TOBI'S DESK

From A Taipei Story   When I hopped over to BAM recently to see Edward Yang’s 1985  Taipei Story , I didn’t realize that I was about to encounter one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen this year.  Taipei Story  is a stunning and fluid masterpiece about a couple, Chin (Tsai Chin) and Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien), slowly drifting apart in an increasingly modern Taiwan. They make vague plans to move to America, but they fall through—neither one of them can seem to stop giving money to their struggling friends and family. The movie is sewn through with glorious slow images: of Taiwan’s new, monotonous high rises (“I can’t tell anymore which ones I designed and which I didn’t,” says Chin’s architect lover); clogged highways; active night markets and cozy karaoke bars. Everything is bent in a glacially paced Weltschmerz. The biggest bummer (spoiler, sorry): when Lung dies, stabbed at the end by a young admirer of Chin’s. It happens so casually, in a muffled street scuffle, that it just see

A painting by Derek Walcott. “What is the motto of St. Lucia, boy?” “Statio haud malefida carinis.” “Sir!” “Sir!” “And what does that mean?” “Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps.” —Derek Walcott, Another Life   “Sir Matthew! Sir Derek Walcott—he die!” Three excited girls bounded into my room at about twenty minutes to eight, as I ate breakfast for a change, to deliver the announcement. One of their fathers worked for Walcott and had mentioned it while dropping her off at school. I called the man, who apprehensively confirmed the story. Walcott was dead—but he didn’t want word of it to spread before the family had made a statement. I assured him that I’d tell no one, and spent the next hour wondering whether emailing someone about it would violate my promise, or indeed basic propriety. Within an hour the news broke anyway.  Though Walcott and I lived on the same island, I didn’t really know him except through his work, which I suspect was—as it is for many people and most ar

“ Search Light ,” an exhibition of paintings, photographs, and drawings by Jane Hammond, is at Galerie Lelong through April 22. The show features what Hammond calls “Dazzle paintings,” works derived from photos, painted in acrylic on a surface of mica sheets over Plexiglas. Hammond infuses these paintings with silver, gold, copper, and palladium leaf, giving them a dense, textured reflectivity. Her photographs, meanwhile, are digitally manipulated to present what she calls “stills from a movie in my head.” In a 2013 interview , she explained, I’ve always worked with found information … When I talk to myself about my paintings, I always use this word jammed . It’s a reference to how each constituent element in the painting is coming from a disparate source, from another culture, from another time. Each one is freighted with the way they drew in England in the 1890s, or an Art Deco sensibility, or the way woodcuts looked in Germany in 1500, or Chinese ink drawings. And I’ve always valu

B.F.F: BEST FRIENDS FOREVER All rights reserved. © 2016 Serah Iyare SYNOPSIS Didi and Mara were childhood friends. Nothing in the whole wide world could ever separate them. One man rocked the boat of their friendship. Will their relationship sink or withstand the overturn?   CHAPTER ONE “Proclaim your awesome power, Tell of mighty deeds, … Continue reading B.f.f: Best Friends Forever 1 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2nEcT4h

A screengrab from Microsoft Bob.   Prediction: Comic Sans MS is due for a comeback. Ostracized and maligned for decades, the world’s most controversial typeface is about to come in from the cold. Books will be printed in Comic Sans. Official memoranda will be typed in it. Highway signs will use it; fashion labels will use it; we will put it on the moon. Vincent Connare, a typographer for Microsoft in the nineties who designed Comic Sans, has begun to campaign for its rehabilitation. He maintains that the font is a perfect marriage of form and content, especially given Microsoft’s ambitions at the time: “ One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children . I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense … Type should do exactly what it’s intended to do. That’s why I’m proud of Comic Sans. It was for novice computer

The annual Short Story Day Africa Prize is set to open for submissions on June 1, 2017. This year’s theme is “Id.” The winner is to be awarded $800, while the second-placed and third-placed entrants get $200 and $100 respectively. Below is the full press release as it appears on the site: In early psychoanalysis, […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2mVC2KO

“In one of these corners, an easel leaning against the wall catches light, displaying a monochromatic sketch on a white square sheet. Ola leans in towards the illuminated easel, about to witness the rarest event of his entire life.” THE drapes billow at the window, letting in a gush of wind; quietly at first, and […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2mVAaSb

  US President Donald Trump, while speaking at a luncheon with Irish Prime Minister Edna Kenny, was quoted to have said: As we stand together with our Irish friends, I’m reminded of that proverb — and this is a good one, this is one I like. I’ve heard it for many, many years and I […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2mVNxSf

“Neli and I opened another bottle of wine, and tried to make up a story for our new friends. Neli thought they were both divorced. I thought the man’s wife was dead.” I was in the checkout line at the pharmacy. There were two women in front of me. They were talking. The older woman […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2oh2Ogp

Help me paint a picture of a soulless city in Africa’s sunrise whose sun its gloom has swallowed. Draw it as dark as darkness itself. Paint the walking shells of humans who have sold to the supermarket of souls their hearts. Paint them soulless, eating white aid meant for AIDS patients on deathbeds. paint them […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2nqHAJ7

