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In 1938, Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of War of the Worlds — a story about Martians invading New Jersey — caused 1 in 12 over-credulous listeners to run out of their houses with towels over their faces, screaming, tripping, breaking limbs, basically caught in a mass hysteria. Back then, listeners had a hard time distinguishing the simulated from the real; today, we seem to have the opposite problem.
Karen Dalton is making a comeback. She is now included consistently in mixtapes, compilations, artist retrospectives, but so much more is still to be known about her.This is what we do know. Karen Dalton was Bob Dylan’s favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk revival set. She was half-Cherokee, beautiful, lanky, wore her long, black hair down, obscuring her face. She lost two front teeth while in a fight with two lovers. She played a 12-string guitar and a banjo and supposedly hated recording so much she had to be tricked into it. She lived in a small cabin in the mountains of Colorado and was “living the life” of the real folk artist while other folk-poseurs took the spotlight in her stead. She had troubles with recording executives because of her heavy drug and alcohol use, hot temper, inability to compromise her sound. In some accounts she died on the streets of New York, alone, forgotten, after years of battling AIDS, and in other accounts she was well-cared for by friends, and died peacefully.  'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait', by Douglas Gordon It became loudly apparent to me Saturday as I watched the England vs. USA World Cup game with a room full of usually quiet and gentle pacifist intellectuals that we all need, once in awhile, to let loose our animal selves. People got drunk; popcorn was thrown; rude epithets, insults, threats bandied; it was a little bit like a controlled reenactment of the Revolutionary War. I’ve been thinking about sports a lot. After watching the Winter Olympics this year it struck me that moments in sports are like so charged and fertile with meaning I don’t know why more writers don’t write about it. Athletic competition takes the most essential human desires and boils it down to something so straight-forward and concrete. That is, we all want to conquer, take from the other, destroy for glory and fame, and when we fall short it’s tragic. (Read: Barthes “The Tour de France as Epic”). Life is really like one epic sports game that goes on and on until you die.
Last month I had the privilege of blogging for the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, a literary festival that spotlights international writers. During the festival I met writers from all over the world and was exposed to work that had not yet been translated. In a market where translations account for only 3% of all books, festivals like this one serve a much-needed cultural exchange function. Yet, of all the writers present, the most important writers were perhaps the ones who weren’t there.
Abbas Kiarostami’s film Close Up (1990) is probably one of the most underrated films of the 20th century. It’s finally been picked up by Criterion (release date set for June 2010) and recently had a short run at Film Forum in New York City. Anyone who wishes to be an artist or has any interest in the arts needs to see this film. Close Up is a “postmodern” film that brilliantly dissects the processes of inspiration, reevaluates the artist’s duty and the ethics of art, and asks all the most vibrant, stimulating questions surrounding art. Is art real? Can art change people? Is art necessary? How does art fit into our late capitalist society? Who can be an artist? Am I an artist or just playing the part of one? [Read More]
This story has been told hundreds of times by now: the story about this mysterious woman who got in her Volkswagon and drove away, never to be seen again. In the days leading up to her disappearance, she had written letters to friends and family, saying her goodbyes. She was a singer-songwriter who dropped out of Mount Holyoke to pursue music in New York City, only to find that her music was never going to reach an audience beyond a small dozen around the world. Heartbroken, she moved to Ann Arbor to be closer to her younger brother and his family. Nobody knows what happened to Connie Converse; if she is still around, she would be 86 today. [Read More]
Her death has always been a mystery to me–most have attributed it to inconsolable depression over a break up, but this always seemed like such a wayward excuse–a way for adults to rationalize the unwieldy and incomprehensible despair of the young. [Read More]  Omer Fast, Nostalia III (2009) It’s the last weekend for New Yorkers to check out Nostalgia, Omer Fast’s 3-part video installation, showing now at the Whitney. I went a few Saturdays ago and was pleasantly shocked to find a line out the door. Because it was so crowded inside the gallery, it was impossible to watch the series as intended, starting with I and ending with III. Instead, I went to the very back of the gallery where the last portion, Nostalgia III, was playing in a dark room. [Read More]  Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv's Text Rain (1999) I’m always so shocked when I ask writers what they think about digital poetics and they either say: “I don’t know what that is” or “That’s for young people” or “It has nothing to do with me.” Will writers be in for a rude awakening now that that the iPad will inevitably revolutionize the way we read and write? For the first time, everyone will be reading (and writing) on a screen. It seems unavoidable that our current definition of “electronic writing” will soon apply to everyone. [Read More]  Vanessa Bell. Original design for Hogarth Press dust jacket: graphite and watercolor, circa 1930. I was reading Paris Press’s reissue of Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill when I discovered something completely mundane and mystifying: Virginia Woolf had had her teeth pulled because it was believed that “an infection of the teeth could somehow poison the brain.” Hermione Lee writes in the intro of the Paris Press edition –
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 How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the DebateIn 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]  Sanullim: Mountain Echo PsychSanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]  We are Freak (Rap)By Adri Wong The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]  ‘The Housemaid’ – A Comparison of Two Korean FilmsIf Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]  Film Review: The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos) dir. by Juan Jose CampanellaThe Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]    |
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