Archives for the 'Asides' Category

Someone wheatpasted a fake Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker critique about street art in Brooklyn. Says C-Monster, “I’m all for spoofing mainstream media, but, sadly, this piece doesn’t live up to its promise. For one, anybody who is gonna spoof the New Yorker better be able to deliver on the turn-of-phrase. This does not. (Sample sentence: “There is no sacrifice to putting this work on the street. That’s the street game, duh.”) On the content side, things don’t fare too well either. Someone risked arrest to let us know that there’s a visual kinship between the work of Swoon, Gaia and Elbow-Toe.” (Previously.)

Good news from Critical Mass: NPR plans to increase its book coverage. NPR senior supervising producer Joe Matazzoni is quoted saying, “Books are among the top three topics attracting traffic to the NPR site.”

“Lament for democracy in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe” in The Chicago Tribune. Joe Trippi calls it one of the “best” articles he’s seen on the conflict, and I agree.

One of my favorite parts of any novel is in The Drowned World. When the city of London is finally drained, the characters aren’t pleased, in fact they’re horrified. They can’t believe people lived in these structures and streets so far removed from nature (this isn’t a spoiler by the way, it happens in the middle of the book.) So it’s funny to see that these images from squint/opera, so obviously inspired by the book, are getting a largely positive reaction: “Look at what these people are doing; fishing, swimming, DIY, playing and tinkering within peaceful contexts. All positive things within buildings that have seen their day within this scenario,” says one comment. “That water is crystal clear. Looks like a wonderful place to live,” says another. You must take a look at the images by the way. The film and media studio’s “Flooded London” set is part of the London Festival of Architecture.

How the front page of today’s New York Times “perfectly encapsulates” Zimbabwe’s horror

Subtopia enthusiastically writes about Amnesty International’s Counter Terrorism With Justice campaign — a scaled replica of a Guantanamo Bay maximum security isolation cell traveling the country. Visitors are encouraged to experience isolation and share their thoughts in video (Flickr set.) Great post on the “symbolic implication of the replica cell itself, as if it were a mobile unit of detention being put on real display at a trade show or something, selling its exportability, strapped down on the back of some shipping vehicle as simply as any old box of trade goods, or a prefab architecture kit.” Amnesty has done such a great job using public space to deliver their message. This follows their famous (and best campaign) using transparent billboards as an example of to effectively get the message out to a mass audience.

Brody Condon just won a Rhizome award to adapt Neuromancer at a “red barn theatre in rural Missouri with a local, former political activist in the role of the protagonist.” This could be very wonderful or completely terrible, either way I want to see it. With the news The Fly is the source of an upcoming musical, maybe Broadway is next for William Gibson’s book. The full list of Rhizome Commissions Program winners includes several interesting projects, especially “Marfa Webring” by artists Claire Evans, Jona Bechtolt and Aaron “Flint” Jamison. It is described as an “attempt to alter the Google search results for the town of Marfa, TX by creating a Webring and, then, (with the cooperation of the town’s permanent residents) investigating the results of this action on the daily life of the town.”

Is this a joke? Entertainment Weekly attempts to list the 25 “best book covers” since 1983. But not a single one of these covers is memorable (and don’t expect to see for yourself from the article, EW inexplicably didn’t include any images to accompany the text.) Really A Million Little Pieces and The Handmaid’s Tale? High Fidelity? Prep?!?!?!?!? Did they just pick up books at random and input the ISBN numbers? This list is like saying Banana Republic and Old Navy have the most innovative fashion designers on the planet. Ok, Jimmy Corrigan is a good cover (obviously,) but if we’re going to throw in a graphic novelist for cool points, why not Black Hole? Chip Kidd is listed several times, but for the worst examples of his work. ICA had an entire wall of his book covers at their Design Life Now show and not one of those is on this list (He’s designed over 800 covers.) Here are some of his better designs. And regardless of what you think of McSweeny’s titles, they do graphic design right: I almost thought about buying How We Are Hungry just for the cover, even though I knew it would annoy me. Chris Adrian’s The Child’s Hospital is incredible both hardcover and paperback. Shelley Jackson designed her own cover and it’s lovely. I rather like the cover of All The Sad Literary Men too. Here are great book covers that came out just in the past year.

Jessa Crispin reviews Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North on NPR. She — shockingly — isn’t a much of a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale, but likes this one a lot: “I like a good dystopia as much as anyone, but I prefer mine to come with an organized resistance army.” (Previously.)

Caterina Fake has fantastic taste in literature: Arthur Schnitzler, Elfriede Jelinek, Stefan Zweig. I found her blog googling a book and enjoyed her concise reviews, (All The Pretty Horses — “Reading it was akin to seeing your cult band sell out, putting out Top 40 when previously they’d written only complex hieroglyphics whose meaning could be teased out only by those willing to climb the mountain and take the vows,” Alfred Jarry –”Turgid, overwritten and solipsistic.”) It wasn’t until a few years later I realized (what was once) her day job. Glad she’ll have more time now for the “hugely ambitious novel.”