Table of Contents: Culture
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope http://quotecorner.com/online-pharmacy.html that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken. – John Updike
Her arrow-straight hair will not escape from its bow. Her glasses will never slide down her nose. From now on her base will be Boston. She will tell the passengers tied to their seats how she and our captain are going to be divorced. Her voice has made up its mind.
On Dumbo, a great grey beast, we head north towards Philadelphia, over an ambiguous fog where turtles swim in mud which is neither sky nor sea. The turtles are only four inches long. Their small paws are webbed. Their shells are surprisingly sensitive. We know which way they are going.
Who can tell what an elephant will do? In the hook of Dumbo’s trunk, Captain Wright swings like a broken bell, as if he’s drunk or piloting an invisible bomber running out of fuel. Soon his shoes will drop from his feet, two birds plummet to earth. O blue stewardess with red striped cuffs, we hope you enjoy your fight.
– Phyllis Janowitz, Soon The Final Decree
Esquire Magazine, June 1977. Janowitz is a poet, and Professor of English, at Cornell University. Also, yup, the mother of Tama Janowitz, author of 80’s novel / artifact Slaves of New York.
Serial cover designs by the German imprint Suhrkamp. Exquisite, masterful lessons in restraint and spare, deliberate composition. Suhrkamp is a 50 or so year old publisher of literature, philosophy and essays. A more, um, impressionistic description courtesy of a certain Siegfried Unseld and the inimitable Google Translate: On the question of how in the shortest form of the Suhrkamp publishing house was to characterize, I answer generally: Here are no books publish authors.
A little late to the Vivian Maier party, which is fitting, considering Maier never made it to her party either – in fact, knowing her, she probably wouldn’t have gone if she could… Anyhoo – what’s the fuss? It’s that Maier’s photography was discovered in a thrift auction cache a couple of years ago, some 100,000 shots, most not even processed. What scenes! Masterful, poignant and supremely artful street photography, moments equal to and anticipating Eggleston, Winograd, etc… just moldering away in a storage locker on the South Side of Chicago.
Came across her the other day in Slate’s new photo blog, Behold. Besides the sheer impact of the photos, it’s also a nourishing lesson and reminder to anyone who works at making art – that while the desire to show, share and be recognized is a powerful one, the vast share of the satisfaction comes from the privilege of doing.
More of her work here, here, biographical info here, and a great article here. Enjoy.
Amazing! So much purposeful human striving packed into one single frame – the bustling boogie woogie rhythms of daily life…
A fitting intersection, then, for our beloved space shuttle to cross – born of and built by the same energy and industry that powers the streets below. It’s endearing how much affection that ungainly piggyback elicits. The future was not the sleek finned swooped darts envisioned by Alex Raymond or Chesley Bonestell. The future was function begetting form – a spacecraft that looks as it must, to do what it needs to do, more Jeep than Jaguar.
Guided by technology contemporaneous with Centipede, Donkey Kong & Tempest, it broadened the perimeter of our everyday reach out into the edge of space. Because that’s the thing about the shuttle missions… they weren’t shots into the unknown, like Sir Richard Burton setting off to find the source of the Nile, or the Apollo Missions to the moon. They were meant to explore and colonize a frontier, like prospectors setting out westward to California to pan for gold, bend the direction of rivers, to make rockets and movies in the desert.
It’s why the spirit of Hedy Lamarr floats above this scene like a patron saint – a gifted, glamorous actress who, in her spare time, invented new kind of guidance system for torpedos to better fight the Nazis.
This photograph is a profound hymn to Los Angeles and the idea of California. Los Angeles will always be the most American of cities, defined by the lure of ambition and the blank canvas of possibility rather than the grids of Paris or London. Where hidden in the anonymity of deserts and stripmalls someone is manipulating the genome, making planes invisible, or writing Tootie’s dialog for an upcoming episode of Yo Gabba Gabba.
It’s where a young Gene Roddenberry would begin to write a series of TV scripts that used science fiction as a vehicle not only to boldly go where no man had gone before, but to explore the frontiers of the human condition – to muse on love, faith, friendship, and art.
It is no accident that the first space shuttle was called The Enterprise.
[Photograph by Stephen C. Confer]
WINTER SOLDIER #4
Variant cover by John Tyler Christopher
I. SAN FRANCISCO. Absolutely the most beautiful city in the entire world. With history, class, and cuisine, it’s a place of astounding mystery. l ask myself why I never lived
there. No answer.
