Listing

2013–05–23 Foote and his mouth
Text For roughly three decades in the mid-18th century Foote was England’s pre-eminent stage comic, the toast of the clubs and coffee-houses of London’s ...
2013–05–22 Room 237
Text … my favorite part of Room 237 [is] the analysis of the Overlook Hotel’s uncanny architecture by the solitary female voice-over — ...
2013–05–16 Blickets
Text In “Playing for All Kinds of Possibilities,” a very fun science article in yesterday’s New York Times, reporter David Dobbs describes how ...
2013–05–14 101 Spring Street Restored
Image The exterior of 101 Spring Street, 1972. Photograph: Paul Katz/Courtesy Judd Foundation Archives. Museum-quality art, museum-quality design, and the ...
2013–05–07 The Choco Pie
Text The Choco Pie is a mouth-drying, individually wrapped slab of cake, marshmallow and chocolate, and in South Korea it is as important a part of ...
2013–04–29 Latest episode of Pomerantsevision
Text I first met Mamyshev in the mid-noughties. Hyper-camp and always trying on new ideas, he was just planning his next role: Putin. ‘When I became ...
2013–04–17 The Bitcoin Bubble
Text Historically, money arose from, and in conjunction with, this power. (This point has been made repeatedly over the years, most recently in David ...
2013–04–16 Roberto Bolaño at the baths
Text Together, riding a Benelli—they were everywhere then—we attempted to visit all the baths in Mexico City, guided by an absolute eagerness that was a ...
2013–04–15 Young Mr. Marx
Text The young Marx began his career by securing a post at a radical newspaper in Germany. Journalism was to provide him for the rest of his days with a ...
2013–03–22 Dwight Garner on Richard Hell
Text Mr. Hell’s intellectual progress consisted of defining himself as against, rather than for, things. He scorned the Beats and their “insistence on ...
2013–03–04 The predilections of twins
Text There is further cause for concern. Mistra’s inventories encoded a surprising array of complex, highly individuated behaviours by means of ...
2013–02–25 Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide
Text I mention this now because I think that, after my nearly 20 years online, the Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide page at ...
2013–02–25 Vauxhall & We
Text The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the ...
2013–02–19 ‘Racecraft’
Text Which is where racecraft comes in. If today there is widespread agreement about the inadequacy of race as a biological concept, agreement is just as ...
2013–02–19 Indicated saturation
Text Once in a while, though, the stakes get raised. In October 2009, an administrator posted a thread with the subject line “If you have ordered 2C-B-fly ...
2013–02–11 Victor Shklovsky
Text Shklovsky made a book of it, an odd epistolary novel titled Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923): Triolet had allowed him to write to her on the ...
2013–02–11 An encounter with J-P Sartre (2000)
Text Les Temps modernes had played an extraordinary role in French, and later European and even Third World, intellectual life. Sartre had gathered around ...
2013–02–07 Angela Carter on Elizabeth Wilson (1985)
Text Here she sums up the present condition of aesthetics with positively majestic severity. Yet it is precisely when she discusses fashion in the present ...
2013–02–07 The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks
Text In comic strips of the early to mid-20th century, cartoonists often needed to represent expressive non-verbal noises in the characters' speech ...
2013–01–31 P.G. Wodehouse, ‘Back to Whiskers’
Text Whether the old critics were bitter because they had beards or grew beards because they were bitter is beside the point. The fact remains that all the ...
2013–01–30 Neutral monism
Text Thomas Nagel [in Mind and Cosmos] begins with the clearest of materialism’s problems: the great difficulty it has explaining the subjective character ...
2013–01–28 The temperature of self-regard (1997)
Text … As Audrey edged toward retirement, she suffered substitution; she watched from the sidelines, without sorrow, as other stars took her place. ...
2012–12–14 Brian Dillon on ‘Aspen’
Text In August 1971 the US Postal Service wrote to Phyllis Johnson, the publisher of Aspen, an arts and culture quarterly then in its sixth year, to inform ...
