Category: Arts and Letters

Andrew Sarris Remembrance

THE ARRIVAL IN MY LIFE of Film Culture 28 in the spring of 1963, with Andrew Sarris’s preliminary sorting out of American movie directors that became the basis for his greatly expanded The American Cinema (published in 1968), was one of those before and after moments. It’s hard even to reconstruct what it was like to have the past of American film suddenly spread out, a map of a country known previously only through rumor and fragmentary glimpses. Not just a map: a map accompanied with pointed commentary by a guide at once passionate and endlessly curious. It was all so exotic then. The very titles of the movies seemed like a strange kind of recovered poetry. But it was our own past, a lost world of universal neighborhood experience that had been occulted and buried. He pointed out things that I didn’t know existed and argued persuasively for their importance. Rarely had there been such a cascade of information and insights and urgently communicated judgments.

andrew sarris, 1928–2012
O’Brien, Geoffrey. Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows

The 25 Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture – New York Times List

1. Luis Barragán’s Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City (1948)
2. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill. (1951)
3. Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna Village in Luxor, Egypt (1952)
4. Alvar Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall in Jyvaskyla, Finland (1952)
5. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York City (1958)
6. Kenzo Tange’s Kagawa Prefectural Government Office Building in Takamatsu, Japan (1958)
7. Carlo Scarpa’s Renovation of Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Italy (1959)
8. Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette in Éveux, France (1960)
9. Edward Larrabee Barnes’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine (1961)
10. Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. (1965)
11. Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome for Expo ’67 in Montreal (1967)
12. John W. Moutoussamy’s Johnson Publishing Company Building in Chicago (1971)
13. Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia (1973)
14. Charlotte Perriand and Atelier d’Architecture en Montagne’s Les Arcs in Savoie, France (1974)
15. Juliaan Lampens’s Van Wassenhove House in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (1974)
16. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977)
17. Balkrishna Doshi’s Indian Institute of Management Bangalore in Bangalore, India (1983)
18. Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, Brazil (1986)
19. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals in Vals, Switzerland (1996)
20. Francis Kéré’s Gando Primary School in Gando, Burkina Faso (2001)
21. Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s Xiangshan Central Campus of China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China (2007)
22. Marina Tabassum’s Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2012)
23. Amanda Williams’s “Color(ed) Theory” Series in Chicago (2014-16)
24. Lacaton & Vassal, Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin’s Transformation of 530 Dwellings in Grand Parc Bordeaux, France (2017)
25. Various Designers’ International Space Station in Outer Space (ongoing)

The 25 Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture
Three architects, three journalists and two designers gathered over Zoom to make a list of the most influential and lasting buildings that have been erected — or cleverly updated — since World War II. Here are the results.
Kurt Soller and Michael Snyder

The Power of Art and Self Expression – Example of, Anecdote

Ask a little kid to tell you about a painting they’re working on. It’s a miraculous thing. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to aspire to that level of artistic liberation. I believe it’s still there in all of us. I wrote about this in my first book, but I think it’s worth emphasizing: During my stay in a mental hospital some sixteen years ago now, I witnessed this childlike superpower reassert itself, take hold, and transform a woman who was virtually catatonic in an art-therapy class. I think about it almost every day.

A sixty-something heroin addict who had spent the better part of the previous thirty years in and out of institutions and living on the streets – and whom I had not heard make a sound in any of the group therapy sessions, or even in the smoking room – drew a simple picture of herself. It wasn’t great. But it looked like her.

When she held it up for the class to see, I heard her voice for the very first time. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she had held a pencil. She smiled! And cried. Everyone clapped and gathered around to hold her. It was such a stark, amazing, healing thing to see someone’s eyes light up – become human again – when they realized they had the power to make something that wasn’t there.

How to Write One Song
Jeff Tweedy

This is Radio Clash – The Clash

Interrupting all programs
This is radio clash from pirate satellite
Orbiting your living room,
Cashing in the bill of rights
Cuban army surplus or refusing all third lights
This is radio clash on pirate satellite

This sound does not subscribe
To the international plan
In the psycho shadow of the white right hand
Then that see ghettology as an urban Vietnam
Giving deadly exhibitions of murder by napalm

This is radio clash tearing up the seven veils
This is radio clash please save us, not the whales
This is radio clash underneath a mushroom cloud
This is radio clash
You don’t need that funeral shroud

Forces have been looting
My humanity
Curfews have been curbing
The end of liberty

Hands of law have sorted through
My identity
But now this sound is brave
And wants to be free, anyway to be free

This is radio clash on pirate satellite
This is not free Europe
Noh an armed force network
This is radio clash using audio ammunition
This is radio clash can we get that world to listen?
This is radio clash using aural ammunition
This is radio clash can we get that world to listen?
This is radio clash on pirate satellite
Orbiting your living room,
Cashing in the bill of rights
This is radio clash on pirate satellite
This is radio clash everybody hold on tight

A-riggy diggy dig dang dang
Go back to urban ‘nam

“This Is Radio Clash” is a song by the English punk rock band the Clash. The 1981 single was issued in 7-inch format and also in 12-inch format and cassette tape with additional tracks. The first public performance of the song was on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show on 5 June 1981.[3]

The song is not featured on any of the Clash’s original studio albums, but is included in their compilations: The Singles (1991), The Story of the Clash, Volume 1, Sound System, Singles Box, The Singles (2007) and Clash on Broadway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Radio_Clash

What Literature Can Do

But what literature does, which formal philosophy for example commonly does not – and what literature can hardly help doing – is yield more than its writers know. In thinking about human life, it offers as much excess, untidied material as it can by not only thinking but re-creating the very objects of thought—offering more from within the very middle of things, I will argue, than a more secondary discipline can provide with more formally set starts and goals. Writers offer this by creating not so much a line of argument as a resonant space for thinking. In a book on his reading called A Dish of Orts (1893), the Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald speaks of Wordsworth as a poet not so much offering ideas as putting the reader into the places (physical, mental, and situational) from which such ideas originally arise so that they come of themselves.

Davis, Philip. Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda