Next month, David Gilmour will release his first solo album since 2006 and launch his first tour since ’08. But right now, in the dead of August, you can watch a new animated video for his upcoming track, “Rattle That Lock.”
Created under the leadership of Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis (the design group that produced the iconic artwork for Dark Side of the Moon and other Pink Floyd LPs), the animation pays homage to Gustave Doré, whose illustrations of Dante, Poe and Cervantes we’ve featured here before. And the lyrics themselves, they draw inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, reportsRolling Stone. Gilmour, Doré, Milton — surely a trifecta for many OC readers.
Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut Clerks did much to define the low-budget, high-profile “Indiewood” boom of that era. But set a trend on America’s cultural fringe, and it never takes long for the mainstream to come calling. In this case, the mainstream wanted to cash in on a Clerks television sitcom, the only produced episode of which spent the past couple decades languishing in the vast graveyard of pilots no network would pick up before its rediscovery just this year. You can watch it in all its sanitized glory just above.
Even though those of us who grew up on the mid-1990s televisual landscape won’t recognize the never-aired Clerks itself, we’ll recognize its sensibility right away. “It gives me bad flashbacks to the pre-web monoculture,” writes one commenter on the Metafilter thread about the show — a monoculture built, at that time, upon one-liners and their corresponding laugh tracks, floppy hair and baggy clothes. Ironically, it was that very same dominant glossy blandness that made Clerks, the movie, feel so fresh when it first made its way from festival to theatrical release.
Still, this failed TV adaptation does retain a few elements of its source material: the convenience-store setting (though here called Rose Market rather than Quick Stop), the main characters named Dante and Randal. But the resemblance more or less stops there. “Gone are the movie’s iconic drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob,” writes the A.V. Club’s Christopher Curley, “replaced by backup characters including an ice cream server and a tanning salon ditz. Some of the beats of the film are still there, like Randal harassing his video store customers, but nothing lands or even remotely coheres.”
Kevin Smith made Clerks with $27,575. Clerks the sitcom pilot, made entirely without Smith’s involvement, certainly cost much more — money that bought zero cultural impact, especially by comparison to the film that inspired it. The Indiewood movement showed us how much untapped vitality American cinema still had; almost everything on television looked like lifeless productions-by-committee by comparison. But now that Clerks has passed its twentieth anniversary, the tables have turned, and we look to television for the raw, real stories Hollywood doesn’t tell. The travails of a couple of young sex- and Star Wars-obsessed dead-enders in grim suburban New Jersey, shot in black-and-white 16-millimeter film — would CBS care to hear more?
It may be true that speculation about an author’s personal history can prove not especially illuminating to reading their books. We generally think it best to read a literary work on its own terms. But in certain cases, as in the well-worn case of Ernest Hemingway, the parallels between life and work are impossible to ignore or to pass over without comment, and, for many critics, this goes particularly for discussions about Hemingway’s gender and sexuality. Even Hemingway’s contemporaries had their commentary. Zelda Fitzgerald supposedly remarked that no one could be as masculine as Hemingway, for example, and Virginia Woolf referred to him as “self consciously virile.” Themes of homosexuality and gender anxiety crop up in Hemingway’s fiction, and more prominently in unpublished work unearthed in the 1980s.
For critics like Debra Moddelmog, author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit if Ernest Hemingway, the biographical interest begins with the hyper-macho modernist’s early childhood, during which his mother Grace raised him and his older sister Marcelline as twin girls, dressing them alike “in fancy dresses and flowered hats.” This apparently happened over a period of several years, until Hemingway was at least five years old, and Grace even held Marcelline back a year so that the two could attend the same grade. Though one of Hemingway’s younger sisters, Sunny, has “denied that the twinning ever took place” the evidence seems to show otherwise—in Marcelline’s reminisces and in photograph after photograph of young Ernest and Marcelline dressed exactly alike and having tea parties, riding in wagons, and holding bouquets. You can see them in 1901, in bonnets above and flowered hats below.
At the top of the post, see Hemingway in a girlish haircut identical to his sister’s, and below, see two photographs of him in a wide-shouldered dress. At the JFK Library website (click here and scroll to bottom), you can now view many more of these photographs from Hemingway’s first few years on up to the age of 18. The digitized collection of six childhood scrapbooks, the library writes, were “collected by Ernest Hemingway himself and donated to the John F. Kennedy Library by his widow, Mary Hemingway.” Many of the childhood photographs are fascinating for various reasons, though the “twinning” photographs have provoked the most interest and contributed to already rich theories of Hemingway’s identity as a person and an artist.
Looked at in the context of the time, these photographs don’t seem all that odd. As anyone who has flipped through family albums from the turn of the century (should they have them) will have noticed, little boys were routinely dressed in ambiguously girlish attire, their long hair often styled and curled. The fashion derived partly from a hugely popular character in children’s fiction named “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” the Harry Potter of his day, who had a rags-to-riches story that captivated American readers especially. The character has been the subject of film adaptations even as late as 1980, in which he was played by a young Ricky Schroeder. Fauntleroy had some influence on Grace Hemingway. (See Hemingway in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, with football, in a 1909 photograph below.)
Fauntleroy and other similar characters’ model of “genteel manhood” gained widespread currency. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Victorian novels featuring this character came at a time when childhood was viewed through a much different lens than it is today. (As we’ve seen in the photography of Lewis Carroll and many other artists of the time in which children appear as props and dolls, sometimes in strangely suggestive or androgynous poses that would not have seemed especially prurient or gender-bending to their original viewers.) The trend continued into the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, despite less rigid childhood gender norms, as Hemingway biographer Kenneth Schuyler Lynn writes, Grace Hemingway’s “elaborate pretense that little Ernest and his sister were twins of the same sex” was very unusual. Critics like Moddelmog and Mark Spilka have argued convincingly that Hemingway “rebelled against that identity,” a rebellion that “lasted a lifetime.”
Artist Maria A. Aristidou’s medium is coffee, and lately, she’s been garnering a lot of attention for java-based portraits of such cultural luminaries as Einstein, Darth Vader and The Beatles.
The prolific and highly-caffeinated artist found her niche when an accidental spill gave rise to a somewhat sullen facsimile of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
She has since applied her espresso blends toward the Mona Lisa and one of Baroque era painter Juan de Arellano’s floral still lifes, but for the most part, she draws her subjects from the realm of pop culture.
Scroll backwards to the mid-1800s and you’ll find author—and gifted draftsman—Victor Hugo experimenting with the stuff. Nor was his promiscuous nib a stranger to the artistic possibilities of soot, coal dust, and blood.
Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account last week couldn’t avoid hearing about Walter James Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who allegedly went trophy hunting in Zimbabwe and killed Cecil the Lion, a local favorite who had been illegally lured away from a protected wildlife preserve. I won’t say anything more about it, other than that you can sign a petition to get Palmer extradited to Zimbabwe and let him defend his actions to local authorities.
Meanwhile, back in New York City, two artists Travis Threlkel and Louie Psihoyos were getting ready to turn The Empire State building into a Noah’s Ark of Endangered Animals. And that’s exactly what happened on Saturday night. Placing “40 stacked, 20,000-lumen projectors on the roof of a nearby building,” Threlkel and Psihoyos projected an array of endangered animals “onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide covering 33 floors,” reports The New York Times. You can see photos of the animals over at the Racing Extinction Twitter stream. Touchingly, there was an homage to Cecil the Lion. A video from the Times appears above; another from The New Yorker below.
To learn more about how Project Mapping works, and to see other examples of Threlkel’s work, see the videos on this page.
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