Los Angeles Review of Books - Sounds Of The City: New York 1973-1977. IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, scenes started to cohere around sounds emanating from lower Manhattan. Local musicians and critics sat up and took note. With a massive festival of unsigned bands, CBGB, a dank little Bowery club, confirmed its status as ground zero for New York’s rock and roll underground. Just a few months earlier, Patti Smith, cult poet and fledgling improvisational rocker, had kicked off a seven–week run there with another favorite local band, Television, by signing a seven–album, $750,000 contract. The summer CBGB festival included dozens of hopefuls competing to follow her lead. Neighborhood newspaper critics took turns eking out interpretations.
Christgau’s spirit of 1977 now seems charmingly parochial. 5 Notable Design Books for Summer Reading: Maria Popova. Guest blogger Maria Popova—creator of Brain Pickings, shares for summer reading pleasure her selection of five notable design titles published during 2012. — SK Guest blogger: Maria Popova: Brain Pickings (New York) Profile Summer is a time of escapism, be it physical or intellectual and creative.
Summer reading is thus an invitation to explore the whimsical and the esoteric, or to shine new light on previously unknown facets of the familiar. Here are five books that offer precisely that. TOP SELLING PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS OF ALL TIME. The Family of Man has sold more than 4 million copies The Family of Man was a photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen first shown in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The 503 photos by 273 photographers in 68 countries were selected from almost 2 million pictures submitted by famous and unknown photographers. The photos offer a snapshot of the human experience which lingers on birth, love, and joy, but also touches war, privation, illness and death. His intention was to prove the universality of human experience and photography's role in its documentation. More than 9 million people viewed the exhibit in 38 countries. The exhibit was turned into a book with an introduction by Carl Sandburg, Steichen's brother-in-law. The Americans by Robert Frank. The Recipe for Writing Success? Kill Your Characters. Ok aspiring fiction writers, if you’ve ever wondered how to write a successful novel, the secret is here: kill off your characters.
Of the handful of books that won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2011, all 13 novels had the common theme of putting to death main characters… it’s a lot like the plot of Will Ferrell’s Stranger Than Fiction… everyone knows the story won’t be as good without a solid death. This beautiful graphic designed by the literary heavy “slow journalism magazine” Delayed Gratification, traces the dominant themes from last years winners, showing that not just a few, but ALL the winners featured overriding themes of death. What followed that? In distant second we have themes about love and then betrayal… both subjects that can get the blood boiling, but obviously don’t guarantee a win.
Why We Love: 5 Must-Read Books on the Psychology of Love. It’s often said that every song, every poem, every novel, every painting ever created is in some way “about” love.
What this really means is that love is a central theme, an underlying preoccupation, in humanity’s greatest works. But what exactly is love? How does its mechanism spur such poeticism, and how does it lodge itself in our minds, hearts and souls so completely, so stubbornly, as to permeate every aspect of the human imagination? Today, we turn to 5 essential books that are “about” love in a different way — they turn an inquisitive lens towards this grand phenomenon and try to understand where it comes from, how it works, and what it means for the human condition. No superlative is an exaggeration of Alain de Botton‘s humble brilliance spanning everything from philosophy to architecture. Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.
Sample her work with this fantastic TED talk on the brain in love: Is love really blind? Created Equal: Parallel Portraits of Cultural Difference. By Maria Popova Nearly two years ago, we explored Exactitudes — a visual study of similarity within subcultures.
Now, we turn to the opposite: From photographer Mark Laita comes Created Equal — a visual study of diffrence between subcultures. We Own The Night: The Art Of The Underbelly Project. In 2009, an abandoned NYC subway station slowly morphed from ghost status to the world's best kept urban art status.
Untouched for years, the space was completely transformed over the course of a year, with over 100 artists adding their unique styles under the watchful eye of curators Workhorse and PAC. Scrap Irony: Edward Gorey Illustrates Snarky Cultural Commentary, 1961. By Maria Popova What the physiological effects of space flight have to do with the art of courtship and the Oedipus complex.
Inimitable mid-century illustrator Edward Gorey — notorious letter-writer, illuminator of day and night, purveyor of mischievous eroticism — had a rare gift for irreverent storytelling and dark humor, so it was only fitting he would parter with poet and satirist Felicia Lamport. Over the course of more than two decades, Gorey illustrated three of Lamport’s satirical verse collections, beginning in 1961 with Scrap Irony — an anthology of witty, sarcastic observations on everything from courtship to vice to the era’s hottest technologies, like cybernetics and space flight. Gorey created artwork for the dust jacket, title page, chapter titles, and many of the individual poems. With Gorey’s visual irreverence and Lamport’s penchant for puns, the book defined snark long before snark was a weapon of choice in the arsenal of modern hipsters.
"THE GIFT" ART BOOK by delphinediallo. The 11 Best Art and Design Books of 2011. The 11 Best Photography Books of 2011. 10 Essential Books on Typography. By Maria Popova What Arab culture has to do with industrial ideals, midcentury design and Victorian hand-lettering.
