Panorama

I.

"The Unfurling" is more than 400 feet long, written and illustrated in graphic novel form on a 12-inch-high scroll....

"[Isabel] Rucker, who is the daughter of science fiction author and cyberpunk visionary Rudy Rucker, began work on "The Unfurling" seven years ago when she lived in San Francisco. It details both her city life and her move to rural Wyoming, off the grid. Using the scroll -- technically, three separate 150-foot rolls of paper -- allowed her to vary the width of the panels. While some are compressed, others are quite broad. The illustration of a road trip from California to Wyoming is more than 10 feet long.

—"Isabel Rucker's Long, Long Memoir," L.A. Times, Jacket Copy (by Carolyn Kellogg)

II.

In a helicopter above the city on Friday, Stephen Wiltshire of London looked down at the streets and sprawl of New York. He flew for 20 minutes. Since then, working only from the memory of that sight, he has been sketching and drawing a mighty panorama of the city, rendering the city’s 305 square miles along an arc of paper that is 19 feet long —"Like a Skyline Is Etched in His Head," by Jim Dwyer, NYT

(photo: Piotr Redlinski/NYT)

(Slideshow here.)

I'll come running (to dry your clothes)

Eno parted ways with Roxy Music in 1973 after a major falling out with Ferry. Later on, Eno claimed that he knew he was through with Roxy Music when he started thinking about his laundry during performances. —Geeta Dayal, Another Green World

Speaking of laundry: I'll be reading next Thursday, November 12, at...the Avenue A Laundromat (97 Avenue A)! Has it come to this??? (A: Yes!) I'll be reading with fellow Korean American novelist/New Order fan Sung J. Woo. It's part of the Dirty Laundry reading series. Things get rolling promptly at 7 p.m. (CORRECTION: 7:30 P.M.!) I'm not sure if you're allowed to do laundry during the reading. (I'll know that I'm through with readings if I start thinking about Roxy Music.)

Fast-forward........Two days after that, I'll be at Page Turner, the Asian American Literary Festival, yapping on a panel ("Everyone's a Critic") with the inimitable Hua Hsu....and Dennis Freakin' Lim...(they should just rename the Sunday Arts & Leisure section the Dennis & Lim section).

It's all happening at 2 p.m. on Saturday, November 14, on the ground floor of powerHouse, at 37 Main St. in DUMBO—here are directions!

Two from Jane

I. Signs!

A) Rose Bowl Hoax

B) Yale-Harvard Prank

C) Snyder Bans Posting of Score at Redskins Games: Chainsaw Dan Snyder, who's already suing some of his own season-ticket holders, made another bid to drive away customers by declaring that no critical signs will be permitted at FedEx Field. Guards are to seize any signs Chainsaw Dan doesn't like. Reader Ashley Tate of John's Creek, Ga., notes this fantastic idea -- spectators at the next home game use the grid to determine which Skins color to wear, then spectators themselves would spell out FIRE SNYDER.


II. Let's have some iSnack 2.0.

Woke up briefly to write this down on a nearby Post-it

"It's written primarily in Tatonia, a fearless language no one can understand."

Art issue

The Believer's Art Issue is out!

Michael Paul Mason on an art-world darling—who went on to sell doughnuts at Krispy Kreme...

The grandson of Charles and Ray Eames constructs an alternate universe...

This comics-heavy issue also features Jeff Chang on Morrie Turner (the first nationally syndicated African American cartoonist), the one and only Hillary Chute talking to Aline Kominsky, interviews with Peter Blegvad and Chris Ware, and...a new feature, called "Comics"!

Plus Michelle Tea, Greil Marcus, Joshua Cohen, and much more...

Jack Pendarvis...more...more...

Also!

Eddies in the time-space continuum

Remember when those imps over at Driftwood Singers made you dilute your enthusiasm for the Arcade Fire by comparing them to...Eddie and the Cruisers?

Now they make hay with our Julian Casablancas adoration...by exhuming an unexpected precedent: Eddie Money!

Neck and neck

My former student Rebecca has apparently turned into a vampire...

A largish electronic calculator

My latest Astral Weeks is up at the L.A. Times, on Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing..., the next installment in the late Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. (Alas, I wish I liked it more.)

I love how the description of the Guide itself, 30 years on, sounds infinitely less fantastic:

"[Ford Prefect] had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON'T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. . . . The reason why it was published in the form of a micron sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in."

This description, written back when a line about humans being "so amazingly primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea" would feel au courant, now easily conjures a hand-held device, something like a Kindle crossed with a Blackberry.

Anagrammin'

I. INFIELD and INFIDEL are anagrams!

II. Poundstone: movie anagrams.

Buggin' out

Worth getting Cincinnati Magazine to see Jing Wei's critters as trading cards?

(Pictured above: bedbug, mit refreshments.)

Legends of the fallback

For them, mastery of a script is a benchmark of professionalism. Still, acting fallbacks have a long but largely unnoticed history in the theater. During the national tour of “Legends” in the 1980s, Mary Martin who was in her 70s at the time, used an earpiece that also picked up taxi signals, according to published accounts. —NYT

More...

JULIA AND JULIA (get rid of grating blogger, replace with French structuralist)

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (about a team of renegade copy editors during WWII)

IN THE HOOP (hula documentary, shot in hand-held-o-vision)

SHAKESPEARE IN GLOVE (actors conceal line prompts in handgear)

SANTA TANGO
(from a friend of L.M. Thos.)

Meme of the day

Poundstone's ONE-LETTER-OFF MOVIES.

Samples:

RENO MAN, THE HARDER THEY COMB, AN INCONVENIENT RUTH

Beloved animal pics: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEAL, THE PIG LEBOWSKI

Tycoon is unhappy and wants everyone to know about it: CITIZEN KANYE