April 2010
29 posts
For a €5 “donation,” Bill, an American Marxist, will give you a tour of “Revolutionary Berlin,” featuring the sites where all hell’s expected to cut loose tomorrow during the annual May Day riots.
n+1 →
New site, new issue, Bad Money.
“Of the various things which are astonishing about Goldman, one aspect which really stands out is their demeanour,” John Lanchester noted yesterday at the London Review Blog. “They really do a very convincing impersonation not just of not giving a shit, but of seeming to go out of their way to be disliked.” Today, he adds this nifty little moment.
Meanwhile, Jodi Dean has...
Writers smoking. Writers on drugs. Writers masturbating. What a fun lot writers are.
John Adams: “Glass and Reich: End of a Bitter Feud.” Ouch?
FishbowlNY: “Chris Ware, the brilliant comic-book artist behind the Acme Novelty Library, designed a May cover for capitalist-cheerleader magazine Fortune, only to see it killed. We can sort of see why. A high-res version of the image reveals tiny figures celebrating with wine and music on top of the golden skyscraper. One helicopter shovels money out of the Treasury building while another...
It’s Saul Bellow day at the New Yorker, so his 1978 story “A Silver Dish” is freely available - for one day only.
If Only There Were Some Way to Know for Sure →
Of all the commentary that’s followed in the wake of the New York Times/CBS News poll of Tea Party supporters - and Daily Kos has a fine roundup - the best remains Phil Nugent’s entry, posted a week before the results were made public.
“Re:publica Highlights.” Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer on all I missed while blogging the Cannes lineup.
Katha Pollitt’s “Letter from Berlin.”
Neo Rauch . Begleiter →
Major retrospective opening in a few days in Leipzig and Munich and on view through August 15. Look to the top for “en” to browse in English.
DJ Premier's Malcolm McLaren Tribute Mix →
49’03”. Recommended, too, is textual accompaniment from Mark Beasley for frieze: “His thoughts and deeds run through the literature of art about music and music about art, from Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s Art into Pop (1987); Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1990); Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1991) to Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1993). In McLaren’s words, his was ‘a...
Skyscrapers →
A favorite motif.
“Economic Recovery: Are We Already On Our Way?” Heather Horn’s Atlantic Wire roundup seems to have appeared before Newsweek’s current cover story, a literal flag-waver that breezes past the only issue that ultimately matters, employment. I’m happy to entertain any warranted hopes, but even after the weekly’s pep talk, I remain, with Jonathan Chait,...
Yes, the Awl’s “David Remnick: American Giant,” a riff in verse on this week’s glowing profile in the NYT, is funny. But the joke’s on the paper of record, not on Remnick, who is right on the money in two recent New Yorker podcasts, one on Obama, particularly towards the end once he gets past the biography and onto the current challenges, and the other on Israel.
“No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax. Nor has anyone been able to explain why Mother Nature would keep playing along; despite what it might have felt like in the Northeast these past few months, globally it was one of the warmest winters on record…. Goofball...
UbuWeb Interviews →
Listening (42’07”). “Gertrude Stein at the Algonquin, William Carlos Williams trying to remember ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ Salvador Dali on his phallic moustache, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Derrida, and scads more from the archive.”
David Byrne, whose journal, as I’m sure you know, is a must-read, has quite the ‘do going on in this interview for the BBC in which he talks about Here Lies Love, the Imelda Marcos project he’s just completed with Fatboy Slim. In Austin, by the way, I caught Ride, Rise, Roar, David Hillman Curtis’s record of Byrne’s 08/09 tour. It’s no Stop Making Sense, but you...
