If you still have no gift for Mommy, you may use this virtual one. It's courtesy of Anarchic_Universe® on behalf of Mommy. Just a click away. Please click. G'ahead. Print one or more; as long as you 'fess up where these roses come from; that's alright.
Today is a good day!
Good day t'all. Seemingly back to normal, SAMOHI PTSA announces a grand meeting with the architect in charge of the ch-ch-ch-changes. Two buildings will be demolished and rebuilt; there'll be underground parking built. Ah! Sex in he bathrooms will be cleaner. Click for UCLA report. They're already installing waterless urinals. However, wash your hands, boys and girls! Click for Anarchic_Universe report. I'll be opening our network's del.icio.us links.
I'll leave here a video sent to me thru YouTube. It's a psychedelic take on snakes. I know,I know, click for Craig and Ewan McGreggor, made with the use of fractals. Later, for real, and fer shure, click for Moon Unit Zappa. I'll be back later.
Yesterday I posted a simple list of materials needed for this do-it-yourself Mother's Day gift.
It is here, at a click away
It's very fortunate Xadai, the owner of Lombaxomba, posted a whole bunch of links on writing. Some are in today's list of del.cio.us links. Let's go to the how-tos of this project.
• on your computer, write one of those cutsie adorable letters to your Mom. If you cannot write it, think of all the good stuff your mother did and why they are important. My Mother gave me love for books, for example.
• after writing from the heart, go to a drawing software and make a portrait of Mommy at her best.
• cut and paste the writing and the drawing onto one document.
• print it on acid-free paper, best possible printer. Acid-free paper lasts without fading away.
• glue your paper onto the paperboard. If you know how to glue using an open paper clip and glue, all power to you.
• decorate your project with glitter stickers. Hearts and stars forever.
• finally, insert it all in the cheap-o frame. Voilà!
This is a Mother's Day homemade project my fourth grade class made in 1997. We used the very simple Bilingual Writing Center® software and Kid Pix® in one of its earlier versions. Now you can make your own.
Materials needed:
• self-adhesive stars and heart stickers.
• one piece of 8 1/2" x 11" hard tagboard paper, any color.
• writing software
• drawing software
• good quality printing paper
• good quality glue
• cheap frame
Tomorrow, how-tos.
in fact, I learned this technique to teach it to children in the days a double-edge razor was okay for kids to have. It's Crayola®, covered with ink of China, I think that is its name in English. After dry, we can scrape it or draw on top of the dried paper. I wasn't on drugs at all. As the cartoon John Lennon says in "The Yellow Submarine" film,
"It's all in the mind, you know?"
For more on Os Mutantes psychedelic rock and news click here and add the site to your bookmarks. Keeping my mind busy at the sound of "I'm Fixing a Hole."
Our son, the (spoiles rotten) apple of our eyes, not quite, really, discovered this feature of the Mac, an application called Photo Booth. It's in Leopard.
Mine didn't work, but it seems there is a blog using my photos in a not nice way, in Ireland. Tut-tut, please stop.
If you click on this photo you can see it in bigger sizes and leave a comment for GHR. He will be happy, I can assure you that.
This is nite-nite tme for me, after a long day going places with my husband.
We had to take care of business. For some reason Detroit came to my mind. Oh, the primaries, Hillary and Obama. I can't wait for this first turn to be over.
This photo has copyrihgt. NO reproductions etc. without the explicit authorization of its author.©
GHR can be found at Flickr and at his desk, surfing the Net for his homework. Otherwise, creating music with his piano or sax. GHR has his own blog, Mind My Generation.
I haven't had time to read about Hillary's mudslinging Obama. Tomorrow is another day. I'll survive without reading about more dirt. See you!
Beautiful sunsets are the norm in Santa Monica. The brown layer close to the ocean tells us about pollution. Holding a glass of virgin Bloody Mary, who cares? Some guacamole to help other Mexican finger foods makes us a bit wistful as the sun sinks deep behind the Palisades, a pallid copycat of the mountains we could see in Ipanema.
