Tag: books

Another Green World

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Brian Eno’s Another Green World (33 1/3)” (Geeta Dayal)


“Another Green World” (Eno)

A favorite album of mine, and now the 33.3 book is imminent. I’ve already pre-ordered it I believe. As a teaser, here is the opening few paragraphs of Geeta Dayal’s book

When I initially set out to write a book on Brian Eno, I didn’t realize what a massive endeavor it would turn out to be. This short book has taken several years to write. I wrote, rewrote, threw out entire chapters, and started over more than once. Every idea fanned out into ten other intriguing ideas, and eventually I found myself enmeshed in a dense network of thought. Finally, I realized that I had to pick a direction and run with it, or risk never being finished.

Sometimes a good way to begin a drawing is to first carve out all of the negative space. So I will start out by telling you what this book isn’t. This is not a rock biography that meticulously documents the making of Another Green World. Nor is it a book that dwells very much on Eno’s personal life. It certainly touches on both of these things, to the extent that they are useful in creating a larger picture. This is a book about process. How did these songs grow from kernels of ideas into fully-formed pieces? How were these kernels of thought formed in the first place? I attempt to examine the confluence of ideas at a certain time in a certain place in the 1970s, and how these notions helped to shape the form of three records, all released in 1975: Another Green World, Discreet Music, and Evening Star.

My own background is in the sciences, and I approached this book as a sort of scientific experiment. I came up with hypotheses and tested them by doing research. Sometimes these hypotheses were wrong, so I went back to the drawing board. I did a lot of interviews, read a lot of books, and spent a lot of time thinking and listening. I spoke with dozens of people; one of the great gifts of writing a book on Eno is getting to interview some of the very interesting collaborators that he has worked with over the past thirty-odd years. I wasn’t just interested in speaking with those who worked on Another Green World; I wanted to learn more, in a general sense, about how Eno worked with other people.

I read dozens of books on a number of different subjects — from visual art to cybernetics to architecture to evolutionary biology to cooking to tape loops — for inspiration. Of course, I read books about Eno as well. But many of the most helpful books for understanding Eno’s methods are not explicitly about Eno at all. They are books like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Stafford Beer’s The Brain of the Firm, and Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music. What these books have in common — besides being books that Eno rates highly — are that they unite a variety of seemingly disparate things, and lay out general principles for thinking about these things. In this book, I look at how Eno devised his own sets of tools for thinking, such the “Oblique Strategies” cards he created with Peter Schmidt. (I used a deck of these cards myself while writing this book, whenever I reached an impasse).

Of course, there is the music. In the chapters that follow, I dig into some of the many unique sounds on these records. This is not any kind of formal musicological analysis. What it is, instead, is an exploration of the sonics–the timbres and layers of shifting textures. I spend more time on sonics than I do on the words. Eno has stated many times that lyrics, especially at this time period in his life, did not interest him very much. But that does not mean that words did not serve an important function. Using some ideas from cognitive science, I probe two different phenomena at play in Another Green World. The first, as Eno himself has pointed out, is that only five out of the 14 tracks on Another Green World have words, but that listeners tend to perceive the album as a “song record,” not an ambient record. Each song with lyrics “bleeds” into the surrounding ambient tracks. How does this effect work in our heads? The second phenomenon has to do with another type of sleight of hand — how chains of words, even nonsense words that do not make any sense in sequence, can nonetheless generate distinct, powerful images.

[Click to read more of 33 1/3: Another Green World]

On a different subject, have installed a Feedburner redirect plugin, so if it is properly configured, you’ll be reading this in your newsreader without issue. If it isn’t, doh! Sorry, and please let me know so I can fix or attempt to fix.

Tears of Rage: Richard Manuel is Dead

Seth Anderson0 comment

One of my most favorite songs ever is Tears of Rage from The Band‘s first album.

The opening track on 1968’s Music from Big Pink is one of the most perfect pop compositions ever. It is a perfectly atypical opening number and a perfect introduction to the intriguing style of The Band. It is also a depressing suggestion as to how much more perfect they could have been had Richard Manuel been able to keep himself from himself.

