Mary Farrah Leni Fawcett 1947 - 2009

Foto: Cybertown.

"Farrah had courage, she had strength, and she had faith. And now she has peace as she rests with the real angels". Jaclyn Smith.

Obama as Super Hero

I can't think of any president since Kennedy, as charismatic as Obama. Let's hope he will be up to the expectations. In any case, the man knows how to attract people's sympathy.

Steve Rogers is Back

As I knew Steve Rogers is back from the dead. A major event in the Marvel Universe coming in the first issue of Reborn.

Thinking in Summer (v.2K9)

Image: The Bankruptcy Litigation Blog.

2009 tastes the end of an era for the US automotive industry. Those days of glory, when General Motors Company reigned supreme as the world's foremost enterprise are over. How big can be measured by the fact that its revenues were bigger than the Gross Income of some nations. I recall one particular year, when it was larger than that of the Netherlands. GM's logo is known almost by everyone and it is likely that few people have not got a ride in one of its vehicles, or at least in one made under another brand belonging to that company.

When Nikita Kruschev visited the US in 1959, then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower welcomed him to IBM saying ”you will see a true American company”. Movie director Stanley Kubrick took to the future the icons of that American industry in 2001, A Space Odyssey: Pan American would shuttle people to space; IBM would go on governing computing technology and telephones would be run by Bell (Ma Bell). Only GM was absent in that film (BTW some DVD transfers lack all those logos today).

Now GM is 60% in the hands of the US Government (Where are You, Adam Smith?), though it promises a short term intervention. However, Bell is gone as an empire long ago, as long ago some other covert monopolys went over too. Although IBM is still powerful, it is no longer the tycoon it used to be. I don't think that we are to witness the end of GM, I believe it will reinvent itself to come back like a Phoenix. Would it be possible to think that GM is a herald of a new age, the signal of the end of entrepreneurial megafaunas?

Or perhaps it is exactly the opposite? That we are seen the raise, not of magafaunas, but of petafaunas, capable of eating whole markets at once? Could it be possible tha Nikita´s Prophecy is on its way? Would Eisenhower greet Nikita with so much pride today, like in 1959?

I have never been a big fan of US cars. But I do love some of its finest ones. Like Mustangs, Cobras or Corvettes, which would have been impossible to develop in other markets. Also, I am fed up with the sad and loud GM farewell: Amidst convoluted negotiations,occult agendas and only God knows which other sordid manuevers. History, perhaps, will tell the whole story some day.

Perhaps some day someone will seat in front of the descendant of the Wikipedia just to read it all: "Then President Barack Obama, advised by the Nation leading banking staffs, decided to save the Company by investing billions of dollars taken from taxpayers in order to...".

So, the Saudis goes to the movies...

Oh! I am so happy I was born in the West: "Fayez al-Malki, star of the movie, Menahi, poses in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia late Saturday June 6, 2009, in front of a poster of his film, which became the first movie to be publicly screened in Riyadh in more than three decades. Women were banned from the show because organizers could not get permission for them to attend. Still, the decision to show the film, produced by a company owned by royal tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, at the government-run cultural center was a daring step and a challenge to the more conservative elements of society". (AP Photo)

Thank You, Kodak!

I will try the samples so kindly sent by Kodak. As a lover of B&W film this is a great opportunity.
Image: klavaza, 2008.

Hábitat Imaginario

Claudia Cirici is a young sculptress from Guatemala. Her most recent exhibition delves deeply in one of the most persistent myths in Fantastic Art and Literature, that of lost, forgotten or secret cities, some of which, it is said, were perfect, built by mythical beings, but others found their doom due to their mundane proclivities.

"Morbus is an ancient city... It was built in prehistoric times by a people who are now extinct... I discovered it. I have remodeled and rebuilt it, but largely upon the foundations of the old city, which was splendidly built", tells Edgar Rice Burroughs, of Tarzan fame.

Borges in El Inmortal wrote: "Before any other trait of that astounding monument, I was stoned by the antiquity of its construction. I felt that it was older than men, older than Earth. That notorious antiquity (in a certain way terrible for the eyes) seemed to me the proper work of inmortal masons”.

Nobody, however, has been as able as Lovecraft to further the myth: "Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked".

As Marco Flaminio Rufo (Borges inmortal) did in the lost city of his tale, I wandered through Claudia’s sculptures, idly at first, but increasingly attentive thereafter. I left the Museum premises but her works permeated my mind and came with me, directing my steps to other creators whose idealized cities were left in comics, books or illustrations. Hers, instead, are primordial maquettes, archetypes of what could be called Fantastic Architecture.

Maybe her works are fantastic in nature, but they steam from quintessential art inspired in Escher’s labyrinths, in the bold ideas of Erik Desmazières and in Borges words. Every work in this exhibition has a personal, unique, mark, identifying the hand of Claudia Cirici as her creation, something apparent in the superb patina, finishing and even in the title of every inch of every single marvel of this beautiful collection.
Hábitat Imaginario took place between Oct. 8 and Nov. 9 in the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Guatemala.
Bibliography: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Synthetic Men of Mars, 1940; Jorge Luis Borges, El Inmortal, in El Aleph, 1949; H. P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City, in The Wolverine, 1921.
Images: Abyss of the Four Moons; Infinite Palace C; Windows of the Gods and its fragment, by José Carlos Flores, by kind courtesy of Claudia Cirici.