Books, Design and Culture
Inspired by the Wizard of Oz, Buster Keaton movies, and a whimsical love of books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an award-winning 15 minute animated short by William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg and Moonbot Studios:
The film is one of five animated shorts nominated for an Oscar this year, and there is an interactive version of the story available for the iPad from the app store.
1 CommentRelated to the previous, the latest PBS Arts Off Book documentary short is about the massive changes that have occurred in the music industry in the last twenty years as a result of new technology and the Internet:
Comments closedThe 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.
Comments closed
Jacob Covey’s stunning cover for Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945 due in March 2012 from Fantagraphics.
Anxiety and Time — Adam Roberts, author of By Light Alone, on science fiction at The Browser:
The common belief that SF is in some sense “about” the future isn’t wholly wrongheaded. One feature of 19th and 20th century science fiction is that it is fascinated with time in a deep way. Time only opens up, as a wholly new dimension to be imaginatively explored, at the very end of the 18th century. It’s a puzzle, actually, why this should be. [The critic] Darko Suvin thinks it has something to do with the French Revolution. But before about 1800 people almost never wrote stories set in the future, and then after 1800 lots of people did just that. SF as a mode of projecting oneself into the to-come connects powerfully with human concerns in the way that specific prophesy – pedantic, fiddly, bound to be wrong – doesn’t.
Writing Machines — Tom McCarthy on technology in The Guardian:
I must belong to the only generation of writers who’ve written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka’s obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw your fingers at and the keys would smash into the roller. It felt like a machine-gun or something.
And finally…
Brian Appleyard on Andy Warhol for Intelligent Life magazine:
Comments closedWarhol now endorses a way of life. One simple technology—silk-screen printing—dominated his career. But it was enough to show today’s technology-laden, hyper-connected youth that they could do it too. With the instant publication of digital pictures and videos, anybody can become a cyber-Warhol, swimming in the great ocean that pop imagery has become. Apple’s Photo Booth software reduces the whole thing to a single click—just by selecting “pop art” under “effects” you can change your face into a very credible Warhol multiple self-portrait. Andy, in death, is a generation’s mentor.
Buzzwords of the Incurious — Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, delivers a searing review of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis. A must-read:
The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.
Swimming Out of Guilt — David Ulin talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus at the LA Times:
“I didn’t predict this for myself,” Spiegelman admits, firing up another cigarette. “I thought ‘Maus’ was going to take two years and I’d move on with my life. But it’s an ongoing wrestling match. Basically ‘Breakdowns’ ” — the 2008 collection that recontextualized his early work, including the first three-page “Maus” strip, from 1972 — “and ‘MetaMaus’ are the great retrospections, the period of my life I’m still swimming out of. Then I get to find out if there’s any other stuff in my pockets to make bets with.”
The World We Live In — Author William Gibson interviewed at the A.V. Club:
I don’t actually think of science fiction as primarily a predictive form. That’s its cultural reputation and that’s what lots of people believe it is, but my approach has always been that it’s invariably about the day it was written in. Regardless of what the author tells us, it can’t really be anything else. There’s no way it can be about the future, except it pretends to be the future. It’s like reading 1984. What it’s actually about is 1948, the year it was written. You see Orwell responding to various aspects of the world he lived in, which was changing, since the world always is.
See also: Margaret Atwood talks about speculative fiction and her new collection of essays Other Worlds with CBC Radio (audio) and The Globe and Mail.
And finally…
Trash — Nathan Heller on film critic Pauline Kael, a new collection of her work, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and Brian Kellow’s new biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:
Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.
Also at The New Yorker, Richard Brody looks back Kael’s book 5001 Nights at the Movies.
Comments closed
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about paper-cut artist Rob Ryan, here’s a short film about Etsy itself from PBS Arts Off Book:
Comments closed
In this interview for CBC Radio show Spark, Ted Striphas, associate professor in the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana University and author of The Late Age of Print, talks to Nora Young about algorithmic culture and the social implications of leaving discovery and serendipity to complex math:
CBC RADIO SPARK: Ted Striphas on Algorithmic Culture
Striphas has written a series of posts about algorithmic culture on his blog (also called The Late Age of Print funnily enough).