2012–12–11 Messi’s magic tricks
Text On Feb. 26, with Barcelona tied, 1-1, against Atletico Madrid in the 81st minute, Messi curled a free kick from 25 yards with impeccable accuracy and ...
2012–11–21 Texts about yellowism
Text Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. I think that especially “Black on Maroon” with the title “A potential ...
2012–11–14 The lemony Richard Burton
Text Burton’s diaries, published now for the first time, are filled with these kinds of pocket-size delights. I grapple-snapped my way through them and ...
2012–11–14 ‘Study For A Fence And A Wall,’ 2006
Text The fence/wall could be built, Mr. King explained, using a slipform machine to lay a concrete foundation in a 5-foot deep trench cut into the desert ...
2012–07–17 Cinema Ritrovato
Image The ‘Cento anni fa’ programme is the brainchild of Mariann Lewinsky, a scholar whose expansive vision is coupled with an infectious enthusiasm; she ...
2012–06–22 Little golf pencil
Text By Mary Ruefle, from Issue 13 of Ecotone. Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of Ruefle’s writings on poetry, will be published next month by Wave ...
2012–06–13 Flying cars, technology and labor
Text The usual move in science fiction is to remain vague about the dates, so as to render “the future” a zone of pure fantasy, no different than Middle ...
2012–06–11 On Chinese signage in Hergé
Text One prevalent poster is an advertisement for Siemens (西門子, ‘Xi-men-zi’), which had run factories in China since 1899. Indoors there are ...
2012–05–25 Interview with Royal Headache
Text 1. Big Star – Radio CityNo one has ever been this badass at guitar. Alex Chilton is probably my favorite guitarist of all time, these are his guitar ...
2012–05–18 Michael Merriam: ‘Brothel, Washington DC’
Text I always hesitate and breathe deeply before I tell any of these stories. I don’t really know what they mean. Looking back, despite all my ...
2012–05–16 The making of Marilyn Monroe
Text Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland had challenged and defeated the contract system. Katharine Hepburn contrived her own material as early as The ...
2012–05–13 James Thurber, ‘Our Own Modern English Usage: After Reading a Book on the Subject’
Text The Buried Whom, as it is called, forms a special problem. That is where the word occurs deep in a sentence. For a ready example, take the common ...
2012–04–25 Raymond Roussel at his own expense
Text Born in 1877 on the boulevard Malesherbes, a few doors down from the Prousts, Roussel grew up in obscene luxury (the family home contained both the ...
2012–03–23 T.J. Clark: Picasso in England
Text Picasso, ‘The Source’ (1921); Henry Moore, ‘Reclining Figure’ (1936).Again the question is distance and literalness. At the root of modernism ...
2012–02–09 Also from Robert Walser’s ‘Berlin Stories’ (1907; t. Susan Bernofsky)
Text Meanwhile you have rolled yourself a cigarette, say, and inserted it with great care between your well-practiced lips. With such an apparatus in your ...
2012–02–09 From Robert Walser’s ‘Berlin Stories’ (1907; t. Susan Bernofsky)
Text Another lager please! At Aschinger, you quickly adopt a familiar food-and-drink tone of voice; after a certain amount of time there, a person can’t ...
2011–12–14 Robert Brownjohn
Text By the time the album came out the title had been changed to “Let It Bleed,” but Brownjohn’s design was so powerful that the band ...
2011–12–08 The career of Monte Hellman
Text For his most significant outings as director, however, he enjoyed remarkable latitude: Corman trusted him to do what he wanted with the westerns and ...
2011–12–02 William Hazlitt on Edmund Burke (1819)
Text Burke was an acute and accomplished man of letters – an ingenious political essayist … He had the power of throwing true or false weights ...
2011–11–25 What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook
Text Another thing I did not write about quitting Facebook was that one of the great social pleasures in my life has been to leave gatherings or parties ...
2011–11–25 In Camberwell
Text It is the religious missions and nail bars that seem to do best, especially the missions. You would not know, from the Camberwell Road, that this is a ...
2011–11–10 Nancy Pelosi’s morning routine
Text During her forty-five-minute walk, she plans her day, touches base with her staff, makes thank-you calls to donors, and keeps up with overnight ...
2011–11–09 George Orwell’s defense of English cooking
Text The essay, published in the Evening Standard in December 1945, dwells lovingly on kippers, Yorkshire pudding, bread sauce, Stilton, Oxford marmalade ...
2011–11–09 Joe Frazier obituary
Text It was an overpowering modus operandi that led to versions of the heavyweight crown from 1968 to 1973. Frazier won 32 fights in all, 27 by knockouts, ...
2011–11–07 The metaphysics of Yuichi Yokoyama
Text Yokoyama’s second graphic novel, the recently translated Garden, also follows the logic of motion from beginning to end, of journey to destination. ...
2011–11–05 Sidelines at the marathon
Text Mile 2 Following the graceful curve of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, runners practically coast into Bay Ridge, their introduction to Brooklyn. For ...
2011–10–25 Copiale cipher
Text The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War. ...
2011–10–09 Michel Houellebecq and character
Text Moreover, ‘the simple play of historical forces’ made the post-individual approach increasingly realistic, as human personalities became ...
2011–10–08 Christopher R. Beha on the ‘realist novel’
Text Wallace didn’t believe that this self-consciousness could be put back in its box or neutralised by the prelapsarian gestures of a book like The ...
2011–10–08 ‘Guggenheim Color’ by Fine Paints of Europe (of Woodstock, VT)
Text Beyond the concept itself, which is obviously golden—no, wait, it’s conceptually golden precisely because of the art that was chosen, why ...
2011–10–06 Postcard from the 49th New York Film Festival
Text A modern story set amid the high-rise reflections and blinking lights of midtown Manhattan, Shame can be looked at as a companion piece to ...
2011–10–05 Putin’s Rasputin
Text In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture ...
2011–10–05 The Grand Map
Text Among Mein Herr’s many big ideas, none is as familiar to us as the Grand Map. We use it, or a version of it, on a daily basis. With Google Street ...
2011–10–01 ‘160 km’ at Kid Yellin
Text Elaine Cameron-Weir, 100 (steel), 2011, rolling tobacco, 96 × 5 × 5 in. Kid Yellin is gigantic, and the show is sparsely populated, so there ...
2011–09–30 Artaud-Mania
Text Until then, the twenty-two-year-old Fateman hadn't confessed much in her work; her earlier zines (including the series Snarla, cowritten in the early ...
2011–09–09 David Graeber on the barter myth
Text Even when strangers met and barter did ensue, people often had a lot more on their minds than getting the largest possible number of arrowheads in ...
2011–09–09 Harold Bloom as Kurtz
Text Before we get into this any further, I should mention that Bloom and I were once employed by the same academic department. I hasten to add, lest there ...
2011–09–08 ‘Mens Rea’ Legal Protection Erodes in U.S. as Federal Criminal Code Expands
Text As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time. When the police came to Wade ...
2011–09–07 Barney Rosset and the history of Grove Press
Text Steven Brower and John Gall have called the collaboration between Rosset and Kuhlman, which lasted for twenty years, “a marriage of imagery and ...
2011–09–07 On Ernest Gellner’s ‘Nations and Nationalism’
Text Pre-modern socities which possess agriculture and literacy, the inhabitants of what Gellner sometimes calls “Agraria,” were economically ...
2011–09–04 ‘Cleanup Time,’ February 2000
Text XTC Apple Venus Volume 1 (TVT) Since their outtakes weren’t even rags or bones and their idea of a class pop arranger was the same as Elton ...
