ArchInfo: The World’s 12 Best New Buildings
Virginia
Virginia is a digital artwork by the British artist Julian Opie, who for some time has been making these very pared down portraits of people and landscapes. Sometimes these people are walking, sometimes (like Virginia) they’re simply staring straight ahead, blinking. What I think is really startling about his work is that no matter how reductive these portraits get, they always seem to be engrossing and compelling to watch. I think he’s somehow managed to wrangle elements of both Pop Art (and here someone like Allan D’Arcangelo comes to mind) and contemporary advertising to make these weird vessels that can both contain our projections and fantasies and help us make new ones.
Weekly Picture 42
Mae Suits Up, Spring, Texas, December 2005
Bio Jewellery
From fuk.co.uk:
Four couples recruited through magazine adverts have donated bone cells gathered whilst their wisdom teeth were removed. The cells are to be set into a ‘bioactive scaffold’ made from living tissue which encourages the cells to grow rapidly. The bioactive scaffold will then disappear and the remaining tissue taken from the lab at Guy’s Hospital to the Royal College of Art where Stott and Kerridge will combine the tissue with precious metals to make a pair of rings.
elimae Archive
Last night I went to the web archive and searched for elimae. I founded elimae, now edited by Cooper Renner, in 1996 and some of the earliest pages from the site were still available. The ephemeral nature of the web and digital files made the moment all the more unsettling. I hadn’t seen those pages in almost ten years. I no longer have copies of the original files. In some way, it was akin to seeing a ghost. Some long lost relative partially risen from the dead.
Good books
I thought I would post a list of books I’ve been reading and also books I plan to soon read. I’m leaving out a lot and including mostly prose, and there isn’t much order to this list, but everything here I recommend. I’m leaving out things from my older list on elimae and certain texts that I recently enjoyed, but which for whatever reason were not as new or exciting to me. I’m also not listing Triple Press books, although I think they are great. I can’t speak for my unread list, but I have high hopes for these. I’d love to hear other’s recent recommendations.
Untitled
I got a great job last Friday but the pay is too low and the work I do is
humiliating.
Something Is Happening
The Big Dipper
I have a goofy thing to look at after you have been drinking. Go to:
http://www.locusnovus.com/lnprojects/bigdipper/
and click on one of the bigger “stars.”
If it doesn’t work, ah, whatever.
LSD
From 37signals:
Steve Jobs told a NY Times reporter that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.” Nobel-prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis told Hoffman that LSD helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences. Kevin Herbert, an early Cisco employee, fought to ban drug testing of technologists at the company because, as he put it, “When I’m on LSD and hearing something that’s pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into another brain state where I’ve stopped thinking and started knowing.” Hofmann, who’s still alive, says, “There is global healing in these compounds which have been used for millennia by indigenous people that have much to teach modern man and modern woman.”
A Random Note
Soul food’ll kill you.
Fifty-Fifty
I don’t think anybody’s left.
The World’s Best Quotes in 1-10 Words.
From CareerLab:
I’ve collected thousands of inspirational quotes. It seems that nearly everything that can be said, has been said, simply and eloquently, in a way that can seldom be improved. Winston Churchill wrote, “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.” So, I collected “The world’s best quotes in one to ten words.” These are the quotes, and my comments:
10 x10
From 37signals:
This isn’t rocket surgery (as DHH likes to say), but it’s something that works so well for us that we just wanted to repeat it out loud.
If you’re having a hard time finishing a huge list of things, break that list in a bunch of smaller lists. For example, break a single list of 100 items into 10 lists of 10 items. This way when you finish an item on a list you’ve just completed 10% of that list instead of 1%.
Yes, you still have the same amount of stuff left to do, but you can look at the small picture and find satisfaction, motivation, and progress instead of the staring at the huge picture and being terrified and demoralized.
It’s amazing how something as simple as rearranging the same content can have such an impact on productivity and motivation.
Caption Contest
Here’s a good one:
Covers
Covers is a web site devoted to beautiful book covers.
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
From Edge, The World Question Center:
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Grown Up Names
I was talking to Wayne the other day about how I was glad I had been given a name I didn’t need to grow into. A name that didn’t change from childhood to adult. One that would require me to shift what people called me: from Jimmy to Jim, for instance.
I’ve seen my friends that have names like that struggle with the transition, and it doesn’t seem like fun.
The really tough ones are the three stage ones: Joey, to Joe, to Joseph.
I’d hate to have to struggle with that one.
Weasel Coffee
From Daily Candy:
Wild weasels skulk about in Vietnamese coffee plantations, eating ripe coffee cherries. After a while, much like those clubbers in Faliraki Uncovered, the animals regurgitate what they’ve consumed and the beans re-emerge, infused with their gastric juices. The beans are then roasted and ground into a delicious filter coffee with a unique chocolatey flavour, to be taken plain or with condensed milk.
Humps
Thank the Lord for the internet, so we can see things like this.
Use as needed
Hermann Hesse published his first novel, Peter Camenzind, in 1904, when he was not yet 30. This selection comes from Michael Roloff’s English translation (Farrar 1969). It is worth remembering, in considering these pointed comments rendered via his narrator, that Hesse went on to write Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and Journey to the East.
“At times I was struck by the fervor with which these souls longed for some form of redemption. Yet what strange paths they were taking toward that goal. Though belief in God was considered foolish, almost in bad taste, people believed in names like Schopenhauer, Buddha, Zarathustra, and many others. There were young unknown poets who. . .
16 O’S 16 0′S
O O 0 O 0 O O
0 O 0 0 O 00
0 O 0 0 OO 0
0 O O O O O
0 0 0 0 O
Why Meetings Suck
From 37signals:
- They break your working day into small, incoherent pieces on a schedule incompatible with the natural breaks in your flow
- They are normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or a screen of design)
- They usually contain an abysmal low amount of information conveyed per minute
- They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
- They drift off subject easier than a rear-wheel driven Chicago cab in heavy snow
- They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what its about
- They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway
Jane Unrue, Atlassed
Jane Unrue’s Atlassed has been reviewed at Diagram:
In the end, the book is a sort of revelation in reverse — Unrue brings the veil of language between the reader and the illusion of realism, suggesting dark and frightening possibilities beyond our ken that are at the same time exhilarating. Like the “leafy vines” in “Passion (Asleep),” Atlassed “rocks you in the manner of the darkest pleasures you have yet encountered” (155). Reading Atlassed is at times mystifying; but in the end, its alchemic blend of imminent horror with immanent revelation and its apocalyptic mixture of mystery and desire, create a dark and evocative beauty that is both enigmatic and enlightening.
