The Atlanta Film Festival starts next week. Here’s the festival schedule. The big opener is The Lena Baker Story, which “recounts the tragic true story of the first and only woman sentenced to die in the electric chair in the state of Georgia.” She was pardoned just a few years ago.
Frans Masereel’s book first appeared in 1964 under the title “Route des Hommes.” The 60 woodcuts in this book came forty years after the others I reviewed. From what I can piece together from the French and German sources that I can’t read, I think maybe it was connected with of some kind of exhibition […]
The Thurber & White send-up on the knee phenomenon:
Simply stated, the knee phenomenon is this: occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with… Often the topic of conversation has something to do with it: the young people, talking along pleasantly, […]
Maybe a bit of an alpha-male slant here.
Ernest Hemingway
Donald Rumsfeld “I like to use a chainsaw and cut wood and chop wood.”
Thomas Jefferson
Winston Churchill
Thomas Wolfe
Vladimir Nabokov
John Dos Passos
John Adams
Douglas MacArthur
Virginia Woolf
Leonardo Da Vinci
Benjamin Franklin
Napoleon Bonaparte
William Gladstone
Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we […]
The seven deadly words of book reviewing. There are over 200 comments now that add to the list, most of them very good.
Probably a parallel here with the birth of Athena:
[update: photo of a really awesome woodcut removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst]
From L’Idee by Frans Masereel.
Science confirms the runner’s high, which used to be just folk wisdom. It’s connected not only with better mood, but also with tolerance for pain.
An interview with Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, which I need to remember to buy:
Today there are great drawing tools in a lot of software packages, and many business people, bless their hearts, are getting better at using them. The problem is the pictures […]
As I continue the Frans Masereel Appreciation Week Festival, here’s an animated film adaptation of L’Idee. Berthold Bartosch had Frans Masereel’s help on the film for some of the two years he spent working on it. The end result is almost a half-hour long, and though it starts a bit slowly, there are some legitimately […]
Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes […]
A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here’s my favorite sequence from Die Sonne:
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—you’ll have to trust me that it’s worth your time]
Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. […]
Shop Class as Soulcraft, an article about the value of working with your hands and the increasing assembly-line nature of knowledge work:
Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a […]
You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, an online essay + soundtrack, “was born out of fraughtful observations of the state of our States and the repetitive, empty monotony of consumer culture and electronic music.” [via waxy]
The Stylophone is a pocket-sized organ you play with a stylus. Here’s a medley of Survivor, Final Countdown, and some other 80s hits. I love how the stylophonist leans back around the 45-second mark to kick out the full rock climax effect.
In the wake of our tornados last weekend, a fellow Atlantan has invented the tornado drinking game, which I’m assuming you could apply to your own regional weather concerns. “When you hear a TV reporter or anchor say ‘war zone,’ ‘epicenter,’ ‘path of destruction’ or ‘ground zero’…”
Atlanta Ballet announced the 2008-2009 season [pdf], which is looking pretty damn good. If only they still had the orchestra.
Dracula was pretty cool when I saw it a couple years ago. They do this great opening in pitch black, then the ghoulish red letters of the title project on the rippling stage curtains before they […]
I stumbled on these tabla lessons by Venkat last night and I am sorely tempted to buy a set. So cool.
In a New York Times article about the death of encyclopedias, a Britannica guy talks about well-designed books as a luxury item. Content might be everywhere, but good design can still expect an appreciative audience:
He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs—similar to the way […]
From an interview with Christian Landers, he of Stuff White People Like:
We have a generation of white people who want nothing more than to distance themselves from being white. They need to believe that the earth is being destroyed by evil white people, culture is ruined by the wrong kind of white people, and that […]
I watched Koyaanisqatsi this weekend. It’s got a lot of cool footage and overall it was worth watching. But part of the problem with the message (that we live a “crazy life,” a “life out of balance”) is that it’s so dependent on the soundtrack.
A lot of it made me think of those time-lapse videos […]
Recent photos of the Atlanta tornado. I was totally oblivious to the whole thing. I noticed a thunderstorm earlier in the evening, but late at night I was strolling around, returning some overdue library books while other people were picking up the pieces. Crazy.
A farcical English translation, with soundtrack, of O Fortuna from Carmina Burana. This made my day. [via alex ross]
It’s almost always the anecdotes that bore me in business books. The Definite Drucker is a sort biography of the ideas of Peter Drucker, the late consultant and management guru. I like a lot of the theory and philosophy, but when we get to the struggles of Motorola’s supply chain or decreasing overhead at Colgate-Palmolive, […]
A slideshow of the dented, crumpled, and/or burning wreckage of expensive/exotic cars.
The U.S. terrorist watch list now has over 900,000 people on it. [via funkaoshi]
The earliest known photo of Helen Keller, pictured in 1888 with Anne Sullivan. Things like this remind me that they were actually real people, not just nice little characters in a story.
Customizable graph paper—modify the pattern to your liking, and then it makes a PDF for you to print.
A tour of a 100-square-foot house owned by Jay of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.
I watched the Woody Allen film Sleeper this past weekend and still can’t get over the scene with the giant food.
About 20 years ago, The Orb released “Little Fluffy Clouds,” a great tune that samples a hilarious interview with Rickie Lee Jones and the music of Steve Reich. A friend of mine shared a worthy parody, “Grey Clouds.”
The offices of bldgs, a pair of Atlanta architects, was featured in a New York Times slideshow and article. It’s a pretty cool space, even though it looks like a bit of a disaster from the outside.
Every season, more paint falls off the walls and more rust develops. It’s like an art installation in there—a […]
Ozge Samanci’s daily comics, ordinary things, are a cool mix of illustration and collage.
In my neighborhood, two areas have a 1000% difference in household income levels. They’re barely a mile apart. I think I subconsciously intuited the differences while out on my runs, but seeing the numbers mapped like that is still pretty amazing.
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