2011–09–02 Our 11 Best Places to Eat in Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Text < 10. Ba Xuyen – The beloved Vietnamese sandwich shop is open only from 7:30am till 6:30pm, but I’ve known people to hurry home from ...
2011–09–01 Hollywood in the Fifties
Text [Louis Menand on Dwight Macdonald:] Before 1962, an educated cultural consumer might understandably have concluded that there was not much in the world ...
2011–08–09 In Hackney
Text Someone smashed their way into the Texaco garage on the Junction of Mare Street and Well Street. Boys staggered out with boxes of sandwiches and ...
2011–08–07 Lunch with RuPaul
Text Out of drag, Mr. Charles (Ru to his friends) seems to have the same effect on everyone who meets him. Which is to say you can’t stop grinning. He ...
2011–08–05 ‘A Book of Secrets’ by Michael Holroyd
Text There’s a small, nearly perfect comic moment not far into Michael Holroyd’s new book, “A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, ...
2011–08–02 Michael Wood on ‘Tree of Life’
Text Let’s get the terrible stuff out of the way first. Characters in the movie keep wondering where God is and why he isn’t doing more to help ...
2011–08–01 What Riggins wants
Text Riggins is a man of few words, but he says “Texas, Forever” a lot. It’s a fraternal drunken toast around a dwindling bonfire, a ...
2011–08–01 Ed Ruscha and Street View
Text Car as medium … rotating motorized camera … a series of contiguous horizontal images of buildings and the street on which they are situated ...
2011–07–06 The Evergreen Branch
Text On the fabric of every southwest-northeast street of the Bushwick grid, a subtle disjoint somewhere between Irving and Wyckoff Avenues marks the scar ...
2011–07–06 Permutations in colour. Exploring the dramatic possibilities and problems of overprinting
Text Below: Spread with colour configurations When I came to write one of the briefs for the new module, I returned to Dramatic color by overprinting for ...
2011–07–05 Richard Serra’s drawings at the Met
Text At the start of Richard Serra Drawing (until 28 August) there are four performance videos from 1968. It is a witty bit of curating, in that each work, ...
2011–07–02 World on a Wire
Text The career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the wonders of the modern cinema—of the entire history of cinema—but it would be hard to ...
2011–06–07 Tactile values & significant form
Text The donnee of his work was that the value of painting lay in its ability to enhance self-consciousness, by means of intense increments of ...
2011–06–07 Bernard Berenson
Text Bernard Berenson. I Tatti, Florence, 1952. “If small, lithe tigers could speak, they would have the voice and intelligence of this feline Pole. ...
2011–06–07 Scott McLemee on ‘Playboy’
Text Well, sure — who can read “Dover Beach” without picturing naked Bunnies frolicking in the waves? Ward strives manfully to render his ...
2011–06–06 Marcia Angell on psychoactive drugs
Text Some brief—and necessarily quite simplified—background: the brain contains billions of nerve cells, called neurons, arrayed in immensely ...
2011–06–05 John Burnside, ‘I put a spell on you’
Text I was only three when we moved to Blackburn Drive but it wasn’t long before I grasped that we were ‘coming up’ in the world. By the ...
2011–06–04 Justin Mitchell on Ishmael Reed’s ‘Juice’
Text Reed’s last few novels have been a lot heavier on the “six o’clock news” side of things. Whereas his earlier fiction—with ...
2011–06–03 Jose Mourinho and sportonomics
Text So what causes it? First, Moskowitz and Wertheim rule out the conventional explanations, starting with the support of the home fans. How do you isolate ...
2011–06–01 ‘The Wedding March’ (1928): user review
Text History paints Erich Von Stroheim as the great misunderstood genius, the `footage fetishist' whose grandiose films were too ahead of their time ...
2011–05–09 Rule of tincture
Text The first rule of heraldic design is the rule of tincture: metal should not be put on metal, nor colour on colour (Humphrey Llwyd, 1568). This means ...
