Category: Blogroll Review
I first stumbled upon John Coulthart, whose journal we are looking at today, because he drew a few card illustrations for Magic: The Gathering back in the day. Later on Warren Ellis blogged about him in a websites-to-follow-list. There must have been an even earlier version of said list because I’m sure that I followed the {feuilleton} before 2022.
Coulthart is an illustrator by day and a prolific blogger by night. His blog is a visual delight where one can find Japanese prints of cherry blossoms next to discussions about Moebius’ comics and short films based on letters from William Burroughs.
A regular feature I’m always tempted to copy knowing full well that I would abandon it a fortnight later, are his Weekend Links, which are self-explanatory.
I was about to post BOOOOOOOM‘s latest “Artist Spotlight” for Emily Pettinson into the Media Bites category before I stopped myself and thought “Let’s do a ‘Blogroll Review‘ instead“.
At BOOOOOOOM you get a lot of art for your proverbial buck as well as exposure for your art if you have the real bucks.
It has an art & design blog with a focus on painting and photography and the occasional film and music entries sprinkled in between. They let the art speak for itself. Besides some short intro and links to the artists’ website there is no text just big, beautiful pictures.
It also features ways for up and coming (Canadian?) artists to get into the business of promoting themselves. If you pay a monthly membership fee you can submit your works either for a virtual portfolio or as entries to one of the many projects they have going on.
Technical note at the end: I just noticed that one has to subscribe to three different RSS feeds if one wants to stay up-to-date with their blog as well as the artists’ submissions and the projects.
Originating in 2005 and based in Los Angeles, Aquarium Drunkard is an eclectic audio journal focused on daily reviews, interviews, features, podcasts and sessions. Digging globally, AD bridges contemporary sounds with psych, jazz, avant-garde, folk, garage, funk and beyond. For heads, by heads.
That was easy and is stolen right from their about-page.
While their textual output is as eloquent as it is vast, I mostly consume their audio-features. Either the Transmissions podcast that very often features new-to-me artists and ideas. Or their regular gig on Dublab, Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard. However you might ingest their offerings, I’m sure it <stonervoice>will expand your mind</stonervoice>!
Haven’t done a blogroll-post in a while. This won’t be one either. Expect a lot of tech-related things instead.
I started 2024 with a nasty cold and Chris Coyier’s OPML file of Personal Developer Blogs. After importing it into my feedreader I had a nifty 17.000 unread posts, which kept me busy for a while. I purged most of the dead stuff, the ones about technology I have no clue of (i.e. ruby on rails, ai, and tailwind css), and those which became too political for my taste.
The start of a new year might be the best time to see whether a blog is subscribe-worthy or not. A lot (capital L lot) of folks summarize their previous 12 months, which makes it easy to see if what they are writing about is interesting.
The tech-blogosphere has sort of a midlife-crisis right now. There is talk about a “dark forestization” of the web, and you know it’s serious when they write a book about it (they actually rehashed some older blogposts; see Good Internet for further links). After the whole Twitter-spiel people – again – realized that it’s not good to rely on walled gardens. Personal blogs are up and coming. Google is thinking about digging up Reader from the dead. Capitalism is still bad. But at least we have a diagram of the web now (courtesy of Naive Weekly), to show us that the internet is indeed a net(work). Now all we need is a good search engine to find stuff. Or we could use links. I prefer links. Hence more links. I will also start updating my blogroll again. But first links (I haven’t actually checked most of those, just bookmarked them, but I need to clean my bookmark-bar to position it next to the address-bar, which one can do, which is a fact that blew my mind last week):
Finally, considering that I mentioned Naive Weekly and Good Internet, there is also webcurios for even more link curiosating. That is what you get when you try to mix curating with curios.
It’s hard to keep up with anything media-related these days. No matter what medium (or combination of) is used in the end, if it is possible to put it on the internet someone will have done so. Said internet is stepping on all the gas-pedals and it seems to have forgotten that there is a brake right beside it (or left? I can’t drive a car).
Fortunately there are sources to keep up to date with certain corners/streams and The Quietus is my preferred portal in all things british independent music. They do other types of culture but their main pull is music in form of regular reviews, national news, eclectic essays, etc pp.
For the last few years it has become a ritual of sorts to use an off-day and go through their “Best albums of xyz” (here is the first half of 2023)-features. It takes a whole day because the loading time for the page itself is about an hour and one spends the other 23 of them listening and making notes of genres, bands, and artists you had no idea existed.
A 1.000 word review for 4Columns would be the right thing to do. It’s the soft limit for their own reviews of exhibitions, books, films, and music. You get – who would have guessed – four of those each week. Directly into your mailbox if you prefer. I do. In fact, it’s the only newsletter I subscribe to. Mainly because they don’t offer an RSS feed, but also because it makes for good reading on the bus.
That were about 70 words so the 4-digit word review is not happening. Sorry.
It’s hard to describe what to expect in Dennis Cooper’s blog. One of his gif novels might give (pun intended) a clue. Start with Zac’s Drug Binge [nsfw], which can be viewed online.
His posts – often with the help of guest authors it seems – either feature other artists (i.e. painters et al, actors, directors, authors, etc.) or highlight a certain topic (e.g. snow globes, dolls, haunted houses…). They are huge. Vast collections of images, gifs, videos, and texts that will erode the rubber of the scrollwheel on your mouse (unless you use the space bar of your keyboard, in which case, go easy on it).
Each post ends with a post scriptum, which the author uses to communicate with his readers. There is quite the illustrous comunity in the comments.
Word of warning: Some posts will be not safe for work, especially the ones where DC copies (I presume) ads of gay escorts.
I don’t visit museums or art shows that often anymore (i.e. never). I should look into that. But I know that I love reading about those things and filthy dreams does writing about them very well.
For example, last year’s report “The Milk of Dreams vs. Nocturnal Emissions: The Intense Pleasures and Contrasts of the 59th Venice Biennale Arte” from Bradley Wester (don’t miss the companion piece) is the best thing I read in 2022.
They also do the usual feuilleton fare – i.e. media reviews – and have blog-post material like their top ten list of top playlist.
Camp is a theme, which means that there is the occasional picture of John Waters. Don’t be scared!
Speaking of comics…
To expedite the extension of my blogroll you will get two for the price of one, which is zero if we are being honest, but who’s counting.
Who’s Out There? is a blog with as illustrous categories as “Tentacle Tuesday“, “Do Draw for me Argentina“, or “Basil Wolverton: Brain Bats, Bibles and Barflize“. While they have their topics most entries highlight single artists. They deal with comic’s and related illustrations’ past and let images do most of the talking.
The Comic Journal on the other hand has its focus more on the present and the future. Unless someone died then it’s back to the history books. In contrast to “Who’s Out There?” the magazine is heavy on the text. My favourite feature of theirs is the weekly round-up of links every saturday.
“Croatians love Film” is a bold statement. Too absolute to be true, with evidence as flimsy as one of the dames in a Raymond Chandler novel. Here is my evidence:
On one hand, there is Croatian.film, a collection of short films, documentaries, and feature films you can watch online for free. It is related to the Zagreb Film Festival, which would be another indicator for my initial claim, if not for the fact that every capital in the EU has a film festival (probably part of the conditions to become a member).
On the other hand, Cinephilia & Beyond. What has started as a blog of five Croatian cinephiles (see their Tumblr-blog archive) became a treasure trove of deep dives into the ocean that is filmmaking.
The navigation for the site is a bit shite (as the Brits like to exclaim). They use the categories (“Interviews”, “Screenwriting”, etc) to teaser what content will be found in the linked articles but they hardly help with navigating the large archive the writers have already amassed. This won’t matter much, because once you have subscribed to their RSS-feed you will count the days until the next entry pops up.
I searched for “Batman”, found two relevant examples (you have the choice between Tim Burton’s version or Nolan’s “The Dark Knight”) and will use those to convince you to do just that (subscribing to their feed that is).
Every article starts with an introductory essay about the movie written by one of the aforementioned quintet or from their cast of guest authors. This is followed by an assortment of excerpts from interviews (text and video), books, and articles from the filmcrew. If you have time on your hands, you can read one version of the full script (often more), embedded as a PDF. Finally, the large, high-def behind-the-scenes shots that are scattered throughout the page are collected in a gallery at the bottom of the page. And when all is read and viewed there are links, so many links to most if not all of their sources.
All this is done for most of the movies they review. The archive includes smaller items, but they stay true to the formular described above for the recent (i.e. the last four to five years) entries.
A final note on the films reviewed. I’m not sure if “classics” would be a good descriptor, but all the usual suspects (excluding “The Usual Suspects”) of US-centric cinema are there. You’ve got your Scorcese, Mann, Coens, Lynch, Kubrick, Spielberg, et al. The occasional outliers in Neil Marshall’s works “Descent” and “Dog Soldiers” and some interesting omissions like Tarantino. Interspersed are real classics like “Metropolis” or Hitchcock. And these names were just plucked from the first few pages of their archive!