Co-written by Manuel and Bob Dylan, “Tears of Rage” is the painful lament of a betrayed parent. The first recorded version of the song is the Dylan-sung one that was released on The Basement Tapes. Dylan’s – usually extraordinary – ability to capture the essence of the song was utterly obliterated by Manuel’s on the official Big Pink reading. The extraordinary anguish in Manuel’s voice added exponentially to the already heartbreaking lyrics. The slower composition, Garth Hudson’s haunting organ, Robbie Robertson’s swirling guitar, the unparalleled rhythm of drummer Levon Helm and bassist Rick Danko (who also provides backup vocals), as well as Manuel’s own piano work combined for one of those very rare occasions in which Dylan was completely schooled on one of his own songs (ironically, Manuel does it again on the same album with his version of “I Shall be Released”).

Sadly, the mood of “Tears of Rage” was forebodingly symbolic of the pain and suffering that would eventually consume Richard Manuel – who hanged himself in 1986 after two decades of extreme substance abuse. Perhaps the rarest attribute of The Band was the deficiency of a definitive front-man. With three lead singers and all five members’ status as exceptional musicians, there was no member of The Band who was more important to its achievements than the other; but for the first five minutes of their first album, they seemed to revolve around one genius.

[Click to read more of Tears of Rage: Richard Manuel is Dead | Sound Affects | PopMatters]

Robbie Robertson’s greed re: publishing credits probably had some contribution to Manuel’s early death. Anyway, here’s a YouTubed searing live version from 1969.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI6QdS3jiT8

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXHj4SIlv4

On the topic of Robbie Robertson, and The Band, Levon Helm’s autobiography is a good, fun read. Highly recommended.


“This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band” (Levon Helm, Stephen Davis)

The Band, who backed Bob Dylan when he went electric in 1965 and then turned out a half-dozen albums of beautifully crafted, image-rich songs, is now regarded as one of the most influential rock groups of the ’60s. But while their music evoked a Southern mythology, only their Arkansawyer drummer, Levon Helm, was the genuine article. From the cotton fields to Woodstock, from seeing Sonny Boy Williamson and Elvis Presley to playing for President Clinton, This Wheel’s on Fire replays the tumultuous history of our times in Levon’s own unforgettable folksy drawl. This edition is expanded with a new afterword by the authors.


Music from Big Pink

The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder

Seth Anderson4 Comments


“The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” (Vincent Bugliosi)

I picked up a copy of this book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I should start soon. Funny how the book has been basically ignored by the media, and yet still appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list, even without bulk orders1…

Vincent Bugliosi wants George W. Bush prosecuted for murder. There are others who are complicit in the crime, namely the Vice President and Condoleezza Rice, but Bush is the target of this famed former Los Angeles prosecutor (the Charles Manson case) and best selling author (Helter Skelter and The Betrayal of America as two examples). He is undeterred by the virtual major media blackout on interviews and advertising. He’s taking his case directly to the people through alternate media and the internet.

Bugliosi constructs a devastating case in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. As I write this review, it is still difficult to grasp my sense of shock at this title with this author’s name below it. A legendary prosecutor with a near perfect record in big cases, Bugliosi articulates one of the most revolutionary ideas imaginable in a mix of today’s otherwise vapid and obtuse political thinking. But first, the book and how the prosecutor makes his case.

He wastes no time in following up on the shock generated by the title. In the first sentence, we’re told:

The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history – – the president of the nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false presences, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 American soldiers, to horrific, violent deaths.” (V. Bugliosi, p. 3)

The president “knowingly and deliberately” caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians and that’s called murder, plain and simple. This is not a hypothetical case that could happen under special legal interpretations. When the president leaves office, he is subject to the same law as the rest of us. Bugliosi explains the ability to prosecute the case against George W. Bush by a district attorney or states attorney in any local jurisdiction where a life was lost in the Iraq war. Federal prosecutors also have that option. Bugliosi’s detailed analysis of this phenomenon offers some of the best analysis in the book and the detailed end notes.

[From A review of Bugliosi’s The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder]

George Bush better get his world traveling finished before he leaves office; once 2009 arrives, there might be a few impediments to visiting certain enlightened countries.

Oh, Mr. Bugliosi has a website too, check it out.

