Avant-garde

Continuing our series of Essentials*, here's our Essentials list for independent films. Here's what our writer said:

As nurtured in Hollywood, moviemaking evolved from technological curiosity to mainstream entertainment early on, in partnership with the movie palaces that could exploit major studio productions for the masses. But some of North America's greatest films were made by independent filmmakers; artists driven by a passion for their craft creating work they could express in their own, distinctive voice. Whether seen in a neighborhood multiplex or on the small screen, these essential North American independent features offer a new world of possibilities.

* "Essential" is not the same as "best," so these are not top 10 lists, but more a library-building guide that samples the significant DVDs from a genre, a decade, or a career.

Essentials by Decade: Landmark Indie Films (in no ranked order)

 Blue Velvet (Special Edition)

Pulp Fiction (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

 Days of Heaven - Criterion Collection 

 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Two-Disc Special Edition) 

 The Usual Suspects (Special Editon) 

 Fargo (Special Edition)

 Being John Malkovich 

 Mean Streets (Special Edition)  

 sex, lies, and videotape 

 My Own Private Idaho - Criterion Collection 

More essentials by Genre

It is the story of dragons and demon-lovers, of werewolves  and Walpurgisnacht, of unlikely umlauts and the power of power chords. It is the story of Metal. 

For All Known Metal Bands (the latest triumph in design from McSweeney's), Dan Nelson has descended into the Metal underworld to single-handedly collect the names of nearly 51,000 bands, presenting his research in silver ink on black paper--a treatment sometimes difficult to read in natural light, but one that will glow evilly in the black light of a sunless, suburban bedroom. Cloaked in its Necronomicoid binding, AKMB seethes with ancient magic: a volume which may have been “unearthed from a tomb … or from a metal box submerged in desiccated mud.”

Open it at your peril, gentle reader.

All Known Metal Bands lists these groups of “Ur-men” in alphabetical order, without comment, and repeats the names in the case more than one band shared the name.  From the heroes of Viking Metal (Thor, Thor’s Hammer, Thorr’s Hammer) to Gothic Metal (Black Wytche, Black Witchcraft Savagery, Black Wolf Sacrifice) and beyond, Nelson has assured “those whose ears are never touched by songs of love and weakness” permanent placement in the record of their cülture, and perhaps more importantly, oürs. More of the immortals: 

• Ultra Vomit (2 entries)
• Dark Morbid Death
• Guardians of Profane Secrets
• Lord Goatwarr
• Lucifer in Love
• Ulan Bator (?)
• Violent Marv
• Leatherwolf
• Lazarus Sin
  
• Necrolust (6 entries, included in nearly two pages of Necro/Nekro variants) 

AKMB  serves as an impressive and indispensable tribute to the “quarter of a million humans have undertaken this quest—to unearth, embody, aim, and deliver power itself.” Amen and T.G.I.F., my Metal brothers and sisters. --Jon

Another fun list from Entertainment Weekly: They're counting down the 100 films from the past 25 years that will stand with the all-time greats over time. Nos. 100-76 are revealed today, with the rest coming over the next few days. (It's also fun to see a list that doesn't include the same stuff over and over again.)

100. SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT (1999)
99. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)
98. THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999)
97. GLORY (1989)
<------96. FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)
95. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2001)
94. FULL METAL JACKET (1987)
93. ED WOOD (1994)
92. MENACE II SOCIETY (1993)
91. BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
90. NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (2004)
89. BREAKING THE WAVES (1996)
88. AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY (1997)
87. SWINGERS (1996)
86. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2002)
85. THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (2005)------->
84. SIDEWAYS (2004)
83. EVIL DEAD 2 (1987)
82. LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)
81. MOONSTRUCK (1987)
80. MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007)
79. WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (1996)
78. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)
77. SID AND NANCY (1986)
76. THE DEPARTED (2006)

don't see your favorite on this list? Don't worry, there are still 75 left to go. -- Ellen

Welcome once again to Friday Night Videos, where we usually match up book-related videos against each other in mortal combat--to satisfy the blood-sport instincts of rabid bibliophiles.

Tonight, though, it's poppet theatre, featuring a really cool library heavy with Neil Gaiman offerings. So, it's either eerie surreal poppetry you're enjoying...or a nice review of bookshelves. Only serious bibliophiles need apply. David Kirkpatrick shot the video in his library, with his ten-year-old daughter, Alia: "She wanted to do something with the poppets, and we hit on the idea of doing a stop-motion movie. When we decided to use the bookcase, the plot for the movie jumped out at us."

(For more cool poppets, visit Lisa Snellings-Clarke's website.)