2. WINSLOW, ARIZONA. An excellent stopover on P40 going east or west. Stay at la Posada, an ancient hotel with gardens, a library, art by Tina Mion, a wonderful restaurant called the Turquoise Room, and train tracks outside the back door.
3. RHYOLITE, NEVADA. A beautifully isolated mining ghost town in the dramatic setting of Death Valley. Nearby is Beatty, Nevada, with a homemade mini museum.
4. PAHRUMP, NEVADA. It’s a town that has yet to be built-not many houses, but lots of concrete curbs and partially paved streets. Somewhat of a bedroom town for Las Vegas.
5. NEW YORK CITY. It hits between the eyes. The culture is deafening, and noise is an essential ingredient. It’s the air shaft capital of the world. Everything American starts here.
6. AUSTIN, TEXAS. A beautiful town where bats live under the bridges. Home of lance Armstrong’s bicycle shop, remarkable barbecue, and lora buy vicodin shirt Reynolds’s art gallery. It’s not the musical capital of America, it’s close.
7. AMBOY, CALIFORNIA. Population: two, three, four? It’s, as they say, in the middle of nowhere. The buildings, among them Roy’s Café, are empty but very well cared
for. The post office is next to a tree lull of shoes. Desert winds, quietude…there’s something hospital clean about this tiny stop.
8. HARTSHORNE, OKLAHOMA. A lil’ country town that I always associate with my favorite baseball pitcher, Warren Spahn. It’s in the middle of America, but no way middle American.
9. SELIGMAN, ARIZONA. The Copper Cart café is all I remember. Once the fan belt capital of the world, now the interstate runs through its outhouse. A town where its past
and present are both gone-it’s worth investigating.
10. LOS ANGELES. After Oklahoma it is my adaptive home, but l only care about the central areas like Echo Park, Silver lake, Hollywood, Culver City, and Venice. On
occasion I go up to Mulholland Drive just to smell the ozone and listen to the city throb.
From W Magazine, May 2011
Illustration by Victo Ngai for a story by Peter Stamm in the May 14th order vicodin legally online issue of the New Yorker.
Wonder Woman is really confusing.
Consider the other members of the comic book trinity. Batman: Bruce Wayne, Gotham, detective. Superman: Clark Kent, Metropolis, boy scout. Their essences are schematic. Wonder Woman has been an Amazon and an Olympian. She’s been a god, a mortal, and a mix of both. She’s Diana Prince sometimes, she’s Diana Prince always, she’s never been Diana Prince. She had the invisible plane, gained the power of flight, then gotten the plane back – which I guess she uses when… she…umm… flyes back home? Yes home, which is on the island of Themyscira… or is it Boston, Gateway City, New York? Severe shifts in character and narrative continuity are endemic in comics, sure, but this schizoid blackboard eraser approach is more than a little nuts. It has left her less an icon than a notion of one.
That said, one of Wonder Woman’s most random, and most enjoyable, phases was her 60’s incarnation as a mod boutique owner and secret agent. Pop culture was undergoing a massive collective spy fantasia. Bond movies were at the height of their popularity and surreality. Every flavor of espionage was in vogue – Harry Palmer, Michael Caine’s working class spy, Italian comic book adaptations like Danger: Diabolik and Modesty Blaise, and Dean Martin’s candy colored Matt Helm absurdities. The genre’s high point is probably James Coburn’s peerless set of Flint movies (don’t miss this extended montage of highlights). They all shared a common widescreen Technicolor palette – mod fashions, mid century modern design, a taste for a splashy op art and the occasional dose of the lysergic. On television, Aaron Spelling’s pioneering swinging lady detective series Honey West had just been annihilated by the arrival of a fab new import from the UK – the Avengers.
The Avengers featured the espionage escapades of dapper Victorian John Steed and incomparable hepcat Emma Peel. In Peel, played by Diana Rigg, the genre had found it’s female icon. She was a stone cold fox, a brain box, a wit, and singularly, unforgettably stylish. (Peel’s wardrobe is virtually a case study in 60’s mod fashions – saturated pop colors, geometric patterns and cuts)
Emma Peel became the explicit model for the 60’s manifestation of Wonder Woman. She shed her powers and permanently adopted her mortal alter ego Diana Prince. She opened a fashionable clothing store. She rebuilt her fighting skills under the tutelage of her new sidekick, the wise, blind kung fu sage, I-Ching. The art was fantastic – a perfect blend of 50’s Romance comics, Good Girl Art, and Dan DeCarlo’s Josie and the Pussycats. The result was derivative, obvious, and absolutely delightful. (DC has recently reissued 3 volumes of this era – all are worthwhile, all easily found).
