paperhound:
Meteorology might seem like a dry topic, but actually (brace yourselves) it’s also blustery, frosty, humid, frigid, and most compellingly of all: nebulous. In accordance with our sense of poetic allocation, books on topics atmospheric and celestial are shelved up high, under the common classifier “The Heavens”. One must crane one’s neck to view them, and browsers rarely do, but (in this unbiased author’s opinion) it is well worthwhile. And particularly so with the recent addition of Soft Skies of France, a remarkable little American photographic essay whose thesis states that French cloud formations are unique globally, and that “the skies which hover over France have a limpid quality found nowhere else”. Sentiment and science collide on our highest shelf!
mrstsk:
In the magazine section of a Japanese bookshop I flutter like a butterfly from shelf to shelf. Oh look, i-D has relaunched its Japanese edition, last seen in the late 1990s! Oh look, ku-nel has gone catalogue-style, the penultimate stop before magazine oblivion. And look, Ayumi Ohashi is telling us that the new Arne magazine — featuring a cover story about Mallorcan straw basket weavers — will be the last.
A full-page image in Milk Japon catches my attention. Milk is a French magazine with a Japanese edition that may well outsell the French one, and that fascinates me as an example of the “Europe in Japan” phenomenon: Japan’s tendency to filter and edit and remake Europe to suit its own preconceptions, tastes and needs.
Milk is a children’s fashion magazine, and this photo poses a girl against a shelf of books in a Paris library. It’s that paper-white part of the library featuring belles lettres, mostly volumes of poetry and fiction published by Gallimard’s Nouvelle Revue Francaise (nrf) and Les Editions de Minuit. The creamy-stark whiteness of the spines makes for a unique European ambience, far from the dark sheen of an Anglo-Saxon Victorian leather-bound library, or the ugly and garish array of a neoliberal Anglo-Saxon bookshop.
This is the latest publication from Les Editions de Minuit, and as you can see they’re one of the rare publishers wise enough to have stuck to their original, austerely elegant generic format. It’s a design — reminiscent of classical music folios — struck during the war, when austerity was necessary in France, and preserved ever since, so that a faithful collector of Minuit volumes could, in theory, have kept adding to the whiteness of her shelves for eight consecutive decades, achieving the look of creamy liberal-humanist “enlightenment” captured in the Milk photo.
I have a few similar volumes in my Osaka apartment, although not enough to get a whole shelf to glow with that French look — a look I remember being impressed by in London’s foreign bookshop Grant & Cutler. It’s a Latin cultural thing: in Grant & Cutler the French books led smoothly into the Spanish and South American sections, for they shared a spiny lightness and a simplicity of design which, though austere, could also be sensual (the transparent onion-paper around my Claudel, for instance, is delightful).
Milk Japon’s decision to photograph a girl amongst pale library books has all sorts of resonances. A child is growing up in a civilised, intellectually enriched, liberal-humanist environment. The books represent decades of quiet, thoughtful time she might have ahead of her. It’s a reminder that, for the Japanese, Paris is not just a world centre of fashion — of couture — but also of culture seen as a cute accoutrement, a lifestyle accessory that speaks to the Japanese soul of relaxing leisure time, refined sensuality, coffee, baguettes and Breton fishermen’s shirts.
The images of Japanese girls posing with books in the Bookgirls Tumblr show that Japanese books have a similar pallor, particularly in newly-fashionable, artily-curated secondhand bookshops like Osaka’s LVDB. Here — as in the wa cafés equipped with blankets, kerosene heaters, old books and cameras, vinyl LPs — the best of the physical, retro world (everything, in other words, that isn’t on your iPhone screen) is collected together and made new, young and sexy again.
(via www.youtube.com/watch)
–A friend asked “Jim how are you —really?”
I thought, “Must be a trick question.”
Not a trick by the asker
but trick by
my inner magician,
my personal convoluter,
my lithe prevaricator
who first teased Eve
under a tree
with the acid, orange
kumquat of knowledge
which he bounced
upon his forked tongue
and upon which Eve
and her shifty lover
sadly choked
The question,
How are you, really?
is impossible for a fake
to bear
To answer would be
to mock God
who sees through spin
no matter how sincere
Better to say,
Gooder ‘n some
Better to say,
Badder ‘n others
Better to say,
A mixed bag complex.
A hick in a zoot suit
A pansey in a bucket
of muck
I keep up appearances
I do my thing
I balance odds and ends
as best I can
I go not where the four
winds blow
You want the naked truth?
