#finishedbooks

[zeenabaybayanmakesbooks]

Something's Up With Arlo by Matteo L. Cerilli

Illustration by Elisar Haydar

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2025

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks BLACK: A Celebration of Culture by Deborah Willis. Got this for Christmas and for some reason had left it at my studio and completely forgot about it. Similar to the previously reviewed, "Unseen" (that I got from my grandma) this is a survey of photography from the past to contemporary black life. There have been a good wave of these books post-2020 as the lack of representation finally became evident to the majority. I recall 16 years ago when I first got into photography checking daily for one of the two Gordon Parks books out there, the only black photographer you might have a chance at getting in photo book stores. Now there are at least 5 and they bunch them all together too. But just the act of looking as a kid I always loved my grandma's Jet and Ebony magazines which coming full circle added to the thrill in collage making in being able to create directly from those same images. Going a bit further, as kid in the 80s outside of sports and entertainment, and with the politics of the time with Regan's "super predators" there was even less. Creatively with action figure my favorite game was to take LaVar Burton Star Trek action figure with Heavy Duty the only black GI Joe (Snake Eyes was black tho) and pair them with Raphel my favorite TMNT and just create these amazing adventures, but even at that point at age 3-4 I was conscious you could say of representation. With that I like how the book doesn't pull entirely from the Smithsonian or the handful of black photographers that are deemed good enough. A lot of original work that sees the author even including her own works. Usually I side eye this but for us the more the better...if they wont let you enter the Zeitgeist create your own platform and do it haha. Curiously, however, and my sole complaint about the book...why did they print so dark😭 You can check in the photos above but almost seems cynical a publisher would post a photo book of black people and blow out the blacks...

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks Jean Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks by various. Stumbled on this at my favorite used book store in Mitaka really having no idea this existed. From 1980-87 Basquiat routinely filled these old composition notebooks with sketches and various texts. Some sold during his lifetime and some sadly were price gauged there after his death. In this particular set, there are a few actual composition books that were directly purchased by a friend and just recently compiled and released as the book here. Which when talking about Basquiat it is the legacy of the work. Aside from the seemingly simple trappings of what critics loved to call his primitivity and street art leanings either of which the majority latched on to, for me it was deep preoccupation with African American culture and life intertwined and related through art history that at the time was entirely and completely original in its aesthetics. It is precisely these layers of meaning that separate his work from the seemingly endless parade of hip-hop re-imagined with pop culture references that make up so much of the popular/street art today. Sometimes visiting these shows, one could imagine bringing a bingo card with a hip-hop square in the middle as the free space surrounded by everything from Marvel and Star Wars to The Simpsons and anime. The problem then becomes, aside from the lazy cultural appropriation or rather misappropriation, that the reference never goes beyond a surface layer and comes off tailored for a culture of materialistic hype. The art becomes a slave to the “culture” instead of commenting on it. One can easily see it in the Basquiat Bearbrick next to the Supreme skateboard and Banksy coffee table book at a lot of apartments of this sensibility. Charlie Parker, Black Jack Johnson, and Hank Aaron that he was self relating to get completely lost...and he knew it. It was that surface layer sensibility and racism of the art world that literally killed him. The composition notebooks then for me showed some earlier ideas that were still devoid of the disillusionment with it all that came later.

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck. Picked this up from the free bookstore in Baltimore. I am quite a big fan of his with "East of Eden" being my favorite, so was happy to find a novella that I hadn't read by him for free. This was his propaganda work for the war effort circulated for those under Nazi occupation written right after Pearl Harbor. It was highly criticized at the time for not being aggressive enough, which for a thinking writer like Steinbeck to write such easy propaganda... just wouldn't be possible. The American audience didn't quite get it and as a result it ended up having a huge impact as it was bootlegged throughout Europe with its biggest following in the Scandinavian countries where the locale of the story was loosely upon. Although never actually living under the occupation his work really struck a chord...a result of the interviews he had with people who fled the occupation as the work was for them anyway. Recall in another free book I got from the same place last decade in Sartre's "What is Literature?", he used this novel as an example in his contention that we can have no true understanding of a literary work unless we know who an author is writing for. Also comparative was the famous Vercors resistance novel that circulated through France in "The Silence of the Sea" where the people resisted through silence. There was a pre-French new wave Jean-Pierre Melville film adaptation that was really good as well. All in all a solid read that like a lot of his lesser novels gets its name from Shakespeare. In Macbeth right before Duncan is murdered the two guards mention to each other, "How goes the night, boy?" To which the other replies, " The Moon is down; I have not heard the clock" foreshadowing the descent of evil on to the kingdom. The allusion relates to the spiritual darkness Nazism brought about.

