It’s either a monument to our mistakes or a testament to our triumphs– I’m not sure which. Cobra Mist is a 16mm anamorphic film by Emily Richardson, a filmmaker living in London. The subject of the film is a closed nuclear testing site and nature reserve located on the Suffolk coast of Great Britain, with an appropriately spooky name: Orford Ness.
Acquired in large part by the War Department in 1913, the area was drained to form an airfield and used for hush-hush military experimentation for seven decades. This period saw the construction of such buildings as the Bomb Ballistics Building and Black Beacon, as well as rocket and radar testing. In 1993 the zone was purchased from the Ministry of Defence and repurposed as a nature sanctuary. Tourism is now encouraged.
Richardson’s film, which is named after a coded backscatter radar project that took place in the region, takes a hard look at the area using time lapse and motion control techniques. The film is unnerving, troublesome and lovely; a bit like moving at light speed through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Watch it here.
Cabinet Magazine recently published an article entitled “To Sit, To Stand, To Write,” examining a deep rift amongst history’s greatest writers: the ideal bodily position for writing. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, responded to Gustave Flaubert’s casual remark that “one cannot think and write except when seated,” with an infuriated accusation of cultural decadence, writing, “There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”
Nietzche was not alone in his preference– though he was perhaps unparalleled in the philosophical weight he placed behind it. According to the article, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ernest Hemingway all wrote standing up, hovering over lecterns and typewriters placed upon dressers. Still others preferred the supine pose, including Mark Twain, who wrote in bed. Roald Dahl’s writing habits were generally rather traditional in his tendency to be seated, and yet the description of his writing environment is one of the most interesting parts of the article.
We can conjecture that it was phsical considerations that caused the six-foot-six-inch Thomas Wolfe to write his opulent, autobiographical novels using the top of his refrigerator as his desk, the shifting of his weight from foot to foot being a neat approximation of the Nietzschean decree that all writing should “dance.” But what do we then make of Roald Dahl, also six-foot-six, who everyday climbed into a sleeping back before settling into an old wing-backed chair, his feet resting immobile on a battered traveling case full of logs? Dahl’s claim that “all the best stuff comes at the desk,” is a simple modern variation on Flaubert’s static dictum.
Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, we can go on an informative virtual tour of Dahl’s fabled writing hut, minus the writer and his lanky legs that are no longer resting on that log-filled suitcase. When do the rest of us get our writing huts?
“The world has in Joe Brainard a semi-secret maverick hero who will win new friends indefinitely,” says art critic Peter Schjeldahl. Well, the world had him for a few decades (1942-1994); now what we’ve got left is the genius poet/artist’s work, including The Nancy Book. It’s a classic of reappropriation, up there with anything that Warhol churned out and a lot funnier, too.
You’ll recognize Nancy as the cutenick from Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip, Nancy. With her perennial bow and plump build, the character is an affable icon for Brainard to play with. The Nancy Book is an anthology of Brainard’s reappropriations, which involve plopping Nancy in all sorts of untoward and obtuse situations. Bushmiller threatened to sue, as people will, but nothing came of it. Nancy lives on.
As totally and completely confusing as it is to watch Grant Hill talking into a cell phone while introducing “Art 21″ (Apparently he loves contemporary art?) watching Jessica Stockholder make paper feels just as soothing as something on the internet can feel. An even trade off for 16 free episodes? Surely!
It’s rare to find an individual with as much passion and dedication to helping people as Fred Rogers was. It’s even rarer to find an individual like that, who fights with his whole heart for everything good in this world, to courageously go up against the powerful interests of cynicism and maliciousness, and bring them to their knees in the span of a six-minute speech. But in 1969, Rogers did just that.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had been on the air for less than two years when PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting became a target of massive budget cuts proposed by Richard Nixon, who hoped to funnel that money into the Vietnam War. Two days into a dismal Senate subcommittee hearing that would determine the fate of PBS, Fred Rogers took the floor and addressed the chilly and impatient subcommittee chairman, John O. Pastore, with the goal of underscoring the importance of educational, emotionally positive programming for children. What happens next is straight out of a Frank Capra film. Take a look, and have the tissues ready:
Most of the lasting works of juvenile literature are thoroughly subversive in one way or another: they express feelings not generally approved of or even recognized by grown-ups; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking–as in Anderson’s famous tale–that the emperor has no clothes.
-Alison Lurie, Vulgur Coarse and Grotesque: Subversive Books for Kids, Harper’s, Dec. 1979
Meme Scenery is the sublime result of removing the humans (and cats) from wildly popular internet memes like Star Wars Kid, Afro Ninja, and David After Dentist. What remains are a series of uninhabited environments– documents of ordinary settings minus the characters and actions that rendered them extraordinary. These empty bedrooms, stores and local news environments form the palette of an era. This is the set design manual for 2000s-era period pieces and costume dramas.
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