I just completed my only two Canadian dates on the book tour and am heading home towards New York City, with a short stop and talk in Chicago. There are already 20 American dates behind me all along the West coast, the Midwest, the South and the East coast. Having previously talked to a couple of authors that traveled from afar only to wind up stuck in a Borders with 8 people attending and 4 more browsing nearby--unsure if they actually should sit down--I paired our publisher with the American Institute for Graphic Arts, whose local chapters organized the events. Thus we wound up with mostly sold-out auditoriums, holding between 200 and 1,000 people, which made the entire endeavor infinitely more pleasurable.

My book Things I have learned in my life so far has been out for about two months. During that time, it has been the bestselling art and design book on the Amazons of the world (.com, .de, .co.uk), and I am still not very happy.

This unhappiness stems in large part from the feature Customers who bought this item also bought, which in my case shows that they all bought other design books, hence all my buyers are other designers.

As a designer, I spend a lot of time around other designers, and I get rather self-conscious about becoming somebody who designs for his peers. I have always felt that art for other artists and music for other musicians can become quite self-referential and incestuous. While some of it is necessary to bring the profession forward, the larger part often presents a rather narrow, insular worldview, and the results are often boring.

So if you yourself are NOT a designer, please do look at my book's Amazon page (and right afterwards, check out The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing). It would make me feel so good.

I run a design studio in New York, and among many other things (we used to concentrate on the design of album covers for bands like the Talking Heads and the Stones), we design books.

This turns out to be mostly picture books, mostly because we get to design the entire thing--the cover, the spine, all the pages inside, the flaps.

Fiction and nonfiction books are often designed by different designers: one does the cover, and other the interior pages.

Within the world of graphic design, these tend to be satisfying jobs because we deal with engaging content, get to meet interesting people, design something that is not immediately thrown away, and after a lot of hard work wind up with a neat, compact object that remains as an artifact of that process.

Here is an example:

We were asked to design Worldchanging, which reports about new, positive developments in science, engineering, architecture, business and politics affecting and changing this world. Through the die-cut holes of the slipcase, the (recycled, of course) paper on the cover yellows significantly over time, allowing the sun to imprint (and change) the book cover itself.

We designed this book to appeal not just to a core, green audience, but to a wide spectrum of the general public. It went well.

The following criteria were important to us during the design process:

We wanted this to be positive. We also wanted something innovative, that does not just talk about change but proofs it in the concept (the book cover changes with the power of the sun, the sun designs our cover). We wanted something that allows the reader to browse intuitively, quickly finding the subject he/she is looking for, without having to learn a new finding system. We wanted something that looks and feels authoritative, yet is pretty enough to be left out on a coffee table, without winding up with a coffee table book. The usability needed to be versatile, so that it can be browsed on a desk, leafed through in bed, or checked out on an airplane.

And I admit that I came up with some of these criteria after we designed it all.

Graphic design superstar Stefan Sagmeister joins the May guest blogging fray. If you dismiss design as frivolous, hold up--Sagmeister’s doing his darndest to change your mind. Throughout his professional life (which has included projects for HBO the Guggenheim,  musicians like the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, and others far to numerous to mention), he’s explored how design can promote "good things.”

At his most extreme, he will freak you out. Often, he’ll make you laugh while making a point. Sometimes he goes a little bananas. But with each project, Sagmeister dips into his vast and varied bag of tricks, pulling out all the stops to communicate in a powerfully visual way that crosses cultural and social bounds.

Motivated by a sense of responsibility beyond just branding and selling, Sagmeister has taken more than one commercial hiatus to think and create. The result of his latest "break" is a marvelous new book, Things I have learned in my life so far (one of our March picks for the Best of the Month. This video will give you a sense of its magic.

When he visited us in early spring, Sagmeister was just starting his tour. He asked us for ideas on how to start a dialogue with folks beyond design circles, so we invited him to spend some time on Omni. We hope you find him and his work as charming and provocative as we do. --Mari

P.S. To see more of Sagmeister’s recent work and see his advice for design students, visit his official website.

The New York Times has reported that Robert Rauschenberg, one of the true heros of contemporary art and culture, died yesterday at the age of 82. We're indebted to Rauschenberg for many forms of expression that we now take for granted.  Consider him a kind of grandaddy of mixed and multi-media installations, performance art, and even eco-art.  From his humble beginnings in Port Arthur, Texas (as the son of his German immigrant father and Cherokee nation mother), this preternaturally brilliant and productive artist shook up the very notion of art-making.  He used the physical stuff of daily life and experimented (like a possessed scientist) with new techniques and technologies that mixed the fine arts like painting, sculpture and printmaking with photography, music, and dance. Out with Abstract Expressionism and in with complex, multi-media installations that dealt with everything from space technology and pop culture to ecological destruction. In conjunction with other postwar greats like Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham and Cy Twombly (to name just a few), Rauschenberg literally reshaped the cultural horizon of the twentieth century.

