On Raymond Chandler and his obsession with another man's wife
Topic: Arts
7:08 am EST, Nov 6, 2007
Chandler is so much a part of the furniture that we tend to forget how great he is.
"I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line," Raymond Chandler wrote, in the voice of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe, in 1949. "Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America."
I Am Tired of Being Mistaken for a Golden-Rumped Lion Tamarin.
Topic: Arts
6:50 am EST, Nov 5, 2007
Latkes are potato pancakes served at Hanukkah. Lemony Snicket is an alleged children's author. For the first time in literary history, these two elements are combined in one book.
There are plenty of other choices on the table, of course: duff, glutes, buns, booty, rump, caboose, backside, badonkadonk, bum, tail. We'll ignore fanny (in Britain, it means vajayjay), but how about prat? (Yes, that's what a pratfall is.) They all have their charms. But the bottom line? I'm still betting on butt.
... Magicians. Musicians. Technocrats. Inventors. Philosophers. Photographers. Artists. Humorists. Producers. Performers. Visionaries. Iconoclasts. Living National Treasures. Some of the most dynamic, innovative, eclectic and luminous talents in our culture are coming to EG, 2–4 December at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
This lightwriting project is the work of LICHTFAKTOR; on their MySpace page, they cite explanatory text from another blog, "colourlovers":
A number of graffiti artists have been tagging everything thought to be impossible without being caught. Well — it’s actually not illegal for them. They’re not using paint. As it turns out, time-lapse photography isn’t just for blooming flowers, skyscapes, or brake lights anymore. Termed Light Graffiti, tag artists are taking their colour to an all new level.
Using an exposure of about ten-to-thirty seconds and a tripod for best results, Light Graffiti artists start at the first click. Glowsticks, flashlights, reflectors, and even torches have been used as mediums to create all sorts of designs and tags, as the artist becomes a ghost of a blur, if visible at all.
Any person, place, or thing can become a central piece of the art. Because all it really takes is less than a minute, light tagging phone booth can be just as easy as something in the privacy of home, though staying home is certainly less fun. Some ‘hardcore’ taggers are set on Light Graffiti not actually being graffiti because it doesn’t have a physical presence, but after seeing photos of it, it’s not too different from tagging a building and having it covered or removed the next day.
See if you can make some yourself. The general rule of Light Graffiti seems to be experimentation and play, so, if your first ‘tag’ isn’t brilliance, keep at it.
There are few areas of music where repetition in its myriad forms assumes a greater significance -- and holds greater promises of joy -- than jazz. Despite the changes presented and challenges posed by many jazz recordings released in and after 1959 (Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were all released that year), the essential core of jazz coalesces around group interplay over successive sonic cycles from twelve or thirty-two bars in length. The repetition and moment-to-moment alteration of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments, even when they recur in tunes with different names, provide a ground for further exploration. When alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley begins his fourth solo chorus on "Straight, No Chaser" (from the Davis album Milestones) with a blustery one-bar figure that Charlie Parker frequently used on blues-based tunes, we hear both possible results of repetition at work. Adderley doesn't merely reproduce Bird's tones and phrasing: he worries the line, twisting and transforming it almost as though he has caught himself falling back into old habits and is trying to break their hold.
Ruth is a protective mother and wants a say in whom her daughters choose for friends. But can a parent tell her kids she thinks Jesus is a bad influence and retain the moral high ground?
