Culture Surfing

Is anyone else salivating at the chance to see Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans? The improbable pairing of German auteur Werner Herzog and financially troubled space cadet Nicolas Cage is causing critics to spew all sorts of qualified, conflicted, and adoring statements. Christian Science Monitor is calling the Herzog-Cage pairing a “match made in looney-tunes heaven” and The Washington Post is calling the film a “freaky-deaky home run.” Yeah, whatever that means.

Salon.com is totally owning the ambivalence. Thursday’s review called the movie “so bad it’s good.” In an interview published the next day, Herzog claims, among other things, that he hasn’t seen Taxi Driver, doesn’t remember Chinatown, and never got around to watching the 1992 movie that Port of Call New Orleans remakes. Amazing. The post-Katrina, coke-addict cop drama doesn’t open in Atlanta until December 4.

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Finally, a bag that fits both your spyglass and a tub of lard.

Does someone in your life need nautical-themed letterpress cards? A charm necklace that expresses the love that pirates need? A tote bag to carry sea-faring essentials?

Then, by all means, set sail toward the Indie Craft Experience on Saturday. The one-day-only event is a mecca for all things knitted, charmed, pressed, and generally hand-made.

There is a small cover charge to get in the door, but the first 200 attendees will receive gift bags that look to be stuffed with some decent swag.

Over 100 vendors will be on hand to offer their handcrafted wares, which are not necessarily nautical themed.

More details, directions, and a full list of vendors available at the Indie Craft Experience website.

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Among the winners at last night’s National Book Awards ceremony in New York City was the pride of Milledgeville, GA, Flannery O’Connor. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, a posthumous collection that won the NBA for fiction in 1972, was voted by readers as the “Best of National Book Awards for Fiction” in the last 60 years of the event.

Losing to O’Connor in that category were William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, and others.

Colum McCann was awarded the 2009 fiction prize for his novel Let the Great World Spin.

A full list of winners, finalists, and judges after the jump.

Continue reading “Flannery O’Connor wins ‘Best of’ National Book Award” »

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Vacant space at 479 Edgewood will host the Cheap Paper collective exhibition as part of AXIOM on Sat., Nov. 21.

The corner of Edgewood and Boulevard will be the epicenter of a vibrant arts district this weekend. The first project from the newly founded local non-profit Public Acts of Art, AXIOM: Baby Proof will exhibit art in the Old Fourth Ward from a staggering list of local talent on Saturday.

The Edgewood corridor doesn’t possess the wealth of galleries that neighborhoods like Castleberry Hill or the Westside Arts District can claim. That fact hasn’t stopped event organizers Alana Wolf and Danny Davis, rather, it’s encouraged them. “The whole reason I’m running around begging favors, building out spaces, and working late into the night is to see this neighborhood excel. I want to see what’s in this neighborhood put forward and given a lot of light,” Davis says.

Continue reading “AXIOM transforms the Old Fourth Ward on Saturday night” »

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"Around the Whirl" from Whirl Trade, 2009.

Fahamu Pecou is an Atlanta-based artist with international acclaim. In 2009 alone, he has shown the solo exhibitions Coming From Where I’m From in Cape Town, South Africa, Black Presidential in Basel, Switzerland and New York City, and now Whirl Trade at Atlanta’s Get This Gallery. This latest exhibition of paintings “addresses the impressions, interpretations and misconceptions of blackness that African descended communities perform for each other.”

Performance is an integral part of Pecou’s work. He has developed characters like “Fahamou Pecou is the Shit” and videos that toy with the notions of image and celebrity that run throughout the paintings.

Fahamu was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about his time spent in South Africa and the process he uses to create these massive, magazine-styled paintings.

His answers and more images from Whirl Trade after the jump.

