Gladwell, The Science Of Success
kottke link bait via fimoculous. The video is about two hours long.
Sun Araw
Sun Araw is good ol’ fashioned bluesy fog-laden ambient jams, idyllic anthems to long lost deep-sea gods. The sort of thing that’s really perfect for listening to no matter what you’re doing, but especially when you’re ready to float away on a sonic high-beam.
I had the pleasure of seeing him live last night, and it was a near perfect experience.
With the rise of small labels such as Not Not Fun and Stunned Records, people are starting to concentrate on smaller releases, all meticulously created with handmade elements, original artwork, and a great deal of collaboration between artists and labels alike. This sort of music comprises a good majority of my listening these days, in part because of the people. A lot of my friends are involved on both ends, and it’s incredible to see the talent that torrents out of these relationships. This is what film/art school was supposed to be like, and it’s what life should be. Intense creativity is encouraged, experimenting without abject fear of rejection, and the results are audible, visible, and interesting.
These people are incredibly sincere about the kind of music they are creating. Sure there’s a few people, as in any musical situation, who are just in it because of the cool factor, but most of these people have always been doing this in one form or another for most of their lives.
Here is a fan video someone made for the Sun Araw song Horse Steppin’. 60′s beach footage, and bikini clad girls, a perfect song for the dead of winter.
(Sun Araw website)
Eudora Welty: Photographs of New York
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Untitled photograph shot in Union Square, included in “Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s”, through February 16 at the Museum of the City of New York.
“Eudora Welty in New York” restages Welty’s 1936 solo exhibition of photographs of rural Mississippi with an addition: eleven photographs taken in Manhattan around 1935.
Read Karen Rosenberg’s New York Times review here.
Gran Torino
Proposed drinking game: every time Eastwood makes a pistol with his hand and shoots somebody, drink.
dear clusterflock
What music are the kids these days listening to?
Dont follow leaders, watch the parkin meters
You think alternate side parking is a pain in the ass? France now has parking meters that phone the police the second they run out. Also, to add insult to injury, a text message informs you that you have been fined. Further, it is not only evil, it’s lazy:
Under a mechanism adopted by towns such as Issy-les-Moulineaux on the outskirts of Paris, cars are allowed 20 minutes of free parking. If they stay longer, the smart meter sends a message to a police control room, which alerts officers through their mobile telephones a quarter of an hour later.
“That way police and wardens don’t have to spend the day walking up and down the road,” said Mr Zandona, who said he wanted to introduce the technology to Britain and a number of other countries.
“The police can go and sit in a café if they like and just pop out when they get a message to say a car is parked illegally. They have an 80 per cent chance of finding the car still there between 12 and 18 minutes after the limit, we have found. That’s why we warn them after 15 minutes.”
Amy
World shocked the Barbie designer was “sex crazed”
Seriously, folks. How is this a secret (via HuffPo)?
Staging orgies at his Bel-Air mansion, Ryan, whose wives included Zsa Zsa Gabor, surrounded himself with busty Barbie clones, including Gwen Florea, who was the “voice of Barbie” in a line of talking dolls. The book quotes her: “He once said to me he loved me being tall so he could stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me.”
Ryan’s friend, Stephen Gnass, confides to the author: “When Jack talked about creating Barbie . . . it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode, almost like listening to a sexual pervert . . .” Ryan took calls at Mattel from a madam and patronized “high-class call girls to streetwalkers,” including a “very thin and child-like” hooker. The book claims that Ryan “somehow rationalized that he was the only man in her life” until he was diagnosed with gonorrhea.
Deflowered by Marimba Player
After being deflowered, you discover that your parents refuse to give consent to marriage with mustachioed marimba player. You are prevented from arranging another rendezvous, but you see him by chance at Junior League charity dance. He is playing in rhumba band. At intermission, you meet.
You say, “I’m terribly sorry, Harold, but my parents won’t let me marry you.”
He says, “That’s all right, baby. I’ve been happily married for years.”
You say: “How did your wife get her parents’ consent?”
Your main difficulty apparently is getting the consent of your parents. It is wise to learn how other girls get theirs. Miss H.P.
From Edward Gorey’s The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion.
Chronically Indigent Resent Influx of Nouveau Poor
Experts on sociological stereotypes insist the majority of beggars, bums, and homeless people live in poverty because of personal preference.
“Most of them are alcoholics, drug users, insane, or just plain lazy,” said Dr. Diane Reba Guzman, Dean of Socializing and Socialism Studies at CUNY’s Hunter College. “I mean, seriously, why else would you want to live like that?”
Mr. Baxter, a retired New York City councilman, refuted Dr. Guzman’s characterization.
“I’m a social drinker,” he said while stuffing a crumpled Wall Street Journal into his tattered Members Only jacket. “Society depresses me, so I drink.”
The Mountain Goats – No Children
Joseph Palmer wore a beard
In 1830, at the age of forty-two, a quiet unobtrusive, God-fearing man named Joseph Palmer moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Normally, such an event would have caused no great stir in the community, the newcomer would have settled down and been accepted, and life would have gone on as before. Only one thing prevented matters working out that way—Joseph Palmer wore a beard. And in 1830 beards were not worn in Fitchburg. Had he been merely passing through or stopping off for a few days, he would undoubtedly have been merely an object of curiosity and perhaps some thoughtless finger-pointing. But he had come to stay, to settle among these people, to become one of them; and this was intolerable. The unthinkable had happened—Fitchburg was harbouring a non-conformist.
