Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.
"My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy."
Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read. Those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I’m pretty sure that’s what a bookshelf is there to prove. The reading of those books is entirely incidental.
There are, it seems, people who feel stress about owning volumes they haven’t read. Evidently some of them believe a kind of statute of limitations is in effect. If you don’t expect to read something in, say, the next year, then, it is wrong to own it.
Book reviewing may seem in reasonable health. But the authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture and an increasingly commercial publishing industry. Literary journalism needs to get better if it is to survive.
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
I've recently been referencing this book with a pull quote from a recent review:
What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?
About the book, Lewis Black says:
I have never been Mr. Happy, but after reading Against Happiness, I felt a lot better about myself. It almost made me happy. An important book and a stunning reminder, in these troubled times, that there are important lessons in our pain and that a smile may make a better moment, but not a better world.
Publishers Weekly says:
This slender, powerful salvo offers a sure-to-be controversial alternative to the recent cottage industry of high-brow happiness books. G. Eric Wilson claims that Americans today are too interested in being happy. (He points to the widespread use of antidepressants as exhibit A.) It is inauthentic and shallow, charges Wilson, to relentlessly seek happiness in a world full of tragedy. While he does not want to romanticize clinical depression, Wilson argues forcefully that melancholia is a necessary ingredient of any culture that wishes to be innovative or inventive. In particular, we need melancholy if we want to make true, beautiful art. Though others have written on the possible connections between creativity and melancholy, Wilson's meditations about artists ranging from Melville to John Lennon are stirring. Wilson calls for Americans to recognize and embrace melancholia, and he praises as bold radicals those who already live with the truth of melancholy. Wilson's somewhat affected writing style is at times distracting: his prose is quirky, and he tends toward alliteration (To be a patriot is to be peppy: a person seeking slick comfort in this mysteriously mottled world). Still, beneath the rococo wordsmithing lies provocative cultural analysis.
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer’s new bible, the transport enthusiast’s dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who’s ever traveled in a city.
Sample the praise:
Must-have ... must-read ... impossibly nerdy and thoroughly compelling ... delightful ... fabulous ... fascinating ... fantastic ... perfect ... pure catnip ... the stuff that dreams are made of ... sheer public transit/map porn! An object lesson in information design.
If you enter the search terms “Norman Mailer” and “hammer” on YouTube, you will be directed to a clip titled “Norman Mailer vs Rip Torn—on camera brawl.” Click on the link and an amazing series of frames rolls across the computer screen: Torn, the accomplished and respected actor, bonks Mailer, the novelist and trailblazing New Journalist, over the head with a hammer, drawing blood. The two men tussle on the grass, grunting and cursing. Then Mailer bites Torn’s ear half off in retaliation.
Four of Mailer’s children (three of them under the age of 10) can be heard screaming and crying in terror as Mailer’s fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, bursts into the frame, shouting obscenities at Torn and smacking him repeatedly in the head.
It’s the horrifying climax of Maidstone, Mailer’s third experimental film, which was released in 1971. He called it “a guerrilla raid on the nature of reality.”
Although he is one of the most important American photographers of his generation, Lee Friedlander remains an enigma.
With a repertoire of subjects ranging from street scenes to nudes, self-portraits and factory workers, he has spent decades documenting the warp and weft of the American vernacular. Yet his extraordinary formal composition has always set him apart from his peers.
His new exhibition reveals what happens when Friedlander turns his painterly, avant-garde lens on the landscapes of North American parks. Featuring 36 photographs taken over a 20-year period, the show is devoted to the public spaces, including Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.