2011–05–07 Kelefa Sanneh on reality TV
Text Because Pozner isn’t really interested in viewers, she doesn’t have much to say about why they reject some reality shows while embracing ...
2011–05–04 God Save McQueen
Text Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s memorial tribute to the British fashion designer who died by his own hand in ...
2011–05–04 Weight, Weight, Don’t Tell Me
Text And so it was that at some point a couple of years later, when I met him at a party, I asked him what he’d meant. Of course, he didn’t ...
2011–04–30 ‘Frame is part of drawing’
Text For instance, we know that Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) is one of Robert Rauschenberg’s most important, influential works. It’s the ...
2011–04–08 A progress: or, one foot in front of the other
Text “I hope they like each other,” someone says behind me. “They’ll like each other by the end,” says another. ...
2011–04–08 On Diana Kennedy’s ‘Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy’
Text She moved back to Mexico. In the beautiful state of Michoacan she built an adobe house far ahead of its time in its ecological obsession, started an ...
2011–04–06 David Foster Wallace and taxes
Text One wonders what Wilson would have made of “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace‘s posthumous novel about I.R.S. agents battling ...
2011–04–05 Groover’s paradise
Text The Team (l-r): Chuck Weiss, Alvin Crow, Marcia Ball, Ray Bensen, Carlyne & George Majewski Softball games, birthday parties, wedding receptions ...
2011–04–04 Eternal return
Text When the band performed Pink Flag once more at London’s Barbican Centre earlier this year, and Newman duly delivered the pointed preface to ...
2011–03–08 Jan Verwoert: ‘Secret Society’
Text Admittedly, this approach directly contradicts the declared objectives of Conceptual art voiced by many of its first-generation proponents. This was ...
2011–03–08 An introduction to “Paprika”
Text Suspend your belief in poems, novels, and movies for a moment, however, and imagine that dream-sharing is something completely new in the world. How ...
2011–03–07 Sarang Gopalakrishnan on rationality
Text I should distinguish between contemplative and instrumental rationality: the former is about getting facts right, not believing false arguments, etc.; ...
2011–03–06 Ferdinando Scarfiotti and “Toys”
Image “Scarfiotti returned to work in 1990 on Barry Levinson’s Toys. This project dated from 1978, its fanciful story (of a bombastic general and ...
2011–03–05 Geoff Dyer, from ‘Sleeping Under Four Stars’
Quote At this point a slight qualification is needed, namely that in some ways a room is more erotic than a suite. A suite subtly revives the division of ...
2011–03–03 Jonathan Rosenbaum on Madonna
Quote Loudon Trott (Griffin Dunne), a yuppie attorney, has just been assigned to deliver a snarling cougar to an eccentric client (John Mills) when ...
2011–03–02 Obsession with compression
Text Ideally, compression does not delete information or material but conceals it within itself, making all hidden components readily accessible should the ...
2011–02–28 Fromms Act
Image Fromm improved on the manufacturing technique. He used glass moulds, which were mounted on carrier frames and dipped into a vat of rubber solution ...
2011–02–06 A vanguard of friends
Text Tibor de Nagy Gallery Larry Rivers: Frank O'Hara, c. 1955 The body of Frank O’Hara—the broken nose, the bouncy gait, the jaunty ...
2011–02–05 Garry Kasparov on Bobby Fischer
Text One theory that was not often heard was that Fischer might have been more than a little nervous about his challenger, the twenty-three-year-old leader ...
2011–02–04 T.S. Eliot: The critic as radical
Text Eliot was too subtle not to recognize (and too honest not to acknowledge) that his more general pronouncements about political philosophy were ...
2011–02–04 Studio Visit: Lawrence Weiner
Image I didn’t come from a background that had any idea about what contemporary art was, it was not anti or pro, it had nothing to do with it. I do ...
