This seems pretty cool.

As a musician and pioneering turnable player-improviser, Christian Marclay has recorded with such collaborators as the Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth and John Zorn. He has built "unplayable" musical instruments — including a 25-foot-long accordion — and created such signature works as "Video Quartet" and "Crossfire," film clip remixes powering mind-bending interactions among images, soundscapes and music.

Marclay's new photography book, "Shuffle," packaged as an oversize deck of cards, is an invitation to play along with his view of aural and visual potentialities.

Literally.

A stacked deck

WSJ reviews Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul, a new book from Karen Abbott.

A young man walking up the stairs to a bordello encounters his father coming down the stairs. "Dad!" he says. "What're you doing here?"

"For two dollars," his father replies, "why bother your mother?"

From Publishers Weekly:

Freelance journalist Abbott's vibrant first book probes the titillating milieu of the posh, world-famous Everleigh Club brothel that operated from 1900 to 1911 on Chicago's Near South Side. ... While lesser whorehouses specialized in deflowering virgins, beatings and bondage, the Everleighs spoiled their whores with couture gowns, gourmet meals and extraordinary salaries. ... With colorful characters, this is an entertaining, well-researched slice of Windy City history.

The Most Happy Bordello

An LA Times interview with Michael Ondaatje, whose newest book is Divisadero.

A nonlinear narrative style often called "cubist" or "collage" that fragments both point of view and narrative line makes it even harder to place him. Ondaatje has said he prefers cinematic editing — he's written a book on the Oscar-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch — over the orthodox one-thing-after-the-other of the conventional novel.

Ondaatje on 'Divisadero'

I already told you to see this film, but I'm going to mention it again.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly was a powerfully incantatory film, in part because of the actual Dengler's matter-of-fact description of running barefoot through the tangled tropical foliage—dodging monsoons, sliding down ravines, fending off leeches, eating snakes, and fighting delirium as well as sudden attacks by Laotian tribals. Rescue Dawn, which rivals Apocalypto as a jungle marathon, has all this and more. Bale even looks authentically starved (as in The Machinist) ... Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a "real" movie that Herzog has ever made.

See also, coming soon:

A conversation with Charlie Rose and actor Christian Bale about his new movie Rescue Dawn. The film is based on the true story of Dieter Dengler, a fighter pilot shot down during the Vietnam war and taken hostage at a POW camp.

Here are more quotes from an interview with Herzog:

What's your next adventure as a "soldier of cinema"?

I shot a film in Antarctica. The tentative title is Encounters at the End of the World. It's not about fluffy penguins—but it does have a sequence about insanity and a primitive form of prostitution among penguins.

Can you wait?

Rescue Dawn: Werner Herzog Takes His Hero Worship Hollywood

Just because they’re cute and small doesn’t mean the Aranzi Aronzo characters don’t have real lives. Some of them are really deep. Some of them, like Terry the Aranzi store-dog/mascot, are not so deep. We’d go so far as to say he’s a little dim-witted. But you want to know what they’re up to right? Where they’ve been, where they want to be?

The Aranzi Machine Gun series is no firearm catalog. It’s a massive assault of cuteness and ridiculousness, with a special craft section at the end of every issue, to make practical use of the hilarious (if useless) inside scoops you got in the rest of the book.

Scary Cute Aranzi Aronzo

The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was born in Missouri, and his fiction was mostly set in the future and on distant planets. But there's no question that Heinlein—born 100 years ago this week—was one of Southern California's great prophets.

Heinlein is truly the bard of Southern California.

L.A.'s Nostradamus

Americans love gumption. We believe that stupid ideas become brilliant ones if you just keep working on them with bullish tenacity.

Filled with ingenious contraptions and overweening jerry-rigs, "The Adaptation" remakes "Raiders of the Lost Ark" on less than 1/2,000th of Paramount's original $20 million budget, conjuring exotic locales out of cardboard sets in parents' basements, casting tweens in Boy Scout uniforms as Nazi bad guys, and rolling a gigantic hand-crafted boulder through the family garage to create the film's signature scene. Nothing short of slapdash spectacular, The Adaptation is indie (or Indy?) filmmaking taken to its greatest and most sublimely ridiculous extreme.

A Jones for Indiana

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, muses about the Sopranos, books, and America.

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

A snippet:

In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy. Also in America, to a far greater degree than in Britain, the corporation and the language of advertising reigns supreme. To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people's outlook on the world.

A spot of truth:

The eye has been trained to scan, and to receive, and less and less to read.

More and more, Americans don't have the time to think, let alone to read.

Has the novel been murdered by the mob?

WSJ is afraid of dragons, but they make an interesting point ...

In an age of abysmal science literacy, with fantastical technological distractions a mere mouse-click away, what does the museum's decision to focus on make-believe monsters tell us about this venerable institution?

In a culture where old-fashioned fantasy has been replaced by the television and video-game industries, and scientists create real human-animal chimeras for experimentation, perhaps there is something reassuring about exhibiting the quaint beliefs of previous eras. It reinforces the conviction that ours is a more sophisticated and scientifically literate age. It flatters our belief that the rational study of the natural world and its inhabitants will somehow inoculate us against the all-too-human urge to exploit nature and one another. But this is wishful thinking on par with a belief in unicorns.

...

Most people are unaware of the museum's eugenic past; and officials there understandably are in no hurry to enlighten them. For decades the museum hosted international eugenics congresses and joint sessions of the Eugenics Research Association and the American Eugenics Society.

I wonder what Richard Dawkins and Michael Behe think about this exhibit. For now, I'll have to be content to know what Michael Behe thinks of Dawkins:

I believe his new book follows much less from his data than from his premises, and yet I admire his determination. Concerning the big questions, the Bible advises us to be hot or cold but not lukewarm. Whatever the merit of his ideas, Richard Dawkins is not lukewarm.

Of course, that was before Dawkins reviewed Behe's new book:

I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him.

I'm just waiting for this to descend into farce:

Vicious name-calling has accompanied these events, much of which is chronicled on both men’s Web pages. Mr. Finkelstein has called Mr. Dershowitz a "raving maniac," "hoodlum" and "evil." On normanfinkelstein.com there is a recent Finkelstein article titled "Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?" On Mr. Dershowitz’s Web site (alandershowitz.com), he has had students compile lists of "The Most Despicable Things Finkelstein Has Said," "The 10 Stupidest Things Finkelstein Has Said," and so on.

Bleak Mythology

DAFT PUNK is obsessed with robots. Not just any old heaps of metal that will vacuum floors but high-fashion, house-music-loving robots who move with silky, metronomic timing in mod helmets, black leather pants and jackets with "Daft Punk" emblazoned on the back in rhinestones.

(IMDB)

DAFT PUNK'S ELECTROMA