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Tag: culture

Save the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York

The Rizzoli Bookstore is one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world and an icon of New York City architecture. Unfortunately the owners of 31 West 57th Street, the store’s home for 30 years, have recently announced their plan to demolish the six-story, 109-year-old building and replace it with a highrise “ultraluxury” tower.  The Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose mission is “to be responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings,” has declined to grant landmark status to the building on the grounds that the property “lacks the architectural significance necessary to meet the criteria for designation,” despite its apparent architectural and cultural importance. A campaign to save the store, and a petition to have 31 West 57th Street designated an individual and interior landmark have been started.

You can read more about the plans to demolish the building in The New York Times. While at The New Yorker, Jon Michaud wrote about his time working at the store:

Many of the things that Rizzoli offered its customers (and its staff) are now easily obtainable online: international periodicals, European popular music, and books in foreign languages. But there is nothing online that will replace the ambiance of the place. With its vaulted atrium, marble flooring, and wood-panelled shelving units, Rizzoli looked like the private library of a Medici prince, the sort of place where an Umberto Eco character would hunt down an ancient secret.

Please sign the petition.

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PressPausePlay

The full-length documentary PressPausePlay is now available to watch on Vimeo. The film, which somehow manages to be simultaneously both inspiring and melancholic, looks at the effects of digital technology and the Internet on the creative economy. Worth watching if you have a spare hour (although depending on your attitude to these things it might make you smile in joyful validation or retreat to your bed for about a week to weep quietly to yourself:

PressPausePlay was made by creative agency House of Radon.

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Simon Reynolds on Bookworm

Music journalist Simon Reyolds talks to Michael Silverblatt about his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past on KCRW’s Bookworm:

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Midweek Miscellany

Superhybridity — Tom Payne reviews Retromania by Simon Reynolds for The New York Times:

It’s not so much the selling-­out that saddens Reynolds. Rather, it’s our ready acceptance that the past is our only future: that after postmodernism, with its weary, overinformed view that there is nothing new to say, comes something called “superhybridity.” Superhybridity, a concept borrowed from an art magazine, exists because the Internet can bring whatever we want into our hard drives, so that we can sample it or mash it up: no culture, from any time or place, can be remote from us.

Anger — In light of the recent riots in Britain, Chris Arnot looks at the legacy of Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) with the author’s son David:

Something about the sudden switch from menace to charm, coupled with that jack-the-lad swagger, briefly brings to mind Arthur Seaton, the antihero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning… Arthur had already shrugged off the collectivist values of the postwar years. He was “trying to screw the world … because it’s trying to screw me.”

“Currently my head is empty. I am on holiday.” — Wim Crouwel at Designers & Books.

The Weird Outsider — A long profile of Jared Lanier, author of You Are Not A Gadget, in the New Yorker:

Like an innovative painter who alternately courts and scorns the establishment, Lanier often seems torn between embracing and repudiating his newly influential status. As we drove, he mentioned, with some pride, that he had been “banned” from the TED conferences last year, after publishing an essay about the narcissistic nature of the event in a London magazine. (A spokesperson for TED said that Lanier is welcome at the conferences.) He purported to be similarly unimpressed by Davos, the economic conference, which he has attended “a billion times.” “At one point, I was in an elevator with Newt Gingrich and Hamid Karzai,” he said. “There are really only so many times you want to be in that situation.”

And finally…

Writer Chuck Klosterman interviews Bill James, inventor of sabermetrics — the “ideological engine” behind MoneyballMichael Lewis’ book on baseball — and author of a new book Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, for Grantland:

This line is fascinating if you’re interested in crime fiction:

The whole idea of Sherlock Holmes is dangerous because it encourages people to think that — if they’re intelligent enough — they could put all the pieces together in absolute terms. But the human mind is not sophisticated enough to do that. People are not that smart. It’s not that Sherlock Holmes would need to be twice as smart as the average person; he’d have to be a billion times as smart as the average person.

But this is just great:

There were so many terrible things done by kings and emperors and everyday normal people that are just incomprehensible today. The historian Suetonius writes about how Nero — beyond the many thousands of people he killed in his official duties— liked to sneak out of the palace at night and murder people in the streets, purely for entertainment. Now, whatever you may think of our recent presidents, it’s pretty safe to say they didn’t do that.

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Something for the Weekend

Canadian book designer Bill Douglas annotates one of his favourite covers for the newly launched Toronto weekly The Grid.

Tools of the TradeJonathon Green, author of the three volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang and the somewhat more compact and affordable Chambers Slang Dictionary, on the life of a lexicographer:

What I do is to sit alone in a room with a screen in front of me, a book more than likely to my left, held open by the weight of a discarded piece of chain, and within reach walls full of more books which are not just books but also tools and at the same time both extensions of and bastions for my existence. Some of them I have even made myself. With this screen and books and book-shaped tools I chase down words. And by placing these words in alphabetical order and by naming and defining and providing a word-based background for their existence and more words that illustrate examples of their use I create yet another book which is designated more than any other type to be a tool in its turn.

A Nostalgic Baseline — Harvard English Professor Leah Price, author of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel and the forthcoming Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, on books as objects:

“In thinking about new media, we measure what we do now against a nostalgic baseline. We compare the way we really do use digital media to the way we imagine we once used printed media, so that we take the reading of printed books to stand for all sorts of values we think we used to have, like sustained attention, linear thinking, noninstrumental appreciation,” Price said. “But if you just count how many pages came off of the printing press at any moment, never in any historical period have books, let alone literary works, been the majority of printed production.”

What Are You? — A wonderful essay by Alexander Chee, author of the novel Edinburgh, on comics, identity and American culture at The Morning News:

At the supermarket when people asked my white mom, “Whose little boy is this?” sometimes I would defiantly insist I was hers, sometimes say nothing, but I’d glare each time as if I had eyebeams that could vaporize them… No one else was like me, except my sister and brother… In the bathroom I sometimes imagined myself as I would have been with either a white face or an Asian one, looking into the hazel part of my eye and seeing the green extend across all the way, or watch it shrink back, covered by brown. The freckles would blanch away or extend until they met and my face turned darker.

It would have been easier to be a mutant, I decided. I sometimes told myself I was one, that it was the only explanation for the reason so many people asked me “What are you?”

The Ludovico Treatment — Steve Rose on Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, released 40 years ago, for The Guardian:

Beyond the UK, the movie has never been out of currency, particularly in the US, and particularly among the young. Its sci-fi stylings have aged remarkably well, and its almost abstract portrayal of out-of-control youth and paternalistic society have made it something of a teenage rite of passage, the movie equivalent of The Catcher in the Rye. Remarkably, it has been a style guide for pretty much every subsequent musical genre… On the big screen, meanwhile, every time you see a gang walking along in slow-motion, a speeded-up party scene, a slow pan out from a closeup of a face, a torture scene set to cheerful music, the chances are it was plundered from Kubrick’s original.

There Are Enough Chairs — A short interview with designer Dieter Rams in the New York Times:

Most of the things are done already — you can’t make it better. Look at chairs: there are enough chairs. There are bad chairs, some good ones, mostly bad ones. But there are, even with a chair, possibilities to make it more comfortable or, from the economic point, you can make it cheaper, save some material or you can try new materials.

And finally…

Because it’s Friday, and because I can, The Velvet Underground Oh! Sweet Nuthin’:

You can thank me later.

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Something for the Weekend

Mark Lamster on Gerd Arntz, designer of the Isotype pictographs, at Design Observer.

A new book on Arntz — Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer — has just been published by Dutch publisher 010. A preview of the book can be seen here. (And, yes, my Twitter avatar is a Gerd Arntz Isotype. #nerd)

Barnes & Noble: The Last, Best Hope for American Bookselling? — Editor Edward Nawotka in Publishing Perspectives:

B&N still has enough consolidated power to “make” books. Its buying power makes it indispensable to publishers who need advance orders to justify print runs and the various other knock on effects that entails. They are providing –- via their Nook device –- the biggest rival to Amazon’s e-reader hegemony. And, let’s face it, if they –- along with Borders -– disappeared, how many communities would suddenly be underserved or not served at all? This is the reason small towns lobby B&N to open stores in their community: people are now, like it or not, accustomed to the selection available at big box retailers. True, perhaps half of those who shop at B&N’s aren’t there for the books, but what better chance is there to entice a not-so-avid reader into picking up a book?

The Man with Two Brains — Psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist talks about his book The Master and His Emissary with Natasha Mitchell for ABC radio show All in the Mind:

[T]he idea was that the brain was like a machine that carried out certain functions, and because there were two hemispheres there was twice as much computing power as it were, but we would compartmentalise things. So there was a story that language was in the left hemisphere, reason was in the left hemisphere and something like creativity and emotion were in the right hemisphere. That’s a complete and utter….misconception of things. Every single brain function is carried out by both hemispheres. Reason and emotion and imagination depend on the coming together of what both hemispheres contribute. So that particular dichotomy is incredibly unhelpful and misleading and I keep trying to steer away from it, but there is still, nonetheless, fairly obviously a dichotomy.

(If, like me, you completely missed this book when it was published, author A.C. Grayling reviewed it for the Literary Review).

Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers of The Heads of State interviewed at From the Desks Of

And finally…

The Gamification of Everything — NPR’s On The Media looks at the future of gaming and creating social change through game design:

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