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American Essentials Film Festival

May 8-20, 2018

Sydney, Australia

American Essentials is not your typical new world film festival with the saccharine blockbusters crowding the market.  The focus is firmly on curating a program that sheds light on the independent productions of the last year, covering quite a bit of territory  as diverse as thriller, melodrama, adventure, comedy, coming of age, horror, political, social justice, classics, music, cult, noir, romance and biographical flics.

Needless to say that the festival serves as a great source to detect newcomers who showcase their first emissions that might normally not find their way onto your radar.

The new works were all Australian premieres with some having been shown merely a few days earlier at film festivals in Toronto, Sundance, Rotterdam and SXSW festivals.

The opening night showed The Boy Downstairs, a this millennial romantic-comedy against the backdrop of hipster Brooklyn from debut director Sophie Brooks and starring Zosia Mamet known from the TV show Girls.

Other highlights included John Travolta portraying the notorious New York mob boss John Gotti, his rise to power and how he earned himself the name “Teflon Don”.

As the name suggests, the festival focuses on the essence of current relevant movies and it should become a fixture on every cineasts calendar.

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Photos by @k.a.vv

Aleksandr Zhitomirsky

Photomontage as a Weapon of World War II and the Cold War

Yale University Press

As one might have noticed, I am an aficionado of German artist John Heartfield’s photomontages and the impact it has had on popular and underground cultures, e.g. Sakevi from G.I.S.M.

Aleksandr Zhitomirsky is the soviet equivalent to John Heartfield, whose propaganda and photomontages tackled German troops during World War II.

After World War II and confined behind the iron curtain, Zhitomirsky enjoyed a career as a writer for Pravda and other publications, which he used as a vantage point to not only criticize and vilify mainly the politics and politicians from the new world, from Truman through to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s but also educate his audiences about what was out of reach for them to experience first-hand.

This tome is an encompassing, abundantly opulently illustrated account of political artist Zhitomirsky’s thought-provoking and at times hilarious emissions, which were inspired by his friend John Heartfield, and whose epinomous and classic work of image manipulation has to this date largely remained in the shadows as it was even sidelined in the USSR.

Apart from the focus on Zhitomirsky, Photomontage as a Weapon of World War II and the Cold War is an homage to the power of visual propaganda combined with political messaging and an essential source for those interested in investigating the circumstances and limitations in which he had to operate.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art

Jeff Koons is perceived to be a controversial artist – an iconic one that proves to be hard to by-pass.

This retrospective zeros in on the thirty-five year spanning career that is firmly based on the reconceptualisation and reimagination of mundane everyday objects and images that have become omnipresent in the world of pop.

What makes Jeff Koons’ work stand out is that it is not merely l’art pour l’art but that his oeuvre is essentially subversive and questions the status quo that we have accept to be reality.

Full-colour photographs and illustrations are depicted en detail along with photos and sketches documenting the genesis of some of his more prominent works, showing how they have evolved from exhibition to exhibition.

What makes this tome a resource for both connoisseurs, the uninitiated as well as the critical voices who have been questioning Koons’ work is not only the well-written, insightful essay that Scott Rothkopf contributed about his eclectic career, but also the other elaborations from scholars from different disciplines, be it from the literary or the worlds of academia and of course art, that examine Koons’ artistic process and tackle it from different angles.

A beautiful, insightful retrospective on a unique, contemporary relevant artist, whose approach to art pays homage to a variety of courses, including Dadaism, pop art and surrealism.

Good Design Australia showcase

Overseas Passengers Terminal

Sydney, Australia

May 25, 2018

Design.

Good Design, huh?

What constitutes “good design”?

When there is nothing left to add or nothing left to take away?

The jealousy of other designers?

Simplicity and clarity?

Does content precede design?

Good Design Australia is an organization dedicated to design as a way of life, not only as a key driver for productivity, economic growth and innovation but pervading all facets of our existence. It promotes the value, impact and the whole complex of creative ability, technical knowledge, manual skill and the underpinning foundation of economics and aesthetics.

A key tenet of Good Design Australia is also put on sustainability and the credo to help foster a more balanced world.

2018 marks the 60th anniversary of Good Design Australia and what started in the late 1950s with sporadic Design Centres and Good Design Labels in the mid-1960s to visually indicate and honour good design and manufacturing, resonated with the wider public proportionally to consumer perception of design and trickled down to the mainstream to become an essential part of Australia’s DNA.

Fast forward to the late 1980s: The Australian Design Award is established and Standards Australia, Australia's peak Standards body, is put at the helm of the operation two years later, which leads to the awards being positioned as an important benchmark for continual improvement and international best practice for design with winning products being put on display in Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum for one year with the exponates added to the Museum's permanent collection of Australian design.

Criteria for the award include good design, innovation and the significance of a product not only to Australia's material culture but show potential to be recognized in the global marketplace.

In late 2010, Standards Australia initiates a transition that results in the baton of the Australian Design Awards being handed to Good Design Australia in a bid to position the program in a new, ever-changing environment. 

As a consequence, Good Design Australia expands to include a wider range of disciplines under its umbrella, and incorporates ‘Design-led Innovation' into its aspirations and gives birth to the inception of the inaugural Australian International Design Festival, which brings us to the present day:

The Good Design Awards 2018, comprised of ten main Design Disciplines, and a three-day Good Design Showcase Exhibition at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, launched in tandem of Vivid Sydney.

Both the general public and the design luminaries were granted access to a showcase of examples embodying good design.

Apart from being taken on a journey through sixty years of Good Design, it was interesting to see the exhibition and pick the brains of the subject matter experts as they elaborated on why certain seemingly plan and unimpressive objects push the boundaries of new and innovative thinking, how new systems and technology contributed to its genesis and how both the processes as well as the final emission contribute to sustainability.

An evening that was an ode to the fact that design is not merely what it looks like, but if you dig deeper, the discovery that it is really about how it works.

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Photos by @K.A.VV

At the time tickets went on sale for Stone Temple Pilots’ latest tour, it was unclear initially how many folks were going to be interested in seeing the band with their new vocalist Jeff Gutt. What quickly became apparent, as shows started selling about across the country including their stop in Colorado last Thursday night, is there is still a whole lotta love for this band and these songs.

Admittedly, when the band makes their entrance and the first strains of Wicked Garden come through the p.a., it’s hard to not get a tingle in your nethers. And the tingles just did not stop. Running through a tight 90+ minute set, the band gave the crowd everything they came for and more.

Running through fan favorites, like Vaseline and a crowd-vocal led Plush, through deep cuts, like Coma and the sublime Atlanta, as well as throwing in new songs, that sounded every bit at home in the set, like Roll Me Under and Meadow.

It’s been over 25 years since the release of the band’s debut album and it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly, that Jeff Gutt can sing the shit out of the tunes and onstage, he has the charisma and swagger to hopefully front STP for decades to come.

All photos: Kevin Fitzpatrick