It's low tide now. There is a melancholy pervading the ambiance of happy hour artificial cackle. Tomorrow may be one more day to kill. One more afternoon spent on a lazy hotel rooftop. There is something morbid about the beauty of sunsets.
Anisio Medeiros was my professor at Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, FAU-UFRJ. He taught at the Escola de Belas Artes, too. A set designer, costume designer, art director and architect from Piauí, a state ridiculed before Acre took its place as motif of scorn, Anisio was a genius ahead of his time. And because I loved all films in which he worked, and heard viva voce his stories on how the set was designed (or improvised) or how the costumes were created from scratch, I dedicate this gathering of souvenirs to him.
Bye Bye Brasil has been released here, with subtitles, not bad of a subtitling job, on DVD. Read the NY Times review by Vincent Canby at a click on Bye Bye Brasil above. The film is by Cacá Diegues, who belonged to Cinema Novo and made a cool transition to a Tropicalist æsthetic code in Bye Bye Brasil. Caravana Rolidei is a poor circus on wheels trio, then a quintet. The Rolidei is a phonetic version of Holiday. They seek towns where TV (Globo) hasn't arrived yet, the hypnotic power of a TV set worshiped up in the main square of little towns.
The æsthetic motif of the costumes is great. A hairdo that twinkles with Xmas lights, the clothes of the poor, of the Native-Brazilians, all of it is political in a subtle way, sending us to the days when the Redeemer(coup d'état 64-85) built pharaonic roads, gold was found in the Amazon, but I am moving to the set design. Oh, well. The choices of places in Brazil is perfect: the riverbank town, the palm trees by the ocean, the burned and had Amazon (in 1980!) and Brasília, the destination of poor migrants straight into favelas.
I don't want to spoil the film for you. All I want you to know is this is genius if you are interested in Brazil or Brasil. Cacá Diegues bittersweet good-bye to a Brasil that becomes a Brazil and a Caravana Rolidei that becomes a Caravana Rolidey, with a y, letter inexistent in Portuguese, sum up the Tropicalist message: we devour the foreign products but spit out something different, the message of cultural cannibalism that knows no boundaries. Click here for a great article on this film.
None of what you see in this film and in so many other ones would have been possible without Anisio Medeiros. I was a poor draftsperson with a pencil. He made me the model for our B&W classes. Scorning the Oiticica which follows anyone in the Oiticica family, he would announce to all,
"We can't start the class without Tina Harris."
I remembered him due to my cybertroubles with passwords and nicknames. He would tap the floor with one foot, impatiently, while I finally arrived, late as usual, holding a cigarette, ready for my modeling time. The best souvenirs I have of Anisio Medeiros are of his sharing with us how he designed scenes improvising, as in Macunaíma, where foam was modeled to look like meats in a gigantic black bean casserole. Others are catty gossip which dies with him and us, his fave students. Finally, I did learn a lot of tricks in color techniques, from the precise names of colors to how to obtain them. Watercolor is about transparency, pastels are about several layers over each one of them. It is impossible to replicate our color sessions. I cannot fathom students sitting under a freeway in a dangerous area of downtown in order to capture how luminous a poor area can look. Or on the streets of downtown Rio anywhere nowadays.
I take my hat off to Anisio Medeiros, thank my schoolmate who refreshed some memories of him this morning and encourage you to watch this and all other films he participated in. A fine art director, genius in improvising, with peculiarities that make him a star in an era of constellation of architects teaching at FAU-UFRJ, Anisio Medeiros, wherever he is, for my friend remembered him today, too, will be tapping his shoe for a long wait, I hope,
waiting for Tina Harris, some day, some time. Just a taste of Bye Bye Brazil for you.
Last night we went to visit a French quasi-bistro, quasi-restaurant to treat our son to his favorite food: French food. Here are the photos of the French, who are closet Latinos to me, just a tad more sanguinary. And of me, back to black hair after my roots were showing for ages.
