John Hurt Has Walked On.

John Hurt.

John Hurt.

Actor John Hurt, who gave us all so many great and iconic characters, has walked on at age 77. He has long been one of my most favourite actors, his name in a film would be all I needed to see it.

Born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, UK, Hurt was the son of an actress and a vicar, and, after training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), made his film debut in 1966’s A Man for All Seasons. With his pained British voice and poignant stare, the actor would make an indelible impact on cinema, earning his first Academy Award nomination as Max, a heroin addict trapped in a Turkish prison, in Midnight Express, before performing one of film’s most memorable death scenes in Ridley Scott’s Alien. His next two films, as the severely deformed and chastised John Merrick in The Elephant Man (Oscar-nominated for Best Actor) and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, cemented his status as one of the greats, and marks a stellar 4-film run.

Goodbye, Mr. Hurt, and thank you. I’d watch V for Vendetta again, but right now, it hits too close to home.

Via Daily Beast.

More Clay, Less Plastic.

Clay

MORE CLAY LESS PLASTIC was born in 2014 as an open group on Facebook with the intent of creating a network between ceramicists and the public.
THE MESSAGE The message we want to put through is very simple: more clay less plastic.
PLASTIC POLLUTION Plastic pollution has reached dramatic levels. Reducing the use of plastic is a fundamental and urgent step to save the environment and improve the life quality of every living creature.
INVOLUTION AS A FORM OF EVOLUTION The aim is to highlight respect for the environment by inviting people to rethink their daily habits, for example by avoiding disposable plastic. Colanders, cups, plates, bowls … once made of clay and then substituted with plastic, can be made of clay again.
PEOPLE Today MORE CLAY LESS PLASTIC is coming out of the web to meet people, promoting the reduction of plastic usage at cultural events, workshops and exhibitions.
ARTISANS MORE CLAY LESS PLASTIC believes in craft as a means of going back to a more human dimension, in artcrafts which are not just “things” since they carry stories and ancient knowledge within. By replacing a plastic utensil with a ceramic one we can all be part of a big revolution.

I’m all in favour. When I was young, plastic wasn’t ubiquitous yet. It was getting there, but you still saw much more glass, ceramic, and wood than you did plastic. Go on over and have a visit.

Following in Dad’s Brushstrokes.

joshua-and-james-wedzin

Joshua and James Wedzin with some of their art. James says watching his son work is influencing his own art. (Curtis Mandeville/CBC).

A lovely story about a child following his own artistic path in the wake of his father’s.

When nine-year-old Joshua Wedzin of Behchoko, N.W.T., isn’t watching TV, playing with his brother or at school, he is at work in his artist father’s studio, painting the stars.

His father, James Wedzin, is a well known Tlicho artist who taught himself and then trained at art school in Victoria. He draws inspiration from the landscape around Behchoko.

James said his son began watching him create artwork a few years ago. James said he would get up at 4 a.m. and head over to his studio to work on a carving or painting, and an hour later his son would get himself out of bed just to watch him work.

Joshua recalls being mesmerized by his father’s artwork.

“His painting was beautiful was [what I thought] when I first seen them,” he said.

James, 43, had been teaching others before deciding to take a break. That gave him the opportunity to teach his son.

“So this one day I asked him ‘would you like to paint?’ First he says ‘I just want to watch first.’ And then I painted and talked with him… I didn’t bug him to paint at the time… and then finally one day he came in and says ‘I want to paint northern lights.'”

The full story, and more pictures of these two extraordinary artists is here.

Mary Tyler Moore Has Walked On.

Mary Tyler Moore.

Mary Tyler Moore.

Popular television actress Mary Tyler Moore has passed away at age 80, Bradd Jaffy of NBC News is reporting.

“Mary will be remembered as a fearless visionary who turned the world on with her smile,” Moore’s representative said in a statement.

The former dancer turned comedic actress was taken to a Connecticut hospital on Wednesday where she had been listed in grave condition.

