August 2011
23 posts
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“The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said above, that of...”
– John Ruskin, Modern Painters, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” (1856)
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“Another way of putting this is to say that Tesfaye is fast becoming the David...”
– Nitsuh Abebe, “The Weeknd: Skeezy David Lynch of R&B”
As one can usually expect from Nitsuh Abebe, this article is thoughtful and generous. I’d almost call Abebe’s style of criticism “friendly,” as he tends to engage his subjects from many angles in a warm...
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“Today images abound everywhere. Never has so much been depicted and watched. We...”
– John Berger, “Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible”
I’m virtually 100% on board with this line of thinking, and yet whenever I hear a critique of this sort—a critique of our current visual culture—I reflexively anticipate charges against it as a form of...
“The greater the sensibility and the more subtle the capacity to feel, the more...”
– Fernando Pessoa, in The Book of Disquiet (translated by M. Jull Costa)
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“[David Foster] Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and...”
– Maud Newton, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace” The New York Times (August 19, 2011)
Interesting. I’ve always wondered where that voice (“the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here,...
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Ken Jacobs, Ignacio Torres, and the Ethical...
davidhudson:
Stellar is a series of startling little animations from photographer Ignacio Torres. Via Colossal.
A few weeks ago, I attended a screening of some recent Ken Jacobs shorts, with the filmmaker himself present to talk about his work. In his recent work, his focus has been on the concept of “depth,” and his medium: essentially “3D” digital shorts....
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“Berlin School director Ulrich Köhler’s recent polemical essay...”
– [From a footnote in Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager’s The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, accessed via Google Books. To my knowledge, this essay is not available online in English, but I’d definitely like to read it.]
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“Kim [Ki-duk]’s last film, Dream, features a sequence in which a female...”
– On the context behind Kim Ki-duk’s Arirang (2011)
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“Philosophers like [Philip] Kitcher remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who...”
– James Wood, “Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents” The New Yorker (August 15, 2011)
Also worth reading is Richard Brody’s response entitled “God Is a Character,” which pretty much defines, in general, my own approach to the world’s religious...
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““We read fiction,” writes James Wood, “with two eyes, as it...”
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Tom McCormack, “The Two Horizons“ Moving Image Source (August 9, 2011)
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“[Will] Ferrell’s comedy can be cool to the touch in that he doesn’t...”
– From Amy Wallace’s interview with Jerry Lewis in the August 2011 issue of GQ.
In addition the very intriguing idea of Lewis as an embodiment of the “pre-irony era,” I find this excerpt fascinating because it confirms my earliest impressions of Lewis’ genius (particularly...
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“Speaking of bygone moments, there were years when we would all line up for the...”
– Kent Jones, in his piece on Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Nails it.
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“The image of photography persists in digital capture, and the idea of cinema...”
– D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film 