Footnotes:
  1. certain right wing organizations bulk purchase, and give away, books they want publicity for. Many bookstores will prominently display a book if it is on the NYT best-seller list. If I was wealthy enough, I’d bulk purchase selected liberal-leaning books [↩]

The Most Happy Bordello

Seth Anderson0 comment

The historic bordello district was slightly south of where I currently reside, the city still has certain residues of days gone by, if one knows where to look.1


“Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” (Karen Abbott)Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul sounds like an interesting overview of the period.

The Most Happy Bordello – WSJ.com:
One doesn’t hear much nowadays about bordellos, also known as cathouses, brothels, houses of ill repute or simple whorehouses. When I was an adolescent in Chicago, in the early 1950s, the trip to such a place was a rite de passage for nearly every male youth of unambiguous appetites. In my day the chief such institutions, operating on assembly-line principles, were to be found outside the city, one in Kankakee, the other in Braidwood. Students at the University of Illinois relieved the tedium of their sound liberal arts or business educations by visiting establishments in Danville, birthplace of Dick Van Dyke and Bobby Short.
…But the great cathouse era of Chicago was in the first decade or so of the 20th century. This era and those cathouses have now been described with scrupulous concern for historical accuracy and in clear, lively prose by Karen Abbott in “Sin in the Second City.” Lavish in her details, nicely detached in her point of view, Ms. Abbott has written an immensely readable book. “Sin in the Second City” offers much in the way of reflection for those interested in the unending puzzle that goes by the name of human nature.

Ms. Abbott’s account of fleshly sin and the response to it in the city of Chicago in the early 20th century centers on a bordello known as the Everleigh Club, which even now is talked about in Chicago by men interested in the sporting life. The club was the creation of two sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, who themselves had earlier worked the hard trade of harlotry in Omaha and elsewhere.

The Everleigh Club opened on Feb. 1, 1900, and closed on the morning of Oct. 25, 1911. In between times, the sisters accrued assets, by Ms. Abbott’s estimate, worth more than $20 million in today’s dollars, while their establishment acquired world-wide fame as one of the wonders of the city of Chicago, which, in the words of First Ward Alderman Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “ain’t no sissy town.”

The Everleigh Club was a cathouse with a vast difference — it was more like the Ritz, with, of course, added attractions. Sumptuous food was served (entrées on the buffet included guinea fowl, pheasant and broiled squab), music both serious and popular played while a basso continuo was supplied by the popping of champagne corks, and the downstairs décor included a gold piano that set the sisters back no fewer than 15 grand.

Unlike their consoeurs in the Levee, as the whorehouse district on Chicago’s South Side was called, the sisters Everleigh enforced a high standard of luxury, carefully culled their clientele and monitored the behavior of staff. They also treated their girls — known as courtesans, and sometimes as the butterflies — with fairness and an utter absence of cruelty, which was far from the case in other houses in the Levee. Girls working at the Everleigh Club made more than a hundred dollars a week, a fine wage at the time. To give some notion of the general tone of the place: While customers were upstairs frolicking with the girls, downstairs their suits were being pressed.

Although Ms. Abbott does not describe what went on in the girls’ rooms chez Everleigh, she informs us that corporate accounts were available to good customers, and she chronicles the gaudier scandals. These include one of the Marshalls Field, of the famous department-store family, being shot in the Levee; and, later, Herbert Swift, of the great meatpacking family, dying of unknown causes after supposedly departing the Everleigh Club with one of its girls. The heavyweight champion Jack Johnson served time in jail under the Mann Act for transporting an Everleigh butterfly named Belle Schreiber across state lines.

The characters of Minna and Ada Everleigh and their thoughtful way of going about their business are intricately delineated by Ms. Abbott, who, I think it fair to say, views them affectionately and with measured admiration. But her book is ultimately a saga of a clash between the forces of vice and those of reform in the city of Chicago. In this battle, reform has right but absolutely no humor on its side — right, that is, if one assumes that human weakness is easily eradicated through the changing of institutions.

The methods proposed for dealing with the extensive prostitution in Chicago early in the last century were, first, to segregate it in a particular part of town, and, second, to root it out and eliminate it altogether. Ministers, ambitious young lawyers set on forging political careers, anti-smoking campaigners, temperance workers, the B’nai Br’ith, vegetarians, and others on the side of sweetness and light naturally enough went for complete elimination.

