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Tag: pop culture

Eve Babitz: Muse and Writer

Lili Anolik on the stranger-than-fiction life of Eve Babitz, “an irresistible hybrid of boho intellectual and L.A. party girl”, for Vanity Fair:

Eve Babitz’s claims to fame rest, in large measure, on her claims on the famous. She’s the goddaughter, of course, of one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Then there’s that photograph of the chess match with Marcel Duchamp, Eve contemplating her next move without so much as a fig leaf for cover. And what about the series of Adams, better known than the original, some of them, to whom she offered her forbidden fruit? Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Ed Ruscha, J. D. Souther, Stephen Stills, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Warren Zevon, Ahmet Ertegun all took a bite at one time or another.

If that were her whole story, however, Eve wouldn’t be a whole story. She’d be a footnote. A minor figure of glamour in America’s cultural history. A groupie with a provocative pedigree. She’d be Edie Sedgwick, basically: so relentless a companion to celebrity that she became a bit of one herself, the spotlight just naturally spilling over onto her, making her luminous, too. But she’s not. Eve is Edie cut with Gertrude Stein and a little Louise Brooks thrown in.

Why?… Eve could write.

(pictured above: Eve Babitz, chessboard, and Marcel Duchamp, photograph by Julian Wasser, 1963)

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Martin Scorsese: The Persisting Vision

The August issue of New York Review of Books has a wonderful essay by Martin Scorsese on the history and language of film, Vertigo, and cinema as a great American art form:

As in the case of many great films, maybe all of them, we don’t keep going back for the plot. Vertigo is a matter of mood as much as it’s a matter of storytelling—the special mood of San Francisco where the past is eerily alive and around you at all times, the mist in the air from the Pacific that refracts the light, the unease of the hero played by James Stewart, Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score. As the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again. For those of you who haven’t seen it even once, when you do, you’ll know what I mean.

Every decade, the British film magazine Sight and Sound conducts a poll of critics and filmmakers from around the world and asks them to list what they think are the ten greatest films of all time. Then they tally the results and publish them. In 1952, number one was Vittorio de Sica’s great Italian Neorealist picture Bicycle Thieves. Ten years later, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was at the top of the list. It stayed there for the next forty years. Last year, it was displaced by a movie that came and went in 1958, and that came very, very close to being lost to us forever:Vertigo. And by the way, so did Citizen Kane—the original negative was burned in a fire in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles.

So not only do we have to preserve everything, but most importantly, we can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by contemporary cultural standards—particularly now…We have to remember: we may think we know what’s going to last and what isn’t. We may feel absolutely sure of ourselves, but we really don’t know, we can’t know. We have to remember Vertigo…

(New York Review of Books)

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Alan Moore: The Revolution Will Be Crowd-Funded


photo: Leo Williams

Alan Moore discusses his short films, crowd-funding, the Occupy movement, The Prisoner, and zombies (amongst other things) at Salon:

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded. If Kickstarter and other enterprises are giving projects like Occupy Comics a chance, then it does suggest there are imaginative ideas out there with incredible use and application across the board. Not just in the arts, but in the sciences as well. It’s an exciting concept, and I look forward to seeing what emerges from it.

Moore talks more about his Lynchian short film Jimmy’s End — created with Mitch Jenkins — in this short ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary for Motherboard TV (worth watching just for the interior of the actual Jimmy’s End Working Men’s Club around the 10 minute mark):

He also discusses crowd-funding and ‘The Jimmy’s End Cycle’ of films — the last of which, Heavy Heart, you can still support on Kickstarter —  in an interview with Bleeding Cool from earlier this month.

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Design Matters with Steven Heller

In a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, design historian Steven Heller talks about design and his recent book 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design with Debbie Millman on Design Matters:

Design Matters: Steven Heller mp3

Heller really is an astonishingly prolific author.

(Full disclosure: 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design is published by Laurence King and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)

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Devil Sent the Rain | Weekend Edition

Writer and music critic Tom Piazza discusses  his new collection of essays, Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America, on NPR’s Weekend Edition:

NPR WEEKEND EDITION: Tom Piazza Devil Sent the Rain mp3

(via Largehearted Boy)

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Something for the Weekend

Sweet Nuttin’ — A primer on George Herriman’s classic and wonderfully idiosyncratic comic strip Krazy Kat at Robot 6:

Krazy Kat is far from a chore… Indeed, it is rarely anything less than a delight to read, although it can be a bit challenging for newcomers. The early strips are dense with wordplay, while the later strips take on the quality of near-abstract paintings at times. Then there’s Krazy’s off-kilter dialogue (“If only I could be star or a moom or a komi or ivin a solo eeklip. But me, I’m nuttin”). Thus, whichever book you decide to dive into first, I’d recommend taking your time. Read (and reread) the strips slowly and don’t feel the need to rush through.

Unhappy Endings — Jason Zinoman, author of Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, talks to Terry Gross for NPR’s Fresh Air:

I think that as you look at this period from ’68 to the end of the ’70s, generally, first of all, you see a lot more unhappy endings. There isn’t this kind of catharsis at the end that you see in a lot of movies before that.

The central kind of monsters are no longer werewolves and vampires and the supernatural. The central monsters are – or I guess I would say the central monsters become serial killers and zombies… And I think the other thing that marks it is there’s a certain kind of moral ambiguity about these movies and just generally a sort sense of confusion and disorientation that marks most of these films.

Meanwhile, over on KCRW filmmaker and author John Sayles talks about his hefty new book A Moment in the Sun with Michael Silverblatt for Bookworm.

And finally…

Rick Poynor on the dictionary as art concept for Designer Observer:

With book design, we should value appropriateness to subject, vivid animation of content, and the dexterity and panache with which the designers interpret every purposeful, cherishable convention of the book. The notion of continual reinvention as a worthwhile or attainable goal is particularly misplaced here…

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