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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published August 15, 2013

Warren Ellis Has Arrived

“I’m a comic book writer. I still don’t think this is going to be run by The Paris Review.”


Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine and Dead Pig Collector, in conversation with Molly Crabapple for The Paris Review:

I try not to get involved in the business of prediction. It’s a quick way to look like an idiot. There’s an expectation around writers of science fiction, which I sometimes am, that we’re predictors of the future, that that is the business of science fiction. Which we’re not, and never were.

Science fiction is social fiction. That’s the line from Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the politically committed writers of the sixties and seventies. It’s about using speculation as a tool with which to examine the contemporary condition. The closest it comes to prediction is in the provision of long-range weather warnings.

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Published August 15, 2013

Tom Gauld Totes


Tom Gauld drew this bookish astronaut to go on tote bags for his Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. I’m reliably informed that the bags are available from D+Q at conventions and from their store in Montreal.

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Published August 12, 2013

The Birdman


The Birdman is a wonderful — and an award-winning — documentary short by Jessie Auritt about Rainbow Music in New York’s East Village and it’s eccentric owner.  The store just has to be seen to be believed:

With CDs, VHSs and old cassette tapes stacked head high, Rainbow Music is a hoarder’s paradise. However, its quirky owner, known as ‘The Birdman’, knows exactly where everything is. Amidst the Starbucks and Subways popping up on every corner of the East Village, Rainbow Music maintains its mom and pop feel, and is a hidden gem to its patrons. Due to the weak economy, online music sales and pirating, and the changing neighborhood, this charismatic curmudgeon is struggling to sell what he has in his store. Despite these challenges, The Birdman carries on to his own tune.

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Published August 10, 2013

Toytown: Architecture on the Carpet

The Financial Times architecture correspondent Edwin Heath reviews Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings by Brenda and Robert Vale, which argues that construction toys such as Lego and Meccano not only reflect the architecture of the real world, but influence the way individual architects design:

Construction toys have always been about what adults would like to play with themselves. Or what they feel their children should be playing with. They are worthy. But somehow Lego has managed the difficult feat of appearing playful, of being versatile and not being overly didactic. If English construction toys reflect a residual, Pooterish suburbanism, Lego, whose first plastic bricks appeared in 1947, is liberated Danish pop art modernism, of the same world as Verner Panton’s fiercely colourful plastic chairs and Claes Oldenburg’s confusion of scales. It is the most urban of the toys, encouraging the building of whole cities.

The company recently brought out a series of kits to make modernist icons by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright. They are clearly aimed at adults, the kind of gift which confers on the giver culture and playfulness. In their specificity (designed for only one possible outcome), they are exactly what Fröbel and Rudolf Steiner were set against, the latter, one of the most influential of play theorists, being convinced that only the vaguest sense of reality should be designed into a toy so that as much room is left for the imagination as possible. These are toys emulating an already built reality.

It’s a fascinating idea, but I wonder if the younger generation of architects are more influenced by video games than toys?

(Financial Times)

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Published August 9, 2013

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

I’m ever so late to this, but Noelle Stevenson‘s Harvey nominated webcomic Nimona really is terrific:

The series will be published by HarperCollins in 2015.

(via Waxy)

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Published August 1, 2013

Books: A Documentary

Last year (as some of you may remember) Larry McMurty, author of The Last Picture Show, sold over 300,000 antiquarian books from his store Booked Up at auction. Now, filmmakers Mathew Provost and Sara Ossana of Studio Seven7 Films have started a Kickstarter campaign to help them complete a documentary about McMurty, the auction, and the antiquarian book trade in the US:

The campaign ends August 18th, and as of today they’re some way off their goal, so consider donating a couple of bucks if you want to see the finished film.

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Published July 30, 2013

Nicolas Roeg: “Well, I’ll Be Damned”

Also at The Telegraph, film director Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth)  talks to John Preston about his new memoir, The World Is Ever Changing:

Roeg insists that he had no idea what sort of films he wanted to make when he became a director. Instead he fell into directing when Donald Cammell, who’d written the original script for Performance, needed someone with visual flair to collaborate with.