Moore has long battled diabetes, and underwent brain surgery in 2011.

For many of us, Ms. Moore was a part of our lives over decades. She was tremendously talented in the really hard stuff, comedy, and equally talented when it came to drama. She fought for little things that were truly big – like one episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show having Mary looking for, and referring to her birth control pills. That might seem like a tiny insignificant thing, but it wasn’t. Back in the day, that was one hell of a daring move, making it a fact that the lovely, very single Mary was sexually active.

Ms. Moore was also a tireless activist for diabetes awareness and research. She gave a great deal to so very many people, and she was widely and dearly loved. She’ll be widely and dearly missed, too. Goodbye, Mary, and thank you.

Via Raw Story.

Kemeri Bog.

Absolutely awe-filled, stunning photos of an 8,000 year old Latvian bog. A place of amazing diversity and beauty. Living history. Just a few photos here, there are many more at the link.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

Jekabs Andrusaitis/REX shutterstock.

See and read more here.

Wax That Ass.

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Wax That Ass, Allison Bouganim. Images courtesy of the artist.

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What do laundromats, bus stops, and supermarkets have in common? Besides being everyday locales, these seemingly innocuous sites are also hotbeds of sexual harassment. Wax That Ass, a project by artist Allison Bouganim, fuses sculpture, photography, and on-site intervention to explore the everyday discomfort felt in public places.

Bouganim began the project by making a series of sculptural butts cast from actual butts. The results were a series of plaster and wax butts (hence the project title, Wax That Ass) in a variety of different shades that seem to represent a spectrum of skin tones. Once these were made, Bouganim went to a series of sites that are not only breeding grounds for sexual harassment, but are also places where the artist herself has been sexually harassed before, to enact the performative aspect of her project.

You can read and see more at The Creators Project.

Thierry Bornier.

"Hani Terraces". Images courtesy of the artist.

“Hani Terraces”. Images courtesy of the artist.

 

"Floating Nets"

“Floating Nets”

 

"Huangshan Falls"

“Huangshan Falls”

Thierry Bornier started out as an amateur photographer. The story of his journey is an amazing one, you can read all about it at The Creator’s Project. About that last photo:

…the second, and perhaps even more evocative, is “Huangshan Falls.” Bornier recalls his conversation with several older, local Chinese men after he snapped the photograph. They told him that this type of weather effect occurred only once every hundred years. They had been coming for decades waiting for this moment and he had captured it. It is additionally profound that this photograph has zero post-production. It is the wild, Chinese landscape alone that resides in the beauty of this natural, unadulterated image and it is why Bornier loves what he does: clouds flowing over the hills without the aid of a slowed shutter speed or the manipulation of a blur effect. It is landscape photography in its most basic, and yet ironically most surreal, form.

Thierry Bornier at The Creators Project. *  Thierry Bornier’s website.

Okay…Inauguration Roundup.

IR

© Laura Racero.

Oh, where to start. I guess we’ll start with “Hey, look, a tiny, Bane-full inauguration!

(Photo: Wikipedia commons and screen capture).

(Photo: Wikipedia commons and screen capture).

For all the boasting about the bigliest ever, the crowds at Trump’s inauguration were woefully scant. The Twitternet jumped all over this immediately, and you can see many of the tweets here. Also noted by the Twitternet, and most everyone else on the planet, Trump borrowed a bit of his speech from a fictional villain, which is terribly apropos, but he picked the wrong villain, Bane. Bane was more of a “eat the rich!” kind of villain. That didn’t stop Trump:

Fans of the Batman franchise film The Dark Knight Rises were startled to hear the words of the movie villain Bane coming out of Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s mouth as he made his inaugural address — purportedly written by Trump himself — on Friday.

“We’re giving the power back to you. The people,” Trump said Friday, a nearly verbatim quote from Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay for the 2012 film starring Christian Bale as Batman and Tom Hardy as Bane.

