Nick Risinger, an amateur astronomer from Seattle, quit his day job last year, packed his bags and cameras, and began a 60,000 mile journey, moving across the American West and down to the western Cape of South Africa (twice). His voyage would end with a 5000-megapixel photograph of the entire night sky, produced from 37,440 separate exposures, and it yields a staggering 360-degree view of the Milky Way. Even better, the image now lives online in an interactive format, giving you the ability to wander through the cosmos.
For more on this, be sure to visit Photopic Sky Survey. Here Risinger gives you the personal and technical backstory on his project, and also gives you the chance to purchase photos, or even lend financial support to the sky survey.
What can we say about Gary Shteyngart? The novelist appeared last year in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue (which listed authors “who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.”) He teaches writing at Columbia University and counts James Franco as one of his students. And he’s willing to hustle a little to sell a book. When his novel Super Sad True Love Story came out last summer (find NYTimes review here), the quirky Leningrad-born author (key to understanding what comes next) released a satirical, self-deprecating trailer to promote his book. Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney, Edmund White, Mary Gaitskill and Franco himself all get in on the joke … which gets better as it goes along.
Shteyngart’s book just came out in paperback last week. To mark the occasion, Fresh Air re-aired an interview with him (sans accent) last week. His book is also available as an audio download via Audible.com, and here’s how you can snag a free copy…
Over at Metafilter, Kári Tulinius has a posted a nice selection of experimental short films by the great Japanese animator and manga artist Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka died in 1989, and although he’s most famous in the US for children’s cartoons like Astro-Boy and Kimbo the White Lion (better known to everyone but the Walt Disney Company’s lawyers as The Lion King), his achievements extended well beyond those two US hits. In his home country, The God of Manga is rightly considered a national treasure, and his massive body of work includes a manga adaptation of Crime and Punishment, a 12-volume fantasy saga about immortality, and the world’s first feature-length animated porn movie.
These shorts provide an excellent introduction to Tezuka’s many moods and styles, from the innocent whimsy of Mermaid (1964), about a boy who falls in love with a mermaid at sea.…
… to the caustic humor of Memory (1964), a biting meditation on our rose-tinted view of the past:
…to the light exuberance of Jumping (1984):
… and finally the full-blown apocalyptic darkness of Push (1987), as relevant now as it was 25 years go — if not more so:
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
Playing in Toronto last week, Paul Simon did something, well, awesome. A fan asks him to play “Duncan,” his 1972 classic, and lets him know that she learned to play guitar to that song. So Simon agrees. And, even better, he invites her on stage to take over guitar and vocals. Nervous, almost hyperventilating, she hesitantly gets going, as does the crowd. From there, a big feelin’ groovy moment unfolds, and it just gets better as it goes along. Kudos to NPR’s All Songs Considered for making this great find …
Just last month, Bob Dylan played his first concert in China at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing. It wasn’t exactly a big show. Roughly 2,000 people attended, but it became a big affair at home when NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a caustic op-ed, accusing Dylan of playing a censored set stripped of his revolutionary anthems. In short, she declared, Dylan went to China and sold out his 60s soul:
Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a‑Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
Now, in a note to fans, Dylan took the rare step of responding to these (and other) accusations in a short letter published yesterday. He writes:
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
I’m guessing this response will only partly satisfy Dowd. Perhaps Dylan didn’t change his set to please the apparatchiks. But did he miss an opportunity to make the right statement? Just maybe. But no matter, we’re putting this behind us and getting ready for Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24. We still love him, warts and all…
There is no exact date for this silent home movie shot at the Reseda, CA home of Stan Laurel’s daughter, Lois. But the year must have been 1956, because, during that year, Oliver Hardy, the other member of the great comic duo, lost more than 150 pounds, resulting in a complete change of his outward appearance. Hardy had a mild heart attack in 1954 and started looking after his health. But letters by Stan Laurel indicate that Oliver was also suffering from cancer. In September 1956 — probably not long after this movie was made — Oliver suffered a major stroke, which left him unable to speak and confined to bed for several months. Then, at the beginning of August 1957, he had two more strokes and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered. He died on August 7 that year.
Exactly one week after Oliver’s death, Stan gave a rare radio interview and recounted the moment when he and Oliver met for the first time. The full, one-hour interview can be enjoyed here. Stan died on 23 February 1965 after suffering a heart attack of his own. He was buried at Forest Park Memorial Park in Burbank. Footage from the funeral shows celebrities such as Dick Van Dyke, Buster Keaton and George Chandler in attendance. Stan’s friend Dick Van Dyke delivered this moving eulogy.
In this superb time lapse video, Dominic Boudreault presents five urban cities — Montreal, Quebec City, Chicago, Toronto, and New York City — and what he calls the “the duality between city and nature.”
Most fascinating is the high vantage point from which much of the footage was shot: watch the colorful lights adorning the Empire State Building, and just a minute later, cars shooting down the freeway next to Lake Michigan in snowy Chicago. The City Limits was shot in late 2010, early 2011.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
For a certain kind of person (that means you, Dan C.), a straight hour of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards expounding on the rock n’ roll life is about as close to heaven as one can get without magically transforming into Richards’ favorite guitar. Here is the 66-year old legend being interviewed at the New York Public Library, following the publication of his critically-acclaimed memoir Life, which no less severe a judge than Michiko Kakutani called “electrifying.”
In the interview (see the remaining parts here,here and here) Richards comes off as witty, articulate, and especially eloquent when speaking about his passion for American blues, but one of the most charming early moments comes thanks to his interlocutor, Anthony DeCurtis. DeCurtis is something of a rock star in his own field, but he fights a losing battle with his natural fandom for the first 15 minutes of the conversation, then finally starts to implode at about the 22:2o mark. His mini-meltdown is immediately followed by Richards’ hilarious riff on the Stones’ early Beatles-envy, and it all just gets better from there, culminating in the expected wild applause at the end of the hour.
A footnote: Richards’ collaborator on Life is the respected British journalist named James Fox. Fox spent five years working with the guitarist, or rather, chasing him from continent to continent, recording hundreds of hours of their conversations, and then shaping those hours into a book that is not merely coherent or interesting but genuinely literary. He deserves a round of applause as well.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
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