Whatever else is going on, make sure that you keep buying typewriter ribbon.
In the February issue of The Believer there’s a fantastic interview conversation. Neko Case shares an exchange she had with Sherman Alexie “a couple of winters ago.”
SA: I tell them, “I write this shit for you!” But a lot of writers won’t admit to that, a lot of artists won’t admit to that. They’ll get artistic, or pretentious, or, you know, talk about some “higher calling.” The fact is, I want to move rooms full of people. I want to move someone sitting alone under a reading lamp. I want to move someone sitting on a beach. I want to make them laugh and cry. I want them to see me and come running up to me and tell me how the books made them feel. I love that!
2100°/451°
A short film by Alistair Banks featuring the art of Etsuko Ichikawa.
I can’t remember if I’ve already shared this particular project, but it never hurts to revisit good art.
The Psychology of Death and Dying
That’s the name of one of the classes I’m taking this semester. So far it’s truly excellent. Beyond words, really. If I can find a way to post some of our readings without violating copyright, I’ll do it. In the meantime, have you read these? They’re a couple of my favorites.
The Long Goodbye
In those days, extended family cared for the oldest. Now, in an age when family members are separated by hundreds of miles, we leave it up to nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. And the need has never been greater. The fastest-growing age group in America is the eighty-five-and-older cohort. As the population ages, healthcare costs continue to outpace inflation. Many older people have seen a sharp decline in their retirement investments since the 2008 economic collapse and are rapidly losing value in their homes. American political leaders are not preparing adequately for the huge demographic shift caused by the aging of the boomers, who began turning sixty-five in 2011. Many of them are retiring at the same time they are dealing with parents who are still alive.
Costs for long-term care are skyrocketing because only 3 percent of adults carry long-term care insurance. As a result, middle-class people without Daddy’s pension income are bankrupting themselves and then applying for Medicaid to pay for a nursing home in which they may languish for years.
dear clusterflock
I don’t mean to go around hawking my wares, but this seemed so relevant and useful to you personally that I thought it would be wrong not to share it. Please keep in mind that I am financially involved with this offer, but even so I think you’ll find I was right to share this marvelous opportunity with you today.
Well now here I’ve wasted a lot of your time with technicalities and jibber jabber, I’ll come to my point quickly. Let me ask you just one question:
Have you ever wanted to have a spleen named after you?
A Five Minute Interview with Maurice Sendak
As part of their TateShots series of artist interviews, the Tate Galleries spoke with Maurice Sendak about his books and career. I love this bit about his subject matter:
I do not believe I have ever written a children’s book. I don’t know how to write a children’s book. How do you write about it? How do you set out to write a children’s book? It’s a lie.
Also, he’s obsessed with William Blake and comic books.
Via: Papertastebuds
Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
I’ve become slightly obsessed with Frank Chimero’s talk on the purpose and philosophy of design:
To really think about design, you need to learn and think about everything other than it. Design is a vessel: the most important part is what it holds.
The first comment on the Vimeo landing is a single word: Nourishing. Such a perfect way to sum it all up.
Via: Swiss-Miss
You’re built like a car (You got a hubcap diamond-star halo)
Europeans have all the fun: lower drinking ages, funner beaches, easier lifestyles and . . . dinosaur skeletons having sex in their museums. This exhibit, which clearly shows two T-Rexes “mating”, is located in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.
Via @leatherarchives.
Saul Leiter, early color photography
This is from an announcement for a Saul Leiter retrospective in 2008, and even though I think we’ve posted about his work before, he is always worth revisiting.
Saul Leiter started shooting color and black-and-white street photography in New York in the 1940s. He had no formal training in photography, but the genius of his early work was quickly acknowledged by Edward Steichen, who included Leiter in two important MoMA shows in the 1950s. MoMA’s 1957 conference “Experimental Photography in Color” featured 20 color photographs by Leiter.
After that, however, Leiter’s personal color photography was, for the most part, not shared with the public. He became better-known as a successful fashion photographer in the 1950s and 60s. All the while, Leiter continued to stroll the streets wherever he was (mostly New York and Paris), making photographs for his own pleasure. He printed some of his black-and-white street photos, but kept most of his color slides tucked away in boxes. It was only in the 1990s that he began to look back at that remarkable color work and start to make prints. His sense of color and densely compressed urban life represents a truly unique vision of those times.
Bill Cunningham New York
Jason posted recently about the Bill Cunningham New York documentary, and we watched it last night. It is beautifully done in a straightforward way, and really the subject is what causes the movie to shine. At 80, Cunningham is still buoyant and exuberant, with a clear passion for what he loves: taking pictures of fashion as it is worn by people on the streets of New York (once you see the movie you’ll understand the awkward phrasing). He is the original Sartorialist. The movie is streaming on Netflix, and is available in various formats on Amazon. Recommended.