"Yes, I am fat. Tomorrow I shall not be fat, but you'll still be ugly." That is a variation of a Churchill quote.
Take the title as you please. GHR got his fleece sheared. So now, the loves of my life and one photo of me and the French. Tina Oiticica Harris, the two French from the south.
R. got a braid somewhere. GHR got glasses and braces, a few zits. Tomorrow we go celebrate his birthday at the Museum by USC. And this photo is of my "true love, for if it dies it wasn't love," in a free variation of Nelson Rodrigues' saying.
Nicolas F.Rouquette, sometimes irascible from exhaustion, sometimes sermonizing his thoughts out loud, can be found on Google under Remote Agent, the software that opened the series "New Millennium" for NASA. He's my husband and the father of our most elaborate and exquisite creation. Together they drive me nuts. The French joke will be for tomorrow. With you GHR and Nic: Check out Nic's sh*-eating near grin of pride
for our son. Click to enlarge and enjoy.
I was ticked to no end to find out my photos and images, indexed for you readers, were bombed with several others, including a cover of a magazine with Che Guevara.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=attu.typepad.com%2F&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
My Images are at:
Image Google
Then you choose unrestricted search for:
attu.typepad.com/
Voilà! Images that have been in Universo Anárquico, the default page and Anarchic_Universe, its li'l brother.
Please note a few images aren't mine. Mine are up for use with attribution.
Enjoy!
(Say, Tina, are they the same blog?)
Yes and no. Blogging for the English-speaking audience is different than blogging in Portuguese. Here are some brand new photos: flowers, prickly pears and the edible core: tunas or thorns, go figure.
Seth A's links are in place. I hope this will be the last lay out; gawgeous. His files are easy to find. There we go:
-- Write like Google, from the NYTimes David Pogue's desk
My future my past
blast vultures
I'll burn at last
Inot Into ash es
To the left
my future
To my right
My latest
Re-creation
my half-self.
The Poet Laureate's book in English is great. Paulo Henriques Britto's The Clean Shirt of It -- 
My "French China
Made in Spain" was filled with good intentions.
My son brought it for my b'day.
On Flickr.
Finally, the motif for this first post in the early morning.
La reine et le Prince Soleil. © Anarchic_Universe, 2007
flickr photo blogging
I'll be using Cora Rónai's method, from InterETC.. She leaves her cell. photos posted, one/hour. It's the 30,000 readers who decide what's what.
This vine is a .....? Please fill in the blanks in the comments.
Cora's blog has the most talked about map in the past two weeks:
The Grand Dahmer Map of the Brazilian Blogsphere crafted by Andre Dahmer, the owner of malvados.com.br -- The comic strip banner right there, to the left.
The map comes with live links that take you straight to the chosen 117 blogs. My Universo Anárquico is there! A puny li'l island. I feel happy about that.
Finally, B 12 Solipsm's insistence to prove how beautiful Chicago is. Tr00. It's my Second City, nicer than NYC, my hometown. Click on the link and on the photos to embiggen.(His expression.)
This is Anarchic_Universe, straight from SMonica, Ipanema, US-Brasil.
©Anarchic_Universe,2007
If you are wondering how come I have three posts today and none on Os Mutantes or on the tragedy at the airport in São Paulo yesterday, the answer is simple: there are many posts on Os Mutantes, whom I miss so much already. There is coverage of the tragedy in Universo Anárquico and in many other papers and blogs. I feel irritated at how cheap human life is in a Third World country. Better yet, anywhere if you think of our kids serving in Iraq to protect "our economic interests". So let's forget exploitation and focus on art.
I would like to share with you a photo of the Queen of the House, Kitty Carslyle. It's a close -up, as if she were saying,
"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille" ( Line from "Sunset Boulevard" , by Billy Wilder.) Click for the scene of a film that is part of our cinema culture.
