Vast and grand, monumental

Carlos Brillembourg on Adam Bartos

2006-05-18T15:32:00.000-05:00

Carlos Brillembourg~BOMB
The photographs in Adam Bartos's Boulevard, taken in Paris and Los Angeles, document places that are at once ubiquitous and hidden. Bartos photographs a commonplace urban scene animated by a soft wash of light infused with color emanating from a car, a fence or a blank plaster wall. More than urban landscapes, they become still-lifes of the hyper-familiar.
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R.I.P., 'Arrested Development'

2006-03-31T11:34:00.000-06:00

Tim Goodman~San Fransico Chronicle
"Arrested Development," the critically praised but low-rated Fox show that won an Emmy for outstanding comedy series, as well as Emmys for writing, will not be resurrected on Showtime as rumors circulating for months have suggested.
A source close to the negotiations said that creator Mitch Hurwitz had decided after a lengthy period of debating an offer from Showtime that "Arrested Development reached its end, creatively, as a series."
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Interview with Damien Jurado

2006-03-31T11:14:00.000-06:00

Brian Hoscheit~30music
30: So it’s the realism that touches people more easily? It seems like you used your character David like that.
Jurado: David is actually David Bazan [of Pedro the Lion] from a dream I had where his wife and I go looking for his soul, so that is where that came from.
30: Beyond all this touring and recording, how have your priorities been with your life?
Jurado: Being with my family. I tell my wife that I’d stop it today or tomorrow if I had to, but so far it’s been good financially. Family is the most important thing to me. I got a wife and a kid, and I enjoy being home. Yeah, that’s my main priority.
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Borges and the Plain Sense of Things

2006-03-31T11:07:00.000-06:00

Gabriel Josipovici~ReadySteadyBook
The name of Borges, among readers of modern literature, has always been synonymous with labyrinths, babelic libraries, gardens of forking paths, parallel universes, refutations of time and all sorts of cunning intellectual paradoxes. I want to argue, however, that these are merely the means whereby this profoundly modern writer seeks to make manifest the importance of the ordinary and the contingent in our lives and to remind us that this is the only life we have, that death will bring it to an end, and that every moment of it is infinitely precious.
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See also A Conversation With Jorge Luis Borges.

Interview with Ray Caesar

2006-03-29T16:16:00.000-06:00

Brentley Frazer~Pixelsurgeon
Like a wonderful old book you find that captures you with the mystery of the main character you read the beginning and fall under its spell and become unaware of the real nature of reality because you are absorbed by the story till its end. I figure that's what life is and if you cherished a piece of music or an old jewelry box or favorite chair they become part of your soul just as you leave a part of yourself in those objects when you leave this world.
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2nd Annual Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest

2006-03-29T16:11:00.000-06:00

Apartment Therapy
The Smallest, Coolest Apartment contest is a contest for all small apartments and homes in the lower 48 states under 650 square feet. We are seeking the most ingenious and beautiful 120 submissions along with all the tips and resources we need to maximize our own homes.
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Concrete Island

2006-03-24T13:59:00.000-06:00

Geoff Manaugh~BLDG BLOG
I suppose it's not even outside the realm of possibility to imagine, several hundred years from now, after nearly everyone's died of bird flu, AIDS, or open civil warfare, that freeways – those massive examples of widespread land use, the world over – could be reclaimed, domesticated, built upon as new foundations. Houses in the midst of highway flyovers, cloverleaf junctions given windows, bedrooms constructed on off-ramps. New feudal worlds of elevated flyovers, towns held aloft in the sky.
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D'oh The Right Thing

2006-03-24T13:53:00.000-06:00

New York Post
"Simpsons" cast member Harry Shearer, who provides the voices of Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns and Rev. Lovejoy, among others, says vocal work on the movie has begun. Appearing on the syndicated Mancow radio show, Shearer said the movie dialogue now being recorded is a bit more edgy than what's seen every Sunday on Fox - but not enough to give the movie a restricted rating.
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This Sunday's episode will feature the live action intro.

The Art of Fiction No. 11: Nelson Algren

2006-03-24T10:07:00.000-06:00

Alston Anderson & Terry Southern~Paris Review
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel that you should try heroin, in connection with writing a book about users?
ALGREN: No. No, I think you can do a thing like that best from a detached position.
INTERVIEWER: Were you ever put down by any of these [users] as an eavesdropper?
ALGREN: No, they were mostly amused by it. Oh, they thought it was a pretty funny way to make a living, but—well, one time, after the book came out, I was sitting in this place, and there were a couple of junkies sitting there, and this one guy was real proud of the book; he was trying to get this other guy to read it, and finally the other guy said he had read it, but be said, “You know it ain’t so, it ain’t like that.” There’s a part in the book where this guy takes a shot, and then he’s talking for about four pages. This guy says, “You know it ain’t like that, a guy takes a fix and he goes on the nod, I mean, you know that.” And the other guy says, “Well, on the other hand, if he really knew what he was talking about, he couldn’t write the book, he’d be out in the can.”
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Saturday is the 18TH Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party at ACME Arts Bldg.

An Interview with Dan Bejar of Destroyer

2006-03-23T15:51:00.000-06:00

Phil Hunt~The Odyssey
Is there anything that inspires your lyrics? What are you reading right now?
Yeah always I guess. Not maybe subject matter. The way I write is pretty fixed these days. I don't think I'm aping other writers the way I once did when I was younger. I find that reading something that I really like inspires me to write. Seeing a film I really like inpires me to write. Hearing a song that I think is really amazing. Those are the kinds of things that get under my skin. I don't know if you mean any specific things, but to be honest I can't think of anything recent. I know there has been.
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Don't miss Destroyer tonight at the Abbey Pub.