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#finishedbooks Tarkovsky: Films, Stills, Polaroids, & Writing by various. Got this at my favorite used book store in Mitaka near our ikebana studio. I actually thought it was his polaroid photo book that had been on my list for years and instead realized it was just a Thames & Hudson coffee table book. With that there is much more content here featuring essays from legends such as Ingmar Bergman and Jean- Paul Sartre, extracts from Tarkovsky's own book (amazingly dense), film commentary, and yes there are Polaroids which with his eye, I really still want that photo book now...amazing photography. I had actually watched his films chronologically in the early 2010s and strangely only remember fully enjoying "Ivan's Childhood" and "Nostalgia" really. I ended up seeing "Stalker" last and loved it and since reading this have been jumping around his films again with a renewed appreciation. I remember around the time I preferred Bergman much more who I for some reason compared yet incidentally confuse scenes from his films and Kubrick's that have some albeit very loose parallels. However, what I understand now is the notion of rhythm in his films... that is the common denominator that binds moving pictures and sound. It organizes chaos and most importantly time. Rhythm is not then metrical sequences of pieces, it is the time thrust within frames. People see it as editing but it is rhythm that serves as the main formative element of cinema. Now I don't think this is new statement by any means, but for Tarkovsky his originality then lies upon his emphasis on subjectivity. From the excerpts from his book included here, he defines rhythm as the manifestation of a particularly sense of time in which a director's individuality finds its expression. It became very evident to me in a rewatch of the Mirror that his feeling of time.

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#finishedbooks Visualizing Black America by W.E.B. Du Bois. Was really excited when I heard about this from the previously reviewed book, Centered Diversifying Design where pioneering African designer Saki Madndikwa mused on how many even knew about DuBois graphic design work. Iainteventknowit. So here we are, Du Bois offers a narrative of what would now be called data visualization that is the rendering of information in a visual format to help communicate data while also generating new patterns and knowledge through the act of visualization itself... literally fitting in line perfectly with his famous quote, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." The striking aesthetics and forms of the infographics, visually, are central to Du Bois's thought of black invisibility and his term double consciousness he used to describe the experience of always seeing oneself through the eyes of another, a psychic alienation and social isolation produced by the peculiar position of being black in America. It then becomes a second sight that could be transferred from a negative to a positive offering a unique perspective on existence itself. With that though...the aesthetics! The book is comprised of two sets of infographics one from 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris and the second was with Atlanta University titled, "A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America." Quite a mouthful. What is important is the date as Du Bois was a decade before the rise of dominant European avant-garde movements predating modular design elements having various origins in Russian constructivism, De Stijl, and Italian futurism; and twenty years before Bauhaus making clear use of primary colors built upon circles, triangles, and squares. But the application of charts that by then had been around for a 100 years, believe it was a Scottish statistician who created bar and pie charts and later much more famously Florance Nightingale who first linked data visualization to social action some 40 years prior that would could make the argument a PhD like Du Bois would have come across. But beyond all of this his infographics are a real unique experience made in ink, gouache watercolor, graphite, and photographic prints that I see informing my next set of collage work... always better to show than say.

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. Read this a long time ago in 2008 when an English teacher friend lent it to me and said it would be a fast fun read. As a then self serious 23 year old I dreaded reading it since I was only doing 19th century alternating between French and Russian lol. But it was a fun read and of course did Fear and Loathing etc later, but never a novel I felt that ever warranted a re-read. So @eikaneko gave this to me, I was like thanks but having read it I just put it in my library near the Beat writers and Bukowski. Ei recently asked about it and I didn't realize it was a bootleg book complete with xerox scanned pages with a few missing sprinkled around; the cover is water damaged and taped while the font is hardly legible at times completing the effect. This coupled with the content of the novel or really Thompson in general I really came to just appreciate the book as an object. So decided to read it again and guess the biggest difference was my understanding of the characters' lifestyle...where when I read it at 23, I was like man those people are out of control and reading it now I am like yaaaa that level of high functioning alcoholism is about par for the course for me. In all a fast and fun read that looking back was a low key mature debut novel for the then 20 some year old Thompson.

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks The Making of Munakata Shiko by various. Picked this up from the retrospective exhibition at MoMAT. When I used to write museum reviews for Tokyo Art Beat I got these exhibition books for free so have a quite a collection going. The joy of these books is usually just in being able to get in print a bilingual book from artists that typically wouldn't be published in the west. Definitely the case with this book but also in last books that featured Yamada Masaaki, the Gutai or Dansakwa movements, or someone soon to get there flowers in a Tomo Gokita just off the top. So enter Munakata Shiko an artist who I came into through the Mingei folk art movement that he was associated with. The movement was founded by Yanagi Soetsu has a lot of amazing aesthetic philosophy books out there that I came to through his son who the modern product designer Sori Yanagi (most of my appliances are designed by him). Munakata I recognized most from the covers of my English translations of Tanazaki Junichiro. So with that a really great show that shows his whole range from the various religious and folk art woodblock print series to his mid career when he became a bit known collaborating with the major literary figures at the time to his twilight where Ken Doman captured with his decaying eye site the wonderfully beautiful character he became creating with his face right up to the work. Was really happy to get a chance to go to the opening. The show is up for sometime do yourself a favor and check it out.