Links / Profile
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Teddy Blanks. Photo by Graham Dickie for The New York Times. Responsible for the opening titles of films like Barbie, Nosferatu, Midsommar and Wicked, and TV shows like Severance, Teddy Blanks is becoming the modern-day Saul Bass.
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Flounder Mode
№ 70
If this is a way of living and working that’s available to all of us, why do we fetishize the white-knuckling and pain?
More of an essay on than a profile of Kevin Kelly, written by Brie Wolfson, for Colossus Review. Reading the piece is like seeing Brie’s eyes being opened by Kelly’s way of living, working, and being.
I wasn’t so familiar with Kelly, and this has made me want to dig deeper. A fascinating and inspiring person, whose working methods I think I very much agree with.
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Richard Brody on the life and work of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. I’m looking forward to reading the upcoming biography, and I’ve quite a few of her films to catch up on.
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Drawing comparisons to the late Joan Didion, Gopnik outlines why Ernaux’s win of the Nobel Prize in Literature signifies an importance of memoir as a genre in times of Twitter and TikTok. I have not read enough of Ernaux’s work and am therefore in what he describes as the second camp, but The Years was one of my favourite books read in 2021. Time to head to the book store once more.
"Her ascension marks a recognition that memoir, in all its many faces and poses—direct, self-critical, rueful and comic, engagé and not—is perhaps the leading genre of our time, as much as the novel was for the first half of the twentieth century."
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Three of Fitzcarraldo’s authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and they have not been in business for even 10 years. The New York Times published a profile on the publishing house. Trying to account for the Nobel success, Testard [the founder of Fitzcarraldo] said that his taste just happened to align with "a bunch of older bourgeois Swedish people." Delightful!
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A fantastic profile of Jonny Greenwood, best known for his work with Radiohead and The Smile, elaborating on his work as a composer of incredible film scores.
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Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, already, one of my favourite books I’ve read in 2022. It’s an incredible and sensitively written book. He has now won a MacArthur "genius" grant, and spoke to The New Yorker about his approach to writing.
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As the new season of Succession kicks off, it’s worth (re)reading this profile of Jeremy Strong—who takes playing the role of Kendall Roy incredibly seriously.
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“You didn’t have to agree with her, but you had to submit to her sentences.”
In remembrance of Joan Didion, who passed away late in 2021.