Bill Callahan – Apocalypse
Bill Callahan’s new album came out on April 5th. It’s good.
(Click on the image to buy or listen to tracks)
‘Bill Callahan’s fourteenth album Apocalypse is the best he’s sounded in a while, though even the worst Smog or Bill Callahan album the album is still better than most people’s best. Apocalypse clocks in at seven songs, and just over forty minutes. With one strange and obvious misstep, the mystical and ridiculous Free’s, the rest of the album is driven and resounding. The stripped-down songs drift one into the other until you’ve reached the end, and while there’s little except the song ‘America’ or ‘Riding for the Feeling’ that stands as singularly strong or memorable as songs on his other albums, the overall impression is a good one.’
Here’s a long thing I wrote for the Hairpin about him and women that they ended up not being able to use after all. So you get it.
In My Language, by A. M. Baggs
The first part is in my “native language,” and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.
quote out of context
While Green was in the ocean, Wallace would routinely stand on the shore, yelling anecdotal statistics about shark attacks at her.
You are — “in quotes” — a serious actress
Historical perspective on Helen Mirren’s magical bosom.
Thanks to Kimberly and Ju Ju for this. (We’ve had an extended afternoon conversation about Helen Mirren.)
Michael Kukla: Sculpture
Michael Kukla. Twisted, 2010, marble, 9.5 x 15 x 4.5 inches.
(Thanks, Lizzie.)
Bill Callahan – Drover
Holyshityouneedtolistentothis.
dear clusterflock
Heard a good joke lately?
from the comments
Rick, my imitation of Peter Sellers imitating someone from the Indian subcontinent is almost always a miss. It slides into the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
Why do experts get it wrong?
Ravi Mehta, a professor of marketing at Illinois University, and presumably an expert, on why experts so often get analysis wrong:
[His] suspicion is that “feelings of accountability cause experts to focus more on the steps involved in making their judgments, rather than the final decision itself, and ironically this focus leads to memory errors.”
In addition, they found that “consumer experts have a far better developed schema than novices; thus, consistent with prior research on false memories, their more complex schemas increase the likelihood of falsely recalling as associative link from memory.”
(via the browser)
from the moderated comments
Sexy blow job and i like those testicles and i love the erect dick
The difference between the sibling with X-Altruism and the one with Sociopathy could come down to the presence or absence of a few crucial regulatory mechanisms that affect expressed empathy
A few years ago, I wrote an article titled, “Addicted to Being Good? The Psychopathology of Heroism”, in which I first discussed the potential genetic link between Sociopaths and Heroes, or X-Altruists. In theory, their genetic make-up is very similar—same basic group of extreme traits in each personality—with a few important exceptions, one being expressed empathy. This notion was hinted at in 1995 by Behavior Geneticist David Thoreson Lykken in his book, The Antisocial Personalities, when he said, “the hero and the psychopath may be twigs on the same genetic branch.” It is very possible that two members of the same family—even brothers in a shared home environment—could end up as seemingly polar opposites; one doing extreme good: the X-Altruist, the other doing extreme bad: the Sociopath.
(via longreads)
from the spam
What is your opinion of homemade costumes?
Perspective
Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid last year. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government.
Pejoratives aside, it’s certainly clear where our priorities lie.
Ford Truck And Cross. U.S. 90, Brackettville, TX 78832
Made, pt. 2
Location locked, Editor hired, Production Designer and Props master hired, budgets set. Are you emailing her? Should I? Shoot dates firmed up, Sidney Lumet’s book ‘Making Movies’ read. Are we shooting on the 7D or on two RED cameras? I’m not sure, about that, let me get back to you. No, you have enough to do, let’s farm that out. Casting breakdowns were sent out through a casting agency, in about an hour or so we’d already received 400 submissions.
Fuck You. Pay Me.
Mike Monteiro of Mule Design talks about why you should use contracts for creative consulting work.
It’s about a half hour long, but you can easily just tab out and listen. He also wrote a companion piece.
Quote out of context
Finally, coming close to my threshold for pain, I asked the chef, “How do I know when it’s done?” I waited expectantly for his wisdom. With a mischievous glint in his eye he smiled, and said “When the sweat starts pouring down the crack of your ass.”
self-interest properly understood
From a Vanity Fair article concerning the top 1% of the economic strata:
Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.
An agnostic looking for love in the Bible Belt
I find this article fascinating because I so often have precisely the opposite problem (although, I am a far cry from the dudes in this article):
After the waiter departed, Matthew leaned across the table, almost apologetically, and said, “You don’t mind that I ordered a bottle of wine, do you?”
I assured him that I approved of his choice. Still, he looked bothered.
“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I like to unwind with a drink now and then, but I don’t drink all of the time,” Matthew said. “I bet you don’t either.”
“Not in the morning.” I laughed.
“Oh, a joke. That’s funny. But seriously, do you think you’ll drink after you have children?”
I was certain he was putting me on. I was 22, freshly graduated from college and unaccustomed to this line of questioning, especially on a first date. But he persisted. He’d enjoyed our tipsy two-step, he explained, but he was looking to plan his future. He believed in getting the serious business out of the way on a first date. I wondered how many second dates Matthew ever had.
“I don’t even know that I’ll have children,” I said.
“Is that another joke?”
“No.”
The wine arrived. As if to demonstrate how moderation worked, Matthew poured me half a glass, which I definitely saw as half-empty.
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“But you believe in God?”
I drained my wine glass and reached across the table for the bottle. I gave him an honest answer, though I suspected I would never see Matthew again. I said that I really wasn’t sure. I certainly didn’t believe that the Bible was the literal word of God, nor did I buy into stories about building giant arks and visiting whale’s bellies. While I didn’t consider myself a Christian or a practitioner of any other religion, I wasn’t an atheist, either. To say definitively that God didn’t exist seemed as restrictive as saying that he did. I was a skeptical agnostic, I concluded.
quote out of context
“She looked at it from the standpoint of what resonated with her, and of ‘I want to live with it.’ It was not done as some people do today, as wall power.”
the political brain
1.
Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.
2.
In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals’ and conservatives’ reaction to “gaze cues” — a person’s tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person’s eye movements, even if it’s irrelevant to their current task — and found big differences between the two groups.
Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.
photo out of context
Supervising Women Workers (1944)
Joe learns that women are “not naturally familiar with mechanical principles”, that they must have everything explained down to the last detail, that they are naturally jealous, and that Joe should never “mix business with pleasure”, though that last statement goes unexplained.
(via cynical-c)
from the spam
3. Wait for results.
from the comments (a long time ago)
I read a story long ago — I think it was in Witness or maybe Grand Street — that was about a small town in Germany during the second world war that did its duty and camouflaged a defunct vegetable canning factory. The factory was out at the far edge of town, and the idea was to tempt allied bombers to drop bombs on a worthless target, which would reduce the number of bombs headed for “important” cities. One night a person who lived near the factory was awakened by a muffled crashing sound. At first light everybody went to investigate, and they discovered that a huge log had been dropped directly on the factory. It was roughly carved into the shape of a bomb, and carved into the side of it was the word: BOOM! The people all shook their heads in wonder that anybody would go to the trouble to do such a thing, and one of them said, “Good God, what sort of people are we dealing with here?!” I have thought since reading this that perhaps the only redeeming feature of Americans is the fact that we value a bizarre sense of humor.