Let me think about it ’cause
I don’t know
poonany:
leffelovesdestrua:
Sharing this because I had NO IDEA that this is how they worked…
This is sexual
10oclockdot:
Catching Up #22: World of Tomorrow (dir. Don Hertzfeldt, 2015) It’s been about a week since Netflix began streaming Don Hertzfeldt’s 2015 short World of Tomorrow, which I think is long enough to qualify for an episode of Catching Up (given how much I love Hertzfeldt). In my July 2013 write-up on Hertzfeldt for The Final Image, I opened with the following observation: “Until recently, Don Hertzfeldt’s short animated films could be mistaken as nothing more than insidiously macabre comedy. But with the completion of his recent trilogy It’s Such a Beautiful Day…, it has become clear to me that Hertzfeldt’s films concern nothing less than the fundamental act of creation. And by creation, I don’t just mean artistic creation. I mean the wresting of a cosmos out of a primordial state of chaos.” (here) Without fail, World of Tomorrow rises to this description and breathtakingly surpasses it. Not only has Hertzfeldt imagined a new future-universe more insightfully, more beautifully, and more totally than in any previous project, he surrounds us with it so immediately that he even has time to destroy it all, too. Now, this appetite for destruction has always overrun Hertzfeldt’s films. But here the bizarre violence and deadpan dark humor have almost disappeared entirely, opening a new space for legitimate philosophical musings on the entwined natures of time and death. When news of Abe Vigoda’s death reached me yesterday, I recalled that in the early 80’s People Magazine had accidentally printed that he was dead, and this greatly-exaggerated report of his death has been played for humor ever since. But in the same way that the Twitter account which reproduced On Kawara’s I Am Still Alive postcards (as tweets) for the digital age took on greater significance the moment Kawara died, the jokes about Abe Vigoda’s death take a strange conceptual turn now that he has actually died. Suddenly, albeit 34 years late, People’s erroneous report is accurate. This led to a further thought: each human life occupies a slim sliver of time compared to the total duration of human civilization, and a still-more-vanishingly-minute shaving of the total age of the earth or the universe. Why not, then, print that all living persons are dead? Sure, the report would be momentarily inaccurate, but then eternally correct not long thereafter. World of Tomorrow addresses the awesome scope of time from a similar matter-of-fact, melancholy perspective, pitting the frailty of human attempts to beat time against the thermodynamic guarantee of eventual annihilation. In World of Tomorrow, a clone from the future visits her past self as a child and, through time travel, introduces the pre-K progenitor to the title topos. In the future, it seems that most of human activity is organized around trying (and failing) to escape death. The elderly upload their brains into cubes (apparently a terrifying procedure), the young clone themselves (but the copies are imperfect and invariably deteriorate and die), the human race spends most of its time looking at screens displaying the world of the past or going in search of lost memories, and the poor, seeking any route of salvation from an imminent asteroid impact (in the future), turn to cheap time-travel, which, due to math errors, throws their bodies into space to burn up resplendently on re-entry. (I especially respect this terse analysis of class.) Most profoundly, the clone-guide takes her toddler-grandmother on a tour of one of her treasured memories: a controversial art exhibit which she viewed when she was young. The artist placed a brainless human clone in a vitrine alive, allowing it to age and decay for the course of a human life, and eventually die. The clone-guide recalls how people grew very fond of the boy in the vat, naming him, returning to visit of the course of decades, and mourning his death. As I watched this scene, I asked myself whether it was the lot of humans to be unable to truly understand something without an artwork to reveal the retrospectively-obvious. What else was this imagined art project except an analysis of the effects of time on humans? Haven’t we all aged? Haven’t we seen people we’ve loved age and die? Don’t we wish that we could stop time and preserve beloved things in a changeless state? Don’t we always fail? The conceptual elegance knocked me over. And here it hit me that Hertzfeldt seems to have embarked upon a new project in this film to distill the human condition down to some fundamental element of pathos. Before, Hertzfeldt defended himself against time and decay with a fusillade of bitter, macabre humor, obscuring the fact that these themes have (almost) always been his primary focus. But in World of Tomorrow, the jokes have fallen away almost entirely, leaving the artist naked among these cold realities. And thus, he found it: the common feature of all human pathos is our drive to stop time, in which we always fail, and for which we always try again, every day, again and again, until we die. “Now is the envy of all of the dead,“ the clone-guide tells her past self. Elsewhere, she also remarks: “I am very proud of my sadness, because it means I am more alive.” Hertzfeldt might say the same. For the moment anyway. We’re all doomed to go soon enough. But for today, It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Or, as the girl squeals in the final line of World of Tomorrow, “What a happy day it is!”
