On Sunday, May 06. Radiohead bleached its Internet presence—its Web site faded to white; its Twitter and Facebook pages were scrubbed of content—a move so blatantly counterintuitive that acolytes knew to recognize it as a portent. The week prior, inscrutable paper leaflets had been stamped and shipped to some fans, embossed with the band’s toothy-bear […]
In 1996, while most major British bands were blowing their royalties on cocaine, light aircraft, Patsy Kensit and Hampstead piles, Radiohead did something quite different. They spent a big chunk of what they’d earned on building an entirely new studio and filled it with a variety of exotic types of pricey, abstract and futuristic noise-making […]
Wherever you are in the world, visiting a bookshop is always a treat – but with their numbers dwindling, independent stores that offer something unique are increasingly becoming a destination in themselves. Last year we rounded up some of the world’s most weird and wonderful bookshops – from a bookshop opened by Alice Munro in […]
While many architects develop a unique style that allows their buildings to be instantly identified, Jean Nouvel continually defies easy classification. Nouvel studied at Paris’s École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and early in his career he helped found the Mars 1976 architectural movement and the Syndicat de l’Architecture, the country’s first labor union for architects. […]
My wife, Susan, and I lost our minds. For more than two weeks at the beginning of February, we were locked in a ritual that became the center of our day, the center of our conversation—watching first the six-hour original 1979 BBC version of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (not to be confused […]
Mr. Libeskind, Goethe compared architecture to frozen music and said that “the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.” Do you agree? Oh, absolutely! Architecture is not just an intellectual or abstract exercise, it is an emotional experience just as music is. It is very precise, it cannot be off by […]
“I admire Marlon’s talent, but I don’t envy the pain that created it.” – Anthony Quinn While fully acknowledging his prodigious talent, the prevailing sentiment of the critical community seems to be that Marlon Brando was a remote, tortured man who squandered his prodigious talent for easy money. Some pundits sound downright miffed, as if […]
A new illustrated edition of Finnegans Wake, as imagined by artist John Vernon Lord for the Folio Society, matches James Joyce’s extravagant word games with elaborately collaged pictures, shedding a brilliant new light on Irish literature’s ‘book of the dark’. Here, Lord explains the thinking behind the images. Frontispiece The frontispiece illustration doesn’t apply to […]