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"It’s not that I thought I had heard every pop singer from the sixties. That would be hubristic. But I thought that I had heard of most of them: not only the major artists but also the minor ones, the imitators, the fringe bands, the one-hit wonders, the novelty acts. I had not, however, heard of Tandyn Almer. And so when I saw that the excellent record label Sundazed was releasing an album of Almer’s demos, I stared at the name for a while. Tandyn Almer. It didn’t even seem like a real name so much as a Scrabble spill…"
— Ben Greenman discovers the 1960s songs of Tandyn Almer: http://nyr.kr/YdfkcR(Source: newyorker.com)
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"A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train."
— Calvin Trillin reflects on his experience working as a floater at TIME magazine in the early 1960s: http://nyr.kr/WIA50k -
There’s more breadth and depth—more of a sense of history at large, of the intrinsic and profound horror of the practice and the experience of torture, and of the moral issues involved in political action—in that thirteen-minute sequence than in the whole of “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Richard Brody on the truthful torture scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat”: http://nyr.kr/ZuXX4Z
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Beginning in the late fifties, The New Yorker ran a series of short Talk items about captivating graffiti slogans. Most of these accounts were brief, including simply the location and a description of the graffiti in question. The magazine chronicled an early example of literary graffiti that would take on greater artistic significance. In 1957, a keen-eyed New Yorker contributor published a small item about someone who had recently visited an “espresso joint” in Greenwich Village. The visitor took note of a phrase that was written, in elegant calligraphy, on the wall beside his chair: “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Years later, the playwright Edward Albee, who was often asked about the title of his 1962 play, told The Paris Review how he’d been inspired by a line of graffiti that he had seen scrawled on the wall of a Greenwich Village establishment during the mid-fifties. Perhaps this was the very same scribbling the magazine had noted in its pages nearly five years before the play’s début.
Click-through to continue reading a history of polite graffiti in The New Yorker:
http://nyr.kr/WMyqDb
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Saul Steinberg’s early cartoons:
became equal parts philosophy and art, and no part mirth…
Bob Mankoff pays homage to Saul Steinberg, gag man: http://nyr.kr/SkP8fm
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Ed Koren has crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon three times, an accomplishment that provided the inspiration for this week’s cover, “On Your Mark!” But how about his furry creatures? What was the inspiration for them? “During the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, an avalanche of hirsutism and fuzziness took over the nation,” Koren told us. “Long hair, wild hairdos, exuberant facial appendages were everywhere as expressions of social rebellion, political revolt, and a general questioning of everything established.”
Click-through for a slide show of Koren’s furry creatures throughout the years, as he takes us through his cartoons and recent covers: http://nyr.kr/RLFDks
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"Their moment was untenable, perhaps even impossible, and yet it endures, and Whitehead’s remarkable film captures it in all its wondrous, exhilarating power."
— Richard Brody on “Charlie Is My Darling,” Peter Whitehead’s 1965 Rolling Stones documentary, screening at the New York Film Festival, and coming to DVD next month: http://nyr.kr/QssHjJ(Source: newyorker.com)
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Audio Slide Show: Peter Schjeldahl on "Regarding Warhol"→
This week in the magazine, Peter Schjeldahl reviews “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a show that juxtaposes examples of Warhol’s paintings, films, and sculpture with works by sixty other artists who were influenced by his legacy. ”The sixty artists are well chosen but, in truth, too few. For or against, what artist of the past half century hasn’t reacted to Warhol’s reduction of art’s once sacred aura to a cult of the obvious?” Schjeldahl writes.
In this audio slide show, Schjeldahl remembers seeing “Cow Wallpaper” in an exhibit in 1966: “There were drifting Mylar balloons, and this gorgeous and perfectly idiotic wallpaper. Everybody looked great, was stoned, and in my memory it was the absolute highlight of the nineteen-sixties—everything went to hell after that.” He also analyzes a selection of his favorite works from the show.
Click-through to listen now: http://nyr.kr/Sa7a2K
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DVD of the Week: John Cassavetes’ first studio film, “Too Late Blues” (1961).
Watch the clip, and click-through for more from Richard Brody on Cassavetes: http://nyr.kr/Q7SbWD
(Source: newyorker.com)
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…a 1966 interview with Renoir conducted by the director Jacques Rivette, who gets him to speak about the effect of technical advances on the art of the cinema and on art as such, with surprising results.
Watch the clip, and then click-through for more from Brody on Jean Renoir, technology, and art: http://nyr.kr/Pt2KTc
(Source: newyorker.com)