•The twelve regular readers of this blog know already Anarchic_Universe is a tribute to my grandfather's anarchist-linguist brother, José Oiticica. I am far from being an anarchist, maybe an iconoclast. I am your blogger. My responsibility is with the truth, my family, home and my blogging: sharing knowledge with you, as The Thinking Blog likes to proclaim.
•My grandfather was a federal prosecutor of a high court in the days of caudillo Getulio Vargas, 1930-45. The people liked Getulio so much he was elected in the 50s and led to suicide by persistent accusations in the press, not without leaving a letter to the people whose last sentence is well-known, "I leave life to enter history."
•While Uncle Cajuza, the anarchist professor, was being arrested and released, he and Auntie Sinhazinha had six children: José Filho, an entomologist and draftsman, Selma, Vanda, Sônia, Dulce,Vera. José Filho had three boys: Hélio, César and Cláudio. It is a huge mistake to think anarchists or free thinkers lack discipline. José Filho refused to let his sons enlist in the Armed Forces. His example and his father's were enough to transmit the idea of discipline and hard work along with independent thinking.
• Hélio Oiticica, pronounced EH-lyoo oy-tchee-CEE-cah, was a disciplined artist whose first steps were studied geometric forms. In the 60s he let himself loose . In his words, "Art had to get off the walls." He was ahead of his time. He created the parangolés, pronounce pah- ttan - goh -LEHz, which were masks of diverse meanings, made of cloth, which created life only when people wore them. Then there were the bólides, BOH-lee-daze, colorful figments of his and the people's imagination, click here to see a few bólides and Hélio Oiticica.
• I saw my cousin twice. Once with a group of film makers, the Underground/Marginal they called themselves, they went against the once revolutionary and then Sacred Cow Cinema Novo. I was eighteen and feared approaching him.
•The second time was in 1979 when Caetano Veloso and Raimundo Fagner played a fundraiser for amnesty: ample, general and unrestricted. Whichever amnesty campaign was a brave one in 1979. The Redeemer, 1964-85, was still in full force. I went backstage and introduced myself to Caetano Veloso with the lamest line. "Hélio Oiticica is my cousin." Hélio happened to be there and we chatted for a while. He knew who my mother was, his blonde aunt
, told me about his passion for Mangueira, the samba association in pink and green. He claimed we were Ladinos(new Christians), according to an older cousin in Alagoas, where our family comes from. He considered himself of color. HIs friends were in the favela.
• As Hélio's art became more outrageous to the eyes of the dictatorship, his family convinced him to leave. The military had already instituted strong laws to choke the artists and the people. They got really pissed at a poster of an outlaw shot with a subtitle: "be at the margin be a hero." Hélio had to go. Now, in 1979, he was back.
• I got his address, promised to visit. In a few months Hélio had a stroke and died after a four-day horrible agony, hearing the phone, seeing notes of friends slipped under the door. The family opposed a surgery before making him stronger. He died at 43. When I met him he'd come back from the Bronx,from his forced exile, and told me about how the borough was being burned.
• In May of 1968, the avant-guard Tropicália movement took as its name a "penetrável" now known as installation Hélio Oiticica displayed in São Paulo. It showed palm trees and birds, all kinds of symbols for people to roam in and out . It was the art he desired, off the walls, at last.
•It is an uncomfortable feeling I have he is so popular and studied in Ph.D. dissertations all over the place now. When Hélio died in 1980, he was a great conceptual artist living a frugal life. Oh, well, since anthropophagy (cultural) was part of the tenets of the Tropicália movement, I guess this is all right. I believe he is somewhere laughing all this off, rolling a joint with the "marginal " he befriended, wrapped in a parangolé, dancing to a samba of Mangueira.
•Here I have a collection of videos of Hélio Oiticica's work, presently in display at the Tate Gallery, London, until September 23.
This is a tribute to Hélio Oiticica, who preferred the favela to the condos. An artist who could foresee many trends in art and left us too soon. Thanks for traveling with me on this journey. See you Friday?