A Controversy Over Empire

2006-03-23T13:33:00.000-06:00

Karen Rosenberg ~New York Magazine
At eight hours, Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire is something that one watches, as its creator said, “to see time go by.” Officially, the only way to see the artist’s epic stationary shot of the Empire State Building is to borrow a 16-millimeter print from MoMA or attend one of the museum’s infrequent screenings. But a one-hour edit appears on a new Warhol-film DVD, Four Silent Movies, released by the Italian company Raro Video.
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Watch an excerpt of Empire at Medien Kunst Netz.

The 20 Most Important Tools Ever

2006-03-23T09:34:00.000-06:00

David M. Ewalt~Forbes
From dawn to dusk, humans rely on tools to get us through the day. And from the beginning of civilization, we've used them to build and shape our world. In order to celebrate these devices, and so we might reflect upon the ways that we are the tools we use, Forbes.com decided to compile a list of the 20 most important tools of all time. These are the tools that have most impacted human civilization and helped move the course of history.
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I'm confused why the printing press isn't on this list.

Portrait of Picasso’s Muse Unveiled

2006-03-23T09:02:00.000-06:00

Deborah Brewster~Financial Times
A portrait of Pablo Picasso’s mistress, Dora Maar, was put on public display on Wednesday for the first time in 40 years. The painting is due to be auctioned in New York on May 3. Up until now, It has been in private hands. The portrait is estimated to sell for $50m, (£29m). Picasso’s portraits of Maar, a photographer who was his muse and companion for almost a decade, are regarded as being among the artist’s most important. The painting, “Dora Maar au chat”, shows Maar seated in a chair with a small black cat perched behind her right shoulder.
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Alfred Hitchcock’s Trailers

2006-03-22T15:48:00.000-06:00

Alain Kerzoncuf~Senses of Cinema
For each theatrical trailer (i.e., the English-language ones), we tried to give as precise a transcript as we could. 100 percent precision is an impossible task, since music, narrations, flashing images from scenes, and written cards frequently overlap each other, and can hardly be reproduced in a written essay. All the narrations and dialogue scenes were transcribed, and instead of just typing the words of written cards, we also tried to reproduce, at least partly, their visual character (small or capital letters, italics, etc.) as they appear on the screen. To give a still better feeling of how each trailer looks, we also included in the article a single frame from each of them. These frames were not chosen arbitrarily, but always on the basis of some peculiarity.
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Watch several of Hitchcock's trailers at Classic Trailers.

The Artist as a Young Mandarin

2006-03-22T15:35:00.000-06:00

David Barber~The Boston Globe
Will we ever make our peace with T.S. Eliot? For all the ink spilled on sequencing the DNA of ''The Waste Land" and ''Four Quartets," the circumspect closing passage of the New York Times obituary that ran 40 years ago last January almost might have been written yesterday: ''Although Eliot's influence began to wane in the last decade of his life, we are still too close to the light he shed to take his measure accurately.... If we judge a man by the vacancy that his absence from his time would have caused, T.S. Eliot was a giant."
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Read Eliot's The Hollow Men.

The Myth of Metaphor

2006-03-22T15:30:00.000-06:00

Alan CooperCooper
This idea of taking a simple action or symbol and imbuing it with meaning is familiar to marketing professionals. Synthesizing idioms is the essence of product branding, whereby a company takes a product or company name and imbues it with a desired meaning. Tylenol is a meaningless word, an idiom, but the McNeil company has spent millions to make you associate that word with safe, simple, trustworthy pain relief. Of course, idioms are visual, too. The golden arches of McDonalds, the three diamonds of Mitsubishi, the five interlocking rings of the Olympics, even Microsoft's flying window are non-metaphoric idioms that are instantly recognizable and imbued with common meaning.
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Attention and Sex

2006-03-22T10:02:00.000-06:00

Scott Berkun~scottberkun.com
We are information insecure. The compulsion for more is driven by lack of confidence in what we already have. Out of a secret kind of fear we are convinced that the next e-mail or link is better than the one we’re reading now. The result is a private rat race: what does it mean to stay on top of information that doesn’t satisfy? The unspoken dream is to be attention rich. To have enough attention that at any time we’re comfortable digging in to something that we connect with. But if we’re always spending our attention as if it has no value, and we’re attention poor, we don’t have enough attention to spend even when we find the things we’re looking for.
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Interview with Aleksandar Hemon

2006-03-21T11:23:00.000-06:00

Jenifer Berman~BOMB Magazine
It is very dangerous to equate history and fiction, for you might end up claiming that the Holocaust is fiction, and, God help us, it is not. History is not fiction, or at least it shouldn’t be. On the other hand, to claim that history is a simple representation of "truth" is almost equally dangerous. Then, for example, the absence of African-Americans, until very recently, from the official American histories–the stories of great white men–would be legitimized. I mean they were absent only because the history was largely a set of stories told by white men about white men. Both history and fiction have to be narrated, and it matters a lot who the narrators are and what the conditions of narration are. The way to put it is that history and fiction are continuous, they flow into each other, and the overlapping zone–the exchange zone–is the most interesting and the most dangerous.
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Read 'Love & Obstacles' from The New Yorker International Fiction edition.

The Contemporary Dopplegänger

2006-03-21T10:06:00.000-06:00

Donato Totaro~Offscreen
The doppelgänger is present at every level in film: thematically, formally, technologically, and theoretically. It cuts across nations and genres. The term, being of German origin, was first used critically to define an important aspect of German art, beginning with Romanticism, Expressionism and, of course, the classic period of German Expressionist cinema (1919-1930). Many of the great Expressionist films deal formally and thematically with the doppelgänger, through such themes as the whore/madonna complex (the two Maria's in Metropolis), split personages (Der Januskopf), character degeneration (The Blue Angel), immortality (Faust) and visual tropes such as chiaroscuro lighting (light/dark) and mirror imagery.
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Austria Loses Fight to Keep Klimt's £170m Gilded Masterpieces

2006-03-21T09:57:00.000-06:00

Paul Arendt~The Guardian
A collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt, stolen by the Nazis in 1938, has been restored to its heir in California after an eight-year legal battle. The five works, together worth £170m, now belong to 90-year-old Maria Altmann, who fled the Nazis following the annexation of Austria.
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Adele Bloch-Bauer is Maria Altmann's aunt.

