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"Do the Panic"

There’s nothing like a fix of seventies New York to make you either nostalgic for the affordable rents or grateful for the passing of junkie squalor. 

For The Panic in Needle Park (1971), director Jerry Schatzberg let his actors feel their way through Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s script: Al Pacino (before his stupefied mania became shtick) and the game-for-abuse Kitty Winn play the addict-lovers living on a now-posh stretch of the West Side. 

 David Edelstein — New York Magazine

Leonard Lopate talks to director Jerry Schatzberg and actor Kitty Winn about the making of the film, which is being screened at Film Forum (209 W. Houston) Jan. 30-Feb. 5.

Maira. At Last.

"And the Pursuit of Happiness"

By Maira Kalman

RIP, John Updike

They will not be the same next time. The sayings

so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.

Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in

the more securely to the worldly buzz

of television, alphabet, and street talk,

culture polluting their gazes' pure blue.

It makes you see at last the value of

those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells

of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces

like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)

who knew you from the start, when you were zero,

cooing their nothings before you could be bored

or knew a name, not even your own, or how

this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

                          

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

By John Updike

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Henry Miller

Mr & Mrs Smith all started with a real couple, as they drove back from a weekend break at a hotel that had promised far more romance than it delivered. 

How could the guide they'd trusted have got it so wrong? Where were the people who understood what we really want from a trip for two -- reviewers who could be relied on to report back with the honesty you'd expect from your best friend?

So began Mr & Mrs Smith’s quest, to find the most idyllic places to stay.  

Mr & Mrs Smith latest book,  

The Global Shortlist includes 30 staff favorite boutique hotels from Belize to Barcelona, Puglia to Phuket, Los Angeles to London… well... you get the idea.

 This unique guide stands out for its elegant design,sumptuous photography, witty text, and the trademark Smith attention to detail. 

All featured hotels can be booked directly online through the smart and user-friendly award-winning website.

 A special membership card comes with each book; this card provides a year’s free membership, enabling readers exclusive offers such as room upgrade and champagne on arrival. (pas mal)

Pink Eye

“Weird Beauty” provides an instant update on fashion photography as a fast-moving collective expression. It is as esoteric as abstract art, and as startling as a sleek, hissing serpent in the drab garden of everyday reality. The alpha and the omega of the collaboration are the clothing designer and the photographer; in between lies the crucial participation of magazine editors and graphic designers, hair and make-up artists, sets (or setting), models and especially stylists. (The stylists’ names are featured prominently on the exhibition labels, just below the photographers’.)

link: Fashion Forward (Not for the Fainthearted) Roberta Smith

The Louvre invites comic-strip art

  The exhibit, titled Small Design: The Louvre invites comic-strip art, showcases the work of five   comic creators enlisted for the project. The authors were given free reign for their stories,   although each had to include the Louvre as a primary location.

  "We wanted to present this art with the goal of showing its … esthetic quality, but also its   quality in the sense of the confrontation between the world of the Louvre and this alternate   universe, which is that of comics," said curator Fabrice Douar.

  "Comics are not just something lighthearted … there are also contemporary comics, which is   more about the creation — there are graphic novels, detective stories and manga," he added.

  "Just like comics are not only fun or for entertainment, the Louvre equally is not dusty and   boring."

  link: New Louvre exhibit shines spotlight on comic strip creations

Barack Obama is Sworn in as the 44th President

Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States Tuesday, 

 and called on Americans to join him in confronting what he described as an economic crisis caused by greed but also “our collective failure to make hard choices.”

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real,” Mr. Obama said in his inaugural address minutes after he took the oath of office on the same bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his first inaugural in 1861. “They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.”

Mr. Obama, the first African American to serve as president, spoke to a sea of cheering people, hundreds of thousands of Americans packed on the National Mall from the Capitol to beyond the Washington monument. 

"In The God's Dreams"

Am I a character in the dreams

of the god Hermes the messenger?

Certainly many of my dreams

have nothing to do with the

common life around me. There

are never any automobiles or

airplanes in them. These

dreams belong to an age in

the distant past, to a time

perhaps when nothing was

written down, to the

time of memory.

I chose Hermes not out of

vanity but because from what

I’ve read about him he had a

pretty good time, was not

just a drunkard on Olympus.

In his traipsings delivering

divine messages he must have

met some pretty girls who

gave him pleasure. We know

that he invented the lyre

for the benefit of poets,

and Lucian relates in his

Dialogues of the Dead that

he was the god of sleep

and dreams.

My dreams are not frightening,

they are not nightmares. But

their irrationality puzzles

me. What is Hermes trying to

tell me? Is he playing a game

with me? Last Monday night

I dreamt about a school for

young children who had heads

but no bodies. Last night it

was a cow that was galloping

in our meadow like a horse.

Another night, and this one

was a bit scary, I swam across

the lake with my head under

water, I didn’t have to breathe air.

What is the message of these

dreams? Into what kind of world

is Hermes leading me? It’s not

the world described daily in the

New York Times.A world of

shadows? A kind of levitation?

How can I pray to Hermes to lay

off these senseless fantasies,

tell him that I want real dreams

such as my shrink can explicate.

I’ve looked up lustration in

the dictionary. Its definition

is not encouraging: “a prefatory

ceremony, performed as a preliminary

to entering a holy place.” That’s

too impersonal. I want a man-to-man

talk with Hermes, telling him to

stop infesting my nights with

his nonsense.

James Laughlin, “In the God’s Dreams”

 Richard Kalver/Magnum Photos 

France. Paris. 1972. Sleeping man and leaves.

The 50th Anniversary of Robert Frank's "The Americans"

The 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking publication will be celebrated in the nation’s capital with the exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank’s "The Americans", premiering January 18 through April 26, 2009, in the National Gallery of Art’. 

In 1955 and 1956, the Swiss-born American photographer Robert Frank (b. 1924) traveled across the United States to photograph, as he wrote, "the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere." The result of his journey was The Americans, a book that looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a culture on the brink of massive social upheaval and one that changed the course of 20th-century photography. 

First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, The Americans remains the single most important book of photographs published since World War II. The exhibition will examine both Frank’s process in creating the photographs and the book by presenting 150 photographs, including all of the images from The Americans, as well as 17 books, 15 manuscripts, and 28 contact sheets. In honor of the exhibition, Frank has created a film and participated in selecting and assembling three large collages. The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from May 17 through August 23, 2009, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 22 through December 27, 2009. 

Profound Performance -- Viola Davis as Mrs. Miller in "Doubt"

Viola Davis Davis is only on screen for 11 minutes but to watch her is to understand an entire life. It is an object lesson in what an actor can convey in a short space of time. She seems to carry her family history in her face: the violence at home and her unswerving love for her child. And she looks dowdily embattled but unassailable in her shabby fawn overcoat. This is no glamorous part - her eyes fill and her nose runs in a chill wind. But her contribution to the film's argument is to accept doubt as if it were a certainty, one of life's givens. She is Mother Courage, and, where necessary, Mother Cowardice, because for her love counts more than justice. It is no surprise that she has already been nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actress and is tipped to win an Oscar.

link: "Mother Superior" The Observer