In the 1960s and ’70s, thousands of aspiring writers enrolled for the illustriously named correspondence class, the Famous Writers School. After submitting aptitude tests (which every applicant passed), students mailed stories to a staff of “famous” writers, who provided generic and encouraging comments on their manuscripts. (Decades later, this served as the basis for an […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inBooks
Book Lovers Unite!
This Year’s Wordstock Book Festival Provides the Steak, as Well as the Sizzle
If it feels like it’s been a really long time since the last Wordstock, it’s because it sort of has been. After the departure of Director Scott Poole, the lit fest gave themselves an extra six months between events, during which they recruited Greg Netzer to run this year’s festival. Shifting Wordstock from April to […]
Posted inBooks
McSweeney’s 24
Since McSweeney’s continues to outdo itself every issue with jaw-dropping design and packaging, it’s easy at times to overlook the content within its covers. Their latest issue, #24, makes it an even slippier challenge: It’s a two-sided book with a panoramic, extended cover. Imagine two books side by side on a shelf, with one turned […]
Posted inArt
Scott Peterman
Ice Houses
Utilitarian architecture, German-influenced typologies, Grumpy Old Men, and a tedious trend in contemporary photography all pop up in Scott Peterman’s minimal and reserved photographs of New England ice fishing shacks at Charles Hartman this month. (Some of these allusions surface more obliquely than others; it’s just hard for many of us to see a shack […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Offensive Driving
Plowing Down Kids on Reservation Road
If you’re a perfect, WASP-y Connecticut family, one in which your beautiful, polite children catch lightning bugs after sublime cello recitals, and your life seems content in that uniquely smug New England way, don’t you imagine you’d be really, really fucked up if some SUV driver plowed over your son and kept driving? At the […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Maybe a Dingo Ate It
Ben Affleck and the Case of the Missing Baby!
The phrase “directed by Ben Affleck” might not be the most inspiring string of words in American cinema, but with the release of Gone Baby Gone, Affleck’s directorial debut, people might be challenged to reevaluate their perceptions of Mr. Gigli. Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Mystic […]
Posted inBooks
The Year of Living Biblically
A.J. Jacobs
In 2004, London artist Neva Elliott produced a work of art called “The Elliott Condensed Bible”: It was a Gideon’s Bible, condensed into four easy-to-use, imperative chapters: “Do,” “Do Not,” “Shall,” and “Shall Not.” Following the common reading of the Bible as a book of literal, holy commands, Elliott made it simple for readers and […]
Posted inBooks
New Photography Titles
A few times a year, we like to take the opportunity to review some of the new photography books that come across our desk. After reviewing novels and nonfiction week in and week out, it’s nice to feast on purely visual books, and no art is suited for bound reproduction better than photography. Here are […]
Posted inMusic
Sugar and Lasers
Bonde do Rolê’s 21st Century Party Music
Bonde do Rolê was actually supposed to play Portland last summer, shortly after the release of their full-length debut, With Lasers, but the Brazilian trio had to abruptly cancel the show for “emergency dental surgery.” An apologetic MySpace bulletin explained simply, “Too much candy.” Coming from any other band that excuse might sound overly treacly, […]
Posted inArt
Masao Yamamoto
PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders, through Sept 29
The photographs of Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto go against the grain of contemporary practices: They’re small, intimate, delicate, and spiritual. In today’s bigger-is-better world, Yamamoto’s birdlike photos feel like tender anachronisms, even though there are few fine art precedents for his approach to photography. Yamamoto’s photographs are tiny: Their scale is closer to dominoes and […]
Posted inBooks
Plazm Launch Party
I’ve often said that if I could start my dream magazine, it would be a whole lot like Plazm. Chock full of beautifully reproduced artworks, terrific articles, and innovative design, Plazm is like an extraction of the best elements of the New Yorker and McSweeney’s rolled up into one perfect-bound periodical. The only gripe I […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Victims and Voyeurism
Kamp Katrina‘s Gratuitous Horrors
I don’t envy any documentarian trying to tackle the complex tragedy of post-Katrina New Orleans, particularly in the wake of Spike Lee’s masterful When the Levees Broke. In Kamp Katrina, directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon broach the subject from an entirely different tact, taking an artless vérité approach to one of the city’s infinite […]