May 1, 2013 Bull City Summer How William Eggleston Would Photograph a Baseball Game By Adam Sobsey Photo: Leah Sobsey/leahsobsey.com I am at war with the obvious. —William Eggleston Not long ago, I wrote about the formal and spiritual affinities between baseball and the genre of music called power pop. Both observe an “unwavering, repetitive adherence to form” while pushing hard against strict, self-imposed formal limits, thus “mak[ing] music out of a very precise, narrow, angular geometry.” Then, on April 8, the day before the Durham Bulls’ inaugural home game of the season, Bull City Summer’s first guest photographer, Alec Soth, gave a talk at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where his show “Wanderlust” is currently on view. He began by showing a slide, not of his own work, but of Flowers for Lucia by the photographer William Eggleston. Eggleston “hangs over me,” Soth confessed, before showing a picture he made of Eggleston himself. These disparate elements—power pop and Eggleston—came together for me just a few hours after Soth’s talk, when the documentary film, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, about the seminal power-pop band, closed Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (Eggleston appears in the documentary, so ravaged and slurred by years of hard living that the filmmakers resort to subtitling their interview with him in order to make him intelligible.) To make a nakedly baseball-centric comparison, you could say that Big Star was a can’t-miss major-league prospect that somehow missed: led by the late Alex Chilton, the band should have found international fame but barely got out of Memphis, the Triple-A city it called home. Read More
May 1, 2013 Humor The Funnies, Part 3 By Tom Gauld From You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, by Tom Gauld.
May 1, 2013 On the Shelf How to Win at Moby-Dick, and Other News By Sadie Stein Moby-Dick: Or, the Card Game takes to Kickstarter. Related: Emoji Dick. Rules for literati. “These rules can be summed up with the overarching theme of Act Like a Normal Person.” How to procrastinate, Kafka-style. Braveheart, and other movies based on poems.
April 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Business as Usual By Sadie Stein Well-known businesswoman Alice B. Toklas. Much has been made in recent days of Wikipedia’s decision to place certain authors under the rubric “American Women Novelists,” rather than merely “American Novelists”—the sort of thing which, in my retail days, I might have referred to as “a strong choice.” Perhaps less controversial, but I would argue just as peculiar, is their designation of a lady who would today have been 136. In the alphabetized list of notable birthdays for April 30 one may find the following: “Alice B. Toklas, American businesswoman.”
April 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Falling Men: On Don DeLillo and Terror By Chris Cumming Some terrorist attacks become cultural obsessions, while others are forgotten completely. There were three bombings in New York City in 1975, none of which I’ve ever heard talked about, each of which would probably shut down the city if it happened now. In January, Puerto Rican separatists set off dynamite in Fraunces Tavern in downtown Manhattan, killing four businessmen—the same number of fatalities, incidentally, that led us to close the airspace over Boston last week. In April, four separate bombs went off in midtown Manhattan on one afternoon, damaging a diner and the offices of several finance firms. The worst one came in late December, when a package of dynamite exploded in the baggage-claim area at LaGuardia Airport, killing eleven. These were underground disturbances, moments of disorder that helped warp the culture, even if they weren’t absorbed or even remembered. In 1975, Don DeLillo was thirty-nine, living in the city, possibly beginning work on Players, his fifth novel and his first about terrorism. Long before it became obvious, DeLillo argued that terrorists and gunmen have rearranged our sense of reality. He has become better appreciated as the world has come to resemble his work, incrementally, with every new telegenic catastrophe, every bombing and mass shooting. Throughout DeLillo’s work we encounter young men who plot violence to escape the plotlessness of their own lives. He has done more than any writer since Dostoevsky to explain them. Read More
April 30, 2013 Humor The Funnies, Part 2 By Tom Gauld From You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, by Tom Gauld.