I did finish reading this book several months ago, well worth reading if you have a chance.

Footnotes:
  1. reposted because there is something wrong with the original movabletype post from 2007 [↩]

Franz Kafka porn brought out of the closet

Seth Anderson0 comment

Surprised Kafka’s porn stash took so long to emerge.

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer’s saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 – a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.

[From Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet – Times Online ]

Raindrop Porn
[Raindrop Porn will have to suffice unless I find any graphic goodies on the internet]

and the stash, kept locked with a key only Kafka had, was apparently pretty racy

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

“Academics have pretended it did not exist,” Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.”

He added: “Perhaps Kafka’s biographers simply don’t like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this… way in the vital early stages of his career

As far as I can tell, the book is only available in England at the moment. American Puritanism at work.

“Excavating Kafka” (James Hawes)

a different title by James Hawes is available in the US, maybe covering some of the same topics:

“Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (James Hawes)

Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka’s genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire’s son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today’s dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique.

Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths:

*Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.

*Kafka was lonely.

*Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write.

*Kafka was tormented by fear of sex.

*Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest.

*Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son’s needs.

*Kafka’s style is mysterious and opaque.

*Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds.

James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers—scholars, biographers, and tourist guides—have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he’ll take no prisoners in the process.

Books on the BBC list of 100

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Facebook meme goes like this:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? I’ve read X

I don’t actually think the BBC list claimed people only had read six – as far as I can tell, the BBC just collected stats on what books were the most read.. The list is nearly identical to this list, but not quite exactly the same.

Still fun to compare/contrast. I’ve read 64 of these books, plus most of the Bible, plus most of “Complete Works of Shakespeare”, plus a couple Classics Illustrated Comics versions.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds—and that would include me. I want to know who’s read what.

And:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – X

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – X

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – X

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling -nope

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – X

6 The Bible -a hard one to answer. I’ve probably read it all, but I can say for certain that I didn’t skip over 2 Thessalonians or something?

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell -X

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman -nope

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – X

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – X

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy –X

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller –x

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all, but most)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – X

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien -X

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – nope

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – X

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger-no

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot -X

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – X

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald -X

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens -nope

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -X

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams -X

27
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -X (one of my favorites of all time)

28
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck -X (likewise)

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll-X

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame- X

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -X

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – X

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis -X

34 Emma-Jane Austen- X

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen –

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – X

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – nope

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres -nope

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden -I don’t think so

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – X

41
Animal Farm – George Orwell -X

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown -nope

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving- X

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins -nope

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery- X

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy -X

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – X

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – X

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan- nope

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – nope, though its on my shelf

52 Dune – Frank Herbert -X

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons-nope

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – X

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth -nope

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon -nope

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – X

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon- nope

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – X

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov-X

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt -nope

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold –

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas- no (but I did used to own the Classics Illustrated Comic version!)

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac -X

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy -X

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding- nope

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie –X

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville -X

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens- X

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker -X

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett -X

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson -nope

75
Ulysses – James Joyce -X (probably my favorite book, at least at one time in my life. Haven’t re-read in a few years)

76 The Inferno – Dante- partial credit. Need a good translation, any suggestions?

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome -nope

78 Germinal – Emile Zola -nope

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray-X

80 Possession – AS Byatt –nope

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens -X

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell -nope

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker- X

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro -no

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert -X

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry -nope

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom- nope

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton-nope

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – X

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery -X

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks -nope

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams- X

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – X

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute -nope

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas -nope (but I did used to own the Classics Illustrated Comic version!)

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare-X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl -X

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo-X

Get Paid

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Harlan Ellison tells us, “Get Paid”! Applies to photography (no more freebies if there’s an option), music, writing, everything. Especially when a corporation as wealthy as Warner Bros is asking for free content, why should they get it?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

(Note, Harlan Ellison uses many, many NSFW words, so adjust your viewing accordingly)

Netflixed: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Julian Schnabel)

Another film based on a book, though a true story this time.

