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fiefoeDaniels and Ryan Reynolds once go tcaught in an "excuse me" vortex in the hallway.
video art: Ryan Trecartin ("Kitchen Girl")
"Her Again" / Anthony Lane
__ After all, film stars are those unlikely beings who seem more alive, not less, when images are made of them; who unfurl and reach toward the light, instead of seizing up, when confronted by a camera; and who, by some miracle or trick, become enriched versions of themselves, even as they ramify into other selves on cue. Clarence Sinclair Bull, the great stills photographer at M-G-M, said of Greta Garbo that “she seems to feel the emotion for each pose as part of her personality.”
__ YouTube has a clip of her, age nine, reading for a part, and the self-consciousness is frightening; not that she is clenched or maladroit, but that she seems like a child impersonating a child, and a spoiled one at that—finding everything a drag and a bind, batting away time with a slow blink. (She still does that, and it always gets results.) For someone of that precocity, adulthood is not another country, many leagues distant, but just around the corner.
"Berlin Nights" / Nick Paumgarten
__ The writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus observed, in the Berlin chapter of “A Sense of Direction,” his 2012 pilgrimage memoir, “What the word ‘over’ really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might have become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you.”
great Expressionist, devoted Nazi, Emil Nolde
"Extreme City" / Michael Specter
__ The Marxists—the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.)—with support from the Russians and led by Agostinho Neto, who later became the country’s first President, relied on an unusual mixture of Eastern European economic advisers and Cuban soldiers.
Displaying such wealth in a country as impoverished as Angola can be a challenge. One member of the President’s inner circle owns a Rolls-Royce, but there are few good roads in Luanda. So every Sunday he loads the car into a trailer, takes it to the Marginal—a recently renovated two-mile-long promenade along the South Atlantic—drives it for a while on the capital’s only smooth road, loads it back into its trailer, and has it hauled away.
"Off Diamond Head" / William Finnegan
__ In the meantime, each man gaudily challenged that establishment by running for mayor of New York City—Buckley in 1965, Mailer four years later.
"The Higher Life " / Lizze Widdicombe
__ The seconds pass slowly. You seem to drop, briefly, into another dimension—the realm of quiet walks and kindergarten nap time. Like travel, the chief boon of meditation might be the way that it throws the place you came from into relief.
__ Chief among them was Milarepa—a tenth-century aristocrat who began meditating so that he could learn sorcery, to get back at his neighbors. He ended up going down a contemplative rabbit hole, dedicating his life to meditation, writing poetry, and living in a cave.
"Five Hostages" / Lawrence Wright
"June, Moon, Tune" / Adam Gopnik
__ Interpretation is the teasing out into articulate words of a complicated sensation or experience. It’s not often the discovery of some other, completely different experience that the surface of the work was hiding.
Fittingly, an entire Web site has blossomed solely to paraphrase contemporary love songs in Shakespearean sonnet garb. Conducted by one Erik Didriksen, in this parody of the Beatles’ famous anthem:
O, there are tasks impossible to bring
to resolution by a person’s choice
the hymns that only cherubim can sing
cannot be sounded by a mortal voice . . . .
To live—to care—to thine own self be true—
all noble occupations done with ease
—if thou art guided by the simple creed
that love is all thy life doth truly need.
video art: Ryan Trecartin ("Kitchen Girl")
"Her Again" / Anthony Lane
__ After all, film stars are those unlikely beings who seem more alive, not less, when images are made of them; who unfurl and reach toward the light, instead of seizing up, when confronted by a camera; and who, by some miracle or trick, become enriched versions of themselves, even as they ramify into other selves on cue. Clarence Sinclair Bull, the great stills photographer at M-G-M, said of Greta Garbo that “she seems to feel the emotion for each pose as part of her personality.”
__ YouTube has a clip of her, age nine, reading for a part, and the self-consciousness is frightening; not that she is clenched or maladroit, but that she seems like a child impersonating a child, and a spoiled one at that—finding everything a drag and a bind, batting away time with a slow blink. (She still does that, and it always gets results.) For someone of that precocity, adulthood is not another country, many leagues distant, but just around the corner.
