Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Jan 07 2025
Roloff Beny: Ruins, Light & the Art of Seeing the World
Magic hour is not the time to be in a restaurant. -Roloff Beny Roloff Beny photographed the world as though civilization itself were a work of art. A ruined column, a desert wall, a flight of birds, a temple reflected in water, a mountain range disappearing into mist, or a narrow opening between ancient stones …
Jan 04 2025
André Masson: Automatism, Violence & the Unconscious in Surrealist Art
André Masson wanted to make art before conscious thought had time to interfere. He drew rapidly, allowing the pen to wander across paper until figures unexpectedly emerged from tangles of lines. He poured glue onto canvas, threw sand across the wet surface, brushed away what did not stick, and then followed the accidental forms that …
Dec 28 2024
Signs of America: Johnie’s Coffee Shop
At the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles sits a coffee shop where you can no longer order coffee. The kitchen has been quiet for decades, the booths stopped serving regular customers in 2000, and the enormous sign no longer performs quite the glowing roadside spectacle it once did. Yet Johnie’s …
Dec 25 2024
Soviet Film Wednesday: Carnival Night
There are only a few hours left before midnight, the decorations are going up, musicians and dancers are rehearsing, and everyone at a Moscow House of Culture is preparing for a lively New Year’s Eve celebration. Then the new director arrives and decides the evening needs improvement. There should be fewer jokes, less dancing, more …
Dec 25 2024
Christmas Jazz Delight: Celebrating the Holiday Season with Oscar Peterson
There is something almost perfectly suited to Christmas about the sound of Oscar Peterson at the piano. His playing can be brilliant and technically dazzling, but it can also become warm, intimate, playful, reflective, and quietly elegant. On An Oscar Peterson Christmas, released in 1995, those qualities transform familiar holiday songs into jazz performances that …
Dec 24 2024
The History of Aluminum Christmas Trees: From Space Age to Nostalgia
For a brief, glittering moment in the middle of the 20th century, the traditional evergreen Christmas tree faced competition from something that looked as though it had arrived from another planet. Aluminum Christmas trees shimmered beneath rotating color wheels, reflected the glow of living-room television sets, and fit perfectly into an era fascinated by rockets, …
Dec 22 2024
A Fusion of Sweetness: Duke Ellington’s ‘Sugar Rum Cherry’
Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” may be one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of Christmas music ever written, but in 1960 Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn took its delicate, otherworldly melody somewhere entirely different. They slowed it down, darkened the atmosphere, added a relaxed jazz pulse, and transformed the Sugar Plum Fairy …
Dec 18 2024
From Retro Futurism to Cultural Monument: The LAX Theme Building
Few buildings capture the optimism of the Jet Age as perfectly as the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. With enormous white arches sweeping over a circular glass structure, it looks like a flying saucer has landed in the middle of LAX—or perhaps like a spaceport designed for a future that people in 1961 …
Dec 18 2024
Soviet Film Wednesday: Jack Frost
There are fairy-tale movies that try to make magic look realistic, and then there is Jack Frost. Aleksandr Rou’s 1964 Soviet film seems perfectly happy to let magic look like magic. Forest spirits appear among the trees, a witch lives in a wonderfully crooked hut, a boastful young man suddenly acquires the head of a …
Dec 11 2024
Soviet Film Wednesday: The Night Before Christmas (1961)
Christmas Eve in the village of Dikanka is not going according to plan. A witch flies through the night sky, the Devil steals the moon, villagers stumble around in the darkness, unexpected visitors hide inside sacks, and a lovesick blacksmith is about to embark on an impossible journey to Saint Petersburg in search of a …