In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby’s autobiography, which he dictated by blinking. Julian Schnabel was nominated for the 2008 Best Director Oscar and won the Golden Globe in the same category for his poignant film about the strength of the human spirit.

[From Netflix: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly]

A powerful film. Not sure if it was the late night viewing, or other maudlin reasons, but was immensely engrossed by this film. A meditation of life, and death, family relations, and the wheel of samsara. Well, not really the rebirth thing, more a ‘life flashing before one’s eyes right before death‘, expanded over a years time, with one of the eye being sewn shut. I had hesitated viewing the movie, since the premise is a bit unnerving (and a real fear of mine – such a horrible thought to be cognizant, 42 years old, trapped in a body that no longer functions), yet couldn’t stop once I started. Innovative cinematically: the Point of View is nearly always through the blinking eye of the narrator (which some exceptions later on).

The director, Julian Schnabel, who also directed Basquiat, filmed on location in Calais, France, using several actual hospital employees, and the movie is better for those choices. Seems authentic, non-Hollywood, as a result.

Johnny Depp chose to be in the dreck, Pirates of the Caribbean, instead of in the Diving Bell, his loss, as one film will be played for years, and one cartoon movie will just make Disney a lot of money. Mathieu Amalric was wonderful in the role, emoting without moving his face muscles at all. Max von Sydow was also magnificent as the dying father of Jean-Do.

From the book jacket:

We’ve all got our idiosyncrasies when it comes to writing–a special chair we have to sit in, a certain kind of yellow paper we absolutely must use. To create this tremendously affecting memoir, Jean-Dominique Bauby used the only tool available to him–his left eye–with which he blinked out its short chapters, letter by letter. Two years ago, Bauby, then the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of Elle France, suffered a rare stroke to the brain stem; only his left eye and brain escaped damage. Rather than accept his “locked in” situation as a kind of death, Bauby ignited a fire of the imagination under himself and lived his last days–he died two days after the French publication of this slim volume–spiritually unfettered. In these pages Bauby journeys to exotic places he has and has not been, serving himself delectable gourmet meals along the way (surprise: everything’s ripe and nothing burns). In the simplest of terms he describes how it feels to see reflected in a window “the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde.

Michelangelo wears Kabbalah bracelet

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican” (Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner)

Could be another case of Dan Brownism (conspiracy theories created without much basis in fact, but fun), I don’t know enough about Michelangelo or Kabbalah to proclaim with any authority.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the renaissance artist worked on for four years in the early 16th century, is actually a “bridge” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith, according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece.

The book, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, is the work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a tour guide at the Vatican.

Scanning through the arrangement of figures on the vast 14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters.

For example, the book states, the figures of David and Goliath form the shape of the letter gimel, which symbolises g’vurah, or strength, in the mystical Kabbalah tradition.

[From Michelangelo ‘hid secret code in Sistine Chapel’ – Telegraph]

Making obscene gestures toward the Pope? Do tell…

The authors believe Michelangelo picked up his knowledge of Judaism while at the court of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence.

In addition, they say there are several attacks on Pope Julius II, who commissioned the work, embedded in the painting.

Disgusted with papal corruption, they think Michelangelo painted the prophet Zechariah in the pope’s likeness.

Behind him, one angel is “making an extremely obscene hand gesture at the back of his head.”

Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

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“The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal” (Gore Vidal)

I’ve read a few of Gore Vidal’s 24 novels, and actually agree with this slightly prickly review by Louis Bayard – Vidal is best as an essayist.

Vidal has confessed that his primary passion in life is not writing but reading, and judging from these deeply informed essays, I can well believe it. Others may suspect him of less pure motives. His social circle has been notable for its glamour, and his willingness to grant audiences to every reporter who comes calling has passed well beyond compulsion. Interviews, in general, bring out his very worst grandstanding impulses and goad him into his most insupportable statements (a bizarre defense of Timothy McVeigh, for instance, and the usual cockamamie theorizing about 9/11).

