History Lesson(s) #17

Untitled (Italo-German air raid over Madrid) - Robert Capa, Winter 1936-1937

An aside, or: links

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Noticed, of late: Patrick Keiller's forthcoming essay collection from Verso, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes; at Vdrome (for another week or so), Eric Baudelaire's The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011); Ryland's second short film, Inside Voices, to be shot this summer; seanema, a homemade archive of annotated images, links and texts being built by May Adadol Ingawanij and Richard Lowell MacDonald (inc. recent texts on Bangkok-based artist Taiki Sakpisit and a note on Tropical Malady); Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings; Erika Balsom's Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art [pdf]; a new article by Jonathan Beller, Advertisarial relations and aesthetics of survival: Advertising –> advertisign; a tribute to Raúl Ruiz by Adrian Martin; Boris Nelepo on Norte, the End of History; and two starting sketches for a new film by Gina Telaroli. 

In London: T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner's Lowry exhibition has opened at the Tate, and is notable for its embrace of a still strikingly reactionary figure – "a rent-collector by day and an artist by night, a lifelong Tory voter and teetotaller," as a celebratory article in the Telegraph a few weeks ago reminded us. The FT marked the opening of the exhibition by commissioning a series of comparative photographs by John Davies. Elsewhere: Death in the Making: Photographs of War by Robert Capa at ATLAS gallery, and, at the BFI, a Jean Grémillon retrospective, and rare screenings of films by Santiago Álvarez and Peter Nestler during August's Art of the Essay Film season.

Also: parts I and II of a rediscovered 1971 interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson – "you have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not an easy thing, because you steal something"; an informative, telling piece on the transformation of London's Olympic park, w/ photographs by Jason Orton (related); Chris Watson's Sheffield Sound Map (and a beautiful new LP recorded on the tidal island of Lindisfarne [320]); David Runciman on Thatcher(ism); It makes us sick: notes on affective labour, sanity, and post-Fordism; two new publications by Red Notes: The Little Red Blue Book: Fighting the Layoffs at Fords and Revolution Retrieved; a typically fine interview with Lars Iyer – "friendship is difficult – it involves a struggle against what is now a widespread opportunism and cynicism. I think there really is such a thing as an art of friendship. I think it’s worth breaking off friendships when this art is being dishonoured – and doing so in the name of friendship"; recent mixes by Mark Fell & Old Apparatus; Four Tet on Hessle Audio; After Dark II; and two older pieces I didn't link to earlier, Amazon Unpacked, and Simon Reynolds' excellent 2011 article for The Wire, EXCESS ALL AREAS, or: The Catastrophe... And What Comes After.

Realism(s) #29, or: some little bare numb spot of ground

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I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn't that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that's why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

--James Salter's beautiful, laconic reading of Break it Down by Lydia Davis. Text from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2011), p.24. Also, recently on Salter: James Meek in the LRB, and Sarah Nicole Prickett on A Sport and a Pastime. 

Des animaux #8

Before Sunset - Richard Linklater, 2004, 35mm