ffactory

The 2006 Whitney Biennial

2006-04-12T17:01:00.000-04:00

Most writings on the 2006 Whitney Biennial focus on the canny way it reflects the “apocalyptic mood at the moment,” or on its above-board internationalism. Michael Kimmelman, in the Times, says that one of the exhibition’s unstated goals “hop[es to] recalibrate the image of the art world as something other than youth-besotted and money-obsessed.” The Village Voice’s Jerry Saltz calls Day for

Death Disco

2006-04-05T23:46:00.000-04:00

The joke, of course, may well be on me if fifteen years from noweverything on the radio sounds like this.But it wouldn’t surprise me too much.—On Second Edition, from theAugust 1980 issue ofStereo ReviewPiL performing “Death Disco”“Top of the Pops,” 21 July 1979Simon Reynolds’s justly hailed (and newly released, stateside) Tear It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 [the book’s website is here

Opening day

2006-04-05T10:56:00.000-04:00

Before violent (and then brisk) spring weather returned to Baltimore yesterday, nature bestowed a few short hours of warm temps to Camden Yards as the Orioles got off to a winning start in 2006 by defeating the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 9-6. (As I have said for a few days now, the battle for fourth place in the AL East has been joined.) Twenty-two-year-old lefty phenom Scott Kazmir started for the

Rumbling...

2006-03-31T21:47:00.000-05:00

Y’all: I’ve been gone for so long that I thought it prudent to tweak the look, so that folks could tell, at a glance, that something had changed. I’m not really sure I like it, but it’ll do until something better comes along.In the meantime, things are a little funky—some of the layouts are off, and I'll be nipping and tucking most of the weekend, I expect. Happy to be back!

Ffalling down.

2006-01-10T12:04:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to believe that folks are clamoring for posts, but clamor they do. I’m back from a busy end-of-year, the new year in Los Angeles, and rarin’ to go, but duty calls: I fly to dusty Ft. Worth for a business trip this eve, and, upon my return, drive my beloved to Nashville this upcoming weekend. Top tens, and more, next week—I promise.[A Bawlamer locution, for those not in the know:] Happy

Sacred spaces

2005-12-12T11:41:00.000-05:00

In the November issue of the Urbanite (pdf here), Zoë Saint-Paul looked at “The Sacred City,” a topic that we discussed when she was writing the piece, and one that I found provocative once she got me thinking about it. I am always on the lookout for peaceful places in Mobtown, but it doesn’t take long to see that the quiet and the sacred are not one and the same. At the time, I jotted down some

More camo

2005-12-02T07:26:00.000-05:00

“Camo Day” photos (more)A second collection of odds and ends from the camouflaged world (part one is here, although you can likely scroll down the page a little to see it).First up is the popularity in American secondary schools of “Camo Day,” where students and teachers dress appropriately [inset left]. Any Camo Day googling will quickly uncover a story on the Spurger [Texas] school that was

Bawlamer happenings

2005-12-01T07:36:00.000-05:00

Connery and HedrenA while back I wrote a little piece on Hitchcock’s Marnie, and how it was filmed on a little street in SoBo; in the comments, there was a short discussion on how parts must’ve been filmed on a sound stage, and other vagueries. Well, ff received an email yesterday from one Mark D. Phelps, who lived on Sanders Street when the movie was being fashioned. From Mr. Phelps’s note:I

Polish trifecta

2005-11-30T02:20:00.000-05:00

Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds has all the hallmarks of a difficult European movie: it is concerned with an unfamiliar postwar history, produced under strictly controlled Stalinist oversight, and filmed with meager resources. Yet Popiól i diament is accessible, visually sophisticated, and startlingly modern. Some background, from Criterion’s entry on the film:In 1999, Polish director Andrzej

The spotted opossum

2005-11-23T00:16:00.000-05:00

I happened upon this site that examines the history of exploration of Australia whilst looking for opossum engravings—really!—and was able to establish that the European settlement of the continent began at the time of our constitutional convention (in 1787).Spotted Opossum, Peter Mazell;hand-coloured copper engravingfrom Voyage of Governor Phillip toBotany Bay by Arthur Phillip(Rex Nan Kivell

City of lights

2005-11-18T17:22:00.000-05:00

Ads from the 1950s:0 1 2 3 4Crikey. I’ve been working long hours this week, and haven't gotten enough downtime to polish off the longer pieces that have been in the hopper for too long already, but a few short notes ere I fly to Nashville this eve.Cindy passed along the following from Stumps, a company that specializes in products for planning proms and other similar events. In the 1940s, they

“The Worst Record Covers of All Time”

