Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Feb 07 2025
Laurie Johnson: The Avengers, Spy Jazz & the Sound of British Television
A burst of brass, a stalking bass line, crisp percussion, and strings that seem to move with the confidence of someone stepping out of a sports car in the middle of swinging London. Laurie Johnson understood that a television theme did not merely have to introduce a program. In less than a minute, it could …
Feb 06 2025
François Truffaut: The Critic Who Helped Reinvent Cinema
Before François Truffaut became one of the directors who changed cinema, he was the young man sitting in the dark watching everyone else’s films. Movies offered him something childhood often had not: escape, companionship, excitement, and a world that seemed larger than the difficult streets and apartments of postwar Paris. Eventually, watching movies was not …
Feb 05 2025
Peter Pan (1953): Second Star to the Right and Straight On ’Til Morning
“There it is, Wendy! Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” Peter Pan On February 5, 1953, audiences were invited to leave London behind, think happy thoughts, and fly toward the second star to the right. Walt Disney’s Peter Pan transformed J. M. Barrie’s enduring story of the boy who refused to …
Feb 04 2025
Daan van Golden: Patterns, Repetition & the Art of Looking
A patterned handkerchief, a piece of Japanese wrapping paper, a blurred photograph, a newspaper image, or the outline of a flower might seem like very modest material from which to build an artistic career. For Daan van Golden, that modesty was precisely the point. He developed an art based not on constantly inventing new images, …
Feb 02 2025
Loren MacIver: Light, Color & the Poetry of Everyday Things
A skylight, a fire escape, votive candles, flowers, the glow of a city after dark, or the fleeting reflection of light on an ordinary surface could become something mysterious in the hands of Loren MacIver. She did not need monumental subjects to make memorable paintings. Instead, she looked carefully at the small experiences most people …
Jan 30 2025
Patrick Heron: Color, Cornwall & the Shape of Abstraction
Patrick Heron believed color could do more than decorate a painting. Color could create space, generate movement, alter the apparent size of a shape, and even change the way a viewer experienced the world beyond the canvas. Across a career that moved from recognizable interiors and harbor views to stripes, floating forms, irregular discs, luminous …
Jan 29 2025
Sacha Distel: Jazz Guitar, The Good Life & the French Crooner Abroad
Long before Sacha Distel became famous for the tuxedo, the effortless smile, and the warm voice that seemed designed for late-night television, he was sitting in Paris jazz clubs with a guitar, trying to keep up with some of the best musicians of the postwar era. The polished crooner image came later. Jazz came first. …
Jan 28 2025
Marcel Broodthaers: Poetry, Mussels & the Museum as Art
Marcel Broodthaers spent years trying to make a life through poetry. Then, at the age of forty, he took copies of one of his unsold poetry books, embedded them in plaster, and transformed the failure to sell literature into the beginning of an art career. It was an appropriately paradoxical entrance for an artist who …
Jan 27 2025
Maki Asakawa: Blues, Darkness & the Sound of Japan’s Underground
Some singers seem to belong to daylight. Maki Asakawa belonged to the hours after midnight. Dressed almost entirely in black, often hidden behind dark glasses and surrounded by cigarette smoke, she created a stage presence that seemed inseparable from the music itself. Her low, weathered voice could move through blues, jazz, spirituals, folk songs, chanson, …
Jan 25 2025
Antônio Carlos Jobim: Bossa Nova, Rio & the Sound of Brazil
Few pieces of music can summon a place as quickly as an Antônio Carlos Jobim song. A quiet piano chord, a gently shifting harmony, the restrained pulse of samba, and suddenly Rio de Janeiro seems to appear: mountains descending toward the water, apartment windows open to the night, rain arriving at the end of summer, …
