Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), “Etretat” (July 1907) (detail) (full image here)
Lartigue again
Art
Lartigue
Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986). “The ZYX takes off… Piroux, Zissou, Georges Louis and Dédé try to fly, too, Rouzat, September 1910.” Silver gelatine print, around 1965, 60,1 x 74 cm. (Via Galerie Berinson)
Orwell: Good Bad Books
The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Read the whole essay here. See also: Orwell on Why I Write.
Whale and Calf
“Whale and Calf,” artist unknown, ca. 1830.
“What it shows is a whale calf in the mouth of its mother. She is not, of course, eating it. (Those teeth are useless.) She is trying to rescue it. And that, my friends, was all part of the whalers’ fiendish plan. If whalers — big drivers of the economy in early industrial America — could get their harpoons into a whale calf they never missed their chance, because harpooning the baby was a perfect way to lure in the adult. The bigger the whale, the more oil.” More on this painting here.
George Harrison: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Aaron Sorkin: Now all I have to do…
At the moment I’m at roughly the same place I was when I decided to write ‘The Social Network’ — which is to say I don’t know what the movie’s about yet. I know it won’t be a biography as it’s very hard to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biopic. I know that Jobs was a very complicated and dynamic genius who fought a number of dramatic battles. I know that like Edison, Marconi (and Philo Farnsworth), he invented something we love. I think that has a lot to do with our love affair with him. We’re told every day that America’s future is basically in service but our history is in building things — railroads and cars and cities — but Steve Jobs, in building something that’s taking us to our future, has also taken us to one of the best parts of our past. Now all I have to do is turn that into three acts with an intention, obstacle, exposition, inciting action, reversal, climax and denouement and make it funny and emotional and I’ll be in business.
Aaron Sorkin on the forthcoming film version of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs
Still lifes by Christopher Stott, cont’d
Christopher Stott
“Inner Conflicts”
24” x 48” Oil on canvas, 2012
John Fox on ball games
Book trailer for The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game by my friend John Fox (on sale May 14). The footage shows the Kirkwell Ba’, an ancient “folk football” game played twice a year, on Christmas and New Years Day, in the streets of Kirkwall, a tiny coastal town in Orkney, northern Scotland.