2005-11-15T22:28:00.000-05:00

Genesis’ FoxtrotWhy do hipsters reject Genesis? Animal Collective couldn't try any harder to mimic them, from the prog-jamming down to the stupid album art.—Brent DiCrescenzo“The Worst Record Covers of All Time,” on Pitchfork[via Troy]

Camouflage survey

2005-11-11T12:35:00.000-05:00

It all started with a great score from Daedalus, a book I’ve been looking for for some time: designer Hardy Blechman’s Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia Of Camouflage (Firefly, 2004—it had previously been available only under a British imprint) for a cool $30—go and check it out at the source, or see Steven Heller’s review in Eye, or the one in Boldtype. Zeitgeist.And then, in rapid

New BüKs

2005-11-10T17:18:00.000-05:00

Buy it at the BüK ShopHey, kids: remember that nutty Valerie Solanas? Before she shot Andy, she published the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, an anti-male polemic—“her radical tract is a stunning salvo in the age-old battle of the sexes”—that has recently been reissued by the folks at BüK.And what is a BüK? It… …is an inexpensive pamphlet—just $1.49—containing one provocative essay, short story, portfolio of

Production up

2005-11-10T15:57:00.000-05:00

I’ve finally been able to shake off my writer’s block and have several columns that will go up tonight and tomorrow through the weekend [sample topics: literary Darwinists and television, camouflage, Blaze Starr, mystical video, and humility]. In the meantime, though, admire this remixed poster from the blog of the National Association of Manufacturers, whose “Wednesday Poster of the Week”

“Grunion runs have ended for this season.”

2005-11-10T12:06:00.000-05:00

So declares the Los Angeles Times’ latest “Fish report.” The California Department of Fish and Game provides grunion porn: Grunion leave the water at night to spawn on the beach in the spring and summer months two to six nights after the full and new moons. Spawning begins after high tide and continues for several hours. As a wave breaks on the beach, grunion swim as far up the slope as possible.

Trick or treat?

2005-10-31T08:58:00.000-05:00

Boo! (and must the Times publish such tiresome stuff?)From Postmarked Yesteryear: Art of the Holiday Postcard

Kinsley on Pynchon

2005-10-28T09:17:00.000-04:00

You can't knock the names, though. Above all, there is the wonderfully Pynchonesque Valerie Plame.—Michael Kinsley, from today’s op-ed on the “bewildering scandal of the moment.”

Baltimore’s best bookstores

2005-10-20T18:12:00.000-04:00

Woman with kangaroo, from theSeptember 1963 National GeographicIn our faire towne, there are too few bookstores to award the titular honor to any establishment—we need more, and better bookstores, dammit—but I wish to plug two local places that don’t get their fair share of praise: the Book Thing and Daedalus Books (in Columbia, but who’s counting?)…A little over a week ago, I visited the Book

Pop music in the autumn

2005-10-20T16:45:00.000-04:00

“[The record] ha[d] somehow gotten into this town by mistake.”—Harry Smith, on his purchase of a recording byMississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan, around 1940Even as I’ve been struggling to read and write over the past few weeks—something that always happens after the final push at the journal I edit; after many weeks of reading, revising, copyediting, and proofreading, What enquiring minds want

Hate the playa

2005-10-05T15:26:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to Monday’s installment of “Laguna Beach” last night, and it was terrific (as usual). The ep opens with Jessica and Alex H., bikini-ed and at the beach, discussing—well, what they always talk about: Alex H.: What’s that saying? It’s like, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Is that how it goes?Jessica: “Don’t hate the game, hate the player.”A: “Don’t hate the game, hate

Freakin’ brilliant

2005-09-27T16:06:00.000-04:00

A frame-by-frame analysis of Blue Velvet at Digital Poetics [via Coudal]. Frame 28 [look closely]Update: Site has been pulled down, alas. [cws::29Sep]

St. Eustace, Athanasius Kircher, and wonder

2005-09-20T12:07:00.000-04:00

Today is the feast day for St. Eustace, the patron saint for hunters and those in difficult situations; he plays a small role in the literature of wonder, primarily for the lasting fascination of Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher with the Roman-general-turned-martyr.Detail, The Conversion of St. Eustaceat Mentorella; from Historia Eustachio-Mariana (1655)(For those of you who make it to Los

Bad mags

2005-09-18T03:07:00.000-04:00

Tom Brinkmann’s site for Bad Mags, a book “due in 2005,” is such a train wreck you might find it curious that I’m citing it as rich in design resources, but there it is.Dig deeper: there’s an impressive collection of sixties and seventies zines, sorted by category (Sharon Tate, true crime, occult sex, bikers, punk, blue films) and by publisher (I’m unfamiliar with their names—Seven Seventy, GSN/

More on Arab TV

2005-09-14T00:09:00.000-04:00

Studying a foreign language in middle school was a virtual Rosetta Stone for me: all of a sudden I was endowed with a pretty good framework to apply in English, too. So this cartoon, by Hindawi for al-Ghad, might serve as an eye-opener for those who pooh-pooh the medium. From right-to-left—this is an Arabic-speaking audience, after all—we see the three types of Arab television viewers: those

illy’in’

2005-09-13T20:44:00.000-04:00

From illy, the coffee folks, a collection of espresso cups and saucers designed by Padraig Timoney and based on “lines and doodles from actual pen tests.” Nice, but a cool $120 for six of each. (There are pen-test sets for two, and numerous other artist-designed cups, from Jeff Koons to Maria Abramovic.)[Via Cindy]

Annoying Baltimore

2005-09-11T23:31:00.000-04:00

In the 17 August issue of the City Paper, Bret McCabe examines Friends and Friends of Friends, an “art book” that is the first publication from an outfit dubbed “Creative Capitalism.” The organizing principle behind the six-by-seven-inch, full-color Friends is that it contains images culled by the Creative Capitalists asking friends to ask their friends to submit work. But the plot thickens as

Reality

2005-09-06T00:31:00.000-04:00

In the beginning of the summer, it looked to be a fairly dismal TV season, with only a few items warranting notice:True Entertainment, a reality TV production company and subsidary of Endemol (oh, no, that’s Big Brother's Big Brother) announced in July that they’re looking to air a new series centered around contestants looking to be political operatives when they grow up; in other words, they’re

Pamuk’s Istanbul, and mine

2005-09-05T10:04:00.000-04:00

I impulsively journeyed to Istanbul as a young man in the early 1980s, after I discovered a Victorian travelogue (Constantinople: City of the Sultans, by Clara Erskine Clement) in a Santa Barbara antiquarian bookstore (here, I think, though I can no longer be certain). It was a peculiar time to visit—I arrived to guns on the tarmac unaware that the city was under martial law, and that the Turkish

Baltimore cinema: Marnie

2005-09-03T16:43:00.000-04:00

Hitchcock's much-admired Marnie (1964), starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, was never one of my favorites, but when I mention it to Mobtown residents, I often get blank stares. Feast your eyes on these stills (courtesy of Hitchcockmania, an amazing font; the Marnies are here) for a rendition of SoBo and the harbor in the sixties. (It was filmed on block-long Sanders Street, south of Federal

West by East

2005-09-03T15:49:00.000-04:00

I think democracy exists in the West because the West has had the novel. And despotism reigns in the East because the East has had poetry. The novel develops the democratic imagination because it offers various paths, various destinies, while poetry is despotic.—Sorour KasmaiVirgin with Child (1595), fromNisaburi’s Stories of the ProphetsBibliothèque Nationale de FranceSome have harrumphed that

Cut

2005-08-31T07:02:00.000-04:00

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,No reckoning made, but sent to my accountWith all my imperfections on my head.—Hamlet, 1.5.76I’m, alas, just about buried but not too far away from sending Cut—issue ten of Link—to the printer. My fellow editors (Stephen Janis, Mark Durant, and Janet Little) and I have been dealing with the usual headaches that come from

One good idea

2005-08-18T14:47:00.000-04:00

The idea that an artist is a different sort of person is a lie. “To live intensely is one of the basic human desires and an artistic necessity,” writes Mr. Kimmelman of Pierre Bonnard and us all. These essentialist ideas about artisthood scamper—discreetly, for the most part—throughout the book. Mr. Kimmelman’s thesis and, I think, his true belief is that the joys of art may be found in

Bresson’s little donkey

2005-08-17T16:58:00.000-04:00

Lotsa good stuff from the beach vacation, already fading from memory: I’ll start with the Criterion disques—for all of you Netflixen out there, note that the essays printed on the DVD notes are considerately provided, free of charge, by the good folks at Criterion (and linked, below, in the discussion)…Criterion’sAu hasardBalthazar site• Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) It’s funny: I

Julian Stanley, remembered

2005-08-15T22:21:00.000-04:00

Julian Stanley, dead at 87On my plane flight home this morning, I was saddened to discover that my undergraduate advisor, Julian C. Stanley, died on Friday (New York Times obituary here).I attended Hopkins from 1975-78, and knew the man since 1972, when he was in the midst of research that would result in the widespread administering of the SAT to elementary-aged students for use in predicting

A fashion portal

2005-08-11T18:05:00.000-04:00

Funny, sometimes the Internet works as advertised. Yesterday, I’m killing time, reading Marginal Revolution, when I happen upon this (a marriage proposal executed via intricacies of blogging software), akin to the guys who ask via Jumbotron. Dopey, yes, but the object of his affection—an apparel industry pattern maker and author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing—runs

The mating rituals of Laguna Beach

2005-08-10T11:45:00.000-04:00

Of all of my, what, few dozen readers, I know that most of them skip right over anything television-related, and of those remaining, all but one will be scratching their collective head at my love for the sublime reality-verité “Laguna Beach,” (on the ol’ MTV, Mondays at 10p)—but I have to relate a captivating moment at the end of last week’s episode.(For the uninitiated, LB films the day-day

The Pit

2005-08-09T11:32:00.000-04:00

The Pit #6(Click here to check out the photo set.) Over vacation, I took a few snaps (0 1 3 4 5) of an abandoned bar—perhaps a strip club—on a drive over U.S. 13 through the Delmarva peninsula (for folks outside of the middle Atlantic, that’s the piece of land that separates the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean, a portmanteau of parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—once abbreviated “Va

Six Feet Under

2005-08-08T18:46:00.000-04:00

What makes for good television? In the eyes of those who treat the medium seriously enough to care to answer the question, it usually has to do with form (cf. the real-time-ness of “24,” or fusing the action drama with the soap opera—see “Alias” and “Lost”—à la J. J. Abrams), instruction, issues, or in illuminating a certain culture (“The Sopranos”). Does the soap opera—even a well-heeled

The high priestess of frosty sensuality

2005-07-29T05:11:00.000-04:00

(Grambo on Vitti)

Kaus on Roberts

2005-07-28T15:32:00.000-04:00

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts appears to drive a Chrysler PT Cruiser. This may be the scariest thing I've heard about him.... Probe this issue thoroughly, Sen. Schumer! —Mickey Kaus, in Slate

To the beach

2005-07-15T23:09:00.000-04:00

Hayden Christensen plays Anakin Skywalker, who is increasingly lured toward what he calls the “dark side” and what the rest of us would call “frowning.”—Anthony Lane in the New YorkerWookiees!I’ve yet to take in many of the summer blockbusters (with the exception of Revenge of the Sith—and here, Mr. Lane’s remark is all one needs to know), but will have plenty of time next week to see Batman

The best album cover in a long time

2005-07-15T10:53:00.000-04:00

(Click here for a magnified image, and here for details about the release.)

Drawing Restraint

2005-07-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint opened last week at Kanazawa’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, including Drawing Restraint 9, a new film from 2005 (the previous components date from 1989-93); it travels to Seoul in the autumn and is scheduled to show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 23 June through 19 September 2006.Still from Drawing Restraint 9The Drawing Restraint

Photobooth

2005-07-13T11:30:00.000-04:00

Musee Mecanique photobooth picture from Thanksgiving, 1978(San Francisco, above Seal Rocks)The Photobooth Blog is one-stop shopping for everything you need to know about the thangs, especially in an era where the old, four-to-a-strip ones are disappearing (they have a locator, and info for rentals in your area).(Photo to the left of the teenage me, and pal Colin Camerer, during our salad days, on

The new economy and the pursuit of happiness

2005-07-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

Does it really matter what one wears? I sometimes think my life might have been different if I had chosen the other wedding dress. I was getting married for the second time, and until the overcast morning of the ceremony I dithered between a bland écru frock appropriate to my age and station, which I wore that once and never again, and a spooky neo-Gothic masterpiece with a swagged bustle and

MoCo Loco roundup

2005-07-08T21:11:00.000-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve visited MoCo Loco, a great modern design site, and I spent some time this afternoon catching up on their archives. Several bits caught my eye (click images for more info):

Shhhh!

2005-07-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

A nice, literate discussion of a topic middlebrow folk don’t care to examine: when the movie is better than the novel (from today’s Times by Caryn James).

Ten things from Nashville

2005-07-08T13:04:00.000-04:00

1. The Belcourt Theatre: it’s hard to believe that this small building, a stone’s throw from Vanderbilt University in the neighborhood of Hillsboro Village, once housed the Grand Ole Opry from 1934 to 1936; the theatre has two screens and a calendar that changes frequently. While in town, Cindy and I sawGreg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2005), a film about pedophilia that Todd Solondz wishes he could

Earthworks

2005-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Tyler has posted from the Lightning Field, almost a year to the day I visited last summer. He notes, among many other observations, thatLooking at Lightning Field was like looking at a painting. When my eyes found one pole, it led me to the next one. The poles moved my eye around the landscape the way the discovery of objects, cats, and people in a Bonnard move my eye around the canvas.andI found

Conference on the political economy of terrorism

2005-07-07T17:46:00.000-04:00

Will someone kindly plow through this stuff [culled from a George Mason University School of Law conference on the political economy of terrorism] and summarize? There looks to be a lot of good material here:Analytical History of TerrorismRelevance of Rational ChoiceReligious Extremists and TerrorismThe Importance of CultureLaw and Economics Perspective on TerrorismExtremism, Suicide Terrorism