This feels about right, this vignette on the cover of this old HeathKit manual, when I think about my dad, about him being my dad, being his son, and being me. We did a lot of this kind of stuff – building things, kits, electronics, etc… the dynamics of the scene feel very familiar, a working sketch of many genuine memories. There’s a lot of each of us woven up in the idea of HeathKits.
For him it was a part of his love of understanding the underlying mechanics of how things worked. In this case the project was an Automotive Engine Analyzer. He also build a Vacuum Tube Volt-meter. It’s apt that he liked to put together devices whose purpose was to evaluate other devices. A profound pleasure for him, I think.
For us, then, it was a bridge, a dense lattice that bound us in the moment, and bound us thereafter. Making, doing, building, learning, understanding, crafting. Many of my fondest, most deeply held moments with him, in retrospect felt like this – like the cover, like HeathKit moments.
Below is a metronome we built together. It’s been with me for decades and it’s still one of my absolute favorite objects – built well, simple, natty looking, reliable, and steady – always steady…
written, as is, May 18th, 2012, with a single word removed. Carriage returns added.
Blue Box of Death, 2011
This masterwork of smartaleckery comes courtesy of Styron Lundberg, a Parisian designer. More work here, all smart, but this one here’s a homer…
A quick session sketch of a Sam Haskins photo / the Jill St. John attribution is just wishful thinking. Naz Dorolvya!
This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of music for the next 15 years. – Brian Eno
With disco albums, we started using themes…I was always the ideas man, and so for Love Trilogy I came up with the idea of having three separate songs and then a fourth song consisting of those three songs linked together, all combined into one. Four Seasons Of Love was a double album, with each side featuring a season, and my next idea — having just read Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time, which is 12 novels inspired by the painting of that name by Nicolas Poussin — was to record an album that chronicled popular music up until the present and on into the future. So, we started out with a ’50s song, ‘I Remember Yesterday’ — I was rather peeved when the album was changed to that name, because I really wanted it to be called A Dance To The Music Of Time — and continued with a bit of rock, a Tamla Motown number and so on, and then brought it up to date with disco, before the final, futuristic song was ‘I Feel Love’. – co-writer Pete Bellotte
Blondie: I Feel Love (Donna Summer Cover)
Thoroughly fascinating article in Smithsonian Magazine by Tony Perrottet on the overlooked biographical details of that legendary Casanova, Giacomo Casanova. The piece opens with a gob-smacking accounting of the serpentine path his celebrated memoir took, ending in its exalted cubby in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Suffice it to say it includes a stop during the 19th century in a special cupboard for illicit books in the French National Library, called L’Enfer, or “the Hell.”
The story then turns to a vividly sketched outline of Casanova’s life – establishing a far, far more interesting character than, as Perrottet puts it, “a frivolous sexual adventurer, a cad and a wastrel.” In fact,
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova lived from 1725 to 1798, and was a far more intellectual figure than the gadabout playboy portrayed on film. He was a true Enlightenment polymath, whose many achievements would put the likes of Hugh Hefner to shame. He hobnobbed with Voltaire, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin and probably Mozart; survived as a gambler, an astrologer and spy; translated The Iliad into his Venetian buy vicodin by phone dialect; and wrote a science fiction novel, a proto-feminist pamphlet and a range of mathematical treatises. He was also one of history’s great travelers, crisscrossing Europe from Madrid to Moscow. And yet he wrote his legendary memoir, the innocuously named Story of My Life, in his penniless old age, while working as a librarian (of all things!) at the obscure Castle Dux, in the mountains of Bohemia in the modern-day Czech Republic.
In British terms, let’s say, this is all much more Richard Francis Burton than Flashman. Fascinating, and as Blackadder would say, “as French as a pair of self-removing trousers.”
As far as the art goes, above are some frisky watercolors by Auguste Leroux from the 1932 French edition of Casanova’s Histoire de ma Vie. Leroux was a celebrated illustrator who worked with Huysmans, Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert… below are some fetching prints by Milo Manara inspired the the 1976 Fellini film. (My appreciation of their finest collaboration, A Trip to Tullum, here.)
Also, for your pleasure, a live cut of Roxy Music’s strutting tribute.
Roxy Music: Casanova:
