The Auteurs is a beta site that from the look and feel of it is going to gain speed pretty quickly. As is the case with new vinyl shops and tidy niche book stores the task of curating that which is already widely available to the public is becoming a true art form as we near our first decade into the 2000’s. Sure computers have made us aware that everything is out there all the time just waiting to be snatched up, but who can be bothered to do all that digging around for just the right good stuff? The weird stuff? The stuff you remember seeing but can’t remember the name of…
Basically it’s a Netflix/Hulu hybrid for cinefiles who geek out on the rare classics. It’s backed by the Criterion Collection and Celluloid Dreams so you can only imagine the slew of “What? You’ve never seen ______ before?” type material they’ve logged already. There’s a growing library of freebies as well as flicks to pay for with really clean video players and unlike the other mammoth movie sites the founders seem to be really mining the community in a by the (film)people for the (film)people way which is nice to see.
The Auteurs is not just about discovering wonderful new cinema or classic masterpieces. It’s also about discussing and sharing wonderful films… which makes us like a small coffee shop… a place where you can gather and talk about alternative endings, directors cuts or whatever those frogs in Magnolia meant… heated debates and passionate arguments are welcome… Hollywood films such as say Annie Hall or Royal Tenenbaums too… at the end of the day it doesn’t matter where films come from, as long as they come from someone’s mind…
The problem with World War I German U-boats is that they were very good at torpedoing allied ships. The obvious solution was to camouflage American and British ships, but here too there was a snag: any paint scheme that effectively hid a boat in one situation would do no good in a situation involving different weather conditions.
Enter Norman Wilkinson , a British artist and naval officer. Wilkinson developed a disruptive camouflage technique that took its cues from cubism. Rather than attempting to conceal the ship, the new scheme aimed at bewildering German U-boat commanders. Did it work? Remains unclear. “Crews on dazzle ships,” however, “were very proud of the bedazzled camouflage.“
Jonathan Mann is the artist formerly known as GameJew: a moniker under which he waxed poetic about his favorite video games, created The Mario Opera, was the first person to buy a Wii on the West Coast, and infamously tracked down Nintendo guru Shigeru Miyamoto to sing him a ballad. Lately, he’s stepped outside the gaming world to take on a new project: writing a song a day in 2009 on his site Rock Cookie Bottom.
The tunes are adorable and nerdy, sometimes sentimental and frequently danceable. Whether Mann’s singing about vampire housecats, gay gladiators, Paul Krugman, or Saved by the Bell, your first instinct will undoubtedly be to tap your foot and sing along. While not every song is destined to become a platinum hit, Mann relies on the 70/20/10 rule: 70% of his output will be just okay, 20% will suck, and 10% of the songs he writes will actually be rad. So over the course of one year, he’ll end up with at least 36 rad songs! This Tuesday’s song, his 161st, definitely falls into the rad category: it’s an infectuous, exhilerating tribute to Where the Wild Things Are. Check it out!
“When he was just a kid, Davy Rothbart and his family visited the most famous neighbor in America — Mr. Rogers — at his summer cottage on Nantucket. Two decades later, as an adult, Davy went back for another visit with Mr. Rogers. This time he brought stories from his own neighborhood, stories of neighborly conflict and distrust — to see what kind of advice Mr. Rogers could give him.”
So many fantastic ingredients in one free podcast.
Allison Grant’s photography weaves together natural landscapes and synthetic materials. It can often be disorienting trying to discern the origin of Grant’s images: is this a piece of black tin foil, or a strip-mined mountain? Where Semâ Bekirovic underlines the contrast between human-made objects and natural ones, Grant obscures it, hinting at the places in which they coalesce. This seems less of an attempt to reconcile our disposable culture with the natural world and more like an ominous warning that we may have forgotten the difference. From her artist statement:
In the face of environmental crisis, we have come to realize that our human-made products may outlast nature as we know it. In contradiction to this awareness, advertisers and organizations have responded to the green movement by increasingly using photographs and other representations of nature that evoke an unattainable ideal. Using illusion, I allude to the wide spread simulation of nature in our built environments and image culture, and the simultaneous deterioration of wilderness in reality. Tensions between fact and facsimile, nature and artificiality, and permanence and disposability can be found in my photographs. This echoes the wilderness of our modern existence: constructed, idealized, mediated, and, therefore, inaccessible.
This week marked the release of the new Dirty Projectors album Bitte Orca, the album that will be on repeat all summer long and is as beautiful as it’s cover. Their last release was in 2007 in where they re-wote the Black Flag record Rise Above, all from memory and was really the spark that made us need to own everything they touch.
Side note: If you haven’t heard their song “Knotty Pine” (w/ David Bryne) from the Dark Was The Night comp you should watch it live here.
Listen to “Stillness Is The Move” off of Bitte Orca and be sure to check out the limited tape version of the album that you can get here.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Subscribe to RSS