Hip-hop Islam

2005-07-07T14:43:00.000-04:00

In the current issue of Al-Ahram Weekly, Hesham Samy Abdel-Alim follows the rise of hip-hop as a global phenomenon, paying particular attention to its connection with the concurrent rise of Islam. Quoting from his piece, As the authors of the forthcoming book, Tha Global Cipha: Hiphopography and the Study of Hip-Hop Cultural Practice (H. Samy Alim, Samir Meghelli and James G. Spady) argue, the

Nashville and wonder

2005-07-07T00:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, upon my return from Nashville, I dusted off The Parthenon, (Harvard University Press, 2003) classicist Mary Beard’s neat, readable, and illuminating volume on the West’s most famous building. I wanted to catch up on the temple’s lore, after visiting Centennial Park’s full-scale replica of the Parthenon, originally built for 1897’s Centennial Exposition in what the guidebooks like to

Pink

2005-07-05T13:38:00.000-04:00

Paul Simenon of the Clash once said to me, “Pink is the only true rock ’n’ roll color.” Apparently, they painted all their equipment pink for a tour.—Luella Bartley, as told to BlackBook, in their spring 2005 issue.

More thanks

2005-06-30T15:45:00.000-04:00

It’s kinda predictable that I’d be getting some high-profile visitors at the time I’m least able to put up new material—it’s the busy season at the journal I edit. (That’ll change after the holiday weekend, after I throw everything into the copyeditor’s lap.)In the meantime, a big shout-out to the good folks at Coudal for linking to my throwaway igloo piece, the esteemed Abu Aardvark for linking

Apples and oranges

2005-06-30T15:34:00.000-04:00

The automobile has always figured prominently in the cultural understanding of Los Angeles, and our ossified thinking has changed little, as if we are trapped by the La Brea tar pits: folks have long privileged the urban pedestrian, the flâneur, the Situationist city, the Big Apple, at the expense of smog, sprawl, and lost environmental virtue.Although it will never be entirely devoid of

Woes

2005-06-18T08:41:00.000-04:00

Swamped at work, just got internet service back at home (out since Wednesday), and off to NYC until tomorrow eve. But back soon! ::cws

Heat index

2005-06-10T11:30:00.000-04:00

The picture at the right, below, Igloo City, Cantwell, Alaska.Courtesy of flickr;originally uploaded by Mr. Lunatic Fringe. an arty snap of an igloo-hotel-in progress near Cantwell, Alaska, made the rounds the other day (I first saw it on Coudal’s website).Here, ff is providing a full-on collection of igloo links—not a lame one among them—to celebrate the onset of summer weather on the eastern

On metal

2005-06-08T17:26:00.000-04:00

Printed from Ameoba’s Music We Like: The Best of 2004!, courtesy of Stacy, “East Bay Mistress of Metal”: Demigod, Behemoth: Unrelenting Polish Extreme Metal! Check out their Crush Fukk Create DVD. It’s the next best thing to witnessing the intensity of their amazing live show.Sardonic Wrath, Darkthrone: Old school Norwegian Black Metal back with a vengeance!Blackdoor Miracle, Ragnarok: Brutal

Art into life, continued

2005-06-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

(Photo courtesy of the BBC.)From a 23 May BBC dispatch:A 60ft high picture of a murdered prostitute has been projected onto a derelict block of flats in Glasgow.Detectives hope it will help to turn up clues about the death of Emma Caldwell, whose body was found in woods in South Lanarkshire on 8 May.The image was displayed for four hours on the multi-storey flats in Cumberland Street,

There's text in them thar hills

2005-06-08T13:05:00.000-04:00

There’s no real iconic building in Los Angeles. The city’s symbol, if one exists, is the “Hollywood” sign, built atop Mount Cahuenga in the 1920s to flog a real estate development. I first visited LA in the late 1970s, touring by city bus, always amazed when the sign would reveal itself to me. It still holds a sense of wonder, many years later: a graphical sign looming above the city.During

Smart LA: boobs and books

2005-06-08T11:30:00.000-04:00

On May 25th, the UCLA Hammer Museum hosted a conversation between artist Lisa Yuskavage and Lisa Cholodenko, director of High Art and Laurel Canyon, as part of the Museum’s “Hammer Conversations” series. Yuskavage’s erotically-charged paintings pose a critical challenge to the public, since her frank, fantastic centerfolds leave the observer nowhere to hide: one cannot admire the technical

City of angels

2005-06-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

I first set foot in LA some twenty-seven years ago, arriving at LAX with my bicycle; I unpacked and set out up Lincoln Boulevard to the PCH, en route to Santa Barbara, where I was set to begin graduate school. To this day, the sight of palm trees is a happy occasion, a homecoming.(“A Beautiful Palm Drive, California,” an image of LA courtesy of the Northern California chapter of the Palm Society.

