Month: August 2011

of Montreal’s music is hard to define, given it changes more often than frontman Kevin Barnes’ sequined and feathered outfits during a live show. One album might be heavy on the drum machine and synthesizer, while another showcases Barnes’ best high-pitched Prince wail with more traditional strings and percussion. The Atlanta band boasts a prodigious body of work; in a decade and a half, Barnes and Co. have churned out 10 albums, eight collections and 29 singles and EPs, including their most recent effort, thecontrollersphere (Polyvinyl). Barnes and of Montreal’s two art directors—wife Nina Barnes (a.k.a. geminitactics) and brother David Barnes—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Nina: Lee Miller was robbed but still won. It is said that during her affair with Man Ray, she accidentally invented photograms, but Man Ray took the credit for it. Either way, this smart and beautiful (of course) photographer is perhaps best known for her work with Vogue at the end of World War II. She recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace and the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. David E. Scherman took a photo of Lee in Hitler’s bathtub in Munich, and this has become an iconic image. She was tough, gifted, vulnerable—a very intriguing character. Her active role in—and influence on—the surrealist movement, along with her poignant frozen documents of the ugliness and brutality of war, will be her legacy.

Video after the jump.

of Montreal’s music is hard to define, given it changes more often than frontman Kevin Barnes’ sequined and feathered outfits during a live show. One album might be heavy on the drum machine and synthesizer, while another showcases Barnes’ best high-pitched Prince wail with more traditional strings and percussion. The Atlanta band boasts a prodigious body of work; in a decade and a half, Barnes and Co. have churned out 10 albums, eight collections and 29 singles and EPs, including their most recent effort, thecontrollersphere (Polyvinyl). Barnes and of Montreal’s two art directors—wife Nina Barnes (a.k.a. geminitactics) and brother David Barnes—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Nina: Ludwig Wittgenstein was that crazy kind of genius that we seem to hate having around us while they are alive, but love to worship, with distance, in time. In addition to his wildly engaging views/theories, I’m also drawn to the complexity of the man himself. Bertrand Russell described him as “passionate, profound, intense and dominating.” Born into one of the wealthiest families of Austria-Hungary, he gave away his inheritance. He, among other things, served in the Austrian army, on the front lines no less, during World War I, wrote a dictionary for children, taught at rural schools (though his career as an educator of children ended in scandal after a lawsuit was filed against him by a parent for his use of excessive physical abuse against his pupils) and held the professorship in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Influenced by his writings, I find myself swinging from the notion that human language is all we have to there is no way language can capture the complexity of “being” to thinking language has divine properties in a Japanese Shinto kind of way (kotodama). I will, either way, love Wittgenstein for this quote: “You have to walk to think.” In Norwegian, we have this word ”tankegang,” which is loosely translated to “the walk of thoughts.” I guess “trail of thought” would be the English equivalent. Either way, I find it to be true. If I am to think, I have to walk. If I sit down, I fall asleep. Sometimes I do sleep while I think though, too.

Video after the jump.