Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Cartledge My rating: 4 of 5 stars Cartledge makes an admirable run at covering a thousand years of history in just a few pages. His focus on key themes and representative cities results in a nicely coherent introduction. View all my reviews
Continue readingThe Beauty of Silence
Just saw The Artist. It reminds me of what was lost when sound came into the movies. Filmmakers achieved an amazing level of visual sophistication and power before sound, and it took years — some would say decades — to regain the artistic momentum stopped dead by sounds’ enormous technical overhead. Indeed, there is an argument that the artistic requirements of building movies around dialogue are inherently at odds with realizing their full visual potential. That’s a bit overstated, but there’s a point to it. If The Artist, produced when filmmakers are basically amateurs in the art of silent movies,
Continue readingBook Review: African Signs
African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45 Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the, African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured
Continue readingReview: Brooklyn Storefronts
Brooklyn Storefronts by Paul Lacy My rating: 5 of 5 stars A lovely collection of artistic shop signs, tastefully photographed and displayed. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: The Flirt
The Flirt by Booth Tarkington My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Flirt, like so many Tarkington stories, is first of all an exercise in gentleness. Tarkington loved his characters to a fault. To his heroes and heroines he showed gentle affection, to his comic relief gentle condescension, and to his villains gentle contempt. All that gentleness throws up a fog of good feeling, but behind the fog there are crags and cliffs of unhappiness, struggle and decay. In the fog is nostalgic escapism to what seems like a “simpler” time and place. But life turns out to be the
Continue readingBook Review: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern
Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, essay by Pamela Kort. Michael Werner Gallery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-8850-1381-1. Paperback $55 Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York. His serious
Continue readingReview: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries My rating: 4 of 5 stars If the test of a good business book is how many ideas inspire you to take notes, this one passes quite nicely. I especially like the arguments for replacing a prioritization culture with a test culture. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes My rating: 3 of 5 stars If you’re interested in the history of Rome, with a bias toward the artistic history, this book is entertaining and engaging, even if poorly edited. There are numerous instances of redundancy and inaccuracy. As you get into the modern period, Hughes’ critical biases come a bit much to the fore. But still, I mostly enjoyed it. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism
Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism by Gary Gand My rating: 4 of 5 stars I grew up in a suburb where the kinds of houses described in this book provided welcome variation from the dominant ranches, colonials and split levels. (Indeed, I grew up visiting one of the houses featured in the book.) These buildings grasped at the actual promise of suburban living that, through lack of imagination, was thoroughly obscured where I typically commonly spent my childhood days. They were invariably set on heavily wooded lots. Their flat roofs and wide expanses of glass facing the trees meant they
Continue readingJacksonville Attractions
Jacksonville, Florida, like many southern cities, is a treasure trove of roadside art
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