Alan Jacobs

It seems to me that in recent years the people who have done the most to make some worthwhile change possible have been the truth-tellers, those who said things that did themselves no good—they’re going to be on the run from the authorities more or less forever—but that they couldn’t stop themselves from saying because of a moral, rather than a partisan, motive. There’s a pretty clear contrast between such truth-tellers and the Nobel Prize–winning president who campaigned on a platform of moral action and then decided it was safest to forget about it. Parables about this kind of thing run through the book, and some of them complicate the whole issue. Norman Mailer, for example, was always committed, in what seems to me a thoroughly admirable way, to the democratic left, very much like Dwight Macdonald, but Mailer got himself tangled up in the idea that his own personal mythology and vision mattered more than what happened to other people. Macdonald never made that mistake, but Macdonald paid a price for seeing things as clearly as he did: he spent many years in something like passivity and despair, which didn’t do him any good, and certainly didn’t do any good for the kind of society he wanted.

momalibrary:

A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two “ones” by Andy Warhol, and two $24 bills by Tom Gormley.  ARTCASH was a benefit party held by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1971.  E.A.T asked artists to design currency to be purchased and used by attendees during the casino style event.  The bills were printed by the American Banknote Company on the same stock used for U.S. currency (though without the anti-counterfeit threads).  From the Steven Leiber Extra Art Archive. -ar

momalibrary:

A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two “ones” by Andy Warhol, and two $24 bills by Tom Gormley.  ARTCASH was a benefit party held by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1971.  E.A.T asked artists to design currency to be purchased and used by attendees during the casino style event.  The bills were printed by the American Banknote Company on the same stock used for U.S. currency (though without the anti-counterfeit threads).  From the Steven Leiber Extra Art Archive. -ar

[gallery] momalibrary:

A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two “ones” by Andy Warhol, and two $24 bills by Tom Gormley.  ARTCASH was a benefit party held by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1971.  E.A.T asked artists to design currency to be purchased and used by attendees during the casino style event.  The bills were printed by the American Banknote Company on the same stock used for U.S. currency (though without the anti-counterfeit threads).  From the Steven Leiber Extra Art Archive. -ar

movieposteroftheday:

Japanese speed for PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati, France, 1967)

Size: 14.5" x 20", folded to 14.5" x 10"

Designer: unknown

Poster source: Heritage Auctions

(via Frank Chimero on Twitter)

[gallery] movieposteroftheday:

Japanese speed for PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati, France, 1967)

Size: 14.5" x 20", folded to 14.5" x 10"

Designer: unknown

Poster source: Heritage Auctions

(via Frank Chimero on Twitter)

Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell:

Lovely tribute by Neil Gaiman to one of my very favorite books. I have mixed feelings about a television adaptation: it’s a highly filmable story, to be sure, but the most distinctive element of the book will be lost: the narrtor’s wry, Austenian voice, with its added element of pedantry manifested in the great horde of explanatory and historical footnotes. Please don’t watch the series without reading the book first!

(And pray that Susanna Clarke will publish another novel.)

Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell:

Lovely tribute by Neil Gaiman to one of my very favorite books. I have mixed feelings about a television adaptation: it’s a highly filmable story, to be sure, but the most distinctive element of the book will be lost: the narrtor’s wry, Austenian voice, with its added element of pedantry manifested in the great horde of explanatory and historical footnotes. Please don’t watch the series without reading the book first!

(And pray that Susanna Clarke will publish another novel.)

Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Charlie Hebdo’s murdered editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier, said he aimed to “banalize” all areas of discourse that were too fraught to discuss. He maintained that generations of satire of Catholicism had made the lampooning of it — and thereby, the legitimate discussion of it — unobjectionable, and he felt that the same could be achieved with Islam and other topics.  

That the cartoons were not intentionally racist does not preclude their being experienced as racist. Cartoons can and do offend. Yet Christiane Taubira, the black French justice minister who was parodied as a monkey in a cringe-worthy cartoon, delivered a poignant elegy at the funeral of one of her supposed tormentors, Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, saying that “Tignous and his companions were sentinels, lookouts, those who watched over democracy,” preventing it from being lulled into complacency.  

The leading French anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, has called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country.” Its current editor, Gérard Biard, says it deplores all forms of racism. According to Le Monde, of 523 Charlie Hebdo covers published from 2005 to 2015, only seven singled out Islam for ridicule (ten were cited as mocking multiple religions); many more mocked Christianity and the racism of the French right.