An Interview With: Nouk Baudrot
You may remember Nouk from a recent post. I became very intrigued with his style, and I had a few questions for him which turned into an interview, with topics ranging from personal responsibility to what exactly style is.
“You can always judge a person coming out of the supermarket, being the most hilarious fashion mishap on earth. But don’t waste your time and energy on it, eventually all the derision makes you bitter and takes away the ability to be really, and truly happy about the one person coming out of the supermarket being absolutely magnificent.”
Hammond Eggs
This girl just bought her second Hammond Organ of the year. The first one I bought is better in many ways, the pedals don’t work though, and the wiring is faulty and I am constantly back there jiggling wires and playing around with electric currents. If I had to guess, it was manufactured in the late sixties or very early seventies. This second one, judging from the intrepid font choices on the face, is very very late seventies. Everything works perfectly, but part of me felt guilty for ooh-ing over the faultless tones. Who doesn’t love a little static-y rotating buzz with their early morning Organ session?
There isn’t really room for dualing organs in my room, so I shall have to move the sewing station. No more organs this year. Unless I find a B-3 lying around, so I should be safe.
Stray Dog
I came across Nouk Baudrot on the infamous fashion site, Lookbook. His style is highly fashionable, and inventive in the oddest ways.
(1964)
His flickr contains a set wherein he dresses up as…himself from almost every decade. The pictures are processed perfectly, and his strong features find a home in every year. Something beautiful.
No Words
A music blog called “No Words”, with strange and wonderful etchings. Definitely worth a look.
A Sobering Thought
So my school used an internal mail system/bulletin board system which kept a log of all the time spent online using the school’s email or message boards. As of today, my total time spent on this system over the past four and a half years is 8 weeks, 1 day, 18 hours and 40 minutes. And that’s purely active time, since the system logs you out after a few minutes of inactivity.
I propose that Facebook and MySpace institute a similar mechanism, that when one logs off, it would say “You have spent x weeks, y days, etc. on Facebook.”
I think that faced with such an exorbitant number, everyone would become more mindful of the time spent online, and perhaps a bit more conscious of their usage. If one knew one spent four hours on Facebook in one day alone, perhaps one would consider making some changes. Remember reading? Painting? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to spend a lot of time online, rather that much like watching T.V., most people are unaware of just how much time they are using.
Flannery Says
A rare audio file has surfaced, Flannery O’Connor gives a lecture one year before her death at 39. She gives this lecture at Notre Dame, about her writing, as well as reads her classic story A Good Man is Hard to Find. Very rare, and her Southern wit and charm are evident through and through.
update: the lecture she gives is also found in the book Mystery and Manners, I forgot to mention earlier.
- “Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without.” - Flannery O’Connor
Death of a Shade of a Hue
A fun and telling exercise/game in which you line up color blocks in a row to change from one color to another. When it’s over, they tell you where you have trouble differentiating. I scored 26, what did you get?
Women At The Grocery Store…
…who annoyed me yesterday.
(camera phone snaps)
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Last night at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, I had the pleasure to see this seldom-screened 2003 documentary.
A fantastic sprawling exploration of the real Los Angeles through clips from 191 films that are set here, filled with remarkable commentary. The three hour film brings up fascinating food for thought at every turn, from the portrayal of police, history, race, and false beliefs about a city that director Thom Andersen has loved for decades. Andersen made the film to show the differences between what Los Angeles really is, and how the movies portray it. As a native, it was hilarious at times, and wonderful to see the city through the eyes of countless other directors, unintentionally and intentionally documenting a city that so few people ever really see for what it is, how it is.
As a lover of, and Los Angeles apologist, it was luxurious to slip into the endless montage of Los Angeles films, sinking deeper and deeper into that love. The longer I live here, the more I see, the more I don’t know if I could ever leave for longer than a year or two. This is one of my new favourite movies.
If you ever get a chance to see this, jump on it. Here is a good essay on the film as well as the imdb.com entry:
If You Were Icelandic: Pt. 1
You would use a system of patronymic naming, taking the father’s first name as your last name.
Let’s say my name is Bryndís Atladóttir, and I marry Jón Stefánsson.
Our daughter, Goðrún, will be named Goðrún Jónsdottir and our son, Heiða Jónsson.
Literally, son and daughter of Jón.
Almanac
For three seasons I’ve run a little hour-long radio show called Almanac, once a week. I usually pick a topic and choose songs, short stories and interview friends and others about that topic. Then I put it all together.
Allow me to share the latest episode, a bit different fare than usual. I wrote a short fictional story as an opener to each song.
featuring music from Beirut, Andrew Bird, Ben Folds, The Solids, Bob Dylan, Denison Witmer, Elton John, Doveman, and Iron & Wine.
Right click here to listen or download
Compathia
About the Cat Power song ‘Good Woman’
Few songs have ever been written that are so bathed in compathia, which Octavio Paz describes as that state where love returns in a concentric circle to the beginning and another place further and washes away all the hatred for a person that only real love could create in the first place. A true freeing. It lives in the same company as [Bob Dylan's] “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Unlike most of the pathetic pleadings drowning the world that call themselves “love songs” but are merely made to mythologize oneself in the heart of the other through weepy melodramatics, “Good Woman” is a gift, not a trap. A close friend once taped a version of it off the BBC and it sounded like the Dirty Three were backing her up, but I could be wrong. But with a song like this, a fucking trustafarian hippie sitting on the street with a broken guitar could sing it and I’d give him 5 bucks.
MP3 Cat Power - Good Woman
MP3 Cat Power - Good Woman (live KCRW version)
(From a Dusted review, written by Six Organ’s Ben Chasny)
dear clusterflock
Are you the favourite person of anybody?
(via miranda july)
Damn Fine Coffee
I was in Seattle for five days, and made my way out to foggy Snoqualmie Falls to see the places where Twin Peaks was filmed. I saw the falls and looked around for any stray owls winging their way through the misty trees. There was too many people to really pretend that perhaps it was 1989, and almost everything had changed. But I was still so very happy. Here’s a picture I took of the cherry pie and damn fine cup of coffee I ate at the Double R Diner. Norma and Shelley weren’t working.
Four Score and Seven Rounds
Radiohead at The Hollywood Bowl
Go see Radiohead? Don’t mind if I do! Last night a friend and I made our way, along with nearly 18,000 other people, to the Hollywood Bowl. I saw them once before at Coachella in 2004 and this experience was far better. The light show that accompanied them was monstrous and strange and wonderful. Huge floor to ceiling columns of light that seemed capable of any combination of color or pattern. That they played even 1/3 of True Love Waits made my evening, and I almost cried.
(via sweetcell’s flickr)
Set List: Reckoner/Optimistic/There There/15 Step/All I Need/Pyramid Song/Weird Fishes/Arpeggi/The Gloaming/Videotape/Talk Show Host/Faust Arp/Tell Me Why (Neil Young Cover) /No Surprises/Jigsaw Falling Into Place/The Bends/The National Anthem/Nude/Bodysnatchers Encore: House of Cards/ Planet Telex/Go Slowly/Fake Plastic Trees/True Love Waits Intro/Everything In Its Right Place Encore 2: Cymbal Rush/Karma Police/Idioteque
(via sweetcell’s flickr)
YouTube Comment Snob
This is the answer to the problem, but I would kind of miss such helpful comments as “y dun’t u suck a bag of dicks,” when trolling the internets.
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:
- More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
- All capital letters
- No capital letters
- Doesn’t start with a capital letter
- Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
- Excessive capitalization or Profanity
“Instinct”
I grabbed this during one of those ten second breaks in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
They make it a POINT to say that service is available in NJ, but that this offer is NOT available in Puerto Rico. They got it right with leaving the punctuation off of coverage, because while “coverage” is available everywhere, coverage is not. Though for your information, in my experience, they offer “excellent” “customer service.”
Why a BIG SUIT?
dear clusterflock
Why does the Windows XP search function take literally MINUTES to find things, as compared to Apple’s near-instantaneous results with Spotlight search?
Nico Muhly
The red curtains surrounding them, much like the Red Room of Twin Peaks, lent a certain air of mystery to the proceedings. Nico Muhly, Doveman, and Sam Amidon played a stunning show last night at the Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles, in one of those nights that confirms what you suspected about Los Angeles, that it is both a good place to be and not at all like you thought it was.
This a piece Nico wrote for Sam Amidon (wearing the hat, above) to sing, and last night it lasted about ten or fifteen minutes, with much crashing of banjos, symbols and drums.
Dear Clusterflock
Do you think you can eat more blueberries than I can?
Something Gross
In the parking lot of the Albertsons, a glorious mass of gummy bears (about the size of an Angel Food Cake) appeared somehow, and I watched the cars drive over it again and again.
My Favorite Things
I’m watching season two of The Wire, and Bodie is driving around listening to A Prairie Home Companion. A conglomeration of bliss.
Bodie is flipping through stations as Keillor’s monologue begins.
“Is this a Philly station?”
He shakes his head, confused.
“Why would anyone ever want to leave Baltimore.”
Circles and Squares
“On February 25 2004, a new square wheel bike was unveiled at Macalester. Designed by Wayne Roberts, it has many improvements over the old one. The ride on the catenary roads is now much, much, much smoother. It is always in place on the lower level of the [Macalester College] science center for anyone who wishes to take a ride.”
This works because it’s an inversion. The circle of the wheel is now the bend in the road.