"Berlin Nights" / Nick Paumgarten
__ The writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus observed, in the Berlin chapter of “A Sense of Direction,” his 2012 pilgrimage memoir, “What the word ‘over’ really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might have become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you.”
great Expressionist, devoted Nazi, Emil Nolde
____________________________________
"Extreme City" / Michael Specter
__ The Marxists—the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.)—with support from the Russians and led by Agostinho Neto, who later became the country’s first President, relied on an unusual mixture of Eastern European economic advisers and Cuban soldiers.
Displaying such wealth in a country as impoverished as Angola can be a challenge. One member of the President’s inner circle owns a Rolls-Royce, but there are few good roads in Luanda. So every Sunday he loads the car into a trailer, takes it to the Marginal—a recently renovated two-mile-long promenade along the South Atlantic—drives it for a while on the capital’s only smooth road, loads it back into its trailer, and has it hauled away.
"Off Diamond Head" / William Finnegan
- He had a silky style, and deigned to surf Cliffs only when conditions were exceptionally good. Leslie Wong caught and pulled into the wave of the day, his back slightly arched, his arms relaxed, making the extremely difficult—no, come on, the ecstatic—look easy. If I ever grew up, I wanted to be Leslie Wong.
- Here’s how ridable waves form. A storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chop—smaller and then larger wavelets, which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm, radiating outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains—groups of waves, increasingly organized, that travel together. Each wave sets off a column of orbiting water, most of it below the surface. The wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. A swell can travel thousands of miles. The more powerful the storm, the farther the swell may travel. As it travels, the swell becomes more organized—the distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, becomes uniform. In a long-interval train, the orbiting water may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes. As waves from a swell approach the shoreline, they begin to feel the sea bottom. Wave trains become sets—groups of waves that are larger and longer-interval than their locally generated cousins. The approaching waves refract (bend) in response to the shape of the sea bottom. The visible part of the wave grows. The resistance offered by the sea bottom increases as the water gets shallower, slowing the progress of the wave. Finally, it becomes unstable and prepares to topple forward—to break. The rule of thumb is that it will break when its height reaches eighty per cent of the water’s depth—an eight-foot wave will break in ten feet of water. But many factors, some of them endlessly subtle—wind, bottom contour, swell angle, currents—determine exactly where and how each wave breaks. As surfers, we’re just hoping that it has a catchable moment (a takeoff point), and a ridable face, and that it doesn’t break all at once (close out) but, instead, breaks gradually, successively (peels), in one direction or the other (left or right), allowing us to travel roughly parallel to the shore, riding the face, for a while, in that spot, in that moment, just before it breaks.
- But there was something else—call it wit, or irony—that accompanied his physical confidence and beauty, something bittersweet that allowed him, in all but the most demanding situations, to seem as if he were both performing intently and, at the same time, laughing quietly at himself.
__ In the meantime, each man gaudily challenged that establishment by running for mayor of New York City—Buckley in 1965, Mailer four years later.
_____________________________________
"The Higher Life " / Lizze Widdicombe
__ The seconds pass slowly. You seem to drop, briefly, into another dimension—the realm of quiet walks and kindergarten nap time. Like travel, the chief boon of meditation might be the way that it throws the place you came from into relief.
__ Chief among them was Milarepa—a tenth-century aristocrat who began meditating so that he could learn sorcery, to get back at his neighbors. He ended up going down a contemplative rabbit hole, dedicating his life to meditation, writing poetry, and living in a cave.
"Five Hostages" / Lawrence Wright
"June, Moon, Tune" / Adam Gopnik
__ Interpretation is the teasing out into articulate words of a complicated sensation or experience. It’s not often the discovery of some other, completely different experience that the surface of the work was hiding.
Fittingly, an entire Web site has blossomed solely to paraphrase contemporary love songs in Shakespearean sonnet garb. Conducted by one Erik Didriksen, in this parody of the Beatles’ famous anthem:
O, there are tasks impossible to bring
to resolution by a person’s choice
the hymns that only cherubim can sing
cannot be sounded by a mortal voice . . . .
To live—to care—to thine own self be true—
all noble occupations done with ease
—if thou art guided by the simple creed
that love is all thy life doth truly need.