2011–02–04 Welles, Sirk, Hitchcock
Text Far more than the Joycean or the Proustian, the Kafkaesque is the high-modernist trope that everyone understands, even Kafka. (“Went to the ...
2011–02–03 The letters of Louis MacNeice
Text The bulk of the post-Oxford letters are practical. They concern the books he did write, and many relate to books he never began or finished: among them ...
2011–02–02 Isa Genzken/Gerhard Richter—Duisburg station
Image Anyway, the work seems remarkably undocumented. These are about the only pictures I could find. Genzken and Richter received the commissioned for the ...
2011–02–01 T.J. Clark on Gabriel Orozco
Text Orozco is a ragpicker. He takes the modern art background of minimum intervention in the world – the tactics of the ready-made, the found object, ...
2011–01–09 Frank Kermode on William Empson
Text And so on, for 25 stanzas, unambiguous about the preferences of the parties, but also firm that the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were ...
2011–01–08 Peter Pomerantsev: ‘Hello Goodbye’
Text Then there was ‘the milkmaid’, whose story became a Russian YouTube hit: a woman of uncertain age, with gold teeth, permed hair, bright ...
2011–01–08 Dino Buzzati’s ‘Poem Strip’
Text Poem Strip is exhilarating in its inventiveness and highly provocative. Enticing and terrifying in turns, it reinvented the whole concept of the comic ...
2011–01–07 How artists must dress
Text The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes. ...
2011–01–07 Jonathan Rosenbaum on ‘Willow’ (Chicago Reader, 1988)
Text Consider the use of foreign accents and ethnic groupings. Disney’s recourse to such stereotypes in the early 40s — from the nationalities ...
2011–01–07 Sonny Clark, Part II
Text One of the saddest sights these days is the terrible condition of one of the nation’s foremost, and certainly original pianists. Having been ...
2011–01–05 The typographic “modern”
Text This turn was anticipated as early as 1949, when Gyoergy Kepes, a Hungarian emigre teaching at MIT, delivered an address at Harvard about the role of ...
2011–01–04 Minecraft, a crudely sadistic sandbox game
Text Minecraft’s physics are, in a way, exceptionally advanced. Thus far, the contents of pretty much every environment in a video game have been ...
2011–01–04 Sam Stephenson on Sonny Clark
Text Clark seated at piano backstage at Syria Mosque for Night of Stars event, 1946. Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Heinz Family Fund; © ...
2011–01–04 The long exposure of Francesca Woodman
Text Taken between 1972 and 1981, Woodman’s photographs are almost all black-and-white and have a general softness of focus not often seen these days. ...
2011–01–03 On ‘Modern Family’
Text Today, we have a similar selection. Anodyne comedies like Modern Family and Parks and Recreation present a pleasant, untroubled picture of the present ...
2010–12–31 Fassbinder’s ‘World on a Wire’ (WDR-TV: 1973)
Image Mirrors and a variety of glass and window panes that fragment and complicate space in the film. Many directors use mirror shots occasionally (with ...
2010–12–05 Los Angeles: Classic Drive-In Delight at Capitol Burgers
Image Once upon a time describing food as “fast” wasn’t pejorative. During the rapid (sub)urbanization of post war America, the slow-cooked ...
2010–12–04 Whose flag was it?
Text And so the story goes that Rauschenberg smuggled them into the show anyway, as elements in his own combine painting. [It’s not clear why ...
2010–12–04 Frederick Wiseman’s ‘Reality Fiction’
Text Belfast, Maine (1999) The turn is evident, to my eye at least, in his beautiful film of 1999, Belfast, Maine, in which there is a palpable ...
2010–12–04 Zadie Smith: ‘Generation Why?’
Text … Finally, it’s the idea of Facebook that disappoints. If it were a genuinely interesting interface, built for these genuinely different ...
2010–12–04 ‘Spirit Duplication,’ Yara Flores
Text …The ditto machine, or “spirit duplicator” as it is more properly known, was a manually cranked drum-printing device originally ...