Back

2005-06-02T17:19:00.000-04:00

OK. Where to begin?I don’t stay wired during vacations, so I was reliant on the Los Angeles Times during the showdown over the filibuster. (In fact, the only time I read the physical newspaper anymore is when I’m on vacation.) Upon my return, I’m turning more to politics, and, after sorting through all of the analyses, I would’ve been fine reading a single site: Mark Schmidt’s Decembrist.

Welcome, and thanks

2005-05-18T14:48:00.000-04:00

If this is your first time at ffactory, welcome! In addition to the small but growing circle that have been supporting this weblog since the beginning of the year—special thanks go out to John Keene, Kevin Thurston, and David Beaudouin—we've been getting a surge of new visitors directed via the mighty Google [some of them looking for girly pix of Nancy Ajram and Anna Beatriz Barros, not that

Book coolie

2005-05-17T15:47:00.000-04:00

I'm in the midst of one of these feverish dreamlike states where I've recalled a recent passage that I've read—something about how man cannot avoid operating without precision, about how we're optimized to make decisions with incomplete information (Calasso? Surowiecki? Help!—but I can't place the book. Whilst compulsively Googling, I happened across Book Coolie (“A tiger does not shout its

More smart political art

2005-05-12T02:00:00.000-04:00

Foote Cone & Belding, founded in 1873, is the world's third-oldest advertising agency. According to their website,This award-winning campaign (FIAP Grand Prix) was created by FCB Portugal for the Portuguese newsmagazine Grande Reportagem, and is intended to reflect the values and independent approach of insightful, smart, assertive journalism. All data is taken from reputable sources including

Bull Moose on Hillary

2005-05-10T12:41:00.000-04:00

From today's Bull Moose dispatch: The ugly truth is that if Jesus of Nazareth himself returned and dared to run on the Democratic line the righteous right would tar him as a bleeding heart vagabond who couldn’t hold a job and that he needed a shave. No doubt a Galilee Fishingboat Veterans for Truth outfit would call into question Jesus’ miracle claims—financed with lavish funding from Rove’s

Funny bits from Tyler Green

2005-05-10T12:28:00.000-04:00

Two quickies from Modern Art Notes:Wynn HotelThe first, a snip from LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in his review of the new hotel on the Las Vegas Boulevard: You've probably heard by now that the Wynn Las Vegas is something of a rarity: a new hotel and casino on the Strip that doesn't have an architectural theme, the way the Venetian, the Paris, the Luxor and countless others do.

Weekend: St. Michael v. Satan, Peranio, . . .

2005-05-10T02:27:00.000-04:00

Weekend report: St. Michael weighing the soul of Satan. Purchase of nice ol’ print [right] from Alicia’s new store, Mommalicious, in Lancaster;Thanks to Troy for the CD recommendations; Thanks to T.J., Joy, and Zoë for a nice brunch with a pleasant bunch; Congrats to Julia Kim Smith, Dave Beaudouin, and Francesca Danieli on the screening of One Nice Thing at the MFF (and groovy party);

Pop culture and the Middle East

2005-05-10T00:54:00.000-04:00

I was last in Turkey during the winter of 1997, visiting Istanbul for the first time in nearly fifteen years: it was immediately evident that the metropolis had radically changed. In the early 1980s, the city was under martial law and a nightly curfew; summers in the old city were sleepy, with few tourists and little economic activity. Taxicabs and dolmuş—vintage American automobiles from

Veiled conceit

2005-05-06T17:51:00.000-04:00

Veiled Conceit is an enormously entertaining and funny blog, devoted to “a glimpse into that haven of superficial, pretentious, pseudo-aristocratic vanity: the New York Times’ wedding and celebration announcements.” To grab a ¶ more or less at random,Ruye and Marion occupy a tricky de-militarized zone in terms of Veiled Conceit mockery. They achieved “Vows” status, but they're really not that

Oh, dear: Crabtown

2005-05-05T11:13:00.000-04:00

Artist: Ron RoosTitle: An Udderly Unique Maryland Species, sponsored by Linehan Family Foundation, Inc.Description: A white crab with black, Holstein cow markings on front and back. Its back is includes an inscription about agriculture and the health of the Bay.Crabtown central; more submissions from the Baltimore City website.

Why “ffactory”?

