Massive Attack

Posted on February 18, 2019 by JMN
massive attack

‘I felt that [with] Mezzanine, the procedure had to be ripped up, the rulebook had to be changed’: Robert del Naja, right, and Grant Marshall. Photograph: Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton/Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones.

“Gigs have become very formulaic these days,” adds [Adam] Curtis. “Not just gigs but all of culture – and that’s the challenge. The way you make people look again is by finding a different sort of image. And so the overall aim is to show how over the past 20 years, we’ve gone into a very static, repetitive world that surrounds us with the same images that keep us from really looking.”

…

“… It’s just not the same world any more in terms of concentration. Attention span’s the biggest commodity of all now. Data is the new oil. It’s inside your head. That’s where the value is and so is the tension. I mean, trying to get anyone to concentrate on anything when people get excited if the audience swipes down a page. If you actually stop and click,… that’s gold.”

(Adam Curtis, documentary film maker, and Robert Del Naja, a founding member of British music group Massive Attack, quoted by Nosheen Iqbal, “Massive Attack: ‘I have total faith in the next generation,’” The Guardian, 2-17-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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“Stubbies” Defined

Posted on February 18, 2019 by JMN
australias new normal

Sally Deng.

Laconic residents [of Queensland, Australia] are interviewed every wet season standing in the debris of their cyclone-battered homes, clad in Stubbies (shapeless gabardine shorts that expose bum-cracks and, on a bad day, drooping genitals), drinking stubbies (small brown bottles of beer), making understated comments about the danger and the damage: “Yeah, it got a bit windy there for a while. Reckon me roof’s being recycled in Fiji by now …”

(Kim Mahood, “Australia’s Burning, Flooding, Disastrous New Normal,” NYTimes, 2-14-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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This Is America, Too

Posted on February 18, 2019 by JMN
bronx bach 1

Photograph by Stephen Hiltner.

bronx bach 2

Photograph by Stephen Hiltner.

Since 1991, the Bronx Conservatory of Music, a nonprofit arts organization, has provided low-cost education in classical music to a constituency that has been historically underexposed to the tradition. And at a time when music classes are being cut from public schools everywhere, it has become an unlikely success story: a weekly pop-up school that trains students, more than 80 percent of whom are black or Hispanic, in a musical tradition long characterized by a lack of racial diversity.

(Stephen Hiltner, “Saturdays in the Bronx With Bach,” NYTimes, 2-15-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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“Moral Multiplier”

Posted on February 18, 2019 by JMN
houston flood after harvey

Flooding in a residential area near the Brazos River south of Houston in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey. Credit Barbara Davidson for The New York Times.

… The effects of individual lifestyle choices are ultimately trivial compared with what politics can achieve… Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply… That is what is meant when politics is called a “moral multiplier”… We shouldn’t ask anyone — and certainly not everyone — to manage his or her own carbon footprint before we even really try to enact laws and policies that would reduce all of our emissions… That is the purpose of politics: that we can be and do better together than we might manage as individuals.

(David Wallace-Wells, “Time To Panic,” NYTimes, 2-16-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Maurice Sendak’s Allure

Posted on February 16, 2019 by JMN
Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak in 1963. Credit Sam Falk/The New York Times.

“Reaching the kids is important, but secondary,” Sendak once said. “First, always, I have to reach and keep hold of the child in me…” With their flattened perspective, the book’s pages have the allure of the poster, brazen, sleek and sturdy [referring to “In the Night Kitchen,” 1970].

(Maria Russo, “In Praise of Maurice Sendak,” NYTimes, 2-14-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Art in the Closet

Posted on February 16, 2019 by JMN
Mark Rothko painting

Mark Rothko’s “Untitled” (1960). Credit Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Sotheby’s.

… The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced plans to sell Mark Rothko’s “Untitled” (1960), mainly to “address art historical gaps” like works by women and people of color… The deep burgundy oil on canvas… is expected to bring $35 million to $50 million [at auction]… The Rothko has not been exhibited at the museum since 2002 nor lent since 2008….

(Robin Pogrebin, “SFMoMA to Sell 1960 Rothko to Help Diversify its Holdings,” NYTimes, 2- 5-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Tolkien, Amateur

Posted on February 16, 2019 by JMN
Tolkien fantasy image

A fantasy landscape watercolor by Tolkien, possibly from around 1915. Credit The Tolkien Trust.

“He’s doing the drawings and the maps and the spreadsheets and all of that detail — the language, the calligraphy — for himself,” [Richard Ovenden, head of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford] said, after pointing out that Tolkien didn’t write his books to earn a living or because he considered himself to be a professional creative writer… “It helps him populate the world with a reality that would be weaker otherwise.”

(Peter Libbey, “Tolkien’s World: An Exhibition Transports Us to Middle-earth,” 2-14-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Photographer on the Straightaway

Posted on February 16, 2019 by JMN
Annie Leibovitz

Ms. Leibovitz in 1976. Credit Annie Leibovitz and Hauser & Wirth.

When Annie Leibovitz was starting out as a photographer in San Francisco, she would toss her camera equipment into the back of her ’63 Porsche Cabriolet convertible and tear off to Los Angeles on Highway 5.

“You used to be able to go 80, 90, 100 miles per hour — it was a straightaway,” Ms. Leibovitz recalled in a recent interview at her Manhattan studio, wearing black and her signature glasses. “You would just get on it and drive like a bat out of hell.”

(Robin Pogrebin, “Annie Leibovitz Revisits Her Early Years,” NYTimes, 2-14-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Touché

Posted on February 16, 2019 by JMN
Joelle Taylor

‘Spoken word allowed me to bypass literary gatekeepers’ … Joelle Taylor.

… I was, in part, asking a question of myself: whether poetry that arose out of social media could hold up under intensive close reading. The answer, in short, was yes… As time passes, and the new poets grow older, a critical discourse will develop, and we’ll begin to see a canon emerge… “Spoken word,” Joelle Taylor says, “is proper poetry. But poetry for the mouth has a different instinct than that for the pen; of equal value, but different. We must be judged on the terms of the chosen expression. Those who undermine the form often reveal an elitist, classist bias – as seen in their need to define and own poetry. You cannot own an art”.

(Sarah Crown, “Generation next: the rise — and rise — of the new poets,” The Guardian, 2-16-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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The Fall and Fall of Title Editing

Posted on February 16, 2019 by JMN

image_570814257484634

Two headlines appearing for different articles in The Guardian on Saturday, February 16, 2019:

“Generation next: the rise – and rise – of the new poets” (Sarah Crown)

“What does it meme? The rise and rise of the fashion viral” (Morwenna Ferrier)

 

(c) 2019 JMN.

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