June 2011
59 posts
The Quietus' Top 40 of 2011 →
The lovely and intelligent folks over at The Quietus have compiled a list of their 40 favourite albums of the year so far. On a whole it’s an admirably eclectic and fairly British collection of albums, a great deal of which I admire and a lot more I intend to explore.
Unrelatedly, bless Casey Kasem and his amazing sweaters.
“was the cause was the remedy was the record was the argument was the delay...”
– “Zong! #26” from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
Scenes from the Suburbs. →
Mubi are showing Spike Jonze’s short film Scenes from the Suburbs - inspired by the Arcade Fire’s last album - in full. Hints of M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video directed by Romain Gavras (though here in a much less transgressive form) inflect Jonze’s depiction of young interpersonal relationships.
The compartmentalization of suburban life into hostile military...
“Eat Shit gladly
both sides Atlantic
Forte love
Forte loot
o found...”
– “OFART” from Caroline Bergvall’s “Goan Atom (Doll)” in Meddle English.
Negativland's "The Mashin' of the Christ" →
The indispensable UBUweb provides this video response to the success of Passion of the Christ (2004). Sure, maybe my posting it now is 7 years too late to miss the relevance train, but the video is a pretty interesting montage stitched together of various films depicting Christ’s life and suffering. I’m always up or a well-executed mashup, regardless of the degree of sacrilege...
Film the Blanks →
Some really lovely re-interpretations of movie posters created by blanking out text into colour blocks and simplifying the details of human figures and other objects. What remains is an interesting look into how space and colour is utilized in these posters.
“The intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the...”
– from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project [M1,3].
WatchA trailer emerges for David Cronenberg’s new film A Dangerous Method wherein Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender play an impossibly good-looking Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I am interested to see how Cronenberg’s longtime fascination with the erotic and its… I’ll call them intricacies - see: Crash, Naked Lunch, Rabid, Videodrome etc. - meshes with the more explicitly...
Tree of Life (2011): 2011: A (Natural) Grace... →
2600 words, Heidegger, the book of Job, Paradise Lost, Heraclitus, dinosaurs, the big bang and not an editor in sight; I’ve thrown some (almost certainly incomprehensible) thoughts on Tree of Life onto my film blog wherein we can maybe figure out the common thread that connects Sean Penn and plesiosaurs.
“They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died...”
– from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Post-Artifact Books & Publishing →
A really interesting piece about how digital culture can inform our conceptions of what a book is and how a re-evaluation of the systems associated with books and book production may be re-imagined.
Famous Opening Lines from Novels Updated for the... →
McSweeney’s continue to be cute, even if the employment of “modern” in the title is potentially problematic.
“I wasn’t finished. From as far back
as I can recall having heard a voice...”
– Ken Babstock’s “As Marginalia in John Clare’s ‘The Rural Muse’” from Methodist Hatchet.
The Electronic "Wasteland" by Touch Press. →
Touch Press take a step toward doing some really interesting work with the eBook medium. You have the text and its myriad notes, various narrators, a staged performance of the poem, the manuscript with Pound’s editorial suggestions, supplemental bits of video featuring Seamus Heaney, and more. Seems to be a great way to capitalize on the multi-media nature of the iPad medium, but $15...
“Tilts back to fall
black hair swivelling off her
shattering the pillow
Billy...”
– from Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Fascinating Paintings of Boredom →
Slate put together a slide show of paintings of people being bored. Boredom seems to be a pervasive topic of contemporary society - see David Foster Wallace’s struggle with it in The Pale King as one example - but, the issue may be illusory and deeper than simple boredom. I’ve taken John Cage’s words to heart that “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for...
Will Book Publishing Fall Into the Music Void? →
Interesting piece on The Quietus, from a man who works in publishing, about what parallels and divergences there may be between the digital revolution in music procurement and the emergence of eBooks and eReaders.
“Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not...”
– From section 5 of “Song of Myself” in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Peter Saville on his Joy Division and New Order... →
The Guardian offers some interesting insights from Peter Saville about the thinking that went into his, often seminal, work on the record sleeves of both Joy Division and New Order.
“It was taking him a very long while
to set up the camera. Enormous pools of a...”
– from Anne Carson’s “XL. Photographs: Origin of Time” in Autobiography of Red.