2010–12–03 Kelefa Sanneh: Jay-Z’s “Decoded” and the language of hip-hop
Text Jay-Z explains not only what his lyrics mean but how they sound, even how they feel:When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes ...
2010–12–03 From “The Narrow Corner,” W. Somerset Maugham (1932)
Text The boy withdrew it from the flame, kneaded the pellet again and cooked it once more; he inserted it into the pipe and handed it to his master. The ...
2010–12–02 After the Cleveland School
Text So, at a minimum, the tension that Clark associates with modernism is at least as old as Hume and Blake. One is tempted to write a long essay about ...
2010–11–09 Interaction design to the letter
Clip In some cases the damage is mitigated. Salman Rushdie’s archive, already being organized by Emory University, displays that writer’s ...
2010–11–08 My Endless New York
Text By the time I got to Paris, most people in the world had stopped speaking French (something the French have been slow to acknowledge). Who now would ...
2010–11–08 Deconstruction as a way of analyzing texts
Text If the text is anything you want it to be, however, then there seems little point in insisting on the precision of the method. In other words, the ...
2010–11–01 The battles for late night
Text Weaver was a Dartmouth philosophy major; his boss, the redoubtable David Sarnoff, president of RCA, which owned NBC, had never gone to college. Weaver ...
2010–10–06 T.J. Clark, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Steam’
Text The question to put to the art of the present, then, is what does that art appear to see as the beliefs in the culture of our own moment that are ...
2010–10–01 Plucked from Obscurity
Video The “hapax legomenon,” as classicists among us know, is a word that appears only once in a language’s (or an author’s) texts. ...
2010–09–09 “The Krazy Kat That Walks By Himself,” from Seven Lively Arts (1924)
Text The theme is greater than the plot. John Alden Carpenter has pointed out in the brilliant little foreword’ to his ballet, that Krazy Kat is a ...
2010–09–09 Messerschmidt’s Mad Faces
Text Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) is one of those elusive eighteenth-century figures who confront us with the nocturnal side of the enlightenment. ...
2010–09–07 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Text Replacing the off-white painted walls that had prevailed there since the Kennedy administration is wallpaper hand-painted in alternating vertical ...
2010–09–04 Elif Batuman: “Get a Real Degree”
Text Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a study of Planet MFA conducted from Planet PhD, might not ...
2010–09–03 The neuronovel
Text In short, we increasingly can’t help but understand – as Hess and Jokeit have it – ‘melancholy as serotonin deficiency, ...
2010–09–03 Pac Marks #2: Hypothetical, Political, Lyrical (In That Order)
Text The verse itself is strong but not stunning. It’s simple and to the point, but in a sense that’s why it’s so impressive. That’s ...
2010–09–02 Jonathan Rosenbaum: on Peter Greenaway
Text One can still enjoy Greenaway’s sarcasm and aesthetic eccentricity up to a point, if only because his intelligence, his art-history background, ...
2010–08–31 Football as Before
Text Usually citing the cool music, or Zidane’s gladiatorial good looks, people uninterested in soccer have often told me the movie exceeded their ...
2010–08–09 William Savory
Text Part of what makes the Savory collection so alluring and historically important is its unusual format. At the time Savory was recording radio ...
2010–08–09 psyched out – bookforum.com / in print
Text In expressing these concerns, I date myself, no doubt. By the early 1990s, something changed in the context of Deleuze’s reception, at least in ...
2010–08–07 T. Hodler on “Alan Moore’s The Courtyard”
Text The original prose story does in fact display flashes of Moore’s trademark wit and invention, but it is end still fairly typical of Lovecraft ...
2010–08–07 Among the Flutterers
Text Quattrocchi draws conclusions a little too easily from a consideration of the connection between the fury of the pope’s attacks on homosexuality ...
2010–08–05 Ty Segall in dreams
Text People streamed out after the band finished and I made my way up to the front, near a fan mounted on the wall, which almost made it bearable to stand ...