Gary Lutz and Lindsay Hunter
From a review in praise of Gary Lutz’s Divorcer I found an excerpt from Lindsay Hunter’s short story collection Daddy’s:
Sibby had the Ziploc out, the one she filled with the spider’s eggs she’d find in the backyard. These are gifts from the Lord, she told me once. He sprinkled them around for me to find. Now she worked the Ziploc under her shoe, slowly mashing the eggs and baby spiders spilling out, like there was great pleasure in it. That what God told you to do with the eggs, I asked her. God told me plenty of times to smash your face under Daddy’s mallet, Sibby said, but sometimes I don’t exactly obey God. She finished her mashing, took off her one shoe and left it over the Ziploc. Let her sock get black with dirt. Why’d you do that, I asked her. Because, she said. She peeled off her sock, laid it out on the back step beside me. They were fixin to hatch, and without no mother it was dumb for me to let them be born. She disappeared into the house behind me.
(thanks, Derek)
spam name
Martinchalk, Cynthia.
from the comments
This seems a good place to say I’ve been singing “Tyrone” ever since yesterday afternoon. Y’all should hear me. I’m singing it right now in my office.
I’m gettin tired of yo shit
You don’t never buy me nothin
from the comments
SC:
I haven’t met anyone under 30 who has read Gershon Legman. I’d put him in my top 100, maybe my top 50. Every now and then someone–most recently Larry McMurtry–goes on about the forgotten Legman but he’s mostly just forgotten. Half the people over 30 who do know about him haven’t read him, they just know him as the inventor of the vibrating dildo or connect him with origami. All of his major work is out of print, as far as I can tell. The two most expensive Legman books on ABE right now are: Oragenitalism: An Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Technique in Genital Excitation and The Limerick, 1700 Examples, with Notes, Variants and Index. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, a short book of essays, is a good Legman starting place and, I’d argue, a book everyone should read. However, Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor is his finest (partially published) work. It’s not too hard to find the Indiana University Press press reprint of the first volume of Rationale but, as the title suggests, its appeal is limited to people interested in dirty jokes and, really, who likes dirty jokes?
A review of iA Writer. My new favorite text editor.
Corona Jackass Clawhammer. Clawhammer.
Courtesy of Brian Beatty. Says this kid is his new hero. I say yes. We need new heroes.
dear clusterflock
I’m curious what everyone is reading these days. I’m almost through my library stack and need some recommendations. Really I’m just trying to find ways to avoid my yearly attempt at reading Anna Karenina.
American Elegy: An Interview with Phil Bebbington
Phil Bebbington (aka Terrorkitten to many on the web and Flickr) is an Englishman with a keen sense for photographing the US. On his photographic journeys to America, he has captured an amazing array of “disappearing America” shots. Upon starting American Elegy, Phil was one of the first photographers that popped into my mind as an artist that needed to be featured here. Though based in Bath, England, I consider Phil Bebbington to be one of the best American Elegy-type photographers working today. I want to thank Phil for working with me for this interview and letting us use some of his wonderful images.
A terrific interview with one of our own. Recommended reading and viewing.
Everything is a Remix – Part 3
Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson’s amazing series Everything is a Remix is out. As far as I’m concerned, it’s even better than parts 1 and 2.
Mike Lee on Victimhood
This is not going to be a good essay. This is going to be a terrible essay, which you should not read, for two reasons.
It deserves to be read anyway.
R.I.P. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)
‘A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’: Patrick Leigh Fermor in Saint Malo, France, in 1992. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Not unexpected. And he led a long and wonderful life. But I am tearing up. This is someone I never met who meant a lot to me in ways that are hard to explain just now. So here is the Guardian obituary. And I hope you will read at least one of his books.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom – anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.
SENNA
A trailer for a documentary about Formula One World Champion Ayrton Senna. Regardless of whether you plan to watch the movie, there are some racing moments here that are electric magic.
Senna is considered by many to be the best driver in Formula One history.
(via @gary_hustwit)
Just a Reminder
Amanda’s Kickstarter project is at 50%, in the final week, with 45 47 49 50 contributors. Let’s get it to 60 if we can.
The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture, it’s a question of millimeters
This video of Henri Cartier-Bresson, told in his words, overlaid with his photos, is too long to describe succinctly, but if you’re interested in art, how to see and think, in learning about the world through taking photos, it is worth the 18 minutes.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English edition was titled The Decisive Moment. It included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book’s cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from the 17th century Cardinal de Retz: “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif” (“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment”). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: “Photographier: c’est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l’organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait” (“Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact”).
James Gleick, The Information
I’m only a couple chapters into James Gleick’s The Information, but already it deserves a recommendation. It is both a straightforward history of the transformation toward information culture and a poetic and metaphorical exploration of it. I could give dozens of examples — the chapter on the talking drums of Africa comes to mind — but if the subject of how we came to transform ourselves into thought is interesting to you, you will want the pleasure of unfurling it for yourself.
Previously on clusterflock:
Also, women were the first computers
Re-winding A Clockwork Orange
Ed and Mike and a few others and I drove to Houston to see A Clockwork Orange when it looked as though it would not be shown In Dallas.
Watching Clockwork that afternoon was one of the most painful aesthetic experiences I’ve endured. And Kubrick’s film remains one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.