A Death Row Blogger's Advice for Life

2006-03-21T09:40:00.000-06:00

Eric Rich~Washington Post
Vernon Lee Evans Jr. -- amateur advice columnist and convicted murderer -- is scheduled to die next month by lethal injection. He is one of the very few death row inmates to have a blog and, activists say, perhaps the only condemned man worldwide to use a blog to take questions from readers.
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Vernon's blog, Meet Vernon, was set up by activist Ginny Simmons.

The Electronic Paper Book

2006-03-21T09:29:00.000-06:00

GizMag
In one of the most significant product announcements of recent times, Sony has announced the lightweight Sony Reader – a product destined to transform the electronic reading experience and which we expect will do for reading what Apple's iPod did for music. Coupling an innovative electronic paper display with precise one-handed navigation, the Sony Reader will allow active readers to carry as many books as they want to read whether they are traveling on the road or just around the corner.
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Though I'll always want my books bound with paper this could be really nice for periodicals.

World of Wild Beards Incorporated

2006-03-20T13:17:00.000-06:00

Rich Bob~Cable and Tweed
Jeff Mangum dropped off the radar a couple years prior, he and fellow Elephant 6 popster Laura Carter turned up for a one-off gig in New Zealand in 2001. Believed to be Jeff Mangum's only show since NYE '98, the gig is captured here in a terrific soundboard recording. Interestingly, the band was billed as World of Wild Beards Incorporated rather than as Neutral Milk Hotel - Jeff explains why during the show.
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World of Wild Beards Inc. was a company that produced sound devices that brought hair to life.

Watch Video of 'Inflation' and Explore Berlin with The Whitest Boy Alive

2006-03-20T12:26:00.000-06:00

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Juno Records has the 'Inflation' 10" for sale.

A Not-So-Silent Jens

2006-03-20T12:01:00.000-06:00

Anna Bond~Dusted
On your website you always post your favorite songs – is the song your favorite musical form?
Songs are my favorite form, in whatever way they’re released. I love the whole filesharing thing. I usually just type in a word that I like for a moment, the name of a city or something. I tried to do that for this tour, actually – I tried to find a song for every city that we were playing in, so I could play a song about the city in every city. But I couldn’t find songs about every city….I like just typing in a word that I like, and just downloading anything that comes up.
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Lekman's made his three tour EPs free for download.

A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece

2006-03-20T10:47:00.000-06:00

Theodore Dalrymple~City Journal
A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like “malenky machines” who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resort to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty?
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Cinema Space has a good essay on Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization of Violence.

This Essay Breaks the Law

2006-03-20T10:17:00.000-06:00

Michael Crichton~New York Times
The question of whether basic truths of nature can be owned ought not to be confused with concerns about how we pay for biotech development, whether we will have drugs in the future, and so on. If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that's your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it.
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Cashback

2006-03-17T15:51:00.000-06:00

Brit Films
Part Slapstick comedy, part visual monologue, Cashback takes the viewers into the mind of Ben an art college student in London, whose artistic imagination runs wild as he works the late-night shift at the local supermarket. What do he and his colleagues do to pass the long, endless hours of the night?
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Watch Cashback.

Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See

2006-03-17T15:41:00.000-06:00

Walter Murch~Film Sound Design
Film sound is rarely appreciated for itself alone but functions largely as an enhancement of the visuals: by means of some mysterious perceptual alchemy, whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.
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I love Onjaadte's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film .

New Monkey Species Discovered in East Africa

2006-03-17T15:33:00.000-06:00

John Roach~National Geographic
Scientists have discovered a new monkey species in the mountains of East Africa. The new primate, known as the highland mangabey (Lophocebus kipunji), was identified by two independent research teams working in separate locations in southern Tanzania. The teams describe the species as a medium-size, long-tailed tree dweller.
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See video of the mangabey.

Short and Sweet

2006-03-17T10:56:00.000-06:00

Dave Eggers~Guardian Unlimited
So when the Guardian asked me if I wanted to do anything regularly for them, I thought first of a weekly pet-care column, but apparently (they said) people don't have pets in England, and don't trust those who do. So it came down to the short shorts, which have been great fun to do, and have paid off most of the debts I've accumulated betting against Bush.
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A Pocket Penguins collection called Short Short Stories is available at amazon.co.uk.

Silver Jews' Lead Mensch

2006-03-16T11:13:00.000-06:00

Martin Johnson~News Observer
Q: Why did you decide to tour for "Tanglewood Numbers"?
A: Well, when I made the first record, I knew I had a lot to learn still and put off touring. I said I'd get to it before I was 30. When I was 30, there wasn't really enough interest in the band to stage a tour. Our records sold well for a non-touring band but in the magazines, etcetera, we were too anonymous for me to bother, so the benchmark became tour before I'm 35. When 35 rolled around, "Bright Flight" was coming out. I was a mess. Two of my very closest companions had just died. So that struck any ideas of a tour. It wasn't such a great record. This is the first time I'm enough of a mensch to handle it without collapsing inward, hopefully.
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Cable and Tweed has a bootleg of Silver Jews first two shows of the tour.

Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964

2006-03-16T10:46:00.000-06:00

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Andy Warhol was one of the first American artists to investigate this cultural obsession, in a body of silkscreen paintings created in the mid-1960s that drew their source materials from the magazines, films, and newspapers of American postwar consumer culture. Organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Douglas Fogle, ANDY WARHOL/ UPERNOVA will bring together more than 25 examples of the artist's early silkscreen paintings, juxtaposing his iconic serial images of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elvis Presley with the artist's evocative and at times disturbing appropriations of newspaper images of car crashes, electric chairs, and other horrifying manifestations of disaster.
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The Andy Warhol Museum features Time Capsule 21 Online Exhibition.

