My friend Kate points to these photos of “street installations” by Mark Jenkins, bits of double-take inducing situationist art plopped down in various major cities, including D.C. What I dig about these is that they’re kind of like inversions of Duchamp’s Fountain which is the go-to example for every Aesthetics 101 discussion of that perennial […]

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In honor of the 70th birthday of Philip Glass, Jens Laurson has a handy starter guide to the minimalist composer. For my money, Solo Piano (which he doesn’t mention) and the Kronos string quartets (which he does) are the best intro points. But either way, if you associate Glass with his early breakthrough work, like […]

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If you couldn’t make it to Utah, cinéaste blogger Rhys Southan has the roundup.

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Via Ross, number 4,839,215 in the ongoing series of tedious conservative jeremiads against modern art manages to be not only willfully, proudly obtuse (no surprises there) but, it seems to me, fairly openly un-conservative. Here’s the author’s main beef: Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, […]

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Does Sufjan Stevens owe minimalist composer Philip Glass a fat royalty check? Not literally—I’m not saying he’s done any direct rips—but something my father pointed out when I was home for the holidays is that most of Stevens’ songs, for all their elaborate arrangements, are built on the kind of undulating foundation that’s the hallmark […]

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Via A&L Daily, I see a posthumous book of Bernard Williams’ essays about opera has just been released, which for me is a little like hearing that Terry Gilliam will be directing Watchmen after all.

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“1984” by freshly-signed Righteous Babe artist Anais Mitchell, who has a blog but needs to make more liberal use of the paragraph tag. (OK, technically the song was released in 2004, but I only just heard it, so it’s the Orwell-inspired folk song of my year…)

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Current Musical Obsessions: Paper Television by The Blow (thanks Ygz!) and Citrus by Asobi Seksu, who will be gracing our very own Rock and Roll Hotel later this month.

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The next generation of moral panics will consist of declining elites attempting to convince the great mass of citizens to be terrified by their own burgeoning capacity to drive cultural innovation.

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Via Boing Boing, the audio book edition of John Hodgman’s hilarious The Areas of My Expertise is now available free on iTunes.

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