Continue reading “A few questions with Fahamu Pecou” »

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Down on Peachtree Street, just south of the High Museum, are the offices of Roark Capital Group. On its website, the private equity firm explains that it specializes in acquiring family businesses and managing franchises such as Seattle’s Best Coffee, Schlotzsky’s and Cinnabon. The website also offers an explanation of the name Roark, which refers to the character Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Distilling Rand’s philosophy in a few choice lines, it says, “Integrity … is commitment to one’s own thinking and one’s own mind. … Howard Roark’s life exemplified the true nature of this independence and integrity.” After reading that, I drove right down to Lenox Square to pick up a Cinnabon, but was disappointed when I didn’t taste much integrity or independence. That empty flavor has more than the name Roark in common with Ayn Rand.

Rand is experiencing a sort of renaissance these days. Atlas Shrugged sold more copies in 2008 than in any year since 1957 and will probably break that record again this year. Charlize Theron has signed up to star in an epic film adaptation of the 1,400-page novel. Glenn Beck can’t stop talking about the author. Perfectly timed to intersect with this capitalist feeding frenzy are the first two biographies to be written about Rand by authors other than her closest acolytes. Out of the two biographers, only Jennifer Burns had access to Rand’s journals, letters and private papers. She’s put that access to good use in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, a vivid, intellectual portrait of the woman born as Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905.

Continue Reading “Rand-y for capitalism”

(Photo Courtesy Oxford University Press)

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Do you really need an excuse to watch a Muppets skit inspired by David Lynch? This will heal your Monday morning blues.

(H/T to FF)

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The latest installment of  the Solar Anus reading series goes down at Kavarna tonight. New York native David Lehman will be reading poetry and Georgia-based Josh Russell will read short fiction.

The prolific David Lehman has two books out this year – a collection of poetry titled Yeshiva Boys and a non-fiction volume about Jewish songwriters titled A Fine Romance – as well as the latest installment of The Best American Poetry series, which he initiated and continues to edit. You can check him out reading a poem called “The Double Agent” below.

Josh Russell is the author of Yellow Jack and two forthcoming novels – My Bright Midnight and A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag. He was raised in Normal, Illinois and lives in Newnan, Ga.

Solar Anus is, hands down, the best name for a reading series in Atlanta. Local author Jamie Iredell hosts the roving series, which will conclude 2009 with a reading at Beep Beep Gallery this Friday, November 20 featuring Kate Greenstreet, Brigitte Byrd, and Scott Wilkerson.

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Let’s say you’re a Nick Cave fan. Maybe not even a “fan,” but someone who owns and likes a couple of his records. You might not listen to him much anymore. If someone asked you why you like him, you might talk about that inimitable Australian voice of his. Or you might talk about his songwriting (which has bordered on story writing for most of his career) and the enduring cast of characters he has born – murderers and witnesses and bystanders to the scenes.

Or, if you’re the story-telling type, you would talk about the first time you really listened to a Nick Cave album. It was Tender Prey and you were single at the time, so no one was around to tell you to turn it down. You pulled a bottle of Bushmills out of the cabinet and listened to it over and over again, turning up the volume a little each time until you realized that Nick Cave just sounded best at 10, blaring so loud that your speakers were in a vague sort of danger. You don’t remember how many times you listened to the album that night, but you can recall how the repetition of songs like “The Mercy Seat” were every bit as intoxicating as the Bushmills. You remember waking up the next day with a splitting headache and the needle skipping at the end of the record.

Maybe that didn’t happen to you, but that’s exactly how I remember it.  When Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, came out earlier this year, I was interested but only vaguely. Have you ever tried to read Bob Dylan’s novel Tarantula? It doesn’t bode well for the musician to novelist crossover. Using that reference as judgment, I didn’t pick up the book and still haven’t.

But I did listen to the audiobook. The unabridged, eight hour long book-on-CD is a recording of Cave reading along with a soundtrack performed by him and Warren Ellis.

Continue reading “Listening to Nick Cave read ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’” »

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Mary Jane Mahan's Brick Store Pub book jumped to the top of Amazon charts last night.

