“I began the work by visiting a rubber plant in India and an iceberg lettuce farm in Arizona. Then I designed a telekinetic machine.” Video artist Mika Rottenberg on her recent work, Squeeze. The New York Times has discontinued it’s humor blog, “a function of the reality of limited resources in a medium where any [...]
There’s an upcoming show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Alexander Calder’s influence on sculpture (inset: Nathan Carter, Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station, 2007). Did you know that Calder once designed costumes for radio plays? Yes, I said costumes. Conjurer James Randi has spent 1 hour and 44 [...]
Below, a page from Antonin Artaud’s notebook, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. “The drawings constitute a countervailing centripetal force: their outlines, pointed up by cross-hatching and striation, double back upon themselves; the marks thicken, darken, take on a coal-like quality from the pencil lead being crushed into the paper; rubbings-out proliferate …” “Our affinities with [...]
Check out the photography of Montreal artist Adad Hannah. Inset: All is Vanity, 2009. Does intellectual life at Princeton suck? One student wonders. “We do not demand satisfactory defenses from the people that we disagree with, and we do not challenge them, for fear of offending them. We do not take risks …” (h/t Margaret [...]
“You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale.” Here’s some advice from Popular Mechanics, at 120 miles per hour. In British Columbia, Victoria’s Poet Laureate makes the mistake of venting her indignation [...]
“‘Why are they doing that?’ my companion whispered. ‘It’s a scrum,’ I said, divesting myself of one of the two things I know about rugby. ‘Yes, but why are they doing that?’ she persisted.” While visiting South Africa, Claire Potter goes to see Invictus. “Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid [...]
“To recover and understand the traditions and ideas that enable and describe human endeavor in the world:” Jacqueline Goldsby is helping to make the Chicago Defender archive public. Word is that The New Thing in poetry is an insistence on reference: “Scientists and shamans, statistically minded investigators and spell-casters, use language with reference to some [...]
Flannery O’Connor didn’t live a flashy life – “from Georgia, liked birds, died of lupus” – says Jamelah Earle, who might not recommend Brad Gooch’s biography to you, unless you want to know how somebody comes up with a story about a bible salesman who steals a girl’s prosthetic leg … In his critique of [...]
Elizabeth Alexander has been selected to write and recite a poem to mark the occasion of President-elect Obama’s inauguration. Sounds nice, right? Particularly in light of a certain other much more boneheaded inauguration choice? How much controversy could there be about a little timely turn of phrase? Plenty, if you ask George Packer, who is [...]
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