A day in February, 1983. Godfrey Reggio is standing in front of the old Reichstag in Berlin. A tall, gaunt man with pale blue eyes and a graying beard that looks like stubble, he has just presented Koyaanisqatsi at the Berlin Film Festival. The notices have been gratifying. One critic called it “a masterpiece . […]
Archives for October 2011
Life in Turmoil, Life Out of Balance
If you can’t get to the screening of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi at Avery Fisher Hall (on Nov. 2 and 3 in New York), where Philip Glass’s score for the film will be performed live by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, or if you can get over there but can’t afford to […]
Is Occupy Wall Street All About the Signs?
Apparently not. I didn’t know it, But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics–its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making–are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar. Yes, really. But you knew that. If you didn’t, then go […]
Jobs Loved Computers, of Course … and Bach
In 1989, Michael Lawrence filmed Steve Jobs for Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. “I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him,” Lawrence messages in an email. “I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me.” “Like so many people around the world,” he writes, […]
The Mind Sashays
The “vulgo:cynicism” of Carl Weissner’s Die Abenteuer von Trashman — his term for the humor of his latest book — was already on display in last year’s Manhattan Muffdiver. Both books, from Vienna-based Milena Verlag, are written in German. Although I read German desperately, like a beachcomber sifting sand on a bad day, even I […]
A Book Clerk Who Was More Than a Clerk
Fifty-four years ago two undercover cops in San Francisco arrested a clerk at City Lights Bookstore for selling them an “obscene” book of poetry. The clerk was Shigeyoshi Murao. The book was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Several months later, on October 3rd, a municipal court judge ruled that the book was protected by the First Amendment […]