Derision changed to outrage and outrage to anger. Palmer’s windows were repeatedly broken, and somehow the culprits were never found. Women crossed the street to avoid him, and their sons threw stones at him. Even the Reverend George Trask admonished him; and eventually, all else failing, the Church refused him communion.
Shortly afterwards, Palmer was set upon in the street by four men, who threw him down, injuring his back, and attempted to shave him. Palmer managed to drive off the assailants with his pocket knife and was thereupon arrested, beard and all, for unprovoked assault. When he refused to pay the fine, he was imprisioned for a year in Worcester.
But this was not the end of his story. In prison he nourished his beard and wrote letters, which he managed, with the help of his son, to smuggle out. The letters protested that he had really been imprisoned not for assault, but for wearing a beard. They were published in various newspapers, the case was widely discussed, public opinion shifted to his side, and Joseph Palmer and his beard became a cause célèbre. After a time, he became such an embarrassment to the local constabulary that they suggested he forget the whole thing and go home. He refused as a matter of principle, saying that if they wanted him out, they’d have to carry him out. And that is what they finally had to do.
Before he died in 1875, Joseph Palmer had the satisfaction of seeing practically the entire male population bearded, including the local clergy. Palmer’s tombstone, on which there is a likeness of his beard, reads: ‘Persecuted for wearing the beard’.
—from Fashions in Hair by Richard Corson (1965)
Box Art
A collection of videogame box art.
The Renewed Mind is the Key
Lice
Craiglisting has a real live one this week. Dude’s looking for lice (via coudal):
Food Matters
Laura Miller’s review of Bittman’s new book presents a compelling narrative on why we should all care about food:
Mark Bittman is the anti-foodies’ foodie, one of the few culinary writers around who don’t indulge in either the precious chefolatry of the Gourmet magazine set or the remedial pandering of Rachael Ray. In his instant-classic cookbooks and “The Minimalist” columns for the New York Times, he treats the preparation of food as an enjoyable daily activity that needn’t be fetishized but that also shouldn’t be reduced to layering prepared foods in a casserole dish, popping it in the oven, and chirping “Yummers!” At a time when one-half of America seems to view cooking as an elite hobby while the other regards it as an esoteric mystery, Bittman is that blessed thing, a practical cook.
Full disclosure: the winter has caused me to consider whether or not to give the pizza delivery guy a key to the apartment.
I am just waiting for the day.
I get to panel six and stop on a normal day, but panel seven never seems that far off.
139-year-old baseball card
Bernice Gallego found a baseball card of the Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati, the first professional baseball team in America, and tried to sell it on ebay.
The starting bid was $10.
But after getting a flurry of inquiries about whether the card was authentic or not, Gallego started to suspect she was holding something a little more valuable and immediately ended the auction.
Turns out her hunch was correct. She did have something more valuable. The card she found was made in 1869 and featured the “Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati,” the sport’s first professional team. It’s considered one of the first baseball cards ever produced and its actual value could be worth more than $100,000 when she puts it back on eBay (with a higher starting price, of course).
pinky and the brain
Yesterday I took the bandage off the end of my index finger. The skin on the top of the knuckle used to be the bottom of the finger. When I rub the top of the finger, now, I feel it underneath.
English hippies concerned about Wifi
Glastonbury residents are claiming it causes ”headaches, dizziness, nausea, severe tiredness, brain fog, disorientation and loss of appetite, loss of balance, inability to concentrate, loss of creativity” and have been using every reasonable measure to combat the problem:
One man has even begun making orgone generators, which use crystals, semi-precious stones and gold to purportedly put out positive energy to combat the negative vibes flooding the town from the Wi-Fi base stations.
“I have given a number of generators to shops in the High Street and hidden others in bushes in the immediate vicinity of the antennae. That way you can bring back the balance,” Matt Todd told the Telegraph. “The science hasn’t really got into the mainstream because the government won’t make decisions which will affect big business, even if it concerns everyone’s health.”
Todd says the Wi-Fi network is weakening the ley lines, supposed invisible webs of energy running through the landscape that the Druids and other ancient Britons are said to have been well aware of.
Those concerned are welcome to sign the petition.
I hate those
stupid Whataburger commercials with the voice-overs by that plummy voiced man saying stupid things like “Don’t forget those fries. They’ve got feelings too.”
Jasper v. Possum
A sample clip from the new camera.
This is
absolutely gorgeous, but once again it just seems to support the American tendency to glorify the wonders which can be worked when one has lots of money.
The Noises Rest
Done by the YLNT crew and commisioned, apparently, by the MoMa.
Joe the War Correspondent
Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher — formerly “The Plumber” — has been hired by conservative web outlet Pajamas Media as a special war correspondent to cover the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
“I get to go over there and let their “Average Joes” share their story, what they think, how they feel — especially with, you know, world opinion. Maybe get a real story out there.” Asked if he’s concerned about his personal safety, he added, “Being a Christian, I’m pretty well protected by God.”
Congratulations, Joe. You’re rich!
