From the monthly archives:

February 2009

Tara Donovan’s Piles of Cups, Straws

Tara Donovan has piles of cups, loops of tape, and a front of straws installed at Cincinnati’s CAC, all worth a look and thought.  In 2006 I saw two of these works at St. Louis’ unbelievably fine art museum, but prefer their Cincinnati versions.  Before, Haze stood in an obscure nook by the staircase; now [...]

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March, almost

There’s this.  And then this. *** I listened to the Elliot County boys’ basketball game last night.  They won a tight one with too many whistles over East Carter, 73-68. Got T’d up near the end, which won’t fly in the Sweet 16 state tournament.  If East Carter had hit their foul shots, etc etc. [...]

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Newspapers are doomed.

Up late during a windstorm, I caught a Charlie Rose roundtable on “The Future of Newspapers.”  He talks with Walter Isaacson, Mort Zuckerman, and Robert Thomson. Based on what they said, all newspapers but the Wall Street Journal are utterly doomed. Isaacson drives the point home with his plan to save the papers: micropayments.  When [...]

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Lower, low

Filmmaker James Fotopoulos: I think that serials from the 30′s and exploitation films, horror films, and these types of cinema that are considered “low” are much closer to life. Because of the complete lack of anything that is rational and the brutality is closer to how we live. For example, I saw some lowly exploitation [...]

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(Add the Net, PCBs, MRSA)

When myth exhausts its power to transmit messages (how to marry, how to eat, how to be brave), it becomes a narrative that does not know how to resolve itself.  Everything, says the contemporary novel, comes to a bad end.  (It was in Victorian times that novels began to have ambiguous, unresolved, ironic endings.)  Music, [...]

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