2005-05-04T02:01:00.000-04:00

(A statement of purpose, manifesto, and FAQ, all rolled into one.)What’s with the double-f? How’s it pronounced?From found photobooth series at The Boat LullabiesI like the connotation of industrial production for a post-industrial age, and didn’t want to mimic the [now quasi-defunct] Factory records. I love smokestacks and beautiful old factory buildings, buildings that are no longer built and

Pop music, novelty, and aging

2005-05-04T00:39:00.000-04:00

Benn Ray's "The Day the Music Died" (printed in the Mobtown Shank a little over a week ago) reminded me of Robert Sapolsky's "Open Season: Why Do We Lose Our Taste for the New?" (from the 30 March 1998 issue of The New Yorker): both essays are concerned with the question of when we lose our taste for novelty in music. Sapolsky found thatMost people are twenty years old or younger when they first

A literary map

2005-05-03T19:21:00.000-04:00

In this Sunday's book review section of the Times, a proposal from "ethicist" Randy Cohen to produce a map of literary map of Manhattan, marking where famous fictional characters live in the metropolis, I began thinking about this map years ago while reading Don DeLillo's ''Great Jones Street.'' Bucky Wunderlick gazes out the window of his ''small crowded room'' at the firehouse across the street

Film shorts: Nashville, Morvern Callar, and In America

2005-05-03T19:00:00.000-04:00

A few words about a few films I've recently seen, two starring Samantha Morton: Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar (2002) and Jim Sheridan's In America (2002), plus Robert Altman's classic Nashville (1975).Nashville first: it's a curious and interesting film, one championed by Pauline Kael (her review may be found in For Keeps, among others) upon its 1975 release. Ms. Kael makes several noteworthy

More from the television wars: does TV make you smarter?

2005-05-03T16:12:00.000-04:00

In last night's episode of "24," the White House and CTU (for those of you not watching, that's the fictitious Counter-Terrorism Unit) are trying to figure out how to get their hands on a Chinese nuclear scientist, who has been collaborating with the bad-guy terrorists who are fixing to detonate a nuclear warhead any moment now. The scientist has sought refuge in the Chinese consulate which, as

Cram Sessions 03: Sound Politics

2005-04-29T18:20:00.000-04:00

I actually kind of like Chris Gilbert's enigmatic image—he's depicted in a City Paper profile as working in a bare office, save a framed portrait of "great Bolshevik" Nadezhda Krupskaya—but am unsure of his curatorial practice, which has steered him awry in Sound Politics, the third, and latest, CS excursion. Gilbert, a "Marxist of a fairly predictable variety," has mounted the Sessions in the

SlideShow at the BMA

2005-04-29T15:43:00.000-04:00

Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a sequence of 690 projected photographic images with recorded musical accompaniment, stands at the center of SlideShow, curator Darsie Alexander's exhibition currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through 15 May. This is due, in part, to Ballad's resemblance to that most accessible of slide shows, the family slide show, where the subject and the

F is for Fake

2005-04-29T11:31:00.000-04:00

From Criterion,Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles’s free-form documentary F for Fake, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career—the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks

Site back up!

2005-04-22T19:43:00.000-04:00

ffactory was down for most of today (and maybe last night) because I had linked to a number of images from Artnet, which has been down for the same period—sorry for the inconvenience. I'll try and get the backlog up over the weekend.

Mao Zedong is the red sun in our hearts!

2005-04-21T18:25:00.000-04:00

Factory 798 (warning: extremely ill-behaved and not very informative website; highlights are this photo of the unimproved gallery space and this one of the finished lounge) was once a military electronics factory, built in the 1950s by East German advisors to the young PRC. (Originally uploaded by Roy.) It's now a Bauhaus white elephant—still sporting communist slogans, e.g., the titular

The ideal woman

2005-04-21T15:13:00.000-04:00

Rama’s wife, daughter of the Earth,incarnation of goddess Lakshmi,embodiment of chastity and purity,Perfect Woman, and doormat.I've always meant to dig into the Ramayana, having looked at comic books, films, and a wide variety of texts, but here's an attractive way in: cartoonist Nina Paley has been fashioning Sita Sings the Blues, a remarkable animated treatment of the Ramayana set to lo-fi,

Islamic graveyards

2005-04-19T12:08:00.000-04:00

Don Milstead, my high school teacher in American history, used to explain how he always visited graveyards when travelling; now, I do the same—on my way to Maryland's eastern shore, or in Los Angeles, or Paris, and in the Muslim world, too. Old Ottoman cemeteries—the grounds of the Süleymaniye mosque in Istanbul—have headstones decorated with headgear that the man wore during his life on earth (

Hex

2005-04-19T11:17:00.000-04:00

Acoustic locators were deployed, between the world wars, to listen for noise from the engines of warplanes. Here, from the 1930s, a remarkable machine on trial in France [above; link to page with other outsized hearing aids]; each of the four assemblies carries thirty-six small hexagonal horns, arranged in six groups of six. [via Coudal]

