Category: Arts

All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patti Smith

AFTER DECADES as a major force in punk rock — dating back to her shows at CBGB’s and her 1975 LP Horses — Patti Smith has earned a considerable reputation as a literary figure as well. She has introduced books of poems by Blake and Rimbaud, published several volumes of her own verse and song lyrics, and won the National Book Award for Just Kids, her 2010 memoir about her crucial early years with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith’s new book is Devotion, a slim volume that is — at once — an ode to her favorite French writers, a short story or fable about a mysterious young ice skater, and a meditation on the creative process. (It is based on a speech Smith gave at Yale and is part of Yale University Press’s Why I Write series.)

Read full interview: All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patti Smith – Los Angeles Review of Books

The Peculiar Poetry of Paris’s Lost and Found

On the southern edge of Paris, a five-thousand-square-foot basement houses the city’s lost possessions. The Bureau of Found Objects, as it is officially called, is more than two hundred years old, and one of the largest centralized lost and founds in Europe. Any item left behind on the Métro, in a museum, in an airport, or found on the street and dropped, unaddressed, into a mailbox makes its way here, around six or seven hundred items each day. Umbrellas, wallets, purses, and mittens line the shelves, along with less quotidian possessions: a wedding dress with matching shoes, a prosthetic leg, an urn filled with human remains. The bureau is an administrative department, run by the Police Prefecture and staffed by very French functionaries—and yet it’s also an improbable, poetic space where the entrenched French bureaucracy and the societal ideals of the country collide [ . . . ]

Read Full Story: The Peculiar Poetry of Paris’s Lost and Found | The New Yorker

First festival: four “Photographic stories” in the den of the abbey of Silvacane

The Abbey of Silvacane in La Roque d’Anthéron (Bouches-du-Rhône) hosts until September 30, 2017 its first festival of “Photographic Stories”. Four projects, led by five international photographers – Hélène David, Ritta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth forming a duo, Corey Arnold and Amy Friend – give their singular vision of the world. On the menu of the journey: commitment, poetry, humor.

Source: First festival: four “Photographic stories” in the den of the abbey of Silvacane

A good exhibition is a lesson for the look – Saint-Merry

The Center Georges Pompidou offers a great retrospective of a major photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) who spent most of his life as a photographer interested in the vernacular, in everyday life, in urban banality. He examined the American soul through its roads, advertisements, ordinary buildings, cars, pedestrians, and so on. It has marked generations of photographers.And at the end of the exhibition, a splendid text that questions less our look than the pleasure to look and evokes the spring of the artist.In this malicious parallel between church and museum, a question and then an affirmation come to mind: “What did you go to see in the desert? ”

Matthew 11: 7-9. As they were going away, Jesus began to say to the crowd about John, “What have you gone to see in the wilderness?” A reed stirred by the wind? But what did you go to see? A man dressed in precious clothes? Behold, those who wear precious garments are in the houses of kings. What have you gone to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet”

Can we establish a parallel between the prophet and the artist?

Troubled question around the see.

John Deuzemes.

 

[ . . . ] Original French Translation: A good exhibition is a lesson for the look – Saint-Merry

Marais and Cocteau: the whole universe of a mythical couple in 50 photos

Until August 20, the hotel “Les Bories”, in Gordes in the Luberon, hosts the exhibition “Marais and Cocteau – Luck was at the rendezvous”.

A dive into the singular universe of the couple in 50 photos displayed in the gardens of this luxurious establishment, exceptionally open to the general public

Read More: Marais and Cocteau: the whole universe of a mythical couple in 50 photos