December 2010
16 posts
3 tags
On Looking at James Franco
via The New York Times Magazine, “14 Actors Acting”
“By offering himself to be seen rather than trying to obscure his performance, Franco at his best has the ability to pacify the camera’s gaze and appear not as a lack of ability, but an excess. As Paul Klee said of art in general, Franco’s acting does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible.”
By Malcolm...
2 tags
Confessions of a Mass Man
“La Manifestation,” Felix Valloton (1948)
“I worry that my fake ideas don’t even have time to reach the words stage, but remain a mere inarticulate drive to consume. In my media intake, momentum has replaced thinking.”
By Rob Horning
When I was a student, I had a deeply ambivalent attitude about the university library. I typically had some very vague research...
3 tags
The Art of the Obituary (9): Brooke Astor and...
Brooke Astor (left) and Leona Helmsley (right), grandes dames of New York, died on August 13th and 20th 2007 respectively.
The arrogance of big money, Mrs. Astor wrote once, “is one of the most unappealing of characteristics,” Mrs. Helmsley, though fun to her friends, was arrogance personified: “Rhymes with rich,” was Newsweek’s caption for her portrait on its...
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The Art of Cuisine (5): Pudding
Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink, That is the finest of suppers, I think; When I’m grown up and can have what I please I think I shall always insist upon these. What do you choose when you’re offered a treat? When Mother says, “What would you like best to eat?” Is it waffles and syrup, or cinnamon toast? It’s cocoa and animals that I love most!
Christopher...
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In Defense of the Scene
Saul Steinberg, Techniques at a Party (1953)
“One of the narcotizing blessings of online sociality is that you can ignore when you are ignored and make it feel mutual. People can’t turn their back to you; they just disappear. Internet sociality for now dulls the the experience both of warmth and exclusion particular to in-person social scenes.”
by Helena Fitzgerald In...
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The Art of the Interview (5)
Armchair/Shotgun interviews Ron Charles:
A/S: You’ve explored the costs and benefits of e-readers and technology as they relate to the reader experience. With that in mind, when the robot revolution comes, will you be the first against the wall? Or not? Explain.
Ron Charles: The Cylons will embrace me because I’m the weasiliest kind of collaborator. On my iTouch and Blackberry, over Twitter...
2 tags
WatchInterviews with Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen. Keret is a graphic novelist, fiction, and screenwriter from Israel. Interviewed here he discusses his short story collection “Girl on the Fridge.” A later interview with his wife, Shira Geffen, covers their collaboration writing and directing the celebrated first filmmaking effort “Jellyfish” which was received well at the 2007...
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Lost & Found (3)
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library:
Worthington, A.W. A Study of Splashes. New York: MacMillan.
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The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country...
1 tag
Dissent Magazine's Holiday Party
Thanks to our friends at Dissent Magazine for hosting a lovely holiday party. We submit some scenes from the night:
The New Inquiry encourages our readers to support the ongoing legacy of this great American intellectual journal by subscribing and/or donating here.
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Reverse-Squeeze
Image (via)
Julian Assange, Hunter S. Thompson & the Honey-Pot Missions
by Ryan Ruby
Earlier this week, Julian Assange, editor in chief of the whistleblowing website WIkileaks, wanted by Interpol and the Swedish government for alleged sex crimes committed against two Swedish women, and wanted by the United States government for his data dump of confidential, sensitive, and often...
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The Art of Cuisine (4): Uncle Nietzsche
In February 1875 Elisabeth Nietzsche went to live with the Wagners in Bayreuth. The month before, her brother, Friedrich, received a letter from Cosima Wagner that he forwarded her. In it Frau Wagner implored Friedrich to convince his sister to take up residence in her household. “I come to you with a big request, and one that you will think is most unusual, my dear friend,” she wrote. “I am...
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Coldness, Cruelty and the Status Update
Image via Easily Mused
“Television’s artifice no longer mediates: in order to for us to be entertained now, someone has to do something to us, hurt us or praise us, talk about us or leave us. This need to be done to, to be acted upon, is masochism. Reality television was sadism. Social media is masochism.”
By Helena Fitzgerald
One of the thrills of adulthood is that no...
1 tag
The Art of Cuisine (3): Airplane Food
Lise, the main character of Muriel Spark’s 1970 novella The Driver’s Seat, might be as young as twenty-nine, or as old as thirty-six. “[N]either good-looking nor bad-looking,” Lise has “widely-spaced, blue-grey and dull” eyes, lips “normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick,” and pale-brown hair “cut short at the sides and...
Beaches of Agnes dir. Agnes Varda
beuscher: