The music video for “Sweater” by Belgian indie outfit Willow relies on an impressive balance of timing, treadmill coordination, projection, and camera-work. A lot of ground is covered in a single room. It’s positively crazy. You might even say it’s virtual insanity. (Sorry I’m not sorry.)
The Room Moves Without Moving
Typesetting in the Digital Age
From Abu Dhabi’s The National, an interesting piece on the challenges of typesetting and book design on digital platforms: “With the coming of ebooks, this invisible craft must be reinvented if it is not to disappear.”
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“A record encapsulating all that is America”
You should check out George Saunders’s “Liner Notes” piece about “2776: A Musical Journey Through America’s Past, Present & Future,” which is set to accompany a forthcoming musical-comedy album from Patton Oswalt, Aubrey Plaza, Ira Glass, and Yo La Tengo, among others. If that hasn’t sold you, consider the fact that Saunders’s piece contains this line: “Truth be told, there were a number of regrettable omissions. Beyoncé and Jay Z’s piece ‘Bomber’ had to be left off the album. (‘Driver of this plane, this / B-52 on the way to Nagasaki / Stuff your ears with cotton and / Close those eyes / Me and my man are about to do it all over this / Here bomb’).”
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Uncanny Valley
“I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment.” An oral account of a 1975 trip to Death Valley with Michel Foucault.
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In the Mind of the Author
At The Rumpus, Suzanne Koven talks with Eve Ensler, better known as the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues. Among other things, they talk about her new book, In the Body of the World.
Influential Books
The Library of Congress has published an updated list of the most influential books in America after hearing responses from the public.
Picture Books
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collections. Among them are thousands of illustrations from bygone days when “picture books” were not for children alone. Pair with Buzz Poole‘s reviews of contemporary works of visual literature in The Millions archives, from hand-drawn self-help quotes to politically-charged images of transit in Tehran.