There is no shortage of love for Decatur’s Brick Store Pub. Love at the Pub by Mary Jane Mahan is the number one regional travel book on Amazon’s sales charts right now. This new book tells the “true story of a small southern town’s love for its friendly beer pub”  and explains how The Brick Store became the #2 ranked beer bar on Earth.

Last night was an organized, online launch party that included a “live world craft beer bar philosophy talk” with Brick Store owners Dave Blanchard and Michael Gallagher, 5Seasons Sandy Springs owner Dennis Lange, and Paste Magazine founder and Editor-in-chief Josh Jackson. The “Telesudinar,” as it was called, offered insights on how to operate a world class beer bar and the possibility to win gift certificates and prizes.

Could online readings and discussions be eclipsing the standard brick and mortar book store readings? It’s highly unusual to see a locally focused book like Love at the Pub, which was published through the self-publishing company iUniverse, rank so high on Amazon’s overall rankings (around #140 this morning, though it reached #82 last night). Authors and publicists might need to get a beer and mull that one over.

(H/T to Andy for link)

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Good intentions don’t always make for successful realities. Atlanta based artist Alex Kvares explores those “moments of unfulfilled hope” in his solo show Oh So Fail, opening at Beep Beep Gallery this Saturday, November 14. Oh So Fail  looks at abandoned cold war military bunkers, Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, and other connections to “collapsed ideals, dilapidated utopias and various ruined promises.” Kvares often draws in colorful short, stitch-like strokes, referencing craft-making and psychedelic aesthetics. You can preview a few of the pieces from the show and listen to Kvares discuss his work in the video.

Oh So Fail runs from Sat., Nov. 14 until Sun., Dec. 6 at Beep Beep Gallery. 696 Charles Allen Drive. 404.429.3320. beepbeepgallery.com

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Frame 18, from the Explosure Series, 2008

Tierney Gearon mostly takes photos of her family. The former Atlantan had a career as a model, followed by a career as a fashion photographer, but she settled down, had kids, and got “thoroughly bored with the whole fashion industry.” She did what a lot of mothers do – started taking photos of her children and relatives. Unlike most mothers, though, she had the experience of creating commercial work for Times Square billboards and the pages of French Vogue. Her first solo show in 2001, i am a camera, drew quite a controversy surrounding pictures of her children. The Mother Project followed by documenting the intense relationship between Gearon and her mother. Her new work photographs family vacations and domestic life through double exposures. Gearon’s photographs exude a surreal quality that autobiographical work can rarely maintain.

Her latest show, Explosure, runs at Jackson Fine Art until Jan. 16, 2010.

Her answers and a few images from the show after the jump

Continue reading “A few questions with Tierney Gearon” »

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Howardena Pindell and others criticize the work of Kara Walker in this collection of essays.

GENRE: Collected criticism about a contemporary artist

THE PITCH: Written responses to Kara Walker’s art divided into three sections: “NO” presents arguments against it, “YES” collects favorable reviews, and “?” is more ambiguous.

BOLD PRINT: Former Atlantan Kara Walker is a phenomenally successful artist, being one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1997  and named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”  in 2007.

THE WORK: PBS says, “Kara Walker’s work explores the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery.” A collection of her work and interviews can be seen at the ART:21 website.

AGAINST: Howardena Pindell sets the tone for arguing against the favorable reception of Kara Walker’s work, “Kara Walker’s work is being used as a weapon against the Black community in general to reinforce and maintain restrictions upon any visual dialogue with other artists of color and the wide range of work they produce.” Pindell and many of the contributors to this volume write that Walker’s work is racist and feel that their opinions have been silenced by “white privilege.”

Continue reading “Shelf Life: Kara Walker NO/YES/?” »

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Atlanta graffiti artist Hense will open his first solo gallery show at The Rail Yard this Friday, including a premiere of a short documentary about his work.  TSL Films has been producing documentary shorts about graffiti artists for a couple years now under ‘The 7th Day Project’ title. The gallery show, Surface Strength,  will feature works on wood, paper, and canvas in a style that’s quite different from the large blocked letters that you can see around town.

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