Vidal’s well-documented reputation as a go-to provocateur has made it all too easy to overlook his astonishing work ethic: 24 novels, five plays, two memoirs, screenplays, television dramas, short stories, pamphlets and more than 200 essays. As this particular collection makes clear, Vidal writes to live. Approvingly, he recalls the final days of Edmund Wilson: “He was perfect proof of the proposition that the more the mind is used and fed the less apt it is to devour itself. When he died, at seventy-seven, he was busy stuffing his head with irregular Hungarian verbs. Plainly, he had a brain to match his liver.”

Plainly, too, Vidal has a brain to match his self-regard. And late at night, when the blandishments of ego subside and a new book lies open in his lap, his lifelong, half-requited love for the novel still burns bright — no matter that the novel itself is fading into insignificance. “Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end,” he wrote in 1967, “if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.”

[From Lou Bayard’s review of “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal” | Salon Books]

From Amazon/Reed Elsevier:

Vidal’s daunting career has encompassed 24 novels, 11 essay collections, six plays, two memoirs and countless occasional writings. This new collection is an entry point into this literary giant’s work for a new generation of readers, offering some of Vidal’s most famous and entertaining essays from the past 50-odd years. Compiled and introduced by Parini (The Last Station), Vidal’s literary executor, the pieces range across Vidal’s far-flung areas of expertise, resting most frequently and contentiously on literature and presidential politics of the past and present. His assessment of The Top Ten Bestsellers of January 7, 1973, is a savagely meticulous dissection of middlebrow American taste, while American Plastic tacks in the opposite direction, skewering the academy-approved, theory-based fiction of Donald Barthelme and William Gass with derisive glee. Vidal’s comfort in puncturing conventional wisdom with his wit and analysis is fully displayed throughout, most notably in his discussion of the battle over the Kennedy legacy in The Holy Family and the controversial Black Tuesday, which condemns the Bush administration for its alleged imperial ambitions in the wake of September 11.

Though, many of the essays chosen for this new collection have been previously published in United States: Essays 1952-1992. If you already own that, not much need to repurchase the same writing in different jacket.


“United States” (Gore Vidal)

This mammoth omnibus of 114 essays is vintage Vidal, a marvelous compendium of sharp wit and independent judgment that confirms his status as a man of letters. The prolific novelist/critic offers withering putdowns of the French “new novel,” billionaire Howard Hughes and bestseller lists. He displays a reporter’s hard nose for facts in travel pieces on Nasser’s Egypt and Mongolia. He pens definitive portraits of H. L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Burgess, L. Frank Baum. He reminisces on his boyhood friendship with Amelia Earhart, who, we learn, was in love with Vidal’s father, Eugene, FDR’s director of commercial aviation. Mingling patrician impulses and egalitarian, subversive sentiments, Vidal takes unfashionable stances, as when he urges the legalization of drugs or ending military aid to the Middle East, including Israel. His sense of the United States as hub of an overextended empire informs pieces on “American sissy” Theodore Roosevelt, JFK, CIA spook E. Howard Hunt and the bloated military budget.

Levon Helm is back

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Dirt Farmer” (Levon Helm)

Levon Helm is cool; his voice is a public resource and a treasure. I wish I could have heard him perform, as I liked his recent album a lot.

What remains of that world-weary drawl is a bit frayed around the edges, but it remains a potent instrument, as evidenced by last year’s “Dirt Farmer” (Vanguard), Helm’s first solo album in 25 years. It contains rural blues and mountain-soul laments that he learned from his parents while growing up on a cotton farm in Helena, Ark., as well as more recent contributions from Buddy and Julie Miller and Steve Earle. It’s done up in low-key rustic colors that evoke Helm and the Band in their “Basement Tapes” glory with Bob Dylan. This is the sound of friends gathered in a room to make music of intense conviction at a relaxed pace, and it feels as comfortable as a well-worn flannel shirt, as heart-breaking as a death-bed kiss, as vibrant as a Saturday-night, moonshine-fueled hootenanny.

The cast of co-conspirators includes Larry Campbell, who has served ably as Dylan’s touring guitarist and now plays the role of Helm’s producer, guitarist and fiddle-player. Campbell’s wife, Teresa Williams, contributes sublime harmony vocals, alongside Helm’s daughter, Amy. But at the center of it all is Helm, who plays drums, mandolin and sings with gusto. He brings a wounded yowl to the Stanley Brothers’ “False Hearted Blues Lover,” a lonesome pathos to Earle’s “The Mountain.” These songs are reminders of a rural way of life that is fast fading, as are singers who actually lived through these experiences.

