SolidAir

What other painter is so radically silent? In Vermeer, you can hear, distantly, Delft outside the door. Agnes Martin hums. The wheels turn softly in Robert Ryman. Hopper? Absolute silence, even in New York. In Rooftops, a watercolor from 1926 that’s in the Whitney’s show, the forms on a New York rooftop make up a crowd, but each form is also a silent single. The water towers aim away, the windows march in a line disconnectedly, and the curves try not to be noticed. When I think of city rooftops, I hear the sound of traffic below. Not when I look at Hopper’s New York.
There are many silences here, notably a silencing of irony. It’s difficult to imagine a world without irony; it seems indispensable today, or at least unavoidable. Irony even at its darkest and most despairing has a lightness: smarts, talk, spin, smiles, interpretation. Irony’s sound is that of intelligence at play. Hopper is strange enough to do without irony, mostly, and that can seem a kind of dumbness. As in struck dumb. That’s a silence the brilliant among us cannot use. It’s irreducible.

The Great American Pessimist 

In the nine years since The Corrections was published, the American soul has been bothered in ways that nobody could have seen coming – the Twin Towers were brought down; Bush invaded Iraq; the global economy fell off a cliff; America elected its first black president. And so, too, have the ways of representing it. Young American novelists such as Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, a close friend of Franzen’s who committed suicide in 2008 and whose name appears without fanfare in Freedom’s list of acknowledgements, have mostly turned their back on the conventional “framework of a novel”, seeking more experimental ways of representation – a fractured mirror with which to reflect their fractured times – or else turned their eye to resolutely small-scale narratives, or non-fiction. Franzen is the exception. The reason to celebrate him is not that he is doing something new but that he is doing something old, presumed dead – and doing it brilliantly.

Jonathan Franzen: one of America’s greatest living novelists?

Man, I’m psyched to see The Promise, a documentary about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town, my favorite Springsteen album (which is a little bit like saying, “the favorite part of my heart.”) Directed by longtime Springsteen cinematographer Thom Zimmy, it’s set to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month, along with interesting-sounding documentaries by Errol Morris, Alex Gibney, and Werner Herzog (whose Cave of Forgotten Dreams is about prehistoric cave paintings and is for some reason shot in 3D).
HBO will be airing The Promise for me in October - and for you, if you want to see it too.

The Awl

Autumn is a great time to get away for a final blast of sunshine not too far from home. Not only have the crowds thinned, allowing you to find space on the beaches and enjoy the sights without the queues, but midday temperatures have receded - perfect for donningwalking shoes and exploring rural areas that are wonderful at this time of year. Best of all, many hotels slash their rates as soon as the summer crowds head home. We pick our top 10 spots for that perfect autumn getaway.

Coffee is the second-biggest traded commodity after oil , and America buys 22 million of the 130 million bags of coffee beans produced worldwide annually. On paper at least – and according to the Specialty Coffee Association of America – the formula for making an espresso across the 50 states is meant to be exactly the same as in Italy. Water: 1 oz. Coffee: 7 to 8.5 g. Temperature: 200 degrees F. Time of extraction: No more than 30 seconds. But plenty of baristas from Brooklyn to San Francisco, from Chicago to Miami, are using as much as 20 grams of coffee in an ounce of water, which makes an espresso look syrupy and sexy but is too overpowering to taste.
“Here in the U.S. the coffee they use is good, but the way they prepare it is bad,” Giorgio Milos (the master barista at the high-end Trieste, Italy-based Illy) says. “Fifty percent of the result of a good espresso is in the hands of the barista. And if consumers can’t recognize that, we lose.”
Even though Starbucks might have taught Americans to buy cappuccinos and lattes – and pay more than three bucks a pop – Milos believes consumers have never learned what those drinks should actually taste like. It’s one thing ordering an espresso or a macchiato, another thing altogether being able to tell whether you got a good one.

 What “true” espresso is, and how Americans ruin it

“Non so se hai presente quel programma che andava in televisione verso la fine degli anni novanta, Re per una notte. Come il film di Scorsese, sì. Ma non c’entra con Scorsese, eh. Lo presentava Mike Bongiorno e con lui c’era una ragazza bionda. No l’Elia, l’altra. Te lo ricordi?
Ecco, quel programma lì poteva avere linfa solo in Italia. Era perfetto: in ogni puntata si sfidavano dei sosia di personaggi famosi. Attori, ma soprattutto cantanti. Ed era assurdo perché tu vedevi tutta questa gente all’apparenza uguale al modello di riferimento - Celentano, tanti Celentano, Patty Pravo, la Vanoni, fai tu - con la stessa identica voce, ma assolutamente fallimentari nei dettagli. Piccole imperfezioni utili solo ad amplificare l’enorme senso di tristezza.
Tristezza vera, pesante. Di quella che ti prende allo stomaco. Di quella che solo in certe città di provincia. Nei paesi. Quei posti dove, tra un matto e l’altro, spunta sempre il tizio convinto di essere il personaggio che imita. Tra un dark e un metallaro ci sarà sempre spazio per un Vasco Rossi. Sempre.”

Be Quick or Be Dead 

Anna Galiena ha lavorato nel cinema d’autore europeo, dove è spesso richiesta per la sua immagine al contempo sbarazzina, ammiccante e mai volgare, intrinsecamente nobile ma costretta a ruoli da subalterna, rassicurante ma dolcemente malinconica, solare ma nel profondo detentrice di inafferrabili misteri, tiepidamente casereccia ma prorompente nella sua prosperosità, donna di carne ma allo stesso tempo apparizione gloriosa illuminata dal sole del midi francese, moglie modesta, timida e riservata che vorrebbe essere casta ma alla fine cede di schianto allo strapotere dei sensi, come una foglia d’autunno che in uno stagno precipita inesorabilmente nel turbinio di una cascata.

Anna Galiena

After Stanley Kubrick

Christiane Kubrick had 42 wonderful years with her husband. But in the decade since his death, she has been beset by tragedy. For the first time, she talks about losing one daughter to cancer, another to Scientology – and why her uncle made films for Goebbels.

Is both the title of a Sun Ra album and also a documentary about him. But none of his recordings are in this playlist. Here instead are recordings by a wide variety of artists who have all written compositions that suck one into a trippy cozmic vortex of sensuous timelessness. Doesn’t that make you want to jump right in? Well, sure, why not? — but see how you feel after a few hours, because many of these artists, whether classical, academic or death metal, have discovered that time is elastic, and they have taken advantage of this property and stretched it quite a bit. (I left off some compositions that run over an hour each!)
This is good bike riding music — but not in traffic! Probably good also for writing that apocalyptic script or novel you were thinking about. Really good for looking out a plane window or scuba diving.

 Space Is The Place - Radio DavidByrne

Hinduism/Dictionary

Prasāda (Sanskrit: प्रसाद, Marathi: प्रसाद, Hindi/Urdu: प्रशाद/پرشاد/prashad, Kannadal: prasāda, Tamil and Malayalam: prasādam, Telugu: prasadam) is both a mental condition of generosity, as well as a material substance that is first offered to a deity (in Hinduism) and then consumed. The act of offering food to a deity is in accord with Eastern traditions of hospitality with the god as a revered guest.
[Prasāda is also my name in Sanskrit.]

Don DeLillo, in a rare interview, talks about living the American dream, growing old and how an art installation inspired his latest novel, Point Omega.

Typos cloud communication, which is the primary purpose of writing. If your text has typos, it’s going to take your readers longer to read it. If typos get in the way of your text, it’s going to cause a problem, especially today, where you often only have a second to grab your reader’s attention. It can also be a warning sign that whatever text you’re looking at was created by someone who might not be paying that much attention. Punctuation was invented shortly after the printing press specifically to stand in for speech effects and improve the whole flow of writing and make things easier for the reader.

“The Great Typo Hunt”: The irresistible allure of bad spelling