Achtung Baby!

Batman + Chip Kidd

+ THE BAT SIGNAL: CHIP KIDD DISCUSSES "BATMAN: DEATH BY DESIGN"
+ Batman: Death By Design Brings Back Old-School Hollywood
+ A Conversation With Chip Kidd and the First Look at Batman: Death by Design
+ A sneak peek of the new architecture-obsessed Batman graphic novel

My design hero

it's not a matter of you versus me

The Cardigans: My Favourite Game.Acoustic

  Kaileigh Everdeen 

I'm gonna name my next hard drive "Firelink Shrine"

+ From Software: Dark Souls Story 'Not Over Yet'
+ Dark Souls PC release confirmed
+ Dark Souls Soundtrack: Firelink Shrine
+ Dark Souls Design Works

poetics & idiosyncratic coinages

Hartman's analysis also applies on the level of Lolita's poetics, especially when the realities of death, aging, and ends creep into Humbert's narrative. Having just introduced his mother into the background of his childhood in the French Riviera, Humbert dismisses her summarily, recounting her sudden death with one abrupt gesture: "picnic, lightning" (10). She becomes the paradigm for the women in his life, all of whom enter the story in the shadow of their eventual deaths. Humbert's penchant for hapax logomena and idiosyncratic coinages parallel in language the foreshortened life of Lolita: despite their ostensible vibrancy, they are dying phrases, obsolete just after their initial utterance. A master of so many poetic devices, Humbert riddles the narrative with instances of tmesis, the figure Hartman identifies as the epitome of poetry's elided middles and over specified ends (344). From his evocation of "the Old and rotting World" (85) he left behind, to his self-characterization as "an enchanted and very tight hunter" (268), Humbert repeatedly pries apart common phrases to insert the world outside his solipsism. But unlike the classical model where necessity is parted for the sake of art, the order is reversed in Humbert's fantasy world: tmesis allows ends to rush back in. Images that traditionally evoke nostalgia become symptomatic of inevitable decay.
Lolita's Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel - Vladimir Nabokov by James Tweedie

 lolita by Marina Kozinaki via fuckyeahnymphets 

a certain modern cartoonist

+ The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist

My Great Art Book Acquisitions of 2012 continues with the arrival of this book. If you're a fan of Scarlett Johansson¹ or Thora Birch² you may have seen Ghost World (2001). If you don't know, it is based on a comic by the Brilliant [DANEIL CLOWES].

¹ I wonder how many Posts with Scarlett Johanson I have. I wish I had created a category for her way back when.

² Seriously, What In The Actual Fuck happened to this girl's career? 

Lo

+ 15 Wonderful Redesigns of the ‘Lolita’ Cover

both inevitably-overrated and impossible to overrate

Watchmen is a staggering piece of work; every time I pull it off the shelf--usually when I’m trying to fact-check some detail while writing an iconoclastic take-down of its legacy--I end up getting sucked back in, twelve years old and mindblown again. It belongs in the pantheon based on Dave Gibbons’ artwork alone. It’s the Easy Rider of superhero comics, the Rites of Spring of superhero comics, the "Birth of the Cool" of superhero comics. It manages to be both inevitably-overrated and impossible to overrate, like the Beatles or Citizen Kane. But it’s not exactly a barrel of laughs. It’s kind of a barrel of tears and razors and Rubik’s Cubes. It’s Citizen Kane, but it’s also Xanadu, all shadows and puzzles and bad vibes. It’s Easy Rider in the sense that it demonstrated that a youthsploitation medium could produce art that punched its weight alongside anything else, but it’s also Easy Rider in the sense that it has a super-buzzkill ending and is kind of nailed to its historical moment (which is why Snyder’s insistence on keeping all the Nixon/Reagan stuff felt so nonsensical in 2007.) And it’s fun, in spite of all that, but a lot of the fun is complicated fun, rarefied fun, specialist fun. Academic fun, too—all those symbols, symmetries, callbacks, ironic juxtapositions, and citations from Nietzsche/Blake/Shelley/Jung gave geeks accustomed to subjecting far less ambitious works to scholarly close-reading a chance to use that intellectual toolbox on something actually designed to reward it.

+ Great Moments in Nerd Trolling: The Watchmen Prequels

+ Alan Moore Is Wrong About 'Before Watchmen'

 book cover 

book.The Annotated Sandman

+ Checking out The Annotated Sandman, volume 1
+ 'The Annotated Sandman' gives new insight into Gaiman series

I have all the Absolute Sandman books (that is, until DC got greedy and came out with one more I'm not going to get). Anyways, I really like the shape of this book, bigger than i imagined. I love annotations. The Anottated Lolita is brilliant. Speaking of Nabokov, there's a new Poetry book from him coming out this year, looking forwards to it. 

book.Almodóvar Archives

+ taschen: The Pedro Almodóvar Archives

My great book acquisitions of 2012 continue with the arrival of this book. I have the Kubrick Archives from a few years ago but it's the smaller re-print. This one is the actual huge 16.2 x 11.8 inches Hardback. Being that "All About My Mother/ Todo Sobre My Made" is one of my favorite films, and he's one of my favorite Directors, I HAD to get it. I fucking love Taschen books. Now, if only Woody Allen would do one.