Reason Magazine has a great illustrated flowchart showing how hard it is to immigrate to the United States.
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Category Archives: Art
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Monday, September 22, 2008
Mike Clelland’s illustrations are relentlessly cheerful. The lines are so relaxed but precise and I love the heavy use of arrows and labels:
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Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Perfume is the art for your sense of smell, just as music is for hearing and art for your eyes and cuisine is for taste. This past weekend at the Decatur Book Festival, my favorite author to hear, by far, was Chandler Burr. Chandler Burr currently writes about perfume for the New York Times. He […]
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Wednesday, August 20, 2008
A Day in the Life of a Musician by Erik Satie:
An artist must regulate his life.
Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm […]
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
Sculptor Richard Serra gave the 2008 commencement speech at Williams College. I like his comments about thinking, obsession, and play:
If it’s not broken, break it. One way of coming to terms with the prevailing language of a cultural orthodoxy is to reject it. It may be necessary to invent tools and methods about which you […]
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Medical students who study art develop better observation skills and make better diagnoses.
≡Robert Frost on creative growth
Monday, July 21, 2008
I’ve been flipping through The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and came across this marvelous bit:
No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet’s germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than […]
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
When you are outside drawing a tree, YOU are choosing what is in focus, what is not—there is an exchange between subject and viewer. That is the art. To be present in that moment.
[thanks, austin]
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Friday, July 11, 2008
Public sculpture can be hit or miss, but I think the Sibelius Monument is pretty sweet.
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Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Really impressive linocuts + lithographs. See more of Edward Bawden’s artwork at BiblioOdyssey.
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Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Singing, Ringing Tree is a sculpture in Lancashire, England that makes wooooing and oooooohhhhing sounds as the wind blows over the hilltop.
≡Old photos from the Brooklyn Museum
Sunday, June 8, 2008
The Brooklyn Museum has some great photos on Flickr. Currently in the commons are a great set of old lantern slides in Egypt, and a lot of images from the 1900 Paris Exposition.
In the Paris set, it’s cool how the primitive coloring job kind of flattens the images. They look almost like paper cut-outs or […]
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Tuesday, June 3, 2008
I like the idea of a corporate artist in residence. Surely a few companies would buy into it?
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
I watched Old Joy last week (trailer, Ebert) and recommend that you do the same. It’s based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond and uses its 70-something minutes very well.
≡Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (review: 5/5)
Monday, May 12, 2008
In 1800s America, Shakespeare productions had juggling and singing amidst the acts, and theatergoers would cheer the heroes, boo the villains, shout out lines along with the actors, even walk about on the stage. Opera divas would sing “Yankee Doodle,” “Home Sweet Home,” Irish ballads and other folk songs, and take requests from the audience. […]
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Sunday, May 11, 2008
David Byrne has a new art installation that connects an organ keyboard to various parts of a large building. Playing the Building makes a giant musical instrument out of the structure of columns, walls, pipes:
I’d like to say that in a small way it turns consumers into creative producers, but that might be a bit […]
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Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The Most Wanted Song and the Most Unwanted Song were written in response to survey results, just like the earlier creation of the world’s Most Wanted Paintings. The Most Unwanted Song features an operatic, rapping soprano and children singing a holiday polka:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and […]
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Monday, April 7, 2008
The New York Times writes about the upcoming collaboration between Big Boi and the Atlanta Ballet. [via around midtown]
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Sunday, April 6, 2008
Stefanie Posavec made a diagram of every sentence in On the Road organized by words per sentence. Here are more literary diagrams.
≡Der Weg der Menschen (review: 3/5)
Sunday, March 30, 2008
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 […]
≡Frans Masereel in Film
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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 […]
≡Die Stadt (review: 3.5/5)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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 […]
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Friday, March 21, 2008
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 […]
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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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 […]
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Chigurh vs. Plainview. I like Javier Bardem’s comments about letting go of the backstory for his role:
Maybe the character’s mother didn’t feed him when he was 5 years old, or something like that…. I started to do that [imagining a “backstory” for Chigurh], but then I realized… in this case, it would be much more […]
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Monday, February 11, 2008
A couple years ago, Alex Ross rounded up some literature on applause during concerts:
Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, applause between movements and even during movements was the sign of a knowledgeable, appreciative audience, not of an ignorant one. The biographies of major composers are full of happy reports of what would […]
≡(What I learned about craftsmanship in) The Violin Maker (review: 4/5)
Monday, February 4, 2008
Stradivarius: legendary quality, mystery. It’s upper-crust and exotic. How did Stradivari make such wonderful instruments? What sort of alchemy was involved, and why haven’t we solved it yet? John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop talks about the mysteries and realities of violin-making. His book follows the work […]
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Monday, February 4, 2008
“It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.” -Paul Rand
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Friday, January 11, 2008
Terry Gross interviewed Chuck Close a couple years ago. Chuck Close is known for his super-large portraits built up from smaller bits. For some reason I just really liked his interviewing style. [via 43 folders]
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Monday, January 7, 2008
On January 28 is Unseen Forces: Electronic Music by Atlanta Composers at Eyedrum, presented by the Atlanta Composers Group. Here’s the program.
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Sunday, January 6, 2008
Paul Festa left a comment that his film, Apparition of the Eternal Church (trailer), will be playing in Athens, Georgia on January 30, and showing across the south in the following week. I’ve got it on my calendar.
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Tumblr and tumblogs are great, but the attribution can be shoddy. I had to click my way back through 4 or 5 websites to to get to the primary source for these really cool illustrations, No Hugging Is So Hard. [sorry, I lost track of the vias, but the next-to-last was startdrawing]
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Monday, December 10, 2007
I don’t know where the nonist found this image. I love it. Maybe he will tell if you ask nicely.
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Monday, December 3, 2007
Art has no shortcuts, folks:
In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen—alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Bezedrine, etc.—but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to affect the health of the cook, and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as […]
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Monday, December 3, 2007
A few impressive woodcuts from the Otto Nückel book, Destiny: A Novel in Pictures. Really cool work. I haven’t been able to find much other information about him, aside from a Wikipedia entry in German and his being an inspiration for Lynd Ward and Art Spiegelman.
≡The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (review: 5/5)
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: “At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, […]
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