Author Archive

Forecast.io

Forecast.io

The most handsome way to check whether the day will bring surf-worthy weather is data from more than a dozen sources and presents it in a clean, easy-to-use format. Bookmark the URL!

Apology

Apology

Jesse Pearson, a longtime editor at Vice magazine, has a new project, called Apology. As he puts it, “Apology is a new magazine that contains literature, interviews, essays, reportage, humor, photography, and art. In other words: pretty much everything. It’s a general interest magazine for people whose general interests aren’t general. It’s a sophisticated alternative […]

The New York Review of Books Turns 50

The New York Review of Books Turns 50

This year the New York Review of Books, one of the world’s most esteemed English-language journals of literature and politics, turns fifty. To mark the occasion, there have been celebrations in New York and a series of remembrances and essays published online. Sample the latter by clicking here, where you’ll find pieces by (and audio […]


ARCHI/MAPS

ARCHI/MAPS

One of my favorite websites to browse is ARCHI/MAPS, which pulls photographs of buildings, floorplans, other architectural renderings, and maps from various historical archives and posts them to the web. You can find Online Casino all manner of buildings, from medieval to modern, at the site, which also ranges across continents. Get lost there for […]

Painter Painter

Painter Painter

The Walker Art Center, one of the preeminent contemporary art museums in the United States, has a show on view now (until October 27) about new developments in contemporary painting. The exhibition, “Painter Painter,” presents the work of fifteen artists from the US and Europe. Here’s a brief description: The exhibition posits abstract painting today […]

New Directions Poetry Pamphlets

New Directions Poetry Pamphlets

The esteemed literary publisher New Directions has revived its series of poetry pamphlets, and the first four contributions look stellar: Eliot Weinberger, Lydia Davis, Susan Howe, and others are involved. A bit more on the series: New Directions is happy to announce the publication of a new series of Poetry Pamphlets, a reincarnated version of the […]


Finding Vivian Maier

Finding Vivian Maier

In recent years the photography world has fallen head-over-heels in love with a previously unknown street photographer named Vivian Maier. She lived her life as a nanny in Chicago, raising a family three children and taking photographs all the while. Thousands of negatives ended up in a storage-unit auction late in the last decade, and […]

Making Cents

Making Cents

Musician and writer Damon Krukowski, of the bands Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business’ headlong quest for capital means for artists today. Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more […]

"Upgrade or Die"

“Upgrade or Die”

New Yorker contributor George Packer offers an “unprovable hypothesis … that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related.” A little more: It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have […]


Acid Magazine

Acid Magazine

Check out Acid, a “surf-related publishing project for the curious-minded.”

Italian Art of the '60s, '70s, and '80s in New York

Italian Art of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s in New York

New Yorkers have recently benefitted from exhibitions of little-known (on these shores, at least) Italian artists whose work from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s is quite spectacular. First there was an exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery of folded and graphically treated paintings by Giorgio Griffa. (That’s one of them above.) Then there was the work […]

For-ev-ah Young

For-ev-ah Young

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is ostensibly a beach movie, thus earning a place on the Harmony blog, right? I hope so, as it gives me an excuse to post my favorite review of the film thus far, by Amy Taubin for Artforum.com. A sample: When the camera has its fill of gravity-defying boobs, it switches to […]


Jerry Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show

Jerry Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show

Are changes in the art market rendering the gallery show obsolete? Jerry Saltz thinks this may be the case, and that it might have profound repercussions: The clustering of hundreds of galleries in several neighborhoods has meant that a huge swath of the art world is continually being presented at our doorstep. That is changing, […]

Massif Management

Massif Management

Writing on the New Yorker‘s website, Jessie Wender notes the formation, last year, of Massif Management, a photo agency that represents a group of surfers who are also photographers.: I’m not sure that surf photography has a discernible style, as opposed to an established iconography, but the best of this work carries with it a […]

Two New Books on Beach and Surf Culture

Two New Books on Beach and Surf Culture

This week sees the release of two new books on beach and surf culture. One, titled Slide Your Brains Out, compiles fifteen years of photographs taken by Thomas Campbell. From the book’s publicity description: “Campbell’s surfing photography has long been admired by fellow surfers for its lack of gloss finish; unlike most, he eschews the […]


800 Views of Airports

800 Views of Airports

David Weiss, who with Peter Fischli made art under the collaborative name Fischli and Weiss, died last April at age sixty-five. The duo had worked together for several decades, making videos, films, photographs, and sculptures that were conceptually sophisticated and often ravishingly beautiful. Though the latter phrase may be most often applied to their double-exposure […]

Charles Simic on "memory traps"

Charles Simic on “memory traps”

The poet Charles Simic has written a short essay on “memory traps”–places that have vanished but which linger in the mind, and which anyone who has lived in a city for a long time will recognize: It doesn’t take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight lingering on the upper floors of […]

Forthcoming Exhibition on "Pressing Environmental Issues" at MoMA

Forthcoming Exhibition on “Pressing Environmental Issues” at MoMA

Midway through a New York Times human-interest story on curator Klaus Biesenbach’s hurricane-relief efforts comes word of a new exhibition of interest to Harmony Blog readers: The bus unloaded at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club on Beach 87th Street, discharging a group of volunteers that included waifish artists, MoMA members, surfers and a film crew gathering […]


Hanging 10 on Screen With Real Surfers

Hanging 10 on Screen With Real Surfers

A story about the making of the new surf moving Chasing Mavericks: After a tense half-minute Moriarity kicked off the sea floor, swam to the boat to grab a replacement for his broken surfboard and paddled back out. An astonished Mr. Barbour would capture what is generally considered the greatest wipeout in the sport’s history, […]

Slow Is Fast

Slow Is Fast

Dan Malloy on the lessons learned from biking, rather than driving, the California coast: We have been on the road for five weeks now and we are thoroughly convinced that we have found the fabled confluence of old California and new California. The bummer is, it’s not a physical place and the only way we […]

Wikileaks and Latin America

Wikileaks and Latin America

Now that my colleague has introduced US President Barack Obama to the blog, it seems an opportune moment to point you toward a special issue of The Nation published last month. Its theme: Wikileaks and Latin America. Click through to be taken to the Table of Contents, which features articles on such subjects as how the […]


California's Central Coast

California’s Central Coast

Apropos my last post about surfing in California, T, the New York Times style magazine, released its fall travel issue this weekend, and it features an extended look at California’s central coast. The tips—perfect for surfers passing through the region—are slowly being made available online. I travel for food as much as for anything else, so […]

A Weekend Surfing "The Wedge"

A Weekend Surfing “The Wedge”

Hawaiian pro surfer Jamie O’Brien keeps up with National Weather Service reports. A few weekends ago, when he saw an alert that Orange County, California, had a high surf advisory, he did the opposite of what most people would do: he packed his bags and headed straight there. A gallery of pictures and a story […]

The Annual New York Times Latin America Travel Section

The Annual New York Times Latin America Travel Section

Last weekend the New York Times published its annual issue featuring Latin American getaways. It includes stories on Managua, Nicaragua; Bogotá, Colombia; food destinations in Mexico City—not in Latin America, I know!—and Buenos Aires; and more. Most relevant to readers of this site, however, is an article on Chile’s surf coast. From that last story: About […]