"The Art of David Lynch”— How Rene Magritte, Edward Hopper & Francis Bacon Influenced David Lynch’s Cinematic Vision. When an artist becomes an adjective—think Orwellian, Kafkaesque, or Joycean—one of two things can happen: their work can be superficially appropriated, reduced to a collection of obvious gestures clumsily combined in bad pastiche.
Ssoar hsr 2012 3 dodds pennock Mass murder or religious homicide. Learning Chords: 4 Basic Chord Types and How to Play Them. How communist Bulgaria became a leader in tech and sci-fi. The police report would have baffled the most grizzled detective.
A famous writer murdered in a South Dakota restaurant full of diners; the murder weapon – a simple hug. A murderer with no motive, and one who seemed genuinely distraught at what he had done. You will not find this strange murder case in the crime pages of a local US newspaper, however, but in a Bulgarian science-fiction story from the early 1980s. When Homer envisioned Achilles, did he see a black man? Few issues provoke such controversy as the skin-colour of the ancient Greeks.
Last year in an article published in Forbes, the Classics scholar Sarah Bond at the University of Iowa caused a storm by pointing out that many of the Greek statues that seem white to us now were in antiquity painted in colour. This is an uncontroversial position, and demonstrably correct, but Bond received a shower of online abuse for daring to suggest that the reason why some like to think of their Greek statues as marble-white might just have something to do with their politics. This year, it was the turn of BBC’s new television series Troy: Fall of a City (2018-) to attract ire, which cast black actors in the roles of Achilles, Patroclus, Zeus, Aeneas and others (as if using anglophone northern European actors were any less anachronistic). The idea of the Greeks as paragons of whiteness is deeply rooted in Western society. The early Greek vocabulary of colour was very strange indeed, to modern eyes. The Substance of Geek Culture. In his article “On Geek Culture,” Ian Williams writes, “. . . what is Superman in the twenty-first century but a corporate mascot, albeit one with a lavish backstory?”
This sets the tone for a fundamentally reductionist approach to geek culture and the various cultural products that populate its mediascape, from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica. Indeed, Williams goes even further in his project of reducing works of art to their commodity form asking the reader to imagine a scenario in which the usual costumed superheroes and other genre characters are replaced by “Geico geckos or Progressive Insurance Flos.” The article is not without its merits, particularly in its call for more creator-ownership over the cultural products of geek culture. Against guilty pleasures: Adorno on the crimes of pop culture.
Classical music and high European culture were at the heart of Theodor Adorno’s philosophy and outlook on life.
He was born in 1903 in Frankfurt in Germany, and grew up with music, both as a listener and a practitioner: his mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno, was a singer, and the young Adorno was a talented pianist. He attended the Hoch Conservatory, going on to study with the Austrian composer Alban Berg. Adorno chose a career as a professional philosopher taking a position at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, but music and culture remained the focus of his interests. Adorno insisted on high standards – culture was not merely a matter of technical progress (in composing more beautiful, more complicated music, for example) but also (if indirectly) a matter of morality. Music, like all culture, could either develop or obstruct social progress towards greater freedom. Sarah Nicole Prickett on Twin Peaks: The Return — The Complete Recaps - artforum.com / slant.
Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017, still from a TV show on Showtime.
Season 3, episode 9. EUCALYPTUS TREES, WEAKENED BY DROUGHT, are on their last legs all over Los Angeles. One fell and knocked out the power lines next to my friend’s house, where I am staying, in Eagle Rock, and we stood on the deck drinking Vinho Verde––delicious, like if wine were beer––watching the action. A fire truck loitered for an hour, produced no helpers, and left. Disruption made the street its own neighborhood. The light dimmed outside, and my friend and I read books by flashlight and candle. How Twin Peaks Is Transcending Prestige TV And Nostalgia. “This is a doughnut.
It is very sweet, and very good. The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. Following his drunken, acrimonious exit from Black Sabbath, Ozzy's music-industry stock was so abysmally low that he had trouble getting a new record deal – and not even his biggest fans would have guessed that he was on the verge of launching a major career comeback with his first solo album.
Released in the U.K. in September 1980 (and six months later in the U.S.), Blizzard of Ozz was a remarkably strong and focused record whose highlights (including "I Don't Know," "Crazy Train" and the controversial "Suicide Solution") were more modern-sounding than anything he'd done with Sabbath, yet still packed a serious metallic wallop. Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s!—Stephen Wolfram Blog. A British Train Station A week ago a new train station, named “Cambridge North”, opened in Cambridge, UK.
