Orson Welles on Hollywood in an essay from 1959.

“What’s valid on the stage or screen is never a mere professional effort and certainly not an industrial product. Whatever is valuable must, in the final analysis, be a work of art. There should be no need to repeat that originality is one of the essential definitions of any work of art, and that every artist is an individual. Just as obviously, the industrial system cannot accommodate originality. A genuine individual is an outright nuisance in a factory. ”

Twilight in the Smog

EM

CA

An interesting article by the ever-provocative Slavoj Zizek, everybody’s favorite dialectical materialist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11zizek.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=zizek&st=nyt&oref=slogin

IC

1978 #1 hit in the UK, and a classy swagger to boot!

FV

An impressive collection of cigarette packages from around the world! It would seem the archive covers the twentieth century, many excellent packages from the first half. I’m a reformed smoker, myself.

La Saga Cigarette

EM

A great piece of rock writing from Lou Reed, originally published at the end of 1966 as part of a Warhol-curated issue of Aspen magazine.

“Of course it had to happen, it really had to happen, it was the natural end to Beethoven’s Ninth. Everyone was getting sicker and looking like a wolverine while the people pushed colleges. Dirty buildings with lawns for people to lie on blankets. Well-groomed wasps or purposefully disheveled sensitives reading Spengler. But meanwhile everything was dead. Writing was dead, movies were dead. Everybody sat like an unpeeled orange. But the music was so beautiful.”

Read The View From the Bandstand via Ubu.

EM 

A history of miniature writing from 2060 BCE through 2003 CE.  

 ”1674 C.E.In order to create a public spectacle that might boost his business, a young Dutch printer publishes the Blom-Hofje, an otherwise forgettable poem, in a volume no larger than a fingernail. It remains the smallest book in print for over two hundred years.”

Read A Minor History of Miniature Writing. 

EM 

“A 900-mile-long string of scientific instruments across a stretch of the open ocean has revealed the first evidence of giant internal waves partially “breaking” inside the oceans.”

More at Discovery…

FV

“If you just want equipment you’re not ready.”

“The whirlpool, it messes with your mind,” said Mr. Freeman, the owner of the Blue Bottle. “There’s no way to rush it.” 

Photo, Peter DaSilva for The New York Times 

FV

Walker Evans, 1929

A change in policy. Journal won’t do. Have decided to continue but to omit dramas, crises, eruptions, explosions, simmerings, boilings, and all manifestations of the chaos of my inner life. Review before leavetaking: I am full of hate; have wanderlust not only in Spring; am firmly intrenched in physical life, and love it; am alone; have soul, to which I hereby bid farewell.

When I took this place I simply couldn’t buy a broom. couldn’t buy anything. Sold, in fact, books, cameras; pawned watch. There was no broom until I found one in the alley back of the abandoned factory. It had a triangular shape. (I didn’t know anything about brooms.) I carried it home and swept bitterly.

I forgot to say that I shall eliminate dates. But I shall go on writing. Every night I shall sit down and write something that hasn’t anything to do with my inner life.

Haaga the grocer has a sale of brooms, 39c.

I don’t mind the cold. I don’t mind anything. I am detached. I walk along the street in the sunlight, with something to do; something connected with my inner life, and therefore unmentionable. Divine
power of thought. I forget what it is I have to do. Left stranded on upper Bway in this condition.

I know I ought to buy a broom. There are times when I actually could buy a broom, financially. But nothing has ever come of it morally.

Ena Douglass was born in Singapore. She now pays $12 a month for a room on 14th ST. Has a long green dress and a long cigarette holder which I sat on and broke in three (REPLACE), and long vocabulary. All this means nothing to me.

Upon one of the main thoroughfares of the city, in a commercial district, I found a cluster of super-brooms. Examined them carefully.

The handle of each was of ash, machine-turned ash, I should say. This part of the implements had been dipped in robin’s egg blue for youth and happiness. The sweeping part was long and green, like Ena’s vocabulary. The sweetsmelling reeds were bound together with ochre twine. Groups of these brooms stood swaying in the breeze, gladdening the hearts of the passers-by. But I was sick of an old passion.

I am going to change my nourishment. I am weary of staple commodities. I think I am in the frame of mind a man gets into when he eats caviare for breakfast, as in Strindberg.

IMPERITIVE NEEDS:

suspenders
drawers
collar pin
bath slippers
Crime and Punishment
rubber cement

Words: the bottom of my life is a shadowy pattern of unreality, imposing in its own private way. I look into it coming out of deleria or even out of sleep on summer mornings before dawn, having set my will to go off at 4:30. Moi intime. My happy hunting-ground. My little core of humanity. Later it is shot through with cold sparks of intellect, or words to that effect.

Soon after I left the house, before I even turned the corner, I saw a worn-out broom lying in the gutter. It is nothing I said; it will pass. But I saw another, and yet another. All had that horrible,
suggestive triangular shape. It was too much. Today, this dateless day, I walked into Macy’s and bought a vacuum cleaner.

Now I shall suck the dust out of chaos.

EM

Maybe my 4th favorite song of all time, but I don’t think I ever saw the video.

FV