A visit to Greenmount cemetery

2005-04-18T18:25:00.000-04:00

I seek out quiet, contemplative places in the city when I want to slow things down.Henry Jacob headstone; other photosfrom Greenmount to be found here. As time passes, places that were once conducive to solace stop working (the Baltimore Museum of Art was once a quiet place to visit, a bit off the beaten track, but it is no longer as cozy, a requirement for peace; Pimlico racetrack used to be a

Viral marketing

2005-04-18T11:58:00.000-04:00

It began with the billboard in a rundown neighborhood on Greenmount Avenue BovineUnite.com billboard, just north of 26th St.on Greenmount Av. at the railroad overpass.(For large image, click here. )[inset] and the moneyed website (the splash demands to know whether visitors are cow or human; Homo sapiens are admonished to exit immediately). Then, stationed in front of the Fells Point post office

Unbuilt Moscow

2005-04-14T17:55:00.000-04:00

From the 1930s to the early 1950s: Unrealised projects in Muscovite architecture; Aeroflot Building [above], D. Chechulin (1934). [via Design Observer]

On manliness

2005-04-14T17:31:00.000-04:00

Contrary to what you might first think, pragmatism is a philosophy, not the dismissal of philosophy. And Teddy Roosevelt was more a philosopher than he knew. His advocacy of manliness reflects the difficulties of pragmatism and tells us something about our situation today. We have abandoned—not reason for manliness like the pragmatists, nor manliness for reason like their tender-minded

(Lileks)

2005-04-14T11:42:00.000-04:00

From Stagworld!

House concurrent resolution No. 29

2005-04-13T18:02:00.000-04:00

WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!" All hail the Idaho state legislature for "commending Jared and Jerusha Hess and the City of Preston for the production of the movie Napoleon Dynamite." [

A visit to the National Gallery

2005-04-13T17:30:00.000-04:00

Gilbert Stuart, Edgehill Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1805)Until yesterday's visit to the exhibition of Stuart portraits in the NGA's west building, the last time I spent as much time with a Gilbert Stuart portrait was in an elementary school classroom watched over by the stern visage of George Washington. In a pre-modernist time—the presidential portraits are largely from the early nineteenth

Political art

2005-04-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

Even good political art tends to be tedious (say, Hans Haacke, for instance): no matter how smart it is, I tend to want to repair to the bar. And, of course, most of what passes for political art is a simple declaration of one's beliefs—often pacifist, or anti-Bush—and that generally looks like a bumper sticker, or not really art at all.But the best political art illuminates the, ahem, power

Dining inside (and around) the beltway

2005-04-12T11:06:00.000-04:00

It's awfully hard getting a good meal in Baltimore (cue violins). But, thanks to Tyler Cowen, economist at George Mason University, proprietor of Marginal Revolution (the best economics blog for non-economists), and author of an annual Ethnic Dining Guide, we're only a short car ride to a reliable, delicious, and healthy meal.On Saturday, Cindy and I made our way to Minerva, an Indian place in Dr

City of God versus Sin City

2005-04-12T10:32:00.000-04:00

I watched Fernando Meirelles's City of God (2003) over the weekend and loved it, as just about everyone else who saw it at the time did. It's the story of semi-organized crime in a Rio de Janeiro slum (that goes by the titular 'City of God'), a shantytown district built by the government to segregate the poor away from the touristic city. Guns are everywhere; in a country that frets over the

Pebbles

2005-04-12T09:12:00.000-04:00

Clockwise from top left:From the estate of Bobo Lewis, an amusement park? cutout (although the annotation suggests something else to me—does anyone know what "New Chinatown souvenirs-Charlie Chan-Los Angeles" refers to?);Paperback cover for Edgar Rice Burroughs's Cave Girl;Joe Chiodo image from New Paintings: Joe Chiodo and Pooch currently showing at Roq la Rue, Seattle; andVintage "Eeka"

Birth-day

2005-04-11T18:37:00.000-04:00

I share a birthday with really minor luminaries, including David Cassidy, Dave Letterman, and Claire Danes, but now I learn that I also was born on the same day as outsider artist, well-read pop culture hound, and possible serial killer Henry Darger. The American Folk Art Museum is celebrating the 113th anniversary of Darger's birth by reading from the last, unbound volume of his typewritten

Victoria Reynolds's meat paintings

2005-04-11T17:01:00.000-04:00

Victoria Reynolds, Down the Primrose Path (2003)

Three findings on hotels

2005-04-11T16:28:00.000-04:00

It looks as if it’s time for a visit to Barcelona. Although my last visit there resulted in a picked pocket, I’m willing to risk a shameful visit to the local police station for a stay at Casa Camper (spectacular website, by the way), a design-y dream in the Catalan capitol’s El Raval district. Adjacent to the hotel is FoodBall, the shoe manufacturer’s new health-food shop which features simple,