March 10: Extra Edition

Ring out, O Best Bells in Literature:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/06/ten-best-bells-in-literature

Philip Gambone at Open Letters Monthly offers a thoughtful essay on a gay-themed novel, Two People, by Tennessee Williams's friend Donald Windham:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/donald-windhams-two-people/

Another loving author revival can be found over at Tales from the Reading Room, which looks at the career of romance novelist Georgette Heyer, overdue for this sort of serious attention:

http://litlove.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/on-georgette-heyer/

Here is a most interesting interview with Thomas Lopez of the ZBS Foundation, producer of wonderful audio dramas including the Jack Flanders series:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/03/throwing-away-ancient-wisdom-painting-with-sound-and-staying-awake-a-conversation-with-radio-dramati.html

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has gathered some of my favorite American paintings for the exhibition "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915":

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/american-stories-lacma.html

http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibTelling.aspx

Usually when I link to a blog post or web article, the subject is interesting and the writing is good. However, occasionally I'll be alerted to a truly interesting subject by the most appalling sort of writing. Ari Messer, an editor at The Rumpus (Lord help them), wrote a piece about Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama that is, frankly, a piece of poop I wouldn't willingly expose my readers to. However, the accompanying visuals were most appealing, so here is the artist's own website:

http://www.matzu.net/

(I must say, it does feel good every so often to fulminate about the junk I encounter in putting PMD together, even though, as I said the other day, my intent is not to police it. But lest anyone think assembling a blog like this is all happy-happy joy-joy, I assure you, for every one blog I keep in my RSS feed, I dump fifty that were on trial, and that is no exaggeration. Dreck is everywhere, and gate-keeping on the Internet is important.)

I hope the Huanacu Warehouse & Office in Santiago, Chile, wasn't affected by the recent earthquake, because it's a sharp building:

http://www.archdaily.com/40086/huanacu-warehouse-office-tfps/

I mentioned in my March 1 post that South African artist William Kentridge had designed the new Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich's The Nose, and Anthony Tommasini declares it a winner both visually and musically:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/arts/music/08nose.html

In his ten best films list for 2009 -- always one of the most original and amusing of such lists -- John Waters included Uli Edel's The Baader-Meinhof Complex:

Now here were some kids who knew how to cause trouble! Hmmm . . . What should we do today? Stop the Olympics or blow up a commercial airplane? These radicals made the Weathermen look like pussies.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang is coming in for renewed historical attention, as this review-essay in The Nation explains:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/gambetta/single