Helm is 68 and has been paying off his medical debts by playing regularly in his adopted hometown of Woodstock, in upstate New York (Helm doesn’t collect songwriting royalties on Band songs, because Robbie Robertson laid publishing claim to most of the band’s material, so he’s largely dependent on live performances for income). His Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, modeled after the traveling minstrel shows of his youth, have attracted the likes of Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John and Donald Fagen.

[From Turn It Up – A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap | Chicago Tribune | Blog]

Robbie Robertson screwed his bandmates out of royalties, as far as I can tell, and should be ashamed. The Band were excellent because they were a collaborative effort, not because Robbie Robertson was a genius. Helm wrote a marvelous book on the history of The Band, including the topic of publishing credits, if you haven’t read it, you should.


“This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band” (Levon Helm, Stephen Davis)

His voice doesn’t quite have the range that it used to soar to, but it still contains a lot of power. I don’t know enough about drumming to recognize if his drumming skills are still stellar, but some say his drumming is still good:

Helm survived a bout with throat cancer that was diagnosed in 1998, and his voice is noticeably more weathered than it once was, but in many respects the additional nooks and crannies suit this material beautifully; his interpretations of traditional rural folk songs like “Poor Old Dirt Farmer,” “Little Birds,” and “False Hearted Lover Blues” sound thoroughly authentic but with a bracing sense of force and commitment in Helm’s vocals, and if Steve Earle‘s “The Mountain” and Buddy & Julie Miller‘s “Wide River to Cross” aren’t venerable classics, they sound like they should be once Levon’s done with them. Though Helm adds a touch of boogie to “Got Me a Woman” and a jumped-up interpretation of the Carter Family‘s “Single Girl, Married Girl,” in this context they add some welcome spice to the stew, and Helm’s drumming remains superb. Dirt Farmer is a hard-edged but compassionate and full-hearted set of roots music from a master of the form, and it’s a welcome, inspiring return to form for Levon Helm after a long stretch of professional and personal setbacks.

J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon

swanksalot0 comment

Rookery
[The Rookery – 35mm, Illford film, Nikon 8008, scanned in Photoshop 3.5, or maybe 4.0]

Received my copy of this collection of essays, put together by Friend of B12 (FOB, as it were), Ginger Mayerson. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks good. Damn good. The front and back cover are photos of mine, so if you are creating a library of my published works, go ahead and order a copy (the Lulu Press version is larger, and is only $7, or you can order a slightly smaller version at Amazon for $9).

The Journal of Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1, is a collection of the following blog essays: On Essays by Paul M. Rodriguez, Liberal Fascism: An Interesting Moral Question by Steve Gimbel, Paint Splatters & Pixie Dust by Dan Kelly, Ten Dates of Christmas? Ten Lords A Leaping: The Gallant Mariner by Deborah Teasdale, Vanity by Susan O’Doherty, The Pillory of Hillary by Becki Jayne Harrelson, Reparation… by TJ Bryan, Richer Than The Sum Of My Skirt by Birdie C. Jaworski, The Music’s Between Us by Kathy Moseley, How to Scare People With Statistics by Tom Good, Red Lipstick by Eva Lake, Barbarella: A Woman of her Time? by Patti Martinson, An Invert’s Manifesto by Chad Denton, Roadtripping by Molly Kiely. Enjoy!

[From The Wapshott Press » J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon]

The Journal of Bloglandia is soliciting essays for a second volume, with more details here

Pilates

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Several people have suggested I take up Pilates. I just hate ‘being instructed‘ by anyone. Growing up in the Canadian woods is hard to brush off. Anyway, this book is supposed to be an excellent overview of the discipline, complete with good illustrations.


