on the shore of the ultimate sea

With a flyer boasting quotes from both J.G. Ballard and Colonel Kilgore of Apocalypse Now, by the time my chum Luis and I arrived at NYU a few weeks back for a special lecture we knew we’d be in for an interesting discussion.

Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, dubstep producer and owner/chief curator of the massively great Hyperdub record label, was talking about his new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. (MIT Press)

Introduced as a “rogue academic” and member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, it wasn’t immediately clear if the talk was going to be highly abstract or grounded, but it turned out the latter–lucid, well researched and informative. Here are some notes.
Read more on Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare talk at NYU

Pssssst…., originally uploaded by nparish.

Pssssst….

My buddy Dan posted this on Facebook the other day and it reminded me of one of the key points in Scott Berkun’s excellent “Confessions of a Public Speaker“. I read “Confessions…” late last year and have been talking about it to anyone who frequently presents or is involved in speaking in front of an audience; its a great resource.

Anyway, a point Scott makes is amply illustrated here: The audience wants you to succeed.

In Dan’s heartwarming case, he got a heads up on his fly being open, and probably went into that talk knowing he at least had one guy in the audience rooting for him.

Dan writes “Today I had to speak in front of about 70 people at this pharmaceutical company near Jersey when this fine older gentleman nonchalantly got my attention and passed me this note:”

Photographer Caroll Taveras emailed the other day with some end-of-project news from her Photo Studio project, which you may remember from our visit this winter. Selections are online, and there’s a book in the works, and, according to Caroll, she’s going to be bringing cheap (but great!) portraiture to more cities. Stay tuned!

(ps., turns out, as you can see above, I made the website, alongside Stefan Ruiz, a photographer and briefly creative director of the iconic magazine Colors.)

(pps. In other eminent Brooklynite news, Jim Hanas, my predecessor at Creativity/AdCritic, has a nifty full-pager explaining why you’ll never be famous in the Post today. The story is based on a talk Jim recently gave at his lecture series, Adult Ed, which I have shamefully yet to attend. Congrats, Jim–if they didn’t tell you about the perks, by dint of the Post filing you in the Opinion/Op-Ed columnist bin you’ve earned a one-year trial membership to the John Birch Society and a 2010 copy of G. Gordon Liddy’s ‘Stacked and Packed’ calendar.¹

1. I kid, but while working on the desk at the Post I got into a protracted phone conversation with one of Liddy’s radio producers that called for some esoteric sports stats and he sent an autographed, dedicated copy of the calendar to me at the paper in thanks. I put it in my mail cubby to take home later, as I was due at the bar that night and didn’t have safe transport, but the next day it was gone. [↩]

There are a couple new entries for this month on the book list, some new releases, fiction and non-.

I’ve been anticipating the movie adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s landmark piece of journalism, Gomorrah, since I finished the book about a year ago and proceeded to recommend it to anyone who’d listen. Unfortunately, while it’s a good enough movie by itself, compared to the book it falls short.

First, a word or two on the book. Saviano, a native of the Naples area, lived and breathed the Camorra, the network of clans of organized criminals growing up, and after twenty-something years had enough and wrote a blow-by-blow account of all the different ways it infects the region, from its fashion output to the mozzarella it eats.  Saviano, who narrates the book while hopping from murder scene to murder scene on his scooter and detailing his own family’s determined path around the muck, published the work to the dual accolades of it becoming the most-requested tome in the Italian prison system as well as drawing death threats from the clans whose foibles and excesses it chronicles. And it made him a very rich, well known (both deservedly so) man, at the price of his own safety and freedom–a true commitment to the cause.

What's wrong with the movie?

The first comics I ever read were in Eagle annuals. I had a stack of them, along with several loose Tiger and Lion collections, holdovers from my father’s postwar upbringing in England. He was a ten or so when he started getting them for Christmas, and I’d reckon I was shown the yellowing hardcovers around the same time.

For a young and inquisitive kid, the stack of Eagles was a treasure. They not only had a dozen or so multi-page strips in each, but they had adventure stories, how-to sections, science articles and all manner of interesting facts and illustrations. The attempts at humor were generally the worst kind of watery cabbage British stuff¹ , but otherwise they were solid gold, chock full of world-expanding stuff.

More on the founding of Eagle, and a look at the content

1. This is coming from a kid who had a whole shelf full of joke books yet still rejected the tin-eared Eagle stuff. There was something about most of it that just screamed Unfunny Uncle [↩]

photos by Billy Whitfield

It’s always interesting when punks get old. That’s why my emphatic finger-point this week is towards a story in Vice by former Born Against frontman Sam McPheeters. McPheeters ventures into one of the Midwest’s  strangest regions, the wealthy suburbs of Michigan’s capital, Lansing, to profile Doc Dart, former frontman for hardcore group Crucifucks. Dart, who calls himself “26,” appears to be suffering from several forms of mental illness, and has become a suburban pariah in the Mason-Okemos area.

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Halldór Laxness by Einar Hákonarson, 1984

For me, one of the more fun and exciting parts of meeting people who write stuff for a living comes when you skip onto something, appreciate it, and, looking back at the byline, realize a respected colleague has written it. That’s more or less what happened the other day when I followed a link from Arts and Letters Daily to this article, “Becoming Halldór Laxness” at the incipient The National out of the UAE. Turns out, it’s pal (and old roommate) Sam Munson reviewing restless Iceland native Laxness’ The Great Weaver from Kashmir. Munson says it bears resemblance to “other works of hectic spiritual heroics” such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which is enough for me to check it out.

In other news barely related to our credit-crunched North Atlantic friends, another chum, Dustin Long, who wrote a novel called Icelander, has provided some year-end recos over at The Millions.

To continue this terribly tenuous connection, I had an icy landing on Friday, barely escaping New York’s snowfall to be blown headlong into a huge Michigan dump. And guess what was on TV that night? Well, Johnny, nothing but a beautiful documentary about an Icelandic band Sigur Rós, Heima.

So, Nick, you ask, what’s the takeaway? And of course I ignore you because “takeaway” is one of those terrible beige middle management words we should actively conduct disgust towards. I guess, though, check these books out, if you’re interested, or have some late-game gift-giving to do for someone who loves reading.

I’m in my own private Iceland in Michigan for a few weeks, but I’ve recently uncovered some childhood treasures I want to bring to you soon, a little treasure trove you can consider your holiday treat.

It’s been an interesting, albeit slow, few August weeks round these parts, so here’s a bit of a Creativity-related fill-in.

One of our favorite publishers, PowerHouse books, sent by a catalog for its new season, which, strangely, included a huge, front-and-center push for a book on small-plates portion control written by none other than Alex Bogusky. If you failed Know Your Advertising Creatives 101 (and no shame in that–certainly other coursework has greater world relevance) Mr. Bogusky is the Chief Creative Officer of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, the Miami-based ad agency whose clients include Burger King and Domino’s. The evangelical pizza business is new, but CP+B’s relationship with Burger King is going on a decade, in which time they’ve revitalized the marketing, with a rock-n-jock approach hitting hard in the agency’s breadbasket, the young adult male. Read more on Bogusky's diet book

Some Flash genuises in NZ have turned classic boox into PowerPoint and mocked up a Windows interface to make it look like you’re absorbing chartjunk while reading Animal Farm. Splendid.

Readatwork.com