Because of a transmission error, a film review yesterday about “Live Free or Die Hard” misstated the critic’s description of the plot. It should have been described as “logic-defying,” not “logic-defined.”
Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.
Wired offers photographs, along with an interview with the photographer Ed Burtynsky:
"I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?"
“A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man”—The New Yorker
“Why isn’t this book famous…Very few novels in English, or literary productions of any kind, have come anywhere near its level for human wisdom or as a work of art.”—C.P. Snow
“Serious, beautiful and affecting, what makes Stoner so impressive is the contained intensity the author and character share.”—Irving Howe, New Republic
“a quiet but resonant achievement”—The Times Literary Supplement
“Stoner by John Williams, contains what is no doubt my favorite literary romance of all time. William Stoner is well into his 40s, and mired in an unhappy marriage, when he meets Katherine, another shy professor of literature. The affair that ensues is described with a beauty so fierce that it takes my breath away each time I read it. The chapters devoted to this romance are both terribly sexy and profoundly wise.”—The Christian Science Monitor
Going Balloon: An Interview with Forro in the Dark
Topic: Arts
5:37 pm EDT, Jun 16, 2007
Forro in the Dark is a band that brings not just the heat of Brazil to crowded, pulsing nightclubs — it brings the heart.
A group of five Brazilians and one American put their rhythmic spin on forró, a style of music and dance from the northeast of Brazil that is full of passion, joy, heartache, and love.
Forro in the Dark have been sneaking up the radar, as their latest album, Bonfires of São João, has been making waves from coast to coast.
Featuring such impressive guest vocalists as David Byrne, Bebel Gilberto, and Miho Hatori, FIT Dark have become an underground sensation with people in the know.
The hippest Manhattanites know that Nublu is where it’s at, and every Wednesday, FIT Dark can be heard making people sweat, sway, and groove until the sun rises.
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude celebrates its 40th birthday this year.
Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela today is watched by far more people than all the readers of Garcia Marquez's novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. But like the firefly, the soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience's passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable.
It seems to me that, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It's a "total" novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours. One Hundred Years of Solitude has done something astonishing: It has survived, accumulating disparate, at times conflicting, rereadings. Isn't that what a classic is, a mirror in which readers see what they are looking for?
Brian Eno once famously remarked that the problem with computers is that there isn't enough Africa in them. I kind of think that its the opposite: they're bringing the ideals of Africa: after all, computers are about connectivity, shareware, a sense of global discussion about topics and issues, the relentless density of info overload, and above all the willingness to engage and discuss it all - that's something you could find on any street corner in Africa.
I just wanted to highlight the point: Digital Africa is here, and has been here for a while. This isn't "retro" - it's about the future.
There's some great stuff at around 57:00, in conjunction with Duke Ellington's "Afro-Euraasian Eclipse". I first heard these samples on DJ/rupture's album, Minesweeper Suite, which I've been meaning to recommend for a while now. From the emusic review:
Barcelona-based DJ/rupture shows off his formidable turntable skills (and frighteningly deep record collection) with a three-deck mix that spans dancehall reggae, Middle Eastern drumming, underground London breakcore and Hot 97-ready a cappellas. ... /rupture's knack for drilling holes through genres (mashing up Aaliyah's "Resolution" with apocalyptic drum 'n' bass, screwing hip-hop into psychedelic glitch-folk) threads a groove that could spin any pair of hips out onto the dancefloor. The form (beat-oriented fusion) and the content (any sound you can imagine, never deracinated but instead radically re-contextualized) make the perfect icebreaker to get trainspotters talking politics, and vice versa.
Heads up ... Clear your shelf for William Gibson's new book -- due out in August.
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.
Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.
Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.
Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
(Previously discussed in March; if you've been counting the days ... we're down to 54.)
The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ... To make it possible to see without seeing.
About this book:
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author Jose Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.
And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human.