2010–07–31 From “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945)
Text His painting was paradoxical: he was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of ...
2010–07–31 Money As We Knew It?
Text Lost gestures What is all this supposed to mean? I believe it is a piece of the historical past of the money experience as well as of individual memory ...
2010–07–03 To Be (or Not to Be) Continued
Text Well, one of my initial impetuses for the way [Wilson] was told was that I was reading the collected Peanuts editions […] And to read them in ...
2010–06–30 Comics of attraction
Text If you put the first three Yokoyama Yuichi books together, you have a composite image of the development of a landscape for leisure tourism in Japan, ...
2010–06–03 Bushmiller’s Nancy and Iconic Solidarity
Text Nancy and her doppelganger-cousin One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn’t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on ...
2010–05–02 Why coffee stains are ring-shaped
Text There’s a group of clever people at the James Franck Institute (UChicago) who study some of the overlooked and bizarre regularities of everyday ...
2010–04–02 On Ecto cooler
Text Flavorists are genre-benders creating tastes (processed in the brain mostly through the nose) by combining chemical elements of what you think you ...
2009–10–06 Dim Sum at Ocean Jewel in Flushing, Queens
Text Ground pork meatballs with slices of conch meat and shitake on top. Fried glutinous rice balls with a shrimp and ground meat filling. Steamed eggy ...
2009–10–01 Where the Wild Things Are
Text A wild thing with James Gandolfini’s voice and Max Records in Where the Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze, 2009).Hoberman, in his Village Voice ...
2009–09–04 The ‘Room Tones’ of the Convent of St. Cecilia
Text Molly Lowe‘s video of compulsive consumption, “K-mart shopping”, is in the former chapel Julio Cesar Gonzalez‘s thin cables ...
2009–09–02 The Maxwell Street Market, Chicago
Text But buried amongst the random stalls was the promise of transcendent food, which was what had brought us to the little stretch of Chicago street next ...
2009–08–09 Summer political philosophy update
Text I’d describe myself as a left-wing individualist; I’m antagonistic in the abstract to most forms of communitarianism, unions, ...
2009–08–05 Michael
Text 2 The Jackson Five were America’s first internationally recognized black adolescent boy band. They were as smooth as the Ink Spots, but there ...
2009–07–08 The Cloud Project
Text Cloud seeding with bacteria to make rain snow ice cream As scientist and emerging technologies advisor Andrew Maynard wrote on his blog, the gap ...
2009–06–04 “The Style is on the Inside”
Text Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the ...
2009–04–07 Against the grain
Text the New Criterionists sometimes boast that they and not the multiculturalists are the true democrats, applying to themselves Arnold’s words in ...
2009–04–07 Eggy bread
Text My inquiries as to the recipe, as I followed him to the table, were met with an equally nonplussed response. The sense I was beginning to get from Dan ...
2009–04–03 Giant Cheetos vs. Regular Cheetos
Text “Giant orange balls are here, Robyn!” exclaimed Adam. …Huh? I had no idea what he was talking about. And then he showed me the ...
2009–03–06 The seagulls inside my head
Text This “new kind of writing” is necessary for realism’s sake. Even if it is true that each succeeding generation of writers “has ...
2009–02–28 Out of borough experience: Sunnyside, Queens
Text Sunnyside is one of my favorite neighborhoods Queens to go and eat. The main reason is that I’m lazy and I’m not always in the mood for an ...
2008–12–07 Slavoutich, the Poisoned Town
Image This is the fourth section of a work of seven dedicated to the Chernobyl tragedy and it focuses on Slavoutich (or Slavutych in Ukraine), a model city ...
2008–11–30 ‘Beyond the literary’
Text James Wood’s greatest strength as a critic is that he does not spend much time and space on “what lies beyond the literary.” He ...

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Cereal Records

Zachary Sachs