© Anarchic_Universe, 2007
Hello, there:
This is one in a series of cell.photography I have been learning with my teen.
No, Seth, I don't need two cups. The beautiful china one was a gift for Mother's Day. The lone star stands for my time de futebol, Botafogo, the glorious in days past.
The fish is a souvenir from Maceió, Alagoas.
The mirror I found in a Rusky store. They swore it was silver. My kid tapped on it; coated plastic. I wanted it after I saw this gawgeous socialite holding one in a New Yorker I saved. The article was "Dressing for Lula" circa early 2003.
My clock was a very kewl item sold at most museums.
There are two DGA director's chairs. If you go to the awards ceremony, you get one. On one chair my inhaler; on the other a paper fairy my friend DADO made and gave me a while ago.
The Crayola box is old. The smell of these wax crayons is the fourth most recognizable in the USA.
There is a silver bracelet with enamel. The desk was my father's. He bought it from the American Embassy before they moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. A friend took care of it until I had money for my big move: books, records,books,the desk, china.
See you later! Top of the morning, I guess ;))
I am sure you enjoy the little sets of photos moving; each set is called a badge. These photos are all at my Flickr site, and more of my photos are there, too. Download HowToPostFlickrPhotoSets.mo.mov
Many of you know I have two hard-headed boys living with me, the Li'l one and the Ph.D. one. The Ph.D organized a little step-by-step demonstration that enables anyone to get his or her photos together in a badge. Flickr is free. You can mark your sets private or public. This is a great way to send just a link to family or friends abroad and show whichever special moment in your life.
How to put together a Flickr badge: Show by Pile-it-Higher-and-Deeper, Nico.
Guilt generated presents cost a lot of money. You want to show your mom you care, even if you called her twice in a year. But say this year your home equity went south, your credit card is maxed out. Don't let anxiety eat your heart up. I will help you with a do-it-yourself project. Moms always love those.
You will need a sturdy piece of paper, red, preferably, a nylon string, a sheet of newspaper and stickers, paint, anything you wish.
You will fold the paper like this:
Before you open it, make a hole. A nylon string will pass thru both ends of what will be a heart. In it you will write with your best handwriting, "Mommy, an invisible thread links our hearts." Sign your name.
If you want to, wrap your heart in a newspaper sheet. Decorate the newspaper with paint, stickers, whatever strikes your fancy. I can guarantee mommy will love it. Use tape and a ribbon left over from the holidays. Voilà!
Wanted:
Talented Visual Artists, no degree necessary, we have a big job for you. We will make one hundred million dollars. This is a respectable, non-profitable institution spreading the love for art. Potentially, you can make twelve thousand dollars a month. Attention to details is a must. It's okay with us if you have an ear missing. We will pick-up your medical tab, if necessary. If interested, please contact: Theo or Vincent a few blocks north of 125th Street, just opposite from Billy's Penthouse. We will be wearing shades because we're not used to the spring sun.
Wanted:
Artist specialized in miniatures, planning, copying from a model to develop junk much needed place-mats, shot glasses, coasters, and any other object bearing the likeness of the model. NO! the model isn't live nude. The model is very special, very beautiful, and very inspiring. No! it isn't a nude model. If interested, we will make gazillions, you will be able to retire on the copyrights. Contact: Julio and me on the school yard on 4th and Pico. We will be the ones carrying sex-o-phones. Make sure you don't confuse sax and sex. We haven't decided which to carry yet. But we will be the only ones on campus with long beards.
Wanted:
An architect who knows how to build a building that will stay up. We don't need no stinking plans. We don't need no stinking interviews to the press. We need an architect who can build a warehouse, which will be the ONLY BRANCH of the Getty in the whole wide world. Imagine the honor and pride bestowed on you! Attention please! If you don't know how to build, we know a thing or two about the concrete business. Our branch must have a big room to display the one hundred million dollar Van Gogh "Irises" Contact: Mario and Luigi at the Rosa Ristorante in China Town.
