Carlos Brillembourg on Adam Bartos
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'
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 SexScott 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.
Read » Interview with Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
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
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
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
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
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Juno Records has the 'Inflation' 10" for sale.
A Not-So-Silent Jens
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.
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