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Something for the Weekend

Deciphered — Designer Peter Saville on his designs for New Order, particularly Blue Monday and Power Corruption and Lies, at Upon Paper:

To me a record cover is part of the everyday, the now. And regularly there were phases of reference and quotation that – for whatever reason – I found relevant or pertinent. There were things going on in fashion or architecture that I would be aware of… things that I would take a reading from. I was interested in how the arts in general, but in particular the applied arts, were in some way evoking the mood, the appetite or the direction, the direction of the now. I always had a sense of what direction ‘the now’ was, it started with my own senses and then I would double-check and double-check to determine that what I was thinking was not merely insular. Around ’82 to ’83, I began to feel confident in my own sensibility.

Txtng teh Apclyps — The Guardian rock critic Alexis Petridis talks to  Nick Cave about this new album:

“Texting is apocalyptic on some level,” he muses, when the title of Push The Sky Away’s first single, We No Who U R is mentioned. “It’s a reduction of things. Maybe the last book, the last thing that ever gets written is just a bye, you know, goodbye in text speak.”

And finally…

Teju Cole on literature, Barak Obama,  dirty wars and drone strikes, at The New Yorker:

The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.