“Pilates: Body in Motion” (Alycea Ungaro)

The most authoritative, step-by-step guide to Pilates available on the market. Popular for decades with dancers, athletes, and celebrities, the Pilates Method is the perfect equipment-free workout for a stronger, leaner, fitter body. With great emphasis on precision and awareness, not only is Pilates great for the body, but for the mind as well. Using step-by-step mat-work exercises and a wide range of programs, from beginner to advanced, Pilate’s Mind and Body is the only practical guide that shows you all of the proper steps to follow and how to avoid common mistakes in your conditioning.

About the Author

Alycea Ungaro is a certified Pilates teacher and licensed physical therapist who discovered Pilates at the age of 14, when a foot injury derailed her classical dance career. In 1995 she opened Tribeca Bodyworks, New York City’s largest studio devoted to the Pilates Method.

I plan on checking the book out, but wonder if a stunt-man tumbling class wouldn’t be more beneficial.

Bucky Fuller: Dymaxion Man

swanksalot0 comment


“Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (Whitney Museum of American Art)” (K. Michael Hays, Dana A. Miller)

I’d really like to go to this exhibit at the Whitney – Bucky Fuller was a wild cat.

One of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.

Fuller called his invention the Dymaxion Vehicle. He believed that it would not just revolutionize automaking but help bring about a wholesale reordering of modern life. Soon, Fuller thought, people would be living in standardized, prefabricated dwellings, and this, in turn, would allow them to occupy regions previously considered uninhabitable—the Arctic, the Sahara, the tops of mountains. The Dymaxion Vehicle would carry them to their new homes; it would be capable of travelling on the roughest roads and—once the technology for the requisite engines had been worked out—it would also (somehow) be able to fly. Fuller envisioned the Dymaxion taking off almost vertically, like a duck.

Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. “If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” Fuller may have spent his life inventing things, but he claimed that he was not particularly interested in inventions. He called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist”—a “comprehensivist,” for short—and believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources. “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe” is how he once put it. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”

Fuller’s career is the subject of a new exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” which opens later this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition traces the long, loopy arc of his career from early doodlings to plans he drew up shortly before his death, twenty-five years ago this summer. It will feature studies for several of his geodesic domes and the only surviving Dymaxion Vehicle. By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?

[Click to read three more pages of Annals of Innovation: Dymaxion Man: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker]

Don’t think I’m traveling to NYC anytime soon however. There is a slide-show up at the moment.


“Critical Path” (R. Buckminster Fuller)

Conflict of Interest Kurtz

Seth Anderson0 comment

News You Can't Use
[News You Can’t Use – click to embiggen]

Funny if this minor interview would be the event that finally brings attention to the walking conflict of interest that is also known as Howard Kurtz. Dr. Eric Alterman has been pointing out this contradiction for what seems like forever. If Alterman gets around to mentioning this event in his column, I’ll append an excerpt.

When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss.

After the interview, in which he also read aloud from the book, Mr. Kurtz told his viewers that he considered Ms. Dozier “a remarkable woman.” He then added, “I should mention that my wife has done some promotion work for Kim Dozier’s book.”

The interview represented another complicated tangle in the complex world of Mr. Kurtz. He is paid by two of the nation’s largest media entities — The Washington Post Company, which employs him as a media reporter, and Time Warner, which owns CNN — to cover the doings at their news organizations, and those at their competitors’. But several media ethicists interviewed in recent days said that, given the financial arrangement between Ms. Dozier’s publisher, Meredith Books, and Ms. Annis, Mr. Kurtz should not have done this particular interview at all. (Ms. Annis said she was actually paid by a subcontractor hired by Meredith.)

“CNN has a lot of great journalists there,” said Thomas Huang, an ethics and diversity fellow at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center, who is on leave as an assistant managing editor at The Dallas Morning News. “Why have Howard Kurtz do it, given his indirect relationship with Kim Dozier through his wife?”

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at Poynter, said, “The interview would have had more credibility if somebody else had done it.”

[From CNN Reporter’s Interview Raises Ethical Questions – NYTimes.com]

—

Update: Dr. Alterman didn’t have much to add, other than a bemused chuckle of a paragraph

Yet another conflict of interest for Howard Kurtz? I didn’t realize such a thing was mathematically possible. Kurtz’s tenure at the Post is one of the blackest spots on the legacy of Len Downie as he goes off into the night. No way Ben Bradlee would have stood for it.