Einstein's "Year of Wonders," 100 Years Later

2006-03-16T10:37:00.000-06:00

Stefan Lovgren~National Geographic News
It has been a hundred years since Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, or "year of wonders," during which the then-26-year-old government worker wrote a series of papers that revolutionized our understanding of the universe.
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Make Einstein write whatever you want on his blackboard.

The Role of Redemption in the Creative Process

2006-03-16T10:04:00.000-06:00

David Bazan~Catapult Magazine
There’s these “No Jesus, no peace; know Jesus, know peace” bumper stickers that you see around. I’ve thought a lot about it and I’ve talked with a lot of people—not that that’s any sort of legitimate research—and I’ve come to the conclusion that, maybe with more definition of the word “peace,” that could possibly be true. But I honestly would have to say that I know more people who are well adjusted and at peace with the people around them and their surroundings who don’t believe in Jesus and don’t care about Jesus at all than I do so-called Christian people who are. I think it’s propaganda of a church that attempts to control people.
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30 Music has an interview with David Bazan from the release of Achilles Heel.

Interview with Robert Towne

2006-03-16T09:14:00.000-06:00

Nathan Rabin~The Onion A.V. Club
AVC: What's the most surprising thing you learned about Los Angeles when you were preparing for Chinatown?
RT: Well, how much I knew. 'Cause I was going out with a production designer, brilliant, Richard Sylbert, and he said, "What do you have in mind for here?" Every location that I pointed to, they said, "Okay, we'll go with that." And I thought, "These fucking guys are really lazy." I didn't realize that I just knew the city much better than even I thought I did. And that was kind of a revelation to me.
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Salon has a critical essay on the case for Raymond Chandler.

Spread the Word About the Sony BMG Settlement

2006-03-15T11:45:00.000-06:00

EFF
Sony BMG won't be held accountable for its dangerous DRM if music fans don't have an easy way to learn about the flawed software, the settlement, and how to submit claims. By posting a banner on your website or blog, you can help music fans protect themselves and get what they deserve.
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Inspired by a True Story: On James Frey and J.T. Leroy

2006-03-15T11:31:00.000-06:00

Rick Moody~A Public Space
When I blame the culture entire for this mess, what I blame the culture for is its phobia at the sweet labor of reading. I do it myself occasionally (to my shame and regret): make do with the sketchiest acquaintance with a book, as though I knew what was inside its covers. This won't do. Reading requires a persistent, engaged, long-term relationship with a book. It requires passion and commitment and patience, that most unfashionable of contemporary virtues. Books that are slapdash and careless about these ideals of the reading experience, books that are made for the television market, or in order simply to be review-worthy, do not, in my view, have that much in common with the kinds of books that lie around for decades and contribute to history.
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An essay by James Frey on the writing of A Million Little Pieces.

An Interview with Errol Morris

2006-03-15T10:57:00.000-06:00

Nick Poppy~The Believer
THE BELIEVER: Can you help tease out the distinction between drama and documentary?
ERROL MORRIS: I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.
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Senses of cinema has a great essay on Errol Morris and the New Documentary.

Wanted: Nerd to Complete Moog's Last, Unfinished Gizmo

2006-03-15T10:36:00.000-06:00

Xeni Jardin~Boing Boing
Electronic music pioneer Bob Moog left behind an unfinished invention when he died last year at age 71. The "Eaton-Moog Multiple-Touch-Sensitive Keyboard" now sits in the New Jersey home of longtime Moog collaborator John Eaton, just waiting for the right technically proficient volunteer to complete it and hook it up:
"It's very difficult to play. But an instrument should be difficult to play. That's the only way to master musical materials, by overcoming these difficulties," says Eaton.
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Trailer for MOOG documentary by Hans Fjellestad.

Old-School Paranoia

2006-03-15T09:57:00.000-06:00

Benjamin Strong~Slate
Viewed today, the popular conspiracy movies of the 1970s, The Conversation especially, look strikingly optimistic beneath their cynicism. Like De Palma, Coppola had based his soundman protagonist on David Hemming's fashion photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). In that film, a jaded man inadvertently records evidence of a murder, and, while trying to solve the crime, he is roused from his usual apathy. Harry fails to stop the conspiracy he discovers, but The Conversation implies that the truth is out there and needs only to be made public.
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The BBC's Christopher Frayling has an interview with Coppola.

The Woman Taking Chile's Top Job

2006-03-14T09:29:00.000-06:00

BBC News
Chile's first woman president, Michelle Bachelet, is breaking many political traditions. Not only is she a woman, but she calls herself a socialist and she is a single parent with a 12-year-old daughter and two other grown children.
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PBS has an interview with Michelle Bachelet.

David Bazan

2006-03-14T08:31:00.000-06:00

Garrison Reid~Indie Interviews
On this show, your host Garrison Reid sits down with David Bazan of Pedro The Lion. David discusses departing from the Pedro The Lion moniker, including profanity in his music, and looking back at the 10 years of Pedro The Lion.
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Bazan will tour with Vic Chesnutt, Mark Eitzel and Will Johnson as Undertow Orchestra.

Thousand Mile Colosseum

2006-03-13T11:42:00.000-06:00

Geoff Manaugh~BLDG BLOG
There is a burgeoning visual style or cinematography associated with this tele-vehicular art form: "The frame of the pursuit – a cropped shot of an anonymous vehicle moving at ominous speed through a featureless landscape – has not been updated since the genre began."
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Nicolas Roeg

2006-03-13T11:13:00.000-06:00

Lee Hill~Senses of Cinema
To the chagrin of many critics, Roeg did not delineate this existential paradox with the austere moralism of Bergman or the godlike minimalism of Bresson, but instead seemed to revel in the beauty of this horrifying enigma. In Roeg's films, characters don't realise they are in hell because they have been having too much fun for the most part. And by the time they do realise what is happening, they have resigned themselves to the fact that they are past the point of no return.
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Gerald Peary interviews Roeg for The Real Paper.

Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation?

2006-03-13T11:00:00.000-06:00

Donato Totaro~Offscreen
The question as I would like to reposition it is, “is Sontag categorically against interpretation?” I would answer that Sontag is not against interpretation per se, but rules of interpretation; she is against the practise of using an interpretative grid over and over to “decode” disparate works of art. When done indiscriminately the films in question begin to look alike, and the process reveals more about the critic than the film.
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Powell's has an interview with Annie Leibovitz, who collaborated with Sontag on Women.

Comic Failure

2006-03-13T10:52:00.000-06:00

Douglas Wolk~Salon
Good comics can sometimes be adapted neatly into other media, as Hollywood knows well, but worthwhile comics adaptations from other media are rarer. The cartoonists who've made something good out of borrowed source material are usually the ones who've taken enormous liberties with it: David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik tearing open Paul Auster's "City of Glass," Gary Panter riffing wildly on Dante in his "Jimbo's Inferno" and "Jimbo in Purgatory." Song-comics are mostly unexplored territory, too.
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The game Wrapped Up in Books, inspired by song of same name, is alot of fun.

In Search of David Foster Wallace

2006-03-13T10:28:00.000-06:00

Joe Woodward~Poets and Writers Magazine
Perhaps, one day DFW will abandon the “virtues of difficulty”. But I doubt it. DFW, though hard to reach, while discursive and funny, is not as interested in reinventing literature as his critics give him credit for. He is, I believe, interested in welcoming us into his mind and heart. It is difficult to guess, but I don’t see DFW giving up the footnotes any time soon.
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The San Antonio Current interviews DFW about Consider the Lobster.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

2006-03-10T16:15:00.000-06:00

Rumsey Taylor~Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Having arrived at Berkeley to host the premier of Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven, Werner Herzog removes his shoes, places them in a pot with garlic and other herbs, and walks barefoot to a shoe store. If this seems bizarre, it is only because you may not be familiar with the legendary exploits of the ridiculously ambitious German director.
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Pop Matters has an excellent interview with Werner Herzog.

Interview with Haruki Murakami

2006-03-10T16:05:00.000-06:00

Roland Kelts~A Public Space
RK What stunned you about Carver?
HM Nobody wrote stories like those. They went beyond common sense. I learned something from Raymond Carver about writing short stories. He always chose a simple vocabulary. He wrote straightforward stories, with a sense of humor, a crispness, and an unpredictable story line and very bleak endings. His stories are about everyday life. What he was saying by writing short stories is that you have to be intellectual when you write, but the subject matter doesn't have to be intellectual.
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The Paris Review has made their Raymond Carver Art of Fiction interview available.

The Gold Coast

2006-03-10T12:16:00.000-06:00

Tom Christie~LA Weekly
Basically, you don’t have time to focus your camera so you pre-set focus to 6 or 8 feet, framing people the way you want to frame them, and quickly bringing the camera to your eye. Not until you get your film back do you know if the subjects were in the zone of focus. It’s like a dance, in the sense of passing through this very animated landscape of people and cars and buildings. Everything is very fluid, the way I’m moving and making the picture.
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See the full exhibit at Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Rules Of Reduction: Interview with Jim O'Rourke

2006-03-10T11:25:00.000-06:00

Andy Battaglia~The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
Q: You’ve taken on many different roles in and around music – composer, songwriter, session player, producer, engineer, remixer and archivist. Do those roles mean different things to you?
O’Rourke: I don’t think they’re different at all. It’s all just necessary. I guess it’s because I don’t really think of myself as a musician. Being a musician just seems so self-reflexive. It’s like turning a mirror back on yourself, and that doesn’t appeal to me very much. So, actually playing music is probably what I do the least.
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The Wire has an Invisible Jukebox test with Jim O'Rourke.

Double Your Music Pleasure

2006-03-10T10:12:00.000-06:00

Greg Kot~Chicago Tribune
On Thursday, two of the organizers behind last year's Intonation Festival in Union Park told the Tribune they are working toward bringing Intonation back to the same location in early summer. The news came a day after the curators of last year's Intonation Festival, Internet magazine Pitchfork Media, announced they are teaming with a former Intonation organizer, Mike Reed, to stage the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park on July 29-30.
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2-day passes are available Monday and The Streets is headlining.

Interview with J.Tillman

2006-03-09T15:00:00.000-06:00

Garrison Reid~Indie Interviews
On this show, your host Garrison Reid sits down with J.Tillman. Tillman discusses transplanting from New York City to Seattle, meeting his recording and touring partners, and the varying approaches he's used with previous recordings.
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J. Tillman will be touring his new album Long May You Run with Damien Jurado March 26th .

Rebels Without a Cause: Making Sense of Dada Today

2006-03-09T10:10:00.000-06:00

Lee Siegel~Slate
Dada first appeared in Zurich right after the First World War and spread to Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, and New York. It was really more of a mood than a movement. As the comprehensive show Dada, currently at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., makes clear, Dada was an enveloping, cathartic reaction to the sickness of modern, mechanized warfare.
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January 6th a performance artist attacked Duchamp's "Fountain" with a hammer.

Dr Octagon - The Return Of Dr Octagon LP

2006-03-09T09:33:00.000-06:00

British Hip Hop
Finally, back again to shock and thrill us after years out in the wilderness, Dr. Octagon, goes straight for the jugular with the release of his highly anticipated new album, The Return of Dr. Octagon. Spliced and diced together by the man, Kool Keith, himself and slickly produced by clued up production trio, One Watt Sun.
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Gorilla vs Bear has a couple MP3s available.

Two Views of the Late Stanley Kubrick

2006-03-09T08:41:00.000-06:00

John Coulthart & Gerald Houghton~The Edge
Welles: Among those whom I would call ‘younger generation’ Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.
Interviewer: But, for example, The Killing was more or less a copy of The Ashphalt Jungle?
Welles: Yes, but The Killing was better. The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing the model...
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The Music Box is showing The Killing in honor of it's 50th anniversary.

