You May Be Able to Get There From Here

Paul Auster, novelist and poet, talks about why the novel, and the book, will persist in the digital age.

The complete interview with Auster is available at Big Think. Auster was responding to Phil Roth’s gloomy prediction of the novel’s future:

The full interview with Roth is on the Daily Beast’s Vimeo page.

I just found this extensive interview with Lars Von Trier from a few years back, in Sight and Sound, a translation of an interview in Die Ziet:

Die Zeit: Lars von Trier, who in your opinion has the power in an interview situation, the interviewer or the interviewee?

Lars von Trier: I could try to insist on a symbolic power. I could lay down the rule that during this talk you have to address me as King Lars. I could threaten to leave the room if you disobeyed. But that would do nothing to change the fact that in an interview, the same rules apply as in cinema. No matter what happens during the filming process, the power is in the hands of the editor. You havethe scissors in your hands so you have absolute power.

[...]

[Question...]

Lars von Trier: I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not do what I liked. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or got drunk on white wine. After a childhood like that, you search for restrictions in your own life.

But communists actually have very strict rules.

[...]

[Question...]

Lars von Trier: That’s true, but that’s where things start to get very complicated. All my life I’ve been interested in the discrepancy between philosophy and reality, between conviction and its implementation. The general assumption is that all people are able to differentiate more or less equally between good and evil. But if this is the case, why does the world look like it does? Why have all the good intentions of my parents come to nothing. And why do my own good intentions lead to nothing?

There’s that wonderful guiding principle: always leave the toilette as you found it. Or: do unto others as you would have them do to you. Kant was right. It’s just that his imperative is a bit unspecific. But it is nevertheless one of the best guidelines for how people should live together. Apart from that I believe a society should treat its weaker members well. And that is not something that happens over there in America.

Die Ziet: Should we be thinking more about George W. Bush‘s sexuality?

Lars Von Trier: He’s a sexual being too and his psyche is very important for us all. I think he’s in love with Condoleezza Rice. And he’s dreaming of being whipped by her.

There’s a certain brand of movie that I most enjoy. Some people call them “Puzzle Movies.” Others call them “Brain Burners.” Each has, at some point or another, been referred to as “that flick I watched while I was baked out of my mind.”

The Morning News survey’s films that puzzle us:

Mindfuck Movies.

I’m keen on watching The Dark City and finish David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which I’m currently watching.

LD Beghtol of the Village Voice has a Control review that touches on Corbijn’s gaze towards Ian Curtis and Joy Division:

His long infatuation with Joy Division first went public when his photos of the band—made literally in Curtis’s final weeks—were shunned by the press as too strange, too arty; only after the singer’s death did these enigmatic images become widely known, making Corbijn famous in the process. Inevitably, then, Corbijn became the de facto image consultant to the burgeoning postmortem JD industry: Witness his risible late-’80s video for “Atmosphere,” in which dwarfish, robed, and hooded figures galumph through an arid sub-Bergmanesque landscape, intercut with stills of the young, then-clueless band. Corbijn’s later videos are often much less cack-handed than this one, making him an obvious (perhaps too obvious) choice for his much-postponed feature-length debut.

Read the article at the Village Voice.

Related:

A comprehensive review of the film can be found at Westminister Wisdom.

First of all, David Byrne has a blog. (Unfortunately, the blog is not called Talking Head, or any variation of this).

Secondly, Byrne makes fun of IKEA on his blog:

My sister had the idea that we would take my parents to IKEA to look at possible replacements for their kitchen cabinets, counters, sinks and storage. I loved the idea of a trip to IKEA since I’d never been there ever. And as it was to be a look-see and not a buying trip, the pressure would be low. I was looking forward to the famous Swedish meatballs for lunch too.

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.

Additional Authors Note: I want to write a history, or some kind of work about IKEA. At this point I only have a title, Do It Yourself: How IKEA Transformed Modern Furniture.

Actually, I’m not reading the hard-copy yet, but I’ve started to read Michael Beruit’s book Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design

Beruit writes at Design Observer, and is eloquent in his observations.