Eventually, the film made legends of Roeg and Cammell, but at the time it almost finished them both. At an early screening, one Warner Bros executive was reportedly so appalled by the sight of Mick Jagger and James Fox exchanging sexual partners, clothes and identities that he threw up. On the film’s release, the critic of Life magazine described Performance as “the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing”.

… Now, of course, the wheel has come full circle and, as Roeg notes drily, he’s lost count of the people who claim to have played a critical role in Performance’s success. Is it a film you look back on with fondness and pride? I wonder. “I don’t look back on any film I’ve done with fondness or pride,” he says promptly. “I look back on my films, and on the past generally…” He shakes his head in a bewildered sort of way. “I can only use the phrase, ‘Well, I’m damned’.”

At the Financial Times, Peter Aspden reviews the book with new books about Orson Welles and Roman Polanski:

The greatest auteurs in cinema have traditionally had a habit of gorging on their favourite subjects, their leading ladies, their studios’ cash registers. Today’s directors are less monstrous, and altogether more respectful of the tiresome fact that cinema is a collaborative art form. Put it down to sharper accountants, blander movie stars, infernally complex technological demands. It is more difficult than ever to be a legend in your own lunchtime, and that’s a shame.

Interestingly, Aspden recommends the interactive iPad edition of Roeg’s memoir, which comes “complete with sequences from his films and grandfatherly accounts of their making, which ramble sweetly into occasional dead ends.” Nice.

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Published July 30, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Devil in the Detail


Gaby Wood interviews journalist Janet Malcolm for The Telegraph:

How Malcolm goes about her journalistic business is clear from her person. Her gaze is remarkably unflinching; unnervous, but not stern. She concentrates on looking at all times. She is difficult to interview, but for reasons much more prosaic than the dramatic ones I had conjured. She simply finds herself uninteresting, and so gives away little. You feel there is much more to know, and that the failure must lie in your ability to ask about it. Because when you listen back to the recording you find that she has not been especially evasive, merely – politely – private. ‘Have a macaroon,’ she says.

Malcolm’s most recent collection of essays, Forty-One False Starts, has just been published in the UK by Granta.  The US edition is available from FSG, (and is, for sake of disclosure etc., distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

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Published July 26, 2013

Interaction of Color Reimagined


Just in time for the 50th anniversary of Interaction of Color by Josef Albers, Yale University Press has partnered with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Potion Design to create an interactive digital edition of the book for the iPad.

In this video,  Michelle Komie, senior editor of art and architecture at Yale University Press, discusses the project:

While this sampler for the app includes commentary by Knopf art director Peter Mendelsund:


On a recent episode of Design Matters Debbie Millman spoke to Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and Philip Tiongson, a principal at Potion, about Josef Alber’s book and the new digital edition:

And, of course, Interaction of Color is still available as a good old book.

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Published July 26, 2013

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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Published July 24, 2013

Chip Kidd: What the Stories Look Like


Penn State alumnus Chip Kidd discusses his career at length in a recent interview conducted at the university by host Patty Satalia:

Kidd’s novel The Cheese Monkeys is  loosely based on his time at Penn State.

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Published July 24, 2013

Semi-Outsiders

At Vulture, Jonathan Galassi, the current president of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, reflects on Boris Kachka’s new book Hothouse, a history of the New York publishing house:

FSG came into its own at a moment when postwar America was opening up and out—when “semi-outsiders,” in the words of critic Irving Howe, were “starting to break into the central spaces of American culture.” What made FSG significant, though, was its ability to catch a long series of literary waves. Straus and Giroux and a whole series of talented younger editors made stars out of Southerners (and Catholics) like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy and Jews like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the émigré Isaac Bashevis Singer. There were the poets of the ­Lowell-Bishop-Berryman generation; Susan Sontag, an entire typhoon on her own, who clued Straus in to great, obscure European writers; and the late-sixties Latin American “boom” (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Neruda). There were the New Journalists (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion) and New Yorker epigone John McPhee; the internationalist poets Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky; and great children’s writers like Maurice Sendak, Madeleine L’Engle, and Roald Dahl. All contributed to what Kachka calls “FSG culture,” which he ­describes as “high-minded and scrappy, aggressive and refined, quintessentially American but thoroughly international.”

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