No Direction Home: Looking Forward from Don’t Look Back

2006-03-08T16:53:00.000-06:00

Tim O’Farrell~Senses of Cinema
The unique appeal of cinema is founded on this “desire that the concrete be preserved, stopped in time”. The fact that this experience is ultimately an attenuated link to another time, occluded in the precision of its representation, limited in context and marked by the subjectivity of its creator, must be acknowledged.
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The most recent Stop Smiling has an excellent interview with D. A. Pennebaker.

Midnight Cowboy

2006-03-08T14:17:00.000-06:00

Noel Murray~The Onion A.V. Club
What Midnight Cowboy most has in common with the American masterpieces that followed over the next five or six years is a mastery of subtle emotions, like loneliness, exclusion, and a yearning for something elusive. Even at its most overbearing, the movie never loses sight of what it's like to want something and have no idea how to get it.
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Makes you wonder why Dustin Hoffman feels the need to keep slumming.

The Visual Dictionary

2006-03-08T13:19:00.000-06:00

The Visual Dictionary is a collection of words in the real world. Photographs of signage, graffiti, advertising, tattoos, you name it, we're trying to catalogue it.
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The Human Clock uses the same idea to make a rotating picture clock.

Will Oldham's Invisible Jukebox

2006-03-08T10:45:00.000-06:00

Anne Hilde Neset~The Wire
Did you have a musical epiphany moment?
"When I had sent some music to some different record labels and Drag City were the only ones who responded enthusiastically, so we made a 7" and then subsequently Drag City said 'when are you going to make a record?' and that was the moment, right there, I never dreamed someone would want a record."
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Liam Gillick: Selected Essays, 1988-2004

2006-03-08T09:47:00.000-06:00

D.A.P. Catalog
No less versatile in his writing than in his installations, films, architecture, and sculpture, Liam Gillick unites his critical essays in this collection, most of which were originally printed in art magazines or exhibition catalogues. Lauded for his ingenious reinterpretation of Conceptual and Minimalist art, Liam Gillick has often used language, whether in type on a wall or on a page, as a site of artistic, theoretical, and political intervention.
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Folding chair has a review of Nicolas Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics.

Gordon Parks: 1912-2006

2006-03-08T08:32:00.000-06:00

Michael Wilmington~Chicago Tribune
"I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America--poverty, racism, discrimination."
So said Gordon Parks in his searingly powerful 1966 autobiography "A Choice of Weapons," a bold statement that aptly revealed two sides of this complex, brilliant and ultimately heroic artist: the outward anger against injustice and the love that lay beneath it. Both helped fuel his rise from Kansas rural poverty to world fame.
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The activist, photographer, musician, author and director of Shaft will be missed.

Photography From Now On

2006-03-07T13:34:00.000-06:00

Pedro Meyer~Zone Zero Magazine
The digital revolution, is going to have a much larger impact on the surrounding landscape, than did the internal combustion engine in its time. At stake is the way we produce, distribute and consume, everything related to communications, entertainment, education, travel, management. Photography is only a minute part within this tidal wave of change, and anyone who still harbors doubts whether the new technologies are going to change photography, is ignoring, if you will, the “larger picture."
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I'm still preferable to a Manual, 35MM, SLR Camera.

The Knife - Silent Shout

2006-03-07T11:49:00.000-06:00

Mark Pytlik~Pitchfork Media
The brainchild of Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson, the Knife have released three records, each an exponential improvement over the last. Although the last, 2004's Deep Cuts, boasted the shimmering "Heartbeats", it was also something of a mess, spitting up steel drum samples, happy hardcore breaks, and innocuous synthpop riffs. A much tighter, laser-guided record, Silent Shout finds the duo honing in on a specific mood, and at last, perfecting a signature sound.
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I hate waiting for expensive imports to make it to the US. Download the album here.

Samuel Beckett Is Dead at 83; His 'Godot' Changed Theater

2006-03-07T10:39:00.000-06:00

Mel Gussow~The New York Times
At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man's relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism, as illustrated by the final words of his novel, The Unnamable: "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Or as he wrote in Worstward Ho, one of his later works of fiction: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
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Celebrate 2006 as the centenary of my favorite playwright.

Titles Designed by Saul Bass

2006-03-07T10:15:00.000-06:00

Rumsey Taylor~Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Bass’ expertise in design exhibits a range, yet his distinguishing aesthetic is one of economy and simplicity. It is in this regard that his work in credits design is of particular significance—his opening for West Side Story, for example, is a solid block of color that morphs according to the overture. Elsewhere (and numerously), he employs hand-drawn type and cutout, construction paper shapes.
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Who can forget the awesome title credits for Vertigo?

The Viking of Sixth Avenue

2006-03-07T09:38:00.000-06:00

Ian Simmons~Nth Position
The music is unique, fusing Western structures with rhythms derived from Native American music that he experienced first-hand as a child, and played partly on instruments that Moondog, like Partch, invented for himself, including the Tuji; triangular drums named the Trimba; plus the Oo and the yukh. The results are startling, highly structured yet deceptively loose, sometimes slow and solemn, sometimes skitteringly joyful.
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Not usually a 'best of' fan, but this should be good. Get a couple MP3s here.

Tickets on Sale Now for Pitchfork Music Festival

2006-03-07T09:28:00.000-06:00

Pitchfork Media
So let's step back and see if we've got this right: 36 of the absolute best artists in independent music. Playing over the course of two of the most beautiful summer days. In Chicago. On three stages. For $30. We know, it sounds crazy, but we're pretty sure it'll be worth it.
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A hundred times better than Lollapalooza.

