Stephen King in NYT Book Review.

The American short story is alive and well.

Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true.

The art form is still alive — that I can testify to. As editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2007,” I read hundreds of them, and a great many were good stories. Some were very good. And some seemed to touch greatness.

But “well”? That’s a different story.

What Ails the Short Story

I rarely find anything of interest on The Corner -- a super-high-volume blog -- but this amusing analysis almost makes it worthwhile.

I've decided I really just don't like Star Trek: Next Generation (ST: TNG) very much. For years, I was its defender against all comers. I liked it a lot when it was still on the air. And I liked it in reruns for awhile. But the more I watch it, the less I find redeeming about it (you might see my influence on this score in this quasi editorial). There are things I still like about it, but it's become increasingly difficult to separate the quadrotriticale from the chaff.

It's Time For A Confession | The Corner, on National Review Online

Justin Quinn does beautiful, mysterious work with text.

Quinn's Moby-Dick series is made up of obsessively detailed prints and graphite drawings composed entirely of the letter E.

Each E corresponds to a letter in a chapter of Melville's book, so each piece is composed of literally thousands of characters.

The effect is almost that of a mosaic or a concrete poem.

"Moby Dick Chapter 55 or 9200 times E"
2004, graphite on hemp paper, 11 x 9"

Justin Quinn

Desktopography is an exhibition, a showcase of nature themed desktop wallpapers created by designers worldwide.

Welcome to Desktopography | Exhibition III (2007)| Natural Desktop Aesthetics

Collect them all!

66 stills from various episodes of The Simpsons, each one beside the still from the movie scene to which it refers

“The Indian Clerk” is a story about guilt. It’s about the impulse to save a foreign stranger (in spite of the fact that your idea of his country is no more than a couple of colorful clichés), and a story about a war in which the boys who die are most often poorer than the ones who stay at home.

Read the first chapter.

Lust for Numbers

The first thing you notice about "The War" is the stark edginess of Keith David's sonorous narration, a far cry from the anesthetizing drone of David McCullough (who narrated "The Civil War") and John Chancellor ("Baseball"). The second, though it may take a while to sink in, is the absence of historical talking heads, which, to put it as plainly as possible, reduces the film's pomposity factor by about 95%.

Burns has indicated that he wants his film to rescue America's war experience from the fog of dramatic myth that has obscured it since the release of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."

The Greatest Struggle

Nobody does bourgeois solidity like the Germans.

Solms is the place to go, if you want to find the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world.

Automobiles need gas, whereas the truest mechanisms run on nothing but themselves.

... durable, companionable, costly, and basically unchanging, like a spouse.

The great inventions, more often than not, are triggered less by vast historical movements than by the pressures of individual chance.

This is not just a question of ergonomics ... Rather, it has to do with ... the illusion, fostered by a mere machine, that the world out there is asking to be looked at —— to be caught and consumed while it is fresh, like a trout.

Candid Camera | The New Yorker

Have you ever grown a photograph?

While a number of artists examine how catastrophic histories are inscribed into geography or architecture, Danh's work is far more organic. It is not just the material that calls attention to the organic - his material is foliage - rather it is the process by which the images are formed and the very quality of them. Danh, in fact, invented an entirely new technique in order, not just to superimpose, but rather to grow the image into the leaf.

See also additional artwork at the Haines Gallery.

Binh Danh's Reconstructing Memories

This is great stuff.

Panamericana, the brand-new album from Federico Aubele, is available now.

KCRW has selected 'En Cada Lugar' from Federico's new album as their Top Tune of the day!

After his previous album, Granhotelbuenosaires, was released, it went into regular rotation on my iPod, and I still come back to it. AMG termed its sound "the reverse image of trip-hop." Here's how PopMatters described it:

Mashing cultures together, and then reconstructing from the post-collision remnants into newfangled fancies of cultural appreciation.

A sort of mad grab of multiple musical idioms to create a veritable visual pastiche which sounds a lot like a Friday evening filled with tango dancers, dark coffee, and hot brume.

Granhotelbuenosaires acquires a cool sense of mystery. It has a secret; it has a surreptitious, slinking self that I can’t quite latch on to despite my imploring and attempts. A sweaty something as I sidle down a side street with candy colored cars and pastel apartments that can’t be quite denied. Try rationalizing, comparing, and compromising and searching for understanding, but the phrases inexorably roll off of the singer’s tongue and caress the night sky.

An online biography explains:

A few months here as a Kinks fan, a couple of weeks there as a Ramones fan, many more months listening to Mozart, followed by Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Vinicius and Tom Jobim all became an important part of his record collection. In time he discovered the avant garde Argentinian tango composer and bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla.

A recent review by Marco Werman:

The PanAmerican Highway is an apt metaphor for Federico Aubele's "PanAmericana." The highway is a network of roads, not one single stretch of blacktop -- each segment reflects the individual character of the country it's in. You can say the same for the tracks on Federico Aubele's album.

panamericana | federico aubele