The scale of the office was intimate and I sat right in the middle of it, very self-conscious at all times but generally invisible to the great and the good who passed by. I imagined an early scene in some novel, maybe by Dreiser: the young clerk at his desk, his pen suspended in midair as he observes this or that eminence on parade. Isaiah Berlin, Lincoln Kirstein, Joan Didion, the debonair Murray Kempton, V. S. Pritchett who still sometimes turned in holograph manuscripts, Edward Gorey towering in his raccoon coat and white Keds. Not many of the names meant much to me at first; I came from another culture in another part of town.
Has Sante written anything on Gorey? It seems like a perfect match… or is that just me?
“I remember I was already thinking about doing an album like mine back in 2006, when touring with Nouvelle Vague…I was sure some Queens of the Stone Age songs would become wonderful, played softly, sung by female vocalists.”
Rather than make the covers album into a Nouvelle Vague project with French singers, though, he was keen to try something different.
“I wanted the album to be performed by English-speaking artists,” Libaux said. “I know that Nouvelle Vague sometimes sounded funny because of some of our singers’ accents. But my ‘Uncovered QOTSA’ had to be 100-percent accent free. I believe it’s because I wanted the lyrics to be as close to the bone as they could be. I then listed all my favorite female singers of this world and sent tones of e-mails. I was very fortunate since many of these singers answered ‘yes’ without any hesitation.”
Its charm may well wear thin on repeated plays, but you can currently stream the whole album at Soundcloud and decide for yourself:
If nothing else, I’d love to know who did the jazzy Milton Glaser-esque art.
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.
Now this is truly wonderful: Designer Pablo Delcán has created an animation to celebrate Kafka’s 130th birthday based on Peter Mendelsund’s cover designs for Schocken Books:
Schocken have just re-released five of Franz Kafka’s letters as eBooks with new covers by Peter, and, if that wasn’t enough, Peter has written a short post about Kafka and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich — whose music accompanies the video — on his blog Jacket Mechanical.
Another charming comic by Grant Snider for the New York Times Book Review, ‘Reading is Dangerous’ illustrates ‘Clunkers‘, James McWilliams’ essay about books as weapons:
Yes, it’s a TED Talk (sorry), but this seems apropos after yesterday’s post about Ivan Brunetti — The New Yorker‘s longstanding cartoon editor Bob Mankoff discussing humour and the magazine’s “idea drawings”:
(And if you’re a cynic, it might also help explain why you don’t think a lot of The New Yorker‘s cartoons are funny!)
At the TED Blog Mankoff selects his favourite New Yorker cartoons.
I’m a little late in the game on this (as usual), but teacher and cartoonist Ivan Brunetti has a new book out this month from Yale University Press. An illustrated autobiography of sorts, Aesthetics: A Memoir is a retrospective of Brunetti’s work to date, including previously unpublished drawings, personal photographs, and handmade objects:
So is thisathing now? I don’t know. You folks seem to like these posts, so maybe… (but probably not because a lot of designers I really like just don’t updated their portfolios that often—you know who you are… cold, hard, stare)…
Here are half-a-dozen covers that have caught my eye recently:
I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow by Jonathan Goldstein; design by Michel Vrana (I think this is actually from last year, but I saw it recently and I really like it. If I’d been paying better attention, it might well have made my 2012 list—maybe next to this!).
On the New York Times Lens blog today there is first part of an interview with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Conducted by journalist and filmmaker Sheila Turner-Seed in Cartier-Bresson’s Paris studio in 1971, the interview was apparently for a film-strip series on photographers produced for Scholastic:
I’m not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I’m a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won’t have an assignment and you’ll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be ‘photojournalist.’ ”
All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to the surrealists. But Capa was extremely sound. So I never mentioned surrealism. That’s my private affair. And what I want, what I’m looking for — that’s my business. Otherwise I never would have an assignment. Journalism is a way of noting — well, some journalists are wonderful writers and others are just putting facts one after the other. And facts are not interesting. It’s a point of view on facts which is important, and in photography it is the evocation. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They’re quick things and there’s a whole world in them.
By a strange coincidence I recently stumbled across a video of Cartier-Bresson talking about his work (via A Piece of Monologue I think). There appears to be at least some overlap between the film and Turner-Seed’s interview at the Times, so I assume it originated with her? (More knowledgeable people, please feel free to chime in!)
Sheila Turner-Seed’s daughter Rachel Seed (also a photographer) is working on a personal documentary about her mother called A Photographic Memory.You can donate to the project on Kickstarter.
At the Smithsonian Design Decoded blog, Jimmy Stamp provides a brief history of The Daily Planet building in Superman comics:
Whenever disaster strikes Superman’s Metropolis, it seems that the first building damaged in the comic book city is the Daily Planet – home to mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, his best buddy Jimmy Olsen, and his gal pal and sometimes rival Lois Lane. The enormous globe atop the Daily Planet building is unmistakable on the Metropolis skyline and might as well be a bulls-eye for super villains bent on destroying the city. But pedestrians know that when it falls–and inevitably, it falls–Superman will swoop in at the last minute and save them all (The globe, however, isn’t always so lucky. The sculpture budget for that building must be absolutely astronomical).
