Chime
Phillip Glass + video game = awesome.
need to want less
this is definitely a thing. (via)
Sleep All Damn Day – The Miracle of 86
A favorite lazy day song from the now defunct Brooklyn band.
Slip of the Tongue
understanding shakespeare
Tag clouds of Shakespeare’s plays. (via information aesthetics)
Cowboy Indian Bear – Saline
(hat tip to @onesmallfire)
FOR NICE GIRLS WHO LIKE STUFF
In a thought-piece about immersive retail and the Hollister store in SoHo, Molly Young sums up why I am mentally unable to handle living in California, particularly SoCal, for extended periods of time:
I do not think I am alone in recounting my teenage years in terms of things bought and the hopes invested in them. As a teenager in California, I wore sweatshirts and tight jeans like the ones Hollister sells, feeling always slightly paler and less experienced than the Kelseys and Jennifers of the world, as though the number of boys I’d hooked up with (zero) was embroidered across my trucker cap for all to see. These feelings rise anew when I enter the Hollister store, and I know why: despite its missteps, the brand nails certain aesthetic truths about my home state.
I attended community college with girls who resembled beta versions of the store’s employees. To Mass Communications 110 they wore garments that insisted on comfort and conveyed the sexiness of total relaxation: sweatshirts, sheepskin boots, and thongs bisecting the slice of tanned upper butt that rose from low-cut jeans. It was a look of lazy, hygienic sexuality. The hottest girls always had brand-new socks, for example, and this was a key detail.
I’m lucky that I coincided with the trend. For one thing, it was an equalizing force. At a school made of both moneyed slackers and teenage mothers, the wealthy girls shopped at the same places as the non-wealthy girls. The former might have collected Tiffany bean pendants at home, but in the classroom it was possible for everyone to look basically the same.
Weed was another great equalizer. It is hard to overstate the importance of weed as a determining factor in the lives of West Coast teenagers. Weed was the reason girls selected clothes based on fuzziness, the reason boys sounded dumb, the reason we inflected every sentence as a question and used like and you know as phatic communications. In an era of T9 input, text messages begun with I would automatically fill in mstoned. Anyone familiar with the dim and spray-scented bedrooms of a weedy adolescence will recognize in Hollister’s decor an environmental proxy of the average Friday night. Weed may not be for sale at Hollister, but its exigencies are everywhere.
I may currently live in Saint Louis, but I am so East Coast it hurts.
the questionable value of happiness
Or, rather, is its perceived value the trump card to end all trump cards?
If the alternative to happiness is not, in the binary way, unhappiness; and if happiness has become so insidious, so hypnotic a single end for a good life, why have we wanted this strange narrowing of our intent? What have we lost, or forgotten, or ignored, or paid insufficient attention to, or protected ourselves from by wanting happiness? Happiness, it would seem, is the most plausible of our aims in life. But what psychoanalysis can chip in with here is that we are at our most defensive when we are at our most plausible
Atheists Don’t Have No Songs
Patriotism
Whatever the reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The Struggle for What We Already Have
The complications notwithstanding, net neutrality, broadly speaking, is what exists now. Among the many benefits net neutrality brings is that it fosters innovation. The great fear of the net neutrality purists, however, is that without federal rules, the Internet providers will begin cutting deals with content providers to give certain traffic priority over other traffic. For instance, Verizon could cut a deal with YouTube that allowed its videos to stream faster than, say, a Hulu video. Or it could even block Hulu. Or it could begin charging consumers extra for Netflix movies that were of better quality than ordinary streaming. As Harold Feld, Public Knowledge’s legal director, puts it: “Companies do what companies do.”
(Which brings up one of the true oddities about the fervor over net neutrality. Cable television distributors make decisions all the time about what people can see and how much they have to pay for it. If special sports-only tiers aren’t an example of placing some content over other content, I don’t know what is. Yet because it is merely television, and not the sacred Internet, nobody seems to view this practice as a crime against humanity. But I digress.)
You’ll notice, however, Nocera’s discussion is about media distribution from large companies to consumers, not those consumers as producers.
planned economy or planned destruction
1934 cartoon from The Chicago Tribune about Roosevelt’s New Deal. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
White Teeth
I was quite pleased with the four episode mini-series based on the Zadie Smith novel White Teeth (a favorite): short, sweet, and captures the spirit of the novel. American television needs more mini-series. A good one eases into a narrative and finishes off at just the right time, none of this “four seasons, fifteen episodes a piece” nonsense.