Normally such an event would be far outside my sphere of awareness. (I think I last took a train to Cambridge in 1975.) But last week people started sending me pictures of the new train station, wondering if I could identify the pattern on it: Yeats’s “Second Coming”—Our Most Thoroughly Pillaged Poem. Fractal patterns in nature and art are aesthetically pleasing and stress-reducing. Humans are visual creatures.
Objects we call “beautiful” or “aesthetic” are a crucial part of our humanity. Even the oldest known examples of rock and cave art served aesthetic rather than utilitarian roles. Although aesthetics is often regarded as an ill-defined vague quality, research groups like mine are using sophisticated techniques to quantify it – and its impact on the observer. Breaking down the glorious first scene of Inglourious Basterds. The opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a drawn-out masterclass in tension that also functions as a prologue and an introduction to Christoph Waltz’s legendary antagonist Hans Landa.
“Tyler, you’re fucking Marla”: A perspective on Fight Club to piss off its devotees – Another angry woman. Content note: there’s a lot of discussion of sex and violence in this post. Also, spoilers for Fight Club, if somehow you’ve made it without watching it or knowing “the twist” for almost twenty years. Aren’t Fight Club fans the fucking worst? Talking Heads 5.1 Downmix. Originally titled Eclectic Remain In Light Downmix Mojique sees His Village from a nearby HillMojique thinks of Days before Americans Came Mojique buys His Equipment in the Market PlaceMojique plants Devices through the Free Trade Zone Mojique smells the Wind that Comes from Far AwayMojique waits for News in a Quiet Place Intro BEING A FAN of the MiniDisc, I enjoy experimenting with new equipment, techniques and manipulation. Downmixing So! To Hell with SCMS. Download All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Journal That Publicized the Avant-Garde Movement a Century Ago (1917-21)
Surrealism, Discordianism, Frank Zappa, Situationism, punk rock, the Residents, Devo… the anarchists of counterculture in all their various guises may never have come into being—or into the being they did—were it not for an anti-art movement that called itself Dada. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Haunting Emotions: Visualizing Hamlet's Melancholy for Students in Two Recent Graphic Novel Adaptations Marina Gerzic and Helen Balfour, University of Western Australia Abstract The study of emotion and Shakespeare and, in particular, emotion and Hamlet, is well established. Shakespeare's work enables us to experience emotions and their transformations as we try to understand them.
From the opening of the play, Hamlet's emotions are all too clearly present; Shakespeare defines him as a passionate and emotional man plagued by melancholy. Akira’s secret weapon is its clever use of lighting. The Limitations of Punching Up – Electric Literature. Let’s All Obsess Over This Intricate Map of Alt Music History. Abandoned places: the worlds we've left behind – in pictures. This Reissue of the Scientists Is Some Riveting, Disruptive Rock 'n' Roll. @gene70 @realDonaldTrump. Mulholland Drive leads the pack in list of 21st century's top films. David Lynch’s surrealist masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which even its most ardent fans admit is as maddeningly baffling as it is mesmerising, has been named the greatest film of the 21st century. A poll by BBC Culture of 177 film critics from 36 countries aimed to find the best films of recent memory. The resulting top 100 list has Mulholland Drive (2001) at No 1, followed by Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000); There Will Be Blood (2007); Spirited Away (2001); and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014).
Inside the World's Only Surviving Tattoo Shop For Medieval Pilgrims. Wassim Razzouk tattooing the classic Jerusalem Cross motif known to look exactly like this since at least the early 1600s. All Mapped Out. Hollywood has ruined method acting. The 50 podcasts you need to hear. Alice Isn’t Dead. Elvis Costello’s 500 Must-Have Albums, from Rap to Classical. You will see that some very famous names are missing completely. The Inner Object: Seeing Kandinsky. Frank Cottrell Boyce: what's the point of culture in Brexit Britain? The Meaning of Studio Ghibli's 'Spirited Away', the Best Animated Film of All Time. (Spirited Away still via YouTube) There's a quote on Tumblr somewhere that says "Disney movies touch the heart but Studio Ghibli films touch the soul. " The Way of Being Lost. 45, John Steinbeck. My art belongs to Dada. Game of Thrones: Season 6 Episode 5 – The Door.
Inside the Rainbow: Russian children's literature 1920-1935 - in pictures. Jim Jarmusch Interviewed - Film Comment. Critic's Notebook: Beyonce's 'Lemonade' Is a Masterpiece of Black Feminism.