Richard Sargent likes to take pictures of them. “Photographing torn posters is a cliché in which I continue to indulge,” he writes. In fact, his photos of “decaying urban billboards” — all of them shot in northern California’s East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond — transform that cliché into brilliant works of […]
Jess Bravin Explains It All for You
The U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitution, & the health care law.
Health and Safety . . . Oh Yeah
That’s the pretext for the cop sweep of OWS protestors at Zuccotti Park. Or as NYC’s billionaire mayor claims, that’s the reason for the eviction by what he called “the world’s greatest police department.” It’s the same police force recently convicted of planting drugs and currently charged with smuggling guns, armed robbery, making false arrests, […]
Mustill’s Message on a Postcard
© 1996 by Norman O. Mustill. From a postcard series of six.
Godfrey Reggio’s Vision of ‘Life Out of Balance’
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 . […]
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 […]
Quote of the Day
Samuel Beckett says: Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Glenn Greenwald says it like so: What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new […]
A Maniac and His Muse
Susan Fleet — trumpet player and feminist music historian — set her first crime thriller, Absolution, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where homicide detective Frank Renzi takes on a serial killer who preys on women. Fleet’s new killer thriller, Diva, is subtitled “a novel of psychological suspense.” That’s an understatement. Renzi is back, now in post-Katrina […]
Not James Cagney
If you guessed Billie Whitelaw doing Samuel Beckett’s “Not I,” you get a Google star. Here’s the complete version at UbuWeb (beginning at 2:51 on the counter), preceded by a short interview with Whitelaw.
What a Day for the Obits
Today’s three-fer . . . 1) Richard Hamilton, British Painter and a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89 2) Carl Oglesby, Antiwar Leader in 1960s, Dies at 76 3) John Calley, Hollywood Chief, Dies at 81 Taking the long view . . . Doncha just luuhv zat akzent? Postscript: Arman’s epitaph — Enfin Seul! […]
LES Jews
It’s a different kind of memorial.
Empty Ceremonies: Grandees to Gather for 9/11
Jimmy Breslin was right. It’s a lousy idea to turn the victims of 9/11 into martyrs and just as lousy to turn Ground Zero into a glorified cemetery. It was wrong in 2003, when he railed against both ideas in his newspaper column; and it is now, when the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is about […]
Ground Zero ‘Visions’ That Never Happened
The tale I wrote at MSNBC.com back in 2002 on December 18, the day nine “visions of Ground Zero’s future” were unveiled in a design competition to rebuild the site, has long since been deleted from cyberspace. I offer it here as a lost document for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. If you detect a […]