You can read all about this one, and see some of the tweets here.

The Twitternet also broke out in gales of laughter and comparisons over Kellyanne Conway’s outfit:

Kellyanne Conway attends President Trump's inauguration (Screen cap).

Kellyanne Conway attends President Trump’s inauguration (Screen cap).

Conway’s outfit, which TMZ claims she describes as “Trump Revolutionary Wear,” is a red-white-and-blue getup that is meant to be somewhat reminiscent of Revolutionary War-era military uniforms.

CNN’s Hunter Schwarz notes that her coat is actually a $3,600 Gucci wool a-line coat — and CNN’s Kate Bennett writes that the coat was originally designed to pay tribute to the city of London, which isn’t exactly a place to celebrate the American Revolution.

You can read all about that, and see tweets here. Oh, and the buttons on it are cat heads.

Then there’s a compilation of all the things that didn’t happen, didn’t come through, and weren’t bigly at all:

Women’s March bus permit requests outnumber inauguration requests by 3 times.

Most hotel bookings have been made by anti-Trump protesters.

Trump is wrong (again): dress shops still have plenty of available frocks.

“There’s never been less demand for inaugural ballgowns in my 38 years,” Peter Marx, who owns D.C. dress shop Saks Jandel, told People. “Never ever has it been less for the inaugural.”

Other shops expressed similar sentiments.

“We were expecting heavy traffic and it has not been that way,” a D.C. Bloomingdale’s representative told Elle. “The last inauguration was a lot more people shopping.”

A spokesperson from Intermix told the outlet, “Usually, it is really big for us, but this year we haven’t seen anything yet, surprisingly.”

Elle notes that “among others we called, White House Black Market and Cusp in Georgetown confirmed they have options in stock. So does Neiman Marcus. And Gucci. And Lord & Taylor. And Nordstrom.”

There’s more here.

And there were artists out, as well as all the marchers and protesters. FORCE put on a big show:

CREDIT: Nate Larson.

CREDIT: Nate Larson.

…For roughly 45 minutes, a slideshow of photos and quotes from survivors circulated on the front of the building, as passersby stopped to take it in. The organizers of the installation hoped their message reached at least a few visitors here for Trump’s inauguration.

“As a native woman, as a queer woman, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and intimate parter violence, there’s so much that is traumatic about seeing my country support somebody that represents violence against all of those things,” said Rebecca Nagle, a co-director of FORCE. “The racism and the misogyny that [Trump] represents is bigger than just him as a person and a figurehead, but is something that is deeply embedded in American culture.”

Many victims of sexual assault were particularly traumatized by the election of Donald Trump, who bragged on tape about sexually abusing woman. Now, as he prepares to enter the White House, there are already signs that Trump won’t pursue policies aimed at preventing sexual violence. As part of his proposed plan to reduce government spending, Trump administration officials reportedly approached the Department of Justice with a plan to eliminate the federal grants used to combat violence against women.

“The goal of the piece is really to uplift survivors voices at a time that a lot of people are normalizing Trump’s behavior,” said Nagle.

Full story at Think Progress. A great work by FORCE!

And because there’s always bad news:

President Donald Trump’s whitehouse.gov page omitted references to a number of policy issues championed by his predecessor, including climate change, civil rights and healthcare, providing a blueprint for the new administration’s priorities over the next four years.

Full story here.

Swarfcrow.

I definitely want to build a large scarecrow come Springtime, but in the meanwhile, I want to make a small one, using swarf for the head. So, time to play a bit and decide what I want to do…

Swarfcrow

And a better shot of the swarf, because it’s so pretty:

Swarfcrow1

And Trashcrow – this would be for a full size only, too much of a pain to do small. Doing a Trashcrow would give me a chance to play around with plastic bag molding, and playing with fire and other fun stuff. :D

Scrows

Scrows1

Clickety for full size. © C. Ford.