Frank Ocean's channel ORANGE remains one of my favorite albums of the year, and I'm glad they cleared his SNL performances of "Pyramids" and "Thinking About You" to stream online, for however long that lasts.
I went to his concert in San Francisco earlier this year, and when he went falsetto on "Thinking About You", a few women in the crowd gave birth on the spot.
Everyone is gaga over the single edition Leica M to be designed by Jony Ive for a charity auction, but let's be honest, none of us will lay hands on it. I'm far more disappointed I didn't hear about this limited edition Folio Society version of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury earlier. 1,480 copies were made, and they're sold out.
Faulkner was well aware that readers would find it difficult, and employed italic and roman type to convey its ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’, but when his agent attempted to standardise and simplify the system this prompted an angry objection from Faulkner. He quickly jotted down eight time-levels in Benjy’s section, ‘just a few I recall’, and wished that it could be ‘printed the way it ought to be with different color types’, but he concluded pessimistically, ‘I don’t reckon … it’ll ever be printed that way’.
‘I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink… I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it’ — WILLIAM FAULKNER
Not an easy novel to read, but still my favorite book of all time for sheer brilliance of writing, and nothing else has come close in recent memory. The bookmark for this Folio Society edition has a key for what dates are referred to by what color print, especially useful for the Benjy section. I'm all for making the novel more accessible to a wider set of readers, and this is a clever way to tackle the issue.
Bookmark has a key to the date for each color of print
If someone has a copy and would like to sell it, leave a comment!
My only exposure to architecture tends to be the occasional profile in the New Yorker. So it was with their recent profile of Bjarke Ingels.
I was struck by an image in the magazine of Ingels' proposed condo complex on West 57th St. in New York City, in Hell's Kitchen.
Computer rendering of the proposed W57 Tower in NYC
Here's another computer rendering which was published by New York Magazine.
The curvature of the building is designed to provide maximum sunlight to as many of the apartments as possible.
I'm not sure the neighborhood will approve a structure like that dropping in on the neighborhood, but that is gorgeous to my eye, like something straight out of Blade Runner.
"No work of art can every really testify to the scale of its own impossibility."
That's Lana Wachowski in a New Yorker profile about the making of Cloud Atlas. In response, Kurt Andersen asked what that meant.
I responded that I thought it meant that no work of art can ever convey how difficult it was to make (Wachowski's version is more poetic, to be sure). Wachowski's quote reminded me of something my film school professor Rory Kelly used to tell us all the time our first year in the directing program. I don't remember the quote by heart, but to paraphrase: the universe conspires against your movie.
That's what it feels like, especially as a student filmmaker. The universe is fighting you every step of the way. It doesn't want to see your movie. It doesn't even want to see it completed.
Two important lessons in that idea. One is not to get down when things go wrong during pre-production or production. That's just the universe's dark sense of humor, and every filmmaker before you has gone through it time and time again. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it takes the prodigious and insatiable will of the filmmaker to overcome these forces and bring the movie into existence.
The psychological profiles of successful filmmakers and entrepreneurs overlap in many ways. They work in a field where success is more probabilistic than anyone would like to admit, but they must believe it is deterministic. Failure in a probabilistic endeavor should be much less of a verdict on one's capabilities than in a deterministic endeavor, and so successful entrepreneurs and filmmakers should brush off failure more easily than the average person for whom one strike can by psychologically crippling.
That's just for the individual, though. The one great difference between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is that Silicon Valley is far more tolerant of failure. The returns to a successfully funded startup are so outsized that tech investors are very comfortable with a portfolio with one massive winner and dozens of failures. It's like playing roulette. You just don't see many movie studios with that type of power law distribution of successes. A run like that gets studio heads fired.