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To See a Forest for the… Artistic Possibilities
I completely missed Earth Week, as it seems that environmental groups are not fans of putting up event flyers, for some reason. So for my post this week I have some interesting pieces of Land/Earth Art, or “Earthworks” as pioneer Robert Smithson called them. Rising with the environmental movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s in ...
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Lessons from Schwitters: Obsession and Patience
I was recently rejected from the tiny, and hence necessarily selective, visual arts program at my university. I met with the director afterward, and I remember one question from our conversation particularly vividly. He asked me how I felt about being rejected so soon after deciding to pursue art seriously. My response: “It would be really easy for me to give up right now, but I’m not going to.”
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Soundtrack
1. The Magnetic Fields, “The Dreaming Moon”: While this first track does not correspond to a particular scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it embodies some of the play’s major themes, not only through its title (both dreams and the moon are both prominent elements, frequently mentioned in the text) but also lyrically. The lyrics ...
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Film Scores and Films Scorned
I’ve pretty much used up every last ounce of wit I had saved up in coming up with that article title, so after this point you will all have to bear with me simply being earnest in my writing about a great hobby and passion of mine: film scores. Sometimes an entire film can be ...
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MoCCA Fest 2011
On April 9th I attended MoCCA Fest in Manhattan; it’s a convention/exhibition that the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has yearly at the Lexington Armory. According to their homepage, “Since 2002 the MoCCA Festival offers a unique venue to experience comics, mini-comics, web comics, graphic novels, animation, posters, prints, original artwork and more.” Their ...
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The Graduate: A Study of Psyche
Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967; cinematographer: Robert Surtees) manipulates cinematography through lighting and shot composition to underscore the film as a study on the psyche of both the characters and the audience itself. The realism of the picture, achieved primarily through the lighting scheme, allows the audience to access the world presented before it: a ...
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The Importance of Place
Sometimes, a place gets into your bones so deep that everything about you seems to emanate from…there. You begin to notice the subconscious way in which you compare almost every restaurant to the ones ‘there’, how you’ve managed to work “back in [___]” into at least one conversation today (just like yesterday), and that you ...
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Pulitzer Faves
Have you heard the news? Of course you have: Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer for A Visit from the Goon Squad, and no doubt her book is already sold out at Barnes and Noble…cause that’s generally how people roll. I have not yet read Goon Squad though I own it – I bought a copy ...
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“Dear Chicago,” Ryan Adams
Ryan Adam’s third album Demolition was released in 2002 after his sophomore album, Gold which included the (sort of) hit song “New York, New York.” Demolition is comprised of unreleased tracks, some of which were just written and some that were supposed to end up on his other albums (e.g. Gold or his first album ...
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Not Just A Catholic School Girl
While Cindy Sherman (1954 – ) first gained fame in the late 1970s with her series of Untitled Film Stills, “black and white photographs…[that] mimicked the characters and settings of fictional 1950s and 60s Hollywood B-movies,” her work in the 1980s consisted of color photographs that “made reference to fashion photography, television, horror movies and ...
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A Fistful of Dollars and Yojimbo
The tropes of the American Western have long been played out in oral traditions, novels, films, and cartoons. In the 1960’s, a genre of film emerged derogatorily dubbed “Spaghetti Western” by Americans. These films often depicted tensions between Mexico and the United States- fighting along the border in particular- and were made to look as ...
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Album Review: Radiohead – The King of Limbs (2011)
Though I love Radiohead I would hardly call myself an expert on their music Then again I wouldn’t call myself an expert on music in general. I often feel quite out of my element when it comes to talking about music, leaving it to other people, so-called “experts” or just people who live and breathe ...