Leon texted me this photo a few weeks ago, and I keep returning to it because it’s compositionally perfect — there, I said it, “perfect.”
Archive for the ‘Art’ category
The inside/out project
You may remember the NYT magazine spread about the French street artist JR, who won the 2011 TED prize for his global innovation in pasting enormous photographs of individual faces in public places: the concrete banks of the Seine, where a giant nude reclines; metal rooftops in Nairobi, where a series of women’s eyes are [...]
Pretty Saro
Sometimes a song is more than a song. Sometimes you hear a song for the first time when your heart is breaking. When you are left and lost and sure no one has ever felt this alone. Then you hear this song and it is everything you feel sung exactly how you feel it. It is [...]
No crying inside baseball
The conference date was approaching, and my paper wasn’t finished. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly started. Months before, I had drafted an irresistible abstract. I reread the two major texts I promised to discuss. As the weeks ticked by, some critical articles arrived via interlibrary loan. Some online research got done in the wee [...]
Another Show
Nights like this, every third week or so for almost exactly five years, I would get home, turn off my sense of self-preservation, and write a review to post by morning. I don’t have an opera blog anymore, and it’s something of a relief, but that’s where I’ve been. I’m wondering if there’s any way [...]
Wrong!
You may choose to imagine the title of the post uttered as by John McLaughlin. “Wrong!” I like really wrong covers. I’m not talking about “oh wow did they really do a [genre] cover of [song in aesthetically incompatible genre]?” That used to be edgy, man, but it’s so done. The bluegrass cover of “Single [...]
I’ve always had good taste
When my brother and I were crappy adolescents, we had very similar tastes in everything, mostly because I idolized him at the time. He loved Jimi Hendrix and German techno, so those were things that I liked. Our favorite movie was Koyaanisqatsi. We were into South American languages and medieval icons, and we both loved [...]
Tuesday lists
RB and I are watching a rerun of SNL as I type this. Oooo-weeee… What up with that! What up with that! Anyway. For your Tuesday pleasure, a few intriguing lists I’ve seen floating around the Internets. 1. 15 Wonderful Words with No English Equivalent (via Mentalfloss.com). These are all fantastic, but my favorite is “Iktsuarpok,” [...]
Are we forgetting art?
Obviously, some among us are getting that art made all the time, doing the painting and the playing and the poeming for the rest of us. Making art might be your job, your hobby, or something you end up doing because your kid needs a story, a song, or a drawing buddy. Some of us [...]