CTA Workers Authorize Strike

2006-03-07T08:04:00.000-06:00

Chicago Tribune
CTA workers voted early Tuesday to authorize the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241 president to call a strike against the rapid transit system because of dissatisfaction over work rules affecting bus drivers.
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I respect workers rights, but this is going to suck.

A Conversation with David Barnes

2006-03-06T15:56:00.000-06:00

Noah Hanson~So Hot Right Now
SHRN:I can definetly see a style in your artwork. Have you always had this?
DB:I was hanging out with my nephews recently and drawing with them, and I realized the way I go about drawing really hasn't changed that much since I was little. The topics are different. And there is more thought and concepts, but when I'm drawing it still feels kind of like I'm playing with toys or something.
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Barnes artwork for Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies alone is worth the purchase.

Spring Books: 2006

2006-03-06T12:40:00.000-06:00

Dan Wickett~The Quarterly Conversation
Even though I had a great time reading old favorites and discovering wonderful new talents during 2005, a quick peek ahead at what I'm expecting to read in 2006 has me extremely excited! There are many excellent titles to keep on your radar in the upcoming months--here are some I can’t wait to get a hold of.
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Looking forward to Steve Gillis’ Giraffes.

Interview with Miranda July

2006-03-06T12:36:00.000-06:00

Eli Horowitz~The Believer
BLVR: You grew up in Berkeley, right? Was it a real Berkeley Berkeley childhood?
MJ: Not in a cliché hippie sense, and not in a druggie sense. But definitely an extremely weird cast of characters. There was always some borderline crazy person who nonetheless my dad was publishing their book. And they needed to live in the house while they finished it, you know.
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Check out July's excellent short Are You the Favortie Person of Anyone? in Wholphin.

All that Glitters: Literature’s Global Economy

2006-03-06T12:12:00.000-06:00

Louis Menand~The New Yorker
As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one.
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This is why I can be okay with the spectacle that is the Academy Awards.

The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist

2006-03-06T11:37:00.000-06:00

Errol Morris
So from the very first film I made, Gates of Heaven, I decided to break all of the rules. Instead of using lightweight equipment, we tried to use the heaviest equipment that we could afford. I tried to be always as obtrusive as possible. One of the great no-no's in making films, you're told, "People are not supposed to look at the camera."
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This lecture includes great clips from Morris' documentaries.

Scorched Earth & Bright Leaves: Ross McElwee's Meditations on the Possibility of Documentary Filmmaking

2006-03-06T11:26:00.000-06:00

Beth Gilligan~Not Coming to a Theater Near You
With a camera on his shoulder and a microphone attached to his hip, a young filmmaker named Ross McElwee set out to chronicle the life of one of the towering figures of American history, Union Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman’s story is one of astonishing success and breathtaking failure, of victory and loss, of one man’s strength becoming his ultimate weakness. It is an epic tale, full of the sorts of contradictions and convolutions historians and filmmakers love.
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Don't miss the upcoming Documentary Issue of Stop Smiling.

The Swastika: Constructing The Symbol

2006-03-06T08:35:00.000-06:00

Steven Heller~Typotheque
Ultimately this is among the most important books about design history and design’s role in political and social persuasion that has been published to date. Proving in a different way that the swastika continues to exercise unparalleled influence.
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Too bad this book sells for $105 on Amazon.

Sick Trips and Red Lips: Words From the Enigmatic Gary Wilson

2006-03-06T08:18:00.000-06:00

Robin Renée~Weirdo Music
From out of an Endicott, New York basement in 1977 came a brilliantly insane record almost no one heard. A short run self-released LP, Gary Wilson’s You Think You Really Know Me featured titles like “Chromium Bitch” and the enigmatic “6.4 = Make Out.” Copies were passed hand-to-hand and dorm room to dorm room, and it became a strange-beyond-words underground classic. Luckily for long-time adherents and those new to the Gary Wilson phenomenon, there is renewed interest in his avant garde work.
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Gary Wilson's voice may be a bit weird, but his music is incredible.

Noah Baumbach by Jonathan Lethem

2006-03-03T16:15:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Lethem~Bomb
JL And this leads to the inevitable question about the proximity of your parents to the characters. I know you've suffered that question.
NB As soon as you got to that, I was going to ask you how you've handled that question.
JL We'll wallow in the awkwardness of that soon enough.
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The Squid and the Whale deserves the Oscar for best original screenplay.

Chapter and Verse

2006-03-03T16:07:00.000-06:00

Alec Hanley Bemis~L.A. Weekly
The L.A. Weekly thought it was high time to discuss the trend toward literary pop and pop literature. To that end, we convened a roundtable (albeit an electronically mediated one) consisting of novelists Rick Moody and Jonathan Lethem and musician John Darnielle. All are known for bridging the worlds of music and literature and for helping to erase the false boundaries dividing them.
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The Flann O’Brien Archives

2006-03-03T14:57:00.000-06:00

Theodore McDermott~Context
Typically collections of letters act as unofficial autobiography. In O’Brien’s case they act as the unofficial autobiography of someone whose life and personality defy the very notions of autobiography, biography, even description.
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Panoramic Maps Collection

2006-03-03T12:37:00.000-06:00

The Library of Congress
The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known also as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views, panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. Although not generally drawn to scale, they show street patterns, individual buildings, and major landscape features in perspective.
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World of Comedy Film Festival

2006-03-03T12:29:00.000-06:00

Littlejohn~Advertising for Peanuts
Instead of creating slap stick joke spots, the comedians play the part of pompous film makers, poking fun at how serious the film world takes itself, and in the end it is indeed quite funny.
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Gerard Unger Brings Atmosphere to the Front Page News

2006-03-03T10:38:00.000-06:00

John L. Walters~Eye Magazine
Gerard Unger is a quietly ambitious typeface designer whose fonts have achieved a popularity and ubiquity that few superstar designers can equal. Born in The Netherlands in 1942, he has been involved in digital type design since 1974: for print; for office use; and for the screen.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman Gets Candid