Comments closedSuperhybridity — 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 Moneyball, Michael 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:
Comments closedThere 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.
A Period of Digestion — Music journalist and author Simon Reyolds talks about his new book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past with the A.V. Club:
[S]o much happened in the 20th century and things moved so fast, and you had this enormous capitalist engine generating all these toys and gadgets and things that became rapidly obsolescent. It’s all piled up, hasn’t it? And you think of the sheer amount of recording that went on. It always blows my mind whenever I go record shopping how many records I’ve never seen before. I’ve been in record stores forever, decades I’ve been looking through them, and I still see things I’ve never seen, artists I’ve never heard of. The sheer amount of recording that was done, it is almost like this universe of music. Daniel Lopatin in the book actually says it’s a period of digestion, we’re digesting and processing all this stuff that happened musically and in other senses in this really runaway, fast period of time of production. And perhaps that’s fine. Perhaps that’s what we need.
And on a not unrelated note…
A wide-ranging interview with Alan Moore about his new book, Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969, comics and popular culture, for Wired:
[T]he overall legacy of the first decade of the 21st century has been one wherein culture mirrors what was going on in our politics during those years. We had a form of politics that was concerned with spin and surface at the expense of any kind of moral or even rational content. In keeping with our well-spun political landscape, I think a lot of contemporary art, if it has a concept it is a concept in the advertising sense. It’s a little mental pun, something that you can use to sell cars or burgers. But in terms of art, once you’ve got the idea of joke, if you like, there is absolutely no need to ever look at those works again.
And sticking with comics…
From Superheroes to Superbrands — Paul Gravett on Grant Morrison’s new book Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero and the poor treatment of the original creators of the comic book superheroes (thx Ed):
How easy is it for fans and pros today, so hypnotised since childhood by these ubiquitous, constantly repromoted properties, to ignore their tarnished histories? I’ve talked recently to some fan readers who are troubled when I mention this horrific, disfigured portrait lurking beneath the polished profiles, masks and capes, hidden in the attic, but who can’t seem to help themselves from still wanting to follow these perfect-looking, super-powered Dorian Grays, no matter what. Morrison prefers to elevate the superhero as an indestructible concept, almost an independent, self-actualising entity, acknowledging only slightly its murkier commercial side, but glossing over the exploitation rife in this business, then and now. Unlike earlier ‘public domain’ gods and goddesses from antiquity and religious faiths, Superheroes are as much Superbrands, properties that must make profits for DC, part of Time-Warner-AOL, and Marvel, bought by Disney. While Morrison and his ilk earn tidy sums from endless, spiralling makeovers of these franchises, both publishers are aggressively fighting lawsuits over ownership against the estates of Siegel and of Jack Kirby, joint architect of the Marvel Universe.
And finally…
A fascinating article by Adrian Hon on ‘cargo cults’ and Unbound, a crowdfunding site for books, in The Telegraph (via Waxy):
Unbound isn’t some fly-by-night operation; it was heavily promoted at the Hay Festival, it’s received gushing praise across the media – yet it may end up with a one in six success rate.
So, why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.
It is perhaps a little unfair to single out Unbound. Traditional publishers who jump on the latest genre bandwagon without truly understanding what made the original popular are just as guilty.
Comments closed
Inspired by Brian Christian’s new book The Most Human Human, the chaps from Radiolab examine what talking to machines can tell us about being human. The show includes an interview with Jon Ronson, author of The Pyschopath Test, about an article he wrote for GQ on talking to robots.
Brian Christian was also interviewed about The Most Human Human recently by CBC Radio’s technology and culture show Spark.
Comments closed
Here’s the neat animated short for the new nonfiction comic book The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, co-host of NPR’s weekly radio show On the Media, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld:
The book apparently looks at the history of the media and argues against the idea that media is external force outside of our control.
The Influencing Machine is published by W.W. Norton.
Comments closed