Brajkovic on May 7, 2009 | 5 Comments »
The digital world and the actual world can bleed into each other in mind-bending ways. A recent example: the furniture sculpture of Sebastian Brajkovic. His chairs are planted solidly in the physical world yet appear to morph, at light speed, into virtual objects. In some ways this blurring / merging / mashing of staticness with [...]
American Flag, Redux.
Posted in Beyond Borders, Check out..., Design, Exhibition, Installation on February 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Dave Cole, Aldrich Museum, American flag, red white and blue, Old Glory, DIY art, knitting, hand crafted art, large public works, sculpture, stitching, national identity
Call Center Drama
Posted in Audio work, Beyond Borders, Performance on January 23, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I entered into the wrong room at the ornate Goethe Institut across from the Metropolitan Museum on 5th Avenue. I waited for the phone call that was apparently originating from a call center from India — a reversal of the dynamic in which one’s call to a U.S.-based corporation is rerouted to a cubicle located [...]
Sarah Palin’s Performance of Self
Posted in Beyond Borders, Performance, Popular Culture, tagged Americana, Palin, Rebranding, Vice President on October 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Sarah Palin’s qualifications for the second most powerful position in the land have nothing to do with her experience (or her lack of it) or the fact that she doesn’t know about the Bush doctrine. Indeed it has nothing to do with the realization that she never met a foreign leader until she visited the [...]
Something is rotten in the arts and cultural state of OZ (Australia)
Posted in Beyond Borders, Check out... on April 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Something is rotten in the arts and cultural state of OZ. At this point in time there is a critical need for arts, cultural organizations and venues (as providers of goods and services) to recognize that we in Australia have a moral and, more importantly, legal obligation under the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act to provide [...]
Le Chant des Partisans
Posted in Beyond Borders, Films, tagged Anna Marly, Joan Baez, Le Chant Des Partisans, Leonard Cohen, Prokofiev, Toulouse on April 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday I learned about another remarkable Russian woman from a documentary entitled Anna Marly, Russian Muse of the French Resistance shown at the first annual Russian Documentary Film Festival. Anna Marly (née Anna Yurievna Betulinskaya) wrote and performed the rousing anthem “Le Chant Des Partisans.” It became the theme song of the Resistance—during the occupation [...]
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