Reading

In the spirit of the book itself, which has become as much samizdat to young people in the arts as Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, someone recently passed along to me a heavily annotated copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. As Hyde describes in his preface, booksellers often have a ten-word tagline with which they can summarize (and thus commoditize) books. Calling upon a vast array of scholarship and a deep reservoir of emotion, this treatise on the endurance of creative work in a world increasingly concerned with money defies that kind of categorization. All I can say is that this book, ostensibly about art, has made me rethink everything from intellectual property rights to the environment to religious ritual. I am forever changed.

—Jack Saul

Watching/Listening

Over at Vogue.com, they’ve got the latest music video by Adanowsky, a.k.a. Adan Jodorowsky—son of director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose memoir Restless Books is publishing this fall—who starred alongside his brother, Brontis Jodorowsky, as revolutionaries with regicide on the brain in their father’s new film, The Dance of Reality. The multitalented Adanowsky, who also wrote the haunting and addictive score for The Dance of Reality, will release a new album in April, called “Ada.” Check out his new track, “Dancing to the Radio,” which has that magically surreal Jodorowsky touch: