Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colors (public library; public domain), his treatise on the […]
Bryan Singer, director Chris McQuarrie rang me up after he’d written about 50 pages of the script and said: “What if the villain pulls the whole story off a bulletin board?” And I replied: “Now that’s a reason to make the damned movie!” A lot of the inspiration for Keyser Söze, the villain, came from […]
Auguste Rodin made sculpture modern by wrestling with its past. His art is a tangled sensual battle of old and new in which Michelangelo and the classical nude give birth to expressionism, surrealism and even dadaism. A “lost” work by Rodin that has just resurfaced in Switzerland after a century exemplifies how passionately he embraced […]
Outside Bernardo Bertolucci’s apartment in Rome there is a large goods lift. Once it carried supplies and shopping from floor to floor but now the goods it carries are Bertolucci and one of his three wheelchairs. Ten years ago, Bertolucci had what he was told would be routine back surgery on a herniated disc. After […]
Tales from the legendary hotel-slash-commune that housed Jackson Pollock, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, and Sid Vicious—told by residents like Rufus Wainwright, Betsey Johnson, R. Crumb, and Andy Warhol. Wll vanish before the city’s merchant greed, Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead More lofty walls will swell This old […]
Mr. Pacino, how do you deal with weight of your own achievements? I don’t know. You don’t think of it that way. You don’t think of those parts as achievements. You think of the roles you play, the paintings you’ve made. I mean, imagine an actor saying, “I don’t want to go on anymore because […]
James Joyce died 75 years ago this week, leaving a lifetime of books beloved by many… and Ulysses, heralded as both the best novel in the English language and the hardest to read. So what do you do if you get stuck? When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that he didn’t […]
There are two main images that instantly rise to mind when the words “Serbia” and “Cinema” appear together: the controversial “A Serbian Film” by Srdjan Spasojevic and the face of one of the most talented directors that Europe saw born in last decades, Emir Kusturica. For now, let’s just forget the blood and necrophilia of […]