Monthly Archives: February 2011
Little Boxes #35
(from Superwest, by Massimo Mattioli, 1987)
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Filed under chris randle, comics
Friday Pictures – The angel of history
Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus, which Walter Benjamin compared, in the text below, to “the angel of history”
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Filed under books, Friday Pictures, margaux williamson, visual art
Nowhere Boy (2009) – directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, written by Matt Greenhalgh, based on biography by Julia Baird
by Margaux Williamson
(I wasn’t too interested in this movie, about the childhood of John Lennon, till my friend Sheila mentioned that the director was Sam Taylor-Wood. Sam Taylor-Wood is a British artist. I was curious to see what kind of movie she would have directed and happy that I would be able to see a complete work. She often works in multi-channel video installations and I have only ever seen stills.
Sheila and I discussed in great detail when and where we would watch Nowhere Boy. Finally, on a very specific and snowy night, I walked over to her house. Inside, it became clear that we had missed the “how” part – neither of us had Nowhere Boy on our persons or in our electronic devices.
So we played Tetris instead, and drank some tall glasses of water. We wondered if this was what it was going to be like when we were old. )
Filed under margaux williamson, movies, visual art
Little Boxes #34
(from Hi-Yo Silver #22, script by Gaylord DuBois and artist unknown art by Tom Gill [thanks to Stephen in comments], 1957)
Filed under chris randle, comics
Tea With Chris: Making a Bad Ting Good
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week: Chris: Via Tom Ewing, I discovered Rastamouse, a new BBC kids’ show about patois-speaking rodents … Continue reading
Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson
Destroyer Does Dad-Rock? Discuss! (Kaputt, Again)
by Chris Randle Carl wrote a long post about Destroyer’s Kaputt last week, and on Tumblr there was much rejoicing: “Finally, commentary worthy of the album.” I wasn’t going to top that, so I decided to focus on the previous … Continue reading
Filed under chris randle, music
Black Swan (2010) – conceived and directed by Darren Aronofsky, written by Mark Heyman, starring Natalie Portman
by Margaux Williamson
(I saw this movie with my friend Ryan Kamstra. I wasn’t sure if I would like the movie, but I thought I might like it better if I saw it with Ryan. We have a pretty easy time laughing at things while also taking them very seriously. This is usually helpful with work that takes no breaks for jokes. We saw it at a big multiplex during the day.)
Swan Lake is an old story. Tchaikovsky brought it into form for the ballet in 1876 [..] Continue reading
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Filed under dance, margaux williamson, movies
The Bands that Don’t Reform, by Antony Harding and Darren Hayman
The Bands that Don’t Reform, by Antony Harding and Darren Hayman, by Carl Wilson
It could read as a pretty thin joke about a couple of those aforementioned nerdz realizing that they only have their petty music-fanatic dogma left in common, but there’s a second, more bittersweet layer: If they don’t think even the relatively minor business of a rock band trying to reunite has any hope of a good result, then why are they trying to glue together a couple of split-up hearts? Continue reading →
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Filed under carl wilson, lectures, music
Tagged as actors?, aesthetic rehab, Antony Harding now lives in Sweden with his wife and kid, Bill Hicks, drugs, Hefner, I'm a bit of a sucker for anything Darren Hayman does, Kim Gordon and Stephen Malkmus probably are hard to get along with, marriage, nerding about nerds, Pop Conference, the flicker of reality, trying not to use the word metacommentary