Joyce McKinney Joins Errol Morris at DOC NYC 2010
If you can, watch all the way to the end.
Eggers on the Giants World Series Run
McSweeney’s now has a poster of author/writer Dave Eggers’s World Series sketches. His drawings of the crowd were commissioned by the Bay Citizen.
Sorry Deron, I thought Texas had a chance, but this is kind of a cool way to cover a baseball game.
from the spam
You are such an amazing writer. Wishing you a strength and peace that surpasses all understanding as you continue to walk the high road … you are amazing, and I honor you for being YOU! You represent grace and dignity … with a smile that melts anyone blessed to be on the receiving end of it. God Bless you Always!!!!
Jasper and a friend.
headline of the day
Google corrects mistake after Nicaragua blames site’s maps for invasion of Costa Rica
Levi
If any of you have been missing me here’s what I’ve been up to.
Levi was born October 31, 2010 at 2:04 PM and weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces. He was 19 inches long.
We’re all happy and healthy.
Alex Madrigal on Zadie Smith on Facebook
He’s critical of the caricature:
Smith wants to say, “You are who you appear to be on Facebook.” But who believes that of themselves or anyone else? She makes the drastic overstatement only to serve as her grounds for outright rejection of the service. Facebook, the way I see it, is an API to your person. APIs are what programs use to pull information from Google Maps or something like that. When she faults Facebook for not caring about the “quality” of the connections that it generates, I have to ask: Isn’t there a box that allows you to enter text? Should Facebook be responsible for making humans better friends, better lovers, more magnanimous, more prone to checking in on grandma?
She urges us to struggle against Facebook, but the real struggle is with ourselves to use Facebook well. She herself notes that she uses text messages to her own ends, regardless of what the medium seems to call for based on how college kids use it. “For me, text messaging is simply a new medium for an old form of communication: I write to my friends in heavily punctuated, fully expressive, standard English sentences–and they write back to me in the same way. Text-speak is unknown between us,” she writes. “Our relationship with the English language predates our relationships with our phones.”
from the spam
I am not certain what’s heading on but my browser mentioned that your internet site is a supply of fishing attack.
Jane Austen’s Fight Club
Oh, yes.
Neri Oxman, materialecology
“Monocoque” represents another approach to the fabrication of a skin-like membrane. The entire weight of each object is supported by its skin, with thicker areas that are reminiscent of natural vascular structures bearing most of the load. As such, they require no internal supports. The objects are fabricated through computational algorithms that, when output through a 3-D printer, produce structures that stand on their own.
a long-run deflationary trend
Tyler Cowen on the aesthetics of price:
In a wide variety of areas, ranging from ethnic food vs. fine dining to blogs vs. books to the art world (Outsider Art is often more visceral and enduring) to clothing, there is a common realization going on: cheap stuff is often better than the more expensive stuff. Furthermore, information technology allows you to reframe your consumption, countersignal your personal image, and reaffiliate with others, and their social movements, in ways which increase the status value of the lower priced goods. It is now quite easy to find the (possibly) small pool of people who will respect you for your cheap hobby or obsession. You can buy obscure items and even your uninformed friends can Google to find out what they are and why some people think they have value. In relative terms, a famous, mainstream, and somewhat upper-class “Nordstrom” label is worth less than before.
from the comments
When my nephew Seth was little, he had a chameleon among his many pets. I was there one night and the boy said the chameleon had escaped from the cage in his room. We looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Seth, about 3 years old, was exhausted, sitting on the edge of his bed, in his pj’s, clutching his blanket. He said, “I don’t want to sleep with no lizard.”
from the comments
Someone in D.C. once laughed and called me “a Norma Rae.” It never seemed predictable to me, but after talking about this, I understand it a little better. There are times when someone small and powerless is being rolled over and it rattles me to the core. And before I’m fully aware, righteous fury lifts me onto the factory table and out pours a verbal lashing that stuns and shames, partly because no one expects it from such a dreamy, non-confrontational person. But it is there. Placed long ago in God’s house.
from the comments
I wrote a book last year and suddenly it was unpublishable because someone else had written the same book at the same time as me. Right after that a friend told me Paul Simon’s “Graceland” was a great song and a great album. I’d never heard it. Paul sang “Losing love is like a window in your heart” and I had to turn off the shower and stand in there and think about that for a good long while before I could move again. This was three months ago? Four?
100 Portraits — 100 Photographers
A hundred portraits by a hundred contemporary photographers.
(via kottke)
Types of flies
You ever see these flies? The ones impossibly small — teeny compared to something regarded as small to begin with — ridiculously tiny? Or the ones that are not afraid, no matter what you do — ticking across your skin as they walk — impervious to flinching or breath — oblivious almost to everything until you fling your hand in pantomime and suddenly they are gone.
Starling Murmurations over the Roman Synagogue Last Sabbath
… to the music of The Photographer (Philip Glass):
Zadie Smith on Facebook
Without making excuses for Zadie’s luddite leanings, I think the essay is a useful caricature of how we interact online:
It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)
So Long, Marianne – Beck & Devendra Banhart
Rick Bass, Nashville Chrome
There was a certain sound, a ringing, that a fully tempered saw made when it had achieved that absolute perfect edge. It was a sound the men could sometimes hear, but other times, for whatever reasons, was indiscernible to them. The sound they listened for–the perfect blade–held an eerie resonance, the faint sirenlike echo of a high harmonic that was little different from the tempered harmony the Browns were already learning to achieve with their voices….
Has it Ever Happened to You
I’ve been wondering about something.
I still remember the awkward times. I had decided to leave my tomboy self behind, but it wasn’t an easy transition. One night, I was roller skating fast and hard with Cyn at a church social. The boy called me over. He was one of a group of new people at the church. They went to a different high school, I did not really know them.
I remember smiling as I skated to him, probably with a flourish. My brother’s girlfriend and family owned the rink. I was a little bit of a showboat.
His voice was deep, smooth, quiet, the words devastating. “You are the ugliest girl I’ve ever seen. We all think that. You don’t seem to know it, so, we thought we’d let you know.” My smile drained away. I thought something had gone wrong with my ears, I could no longer hear. He kept looking back over his shoulder at his friends. I remember finally pulling my quivering voice from a deep hidey hole inside and shoving it out of my mouth. “Who cares,” I said, twirling around, pushing off.
Cyn and I skated around each other like fish in water. I told her. She did not go to my church, she was a visitor that night. She did not believe in God, in church, or anybody who made a big deal about them. In her eyes, God, if he existed, had killed her father, or allowed him to die, at the age of 38. So my report, to Cyn, didn’t make much of an impression. She knew how to deal with people like that. “They’re a bunch of big idiots,” she said.
Dear Clusterflock
Sunday morning edition.
Tell me about the last music that made you really excited, and why it woke you up inside.
The Booki.sh reader
An HTML5 ebook reader by Booki.sh
[iframe http://player.vimeo.com/video/15826571?byline=0&portrait=0" 480 360]
Sun Kil Moon – Trucker’s Atlas
categories
There are categories we have needed for a long time I hesitate to make because I would think of all the posts that should have that category that don’t. I just added childhood.