2006-03-03T09:32:00.000-06:00

Steve Kroft~60 Minutes
"I remember I immediately started talking like myself, like that," he says, snapping his finger. "And, I thought to myself, 'I'm never — I'm never gonna do that again. I'm not gonna act like him anymore.'"
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A Conversation with Lawrence Weschler

2006-03-03T08:30:00.000-06:00

Jay Allison~The Transom Review
Whenever I write or else review my own or other people's writings (or for that matter radio pieces), almost all of my judgments about the process tend to get framed in terms of musical metaphors: questions of pacing, modulation, tone, harmonics, counterpoint. I'll sense that a given passage is out of key, or could use a little more syncopation, or needs to shift from the dominant to the subdominant -- and I don't even know exactly what any of those terms mean, technically speaking.
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The Second Annual Believer Book Award

2006-03-03T08:16:00.000-06:00

The Believer
In Atomik Aztex, Sesshu Foster takes a deep breath and conjures a loopy, violent multiverse in which “78 rpm realities” spin one after the other, for a monstrously comic opera in which life and death, glory and degradation, possible pasts and feverish futures collide on cue.
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Jenny Lewis and the Watsons: Album Download

2006-03-02T14:13:00.000-06:00

Andy Greenwald~Team Love
Modeled after the great "white soul" classics of the past - particularly Laura Nyro and Labelle's seminal Gonna Take a Miracle - Rabbit Fur Coat finds Jenny reaching out to her farflung assortment of wildly talented friends while simultaneously coming into her own as an individual performer and storyteller.
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Public Library Buys a Trove of Burroughs Papers

2006-03-02T13:51:00.000-06:00

Edward Wyatt~The New York Times
The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac's literary and personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.
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The Sharpest Point

2006-03-02T13:24:00.000-06:00

Andrea Gronvall~Chicago Reader
Every entry in this overview of animation from 1908 to 2005 is fascinating. Caspar Stracke's Zuse Strip (2003) begins with an extreme close-up of what look like CGI contours of a plastic mask; only after the history of Konrad Zuse's first primitive digital computer unfolds can the object be read as a punch-holed strip of 35-millimeter film.
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An Interview with Whit Stillman

2006-03-02T08:04:00.000-06:00

Noel Murray~The Onion A.V. Club
The A.V. Club: When are you going to make another movie?
Whit Stillman: [Laughs.] I just finished a script last week that's the first script I've wanted to shoot since Disco. I'm just beginning to show it to people, and I hope to get it off the ground soon.
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Trying to Understand Raymond Carver's Revisions

2006-03-01T16:59:00.000-06:00

Hiromi Hashimoto~Whitman College
"I don't like the term ‘minimalism,’" Raymond Carver repeated whenever interviewed. In fact, Raymond Carver was not a minimalist. Throughout his life, he changed his style drastically, so that it is impossible to define him as an minimalist. Why was he recognized as "a godfather of a burgeoning school of" minimalists? I believe the answer lies in the little-noted original version of The Bath.
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Child's Eye Views

2006-03-01T15:57:00.000-06:00

Jacquey Visick~Design
One of the pitfalls of illustrating children's books is to ape a childish style of drawing. 'I'm sure they despise that sort of thing,' says Treld Bicknell. 'After all, they only draw that way because it's the best they can do but they know it's not the way the object really is.
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Tracking the Ghost — Captured Wolverine May Lead to Answers

2006-03-01T15:33:00.000-06:00

Scott Sandsberry~Yakima Herald
For eight decades, even scientists couldn't say for sure whether this state was home to even one member of this elusive animal species. Until two weeks ago. Now they know all about one.
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Catching up with Ed Templeton

2006-03-01T15:19:00.000-06:00

Jack Spilberg~TransWorld SKATEboarding
JP:Do you ever think you may be separating your art from skateboarding too much?
ET: I always felt like using skateboarding to get somewhere in art was a little weird, so I keep that separate. I want to be presented as, “Here’s what I do” I don’t want to be seen like, “I’m just jumping on this bandwagon of ‘skateboarding is cool right now…Hook me up with an art show because skateboarding is cool.”
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Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

2006-03-01T13:48:00.000-06:00

Edward Jay Epstein~The Atlantic
The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life.
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Why the Reader of Good Prose Poems is Never Sad

2006-03-01T09:54:00.000-06:00

Sarah Manguso~The Believer
In general, Edson’s poems yield aggregate sense rather than accumulated sense. In other words, they need not begin at a position of mystery or obscurity and gradually yield sense, but might vacillate between sense and obscurity as the poem unfolds. Thus, the physical end of the prose poem need not be the physical locus of most sense, just as the physical beginning need not be the locus of most obscurity. Prose poems are antiprosaic prose.
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Impotent Cancerous And Short Of Breath

2006-03-01T09:53:00.000-06:00

Richard West~The Vacuum
There has been a lot of research into the effectiveness of different health warnings but there is surprisingly little in this research about the role of the photographs. These studies are all part of an ongoing battle between between the manufacturers and governments or anti-smoking groups. This has particularly focussed on what the health warnings can say; with health departments getting ever more hard hitting messages and the tobacco companies ensuring these messages are labelled as being from the government.
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London Topological

2006-03-01T08:53:00.000-06:00

Geoff Manaugh~BLDGBLOG
"The heart of modern London," as Antony Clayton writes, "contains a vast clandestine underworld of tunnels, telephone exchanges, nuclear bunkers and control centres... [s]ome of which are well documented, but the existence of others can be surmised only from careful scrutiny of government reports and accounts and occassional accidental disclosures reported in the news media."
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Verdict in Li Zhi Case Confirms Implication of Yahoo!

2006-03-01T08:22:00.000-06:00

Press Release~Reporters Without Borders
The verdict showed that Yahoo! Hong Kong Ltd and Sina Beijing had supplied information confirming that Li Zhi had set up an email account using their services. It did not however say if the content of messages he sent or received had been handed over to the courts.
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