While this Texan trailblazer will be missed, his art will provoke us to think hard and marvel for a long time to come.  Rauschenberg's life story is just as astonishing as his work. I'm taking some time this weekend to savor Mary Lynn Kotz's classic and gorgeously illustrated biography,  Rauschenberg: Art and Life and insider Calvin Tomkin's  Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg .

    
(The Apocalypse Reader cover and Justin Taylor in his "bomb shelter".)

Last week I blogged about Wastelands, an anthology of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. This time, because Monday is all about post-weekend devastation, we here at Omnivoracious bring you some historical, and sometimes hysterical, perspective to the subject via the multi-talented Justin Taylor. His The Apocalypse Reader, published last year by Thunder's Mouth Press and featured on National Public Radio, is the perfect companion volume to Wastelands. It contains a rich mix of stories from a wide variety of time periods, from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Kelly Link, Michael Moorcock, Tao Lin, Steve Aylett, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The range of tone is quite remarkable. Taylor, who recently edited a second anthology (Come Back, Donald Barthelme, published as part of McSweeney's 24) has done a great job of including everything from black humor to extremely serious and unsettling views of the way the world ends. I recently interviewed Taylor via email, to find out just how serious he is about this whole apocalypse thing...

Amazon.com: For the edification of our readers, can you describe where you are right now, while you're answering these questions? Are you in a bunker or other shelter, for example?
Justin Taylor: I'm writing to you from my special bunker, which is craftily disguised as a bedroom with good natural light on the 3rd floor of a small apartment building with bad pipes. It's all really high-tech next-gen kind of stuff. In the event of Apocalypse, my bedroom will float here in space while the rest of the building and/or world crumbles around it. Oh and the pipes stay connected too, so I'll be floating in space but still able to use the bathroom and shower and stuff, though nobody really knows if I'll be able to get hot water or for how long, though that won't be much of a change from how the water situation is now. Of course the exact location is confidential, but I can tell you it's in Brooklyn.

Amazon.com: Does an apocalypse, by your definition, have to be society-wide or can it be singular and personal?
Justin Taylor: It can definitely be either, or both at once. Not to get philosophical on you, but reality is only ever experienced by individuals, so in that sense all Apocalypse is personal. If God returns to earth later this afternoon and Judgment Day begins, that will be something that happens to every person who ever lived, including me, you, Christopher Hitchens, Oprah, Stalin, and every member of the Ming Dynasty. But my experience of Judgment will be my own; it's not something I can share with Oprah.

Amazon.com: Is an apocalypse synonymous, in a sense, with an epiphany, even if in a dark sense of the term?
Justin Taylor: In my introduction to the book I point out that the word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek, and literally means "a revelation" or "an unveiling," but the main idea, I think, is of irrevocable change over which one has no control. "Epiphany" suggests (to me, anyway) interiority and self-initiation, and these notions are sort of in contradiction with another important aspect of Apocalypse, which is Witness. Both "revelation" and "unveiling" imply a subject to whom the thing is revealed, to say nothing of the secondary implication that someone/something is doing the revealing. These are important aspects of Apocalyptic thought, in some cases as important as the revealed event itself.

Amazon.com: Have we always thought we were on the verge of some apocalypse or other?
Justin Taylor: Absolutely. Every single generation in recorded history has wondered if—or even hoped that—theirs would be the last, and I think it's safe to say that the concept goes back even further. We have dreamed of the end since the very beginning. It may even be that the fantasy of Apocalypse precedes the fantasy of creation.

Amazon.com: How do you modulate tone in an anthology like this one? I love depressing stories, but I'm assuming you had to take real care with story order and whatnot.
Justin Taylor: A lot of work went into ordering the stories. I put Lovecraft's "Nyarlathotep" first, because it's a spitfire opener and I thought it worked as an overture to the whole rest of the book. And Lynne Tillman's "Save Me from the Pious and the Vengeful" is at the very end because it's such a powerful affirmation: tenderness without illusion, sentiment without schmaltz. Lynne's piece is a counterpoint to Lovecraft's purple histrionics and really a perfect coda to the book. Dennis Cooper's "The Ash Gray Proclamation" is at the very center, because it's a monumental piece of writing by one of our greatest living writers. So that's the "superstructure." The rest of the stories were organized around those, by a combination of sheer intuition and my own highly refined senses of their themes and relationships to each other, which is the kind of thing that develops after you've read a manuscript probably a hundred times. In my introduction I call it "the logic of the mix-tape or the Grateful Dead bootleg."

Amazon.com: How do you view genre versus non-genre? This anthology is refreshing in the way it puts "literary mainstream" and "SF/fantasy" writers side-by-side.
Justin Taylor: Well, I think that the value of labels is limited, though obviously they serve an important function as loose indicators of styles or trends. But to put it in terms of some of my authors: take someone like Steve Aylett. Is his work sci-fi? Is it fantasy? Satire? Or is it—God help us—"experimental"? A novel like his book Lint is all of those things and then some—there's no name for what Steve does. Or Lovecraft! Here's a guy who could barely get published in his lifetime. He had to fight to break in to magazines like Weird Tales. Seventy something years later, his work is considered literature. He has a Library of America edition. Is Brian Evenson a genre writer? Seems to me that a lot of his stuff meets the criteria for horror and/or fantasy writing, but when he gets pigeonholed as a genre writer, it's usually as "experimental" before it's anything else. But call him whatever you like; I'll go to the mat with anyone who says his work is less (or even other) than "literature." What it comes to is this: if Diane Williams and Rick Moody and Ursula K. Le Guin and Lucy Corin and Nathaniel Hawthorne could all sit on my bookshelf, there was no reason they couldn't all be in my book.

Amazon.com: How much research did you do in tracking down some of these stories? For example, you've included Stacey Levine, who isn't widely known even though she should be, in my opinion.
Justin Taylor:  I did a ton of research. I had a two-page list of stories before I started soliciting writers. I spent a whole summer reading Apocalypse stories. I found the Poe story that way. It's a totally oddball story, and I found it on like page eight hundred and something of his complete works, but I thought people would prefer to read something weird and rare and unexpected over, say, "Masque of the Red Death," which would have been a perfectly reasonable choice for an Apocalypse anthology but we've all seen it a thousand times. I was not shy about asking people for recommendations and leads. This is how I got to Stacey Levine, I think via Shelley Jackson, who definitely turned me onto Lucy Corin.

I [also] kept myself on constant alert. I was working on an MFA at New School while I was editing this book, and the stories by Jeff Goldberg and Jared Hohl were both stories I read first as workshop submissions in a class that David Gates taught. Neither of these guys is a "name" writer, but I thought their stories were great, and I knew they would hold their own if I published them alongside heavies like Moorcock and Gaiman—and they did. Jeff's story, "These Zombies are not a Metaphor" was recently broadcast on NPR, and Jared Hohl's "Fraise, Menthe, et Poivre 1978" has gotten singled out for special praise by more reviewers and bloggers than any other story in the collection.

Finally, I encouraged writers to go against expectation. When I solicited Joyce Carol Oates I had a particular story of hers in mind, but I invited her to send whatever she wanted. The story she sent, "Apoca ca lyp se: A Dip tych" is about nine times removed from anything you'd ever expect to see from Joyce Carol Oates. She even sent a little note saying that if I thought it was too weird we could pick something else, but I loved it.

Amazon.com: Some of these stories really just smash right through certain taboos. Was there anything you hesitated to include, or anything you didn't include that you would've if it hadn't been so disturbing?
Justin Taylor: No. Art should challenge and in some cases discomfit you. It should even offend you, if you're the kind of person who likes to be offended by ideas. I hope people won't read that as a sort of blanket statement of support for "provocative" or so-called "transgressive" because I don't mean that. A lot of that work is incredibly vapid, banal, or in its own way socially conservative. People have told me they found Stacey Levine's story to be the most disturbing in the book, because it's really gory, gruesome, and yet incredibly intimate: the effect is unnerving. I could see Brian Evenson's and Steve Aylett's both drawing heat, Brian for heresy and Steve for political reasons.

Dennis Cooper's story probably has the most "taboos" per capita, but I didn't hesitate for a moment about publishing the story. Quite the contrary—I solicited it specifically from Dennis and it was the first confirmed entry in the book. It had been published once before in the liner notes to a CD, but I published it in a book for a first time, and it was such a high honor for me to be able to do that. Dennis' work is brilliant, but for a total newcomer to his work it can maybe be a lot to take on at once and if you get overwhelmed by the content then some of the nuance and intelligence and humor is lost on you. Some people did react poorly to this story. So with anyone who felt like they didn't get it—what the story was saying or why I included it—I was more than happy to talk about the choices I made, and the extremely high value I place on Dennis's writing, and whatever else they wanted to know that I could tell them. But people claiming to be outraged or offended have already made up they're minds, probably before they opened the book. Those people are axe-grinders, they're pamphleteers. The Helen Lovejoys and Bill O'Reillys of the world give no courtesy or respect, and therefore they deserve none of either. 

Amazon.com: Do you feel we're currently app