The Cranberries – Ode To My Family
Time warp back to 1994: Princeton Coffee House (long since closed) with the crew to talk poetry and literature (i.e., girls hung out there), evenings by the fountain, and my first cigarette. I was a sophomore in high school.
Sufjan Stevens – I Walked
The Accidental News Explorer
A search can yield hundreds of articles and bring you down rabbit trails you can only begin to imagine. This is a fantastic iPhone app for $1.99.
Adam Atomic talks about Canabalt
One of the two iPhone games that I find myself still playing a week after purchase. The other? Flight Control.
Incidentally, you can also play Canabalt on the web.
it took me three reads to get this
(thanks, Rich)
the quest for a gender neutral pronoun
The idea is far from new, but nothing seems to stick:
The traditional gender agreement rule states that pronouns must agree with the nouns they stand for both in gender and in number. A corollary requires the masculine pronoun when referring to groups comprised of men and women. But critics argue that such generic masculines – for example, “Everyone loves his mother” – actually violate the gender agreement part of the pronoun agreement rule. And they warn that the common practice of using they to avoid generic he violates number agreement: in “Everyone loves their mother,” everyone is singular and their is plural. Only a new pronoun, something like ip, coined in 1884, can save us from the error of the generic masculine or the even worse error of singular “they.”
Such forms as co, xie, per, and en abound in science fiction, where gender is frequently bent, and they pop up with some regularity in online transgender discussion groups, where the traditional masculine and feminine pronouns are out of place. But today’s word coiners seem unaware that gender-neutral English pronouns have been popping up, then disappearing without much trace, since the mid-nineteenth century
Personally, I am a fan of the singular, generic “they.” We use it conversationally all the time for this purpose and it is more elegant sounding than any concocted alternative or this “he/she” nonsense.
Matthew Taylor’s 21st century enlightenment
Recalling my distaste with The Empathic Civilization, Taylor’s observations feel more palatable, even if the latent utopianism in humanism gives me the willies.
Maxence Cyrin – Where Is My Mind
via It’s Nice That
this is the right perspective
R.R. Reno, Professor of Theology at Creighton University, has close to the right perspective on the “Ground Zero mosque:”
The symbolism reflects the reality of New York, and of America. We’re a largely if often confusedly and half-heartedly Christian nation that builds temples to Mammon, and then liberally scatters memorial and monuments to satisfy our secular piety. America is a mixed-up national project, unlikely to satisfy the exacting ideals of a theologian, political philosopher, or cultural theorist, and yet preternaturally successful, perhaps because it is a nation and society largely in accord with basic human sensibilities that resist reduction to neat theories and pat principles.
Aristotle ranked magnanimity among the virtues that characterize a man who is at once powerful and noble. This virtue involves treating those who are weaker with a certain indulgence. When a servant breaks a vase, a magnanimous soul waves it off. If an underling owes a debt, it is forgiven as a gesture of indifference. “Don’t worry about it,” says the magnanimous person.
Although we often see its fierce side in the news, by and large Islam is weak. It’s not vying for political control or cultural dominance in America, where it’s largely irrelevant. Radical Islam is of course a global threat, but mostly as a power of disintegration rather than a force to be reckoned with. The country currently facing an existential threat from Islam is Pakistan, not America.
We should be magnanimous. Abdul Rauf’s Islamic Center on Park Place may be a good idea or a bad idea. I’m not sure myself. But this seems obvious: in comparison to the very big fact of America, it’s a small idea, and not worth worrying about.
The language of “weak”, as I read it here, has to do with cultural pervasiveness, i.e., Islam is a minority perspective in the US. I wouldn’t have used the Aristotle quote with the servant example for obvious reasons, but servanthood is not salient to his point, I think. Regardless, the comments on the article are mostly depressing.
Fire Tornado
I had no idea these existed. (thanks, Robert)
Kodak 1922 Kodachrome Film Test
Striking.
shinya kimura
The sound in this video is incredible, use headphones if you have them.