The ANA Prize-winning playwright Jude Idada, whose Oduduwa, King of the Edos was shortlisted for the 2014 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, has accused Nollywood star actress Omoni Oboli of stealing his script for use in her new film, Okafor’s Law. The accusation, which first surfaced in September of 2016, gained traction this year and […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2nqSEGe

The Big Book of the Year buzz of the 2017 publishing season has mostly settled around reports of the $65 million advance received by the Obamas from Penguin Random House. At the London Book Fair, which was held 14-16 March, a few novels have made the right noises. Below is a report from Publishers Weekly, […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2nqYqaO

Picture, as a backdrop, one of those primitively drawn 19th-century mourning paintings with rickety white gravestones and age-worn monuments standing under the faded green canopy of a couple of delicately sketched trees. Add…some Edward Gorey-style ghosts, skittering across the landscape — at once menacing, comical and slightly tongue-in-cheek — From The New York Times Review of George Saunders’s   Lincoln in the Bardo It was an uneventful evening, much like any other. roger bevins iii Mr. Bevins and I were reflecting upon the sounds the branches made as the night wind gusted through the premises. hans vollman Quite dull, really. roger bevins iii As we spoke, Mr. Bevins held up a hand, bidding me to fall quiet. A number of his ears seemed to strain. Someone is coming, he said, his voice low. And I, too, heard a visitor’s approach. hans vollman It was a man, not young, rambling down the path in a state most aggrieved. roger bevins iii It was clear to Mr. Bevins and I that

Adaeze stared at him, not knowing whether to embrace him or to take to her heels in the greatest possible speed. He smiled at her, but his usual charming smile was of no effect of significance as Adaeze’s stare remained blank and bland. “My Sunshine, my heartbeat, my jewel, it is I, Ojadike, the drummer … Continue reading The Harvest Season (7) → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2ogbhjU

Photo: Elsa Dorfman.   We were sad to learn that Joanne Kyger, whom the San Francisco Gate calls “ a leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a rare female voice of the male-dominated Beat generation ,” died last week at eighty-two. In an illuminating 2014 interview with  The Conversant , Kyger discussed her process and, memorably, the role of psychedelics in her work: I participated in several peyote ceremonies and in February of 1959, while taking it with some friends, I had a quite unpleasant experience of massed black energy intercut with animal faces. The fact that I was unwisely taking this trip in my apartment, which was over a bar in North Beach, and was not feeling well, added to a very unstable sense of “reality.” This “black energy” resembled an animal, which I later named, hoping to focus it. A wild animal, which I paid attention to whenever I saw it or saw mention of it. For years I was afraid of stepping over some edge into a loss of self or schizophrenic d

Some poets pick some song lyrics worth reading. Farrah Karapetian, Soundscape 36 , 2015, unique chromogenic photogram, metallic, 40″ x 45″. Courtesy the artist and Danziger Gallery.   Most of us don’t need a small group of learned Swedes to tell us that Bob Dylan is a poet. We likely forged our opinion on the matter long ago, somewhere between “Talkin’ New York” (1962) and “Thunder on the Mountain” (2006). But let’s not stop at Dylan. Why not call all Bobs poets? Bob Marley, Bob Seger, Bob Weir. Add in the Bobbys and Bobbies, too, for that matter: “Blue” Bland, Brown, Gentry. It’s an eclectic group. But if we relinquish the idea that the term “poet” is a kind of coronation, we’re free to understand it as a descriptive term for someone who works with words in concentrate, which all of these Bobs and Bobbies do. Perhaps Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature can be a beginning—of closer attention to lyric craft; of richer conversations among songwriters, poets, and the rest of us. The p

The grim economic prospects of being an artist are well-established, but the cold, hard numbers behind writing and publishing — particularly in the digital age — are mystifying even to many of the people who are trying to make a living doing it. Anything that illuminates the financial realities of the writing game becomes a precious commodity; essays featuring frank money talk tear through the internet, g-chats and Slack channels hum, aspiring novelists desperately glean what they can from Publishers Marketplace before their (tax-deductible) $25 runs out. Enter Manjula Martin , the woman behind  Who Pays Writers? , a hugely valuable resource for freelancers trying to figure out the numbers behind bylines. Martin established the site in 2012 to bring transparency to the woefully opaque writing business using crowdsourcing: writers anonymously offer up the rates they were paid by various publications. The following year, Martin expanded the territory with  Scratch , a magazine about mo

Photo: Zbigniew Bzymek   I met with the director Elizabeth LeCompte over a number of months in her loft, two blocks from the Performing Garage, where her actors and technical team, the  Wooster Group , rehearse on an almost daily basis when they’re in town. Liz, as everyone calls her, lives in a dimly lit space, eclectically furnished. The front part of the loft—you step directly into it, off the lift—contains a bed and screen for guests; several paintings Liz made early in her career are stacked on the floor. Liz’s own bedroom is in the back, off a tidy screened-off bathroom. The main feature in the space is the kitchen; it runs the width of the loft, and even though Liz doesn’t really cook much and eats relatively little—for our meetings I’d bring some Italian takeout, easy to heat up; one saw a number of frozen pizzas in the fridge—it is a homey area, with a wide countertop and high chairs and a television nearby: the director is an avid baseball fan.   The Wooster Group’s late