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September 7, 2009

The Popular vs. the Acclaimed

Matt says,

Great, great, great AskMeFi thread: In the art forms you are experienced or well versed in, what kinds of stuff is notorious for being only liked by the experts, and what kinds of stuff is notorious for only being liked by less experienced or educated casual consumers?

Examples of artists (or works of art) beloved almost exclusively by other artists in their domain include Rothko, Linux, Cloud Gate, Yasujirō Ozu, Ernie Bushmiller, Rush, the screenplay "BALLS OUT" (pdf) and Paranoia Agent.

There are also some fun minor art-snob arguments, and mini-digressions on the nature of taste. As well as a terrific New Yorker essay I never read about the appeal of Charles Bukowski.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 8:03 PM

August 21, 2009

Robin's thoughts: I just love hearing the way they think: But I think we finally started to crack ... >>

The Unattended Documentation Of Culture

I fell in love with The Books in 2002, when I heard "Motherless Bastard" from Thought For Food. It begins with an audio sample, a conversation between a father and his daughter, where the dad playfully says, "you have no mother or father."

"Yeah, I do!"

"No, they left..."

"Daddy..."

And then the hammer falls:

"Don't touch me, don't call me that in public."

That sample was recorded live by The Books' Nick Zammuto at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Los Angeles. The rest of the track is just an insanely sweet, melancholy, beautiful acoustic instrumental, on cello, banjo, percussion, made just slightly glitchy with some electronic effects. That's what they do.

In a new interview with Pitchfork, Zammuto and Paul de Jong talk about their process--

NZ: There is a pulse to the material we work with that you can't find in the mainstream. It's this unattended documentation of culture. The productions are not made for recording any kind of history, but there's all this cultural documentation in there anyway.

PDJ: You can't find it anywhere else. You can't make it up, you can't shoot it yourself. If there's three seconds of beauty in an hour and a half tape, the search is worth it.

-- and their new album --

NZ: We've been really into hypnotherapy tapes. We've been into a lot of spoken-word religious material in the past-- just these deeply ego-ed voices. But, with hypnotherapy, the ego disappears-- it has this relaxing effect independent of what someone's saying. We're interested in that un-self-consciousness. In a bizarre way, it keeps things grounded. There's always this element of not knowing where you stand that you can hear in almost any voice. It's a universal quality.

And we have a vast collection of these tiny little musical fragments-- like analog synth demos-- that are very dated, but we never knew what to do with them. It's really hard to use them without sounding like genres that everybody's familiar with. But I think we finally started to crack the code and figured out how to use them in a way that satisfies us. Like, we have this incredible collection of brass sounds, so we kind of have a brass section going.

PDJ: Yeah, it seems to be developing more into the sounds from traditional pop-rock history-- like, actual drum sounds. We're starting to make sense of what to do with something that's reached a critical mass.

Tim-sig.gif
Posted August 21, 2009 at 1:45 | Comments (1) | Permasnark
File under: Beauty, Music

August 20, 2009

A Short History of Color Printing

Tim says,

So lately I've been thinking a lot about how color turns out to be a surprisingly important part of our experience reading printed books, and I came across this terrific website on the history of color printing, part of a special collections exhibit in the 90s from the University of Delaware's Morris Library.

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I love this stuff:

Lithography was the first fundamentally new printing technology since the invention of relief printing in the fifteenth century.... Early colored lithographs used one or two colors to tint the entire plate and create a watercolor-like tone to the image. This atmospheric effect was primarily used for landscape or topographical illustrations. For more detailed coloration, artists continued to rely on handcoloring over the lithograph. Once tinted lithographs were well established, it was only a small step to extend the range of color by the use of multiple tint blocks printed in succession. Generally, these early chromolithographs were simple prints with flat areas of color, printed side-by-side.

Increasingly ornate designs and dozens of bright, often gaudy, colors characterized chomolithography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Overprinting and the use of silver and gold inks widened the range of color and design. Still a relatively expensive process, chromolithography was used for large-scale folio works and illuminated gift books which often attempted to reproduce the handwork of manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The steam-driven printing press and the wider availability of inexpensive paper stock lowered production costs and made chromolithography more affordable. By the 1880s, the process was widely used for magazines and advertising. At the same time, however, photographic processes were being developed that would replace lithography by the beginning of the twentieth century.


Comments (2) | Permasnark | Posted: 9:28 AM

August 19, 2009

No New Tricks

I love the actor/magician Ricky Jay, not least for his terrific supporting turn in the first season of Deadwood (understated on a show where nobody was understated). I resisted reading an old New Yorker profile of Jay when John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to it earlier in the week, even after linking to an interview Jay gave Errol Morris about deception and talking up Jay's history of magicians and irregular stage entertainers Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (JG: "simply one of the best books I