A FEW WORDS, A FEW PICTURES (Or Determining How Many Words a Picture is Really Worth at Current Market Value)
By John Howe
I’ve often considered that artists should be subject to restraining orders, forbidding them to approach any closer than 100 yards to writing about their ownwork. Alas, I am a convicted and incurable recidivist, and like most of my earnest colleagues, am already serving a life sentence, so a few words won’t hurt.
Those of you who’ve had the pleasure (or the misfortune) of meeting me will likely know I feel very strongly about this whole business of making pictures. (Deep inside me is a thoroughly repressed professor, chained up and living on bread and water.)
So, when offered the opportunity to do a book where I could actually say what I think, I was not going to keep my mouth shut or my typing fingers idle. I spent this spring chained up and living on bread and water, fingers madly dancing their two-step over my keyboard typing words in a frenzy of ardent application (I am an out-of-touch-typist at best), handed it all over to the editor and… well, nothing. That’s publishing. The six months separating the frenzy of creation and revision from actual publication are often disconcerting. Now that interview time is coming around, I’ve forgotten most of what I wrote. [More]
Terumi Isogai writes: I am a fan of LOTR who is living in Wellington, New Zealand. The big news in town is that the famous Chocolate fish cafe is in danger of closing by the end of this year, due to rising cost. You might know this already but I thought we as fans could start some sort of petition trying to stop this from happening.
In the U.S., most people know Ian McKellen as the villainous Magneto in the X-Men movies — and of course as the wizard Gandalf, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But long before he became an international superstar, McKellen was known as the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation. He’s played Romeo, Macbeth, Iago, and Richard III (on stage and on film) and now he’s touring the United States with one of the greatest Shakespeare roles of all time: King Lear.
TORONTO – Viggo Mortensen may be a physical, intimidating presence on screen but in person he is more wiry than you expect, and much, much quieter. A serious, philosophical actor, the Manhattan-born Mortensen (he grew up in New York and South America and his father is Danish, so he’s multi-lingual) is an exhibited photographer, poet, painter and publisher. If that isn’t enough “P” talents for one man, he’s also a pianist whose new album is “Time Waits for Everyone.”