Out of context
Lucy to Sheila. Friday night.
“Let’s not look like Stevie Nicks, ok? Like, ever.”
Be it hereby resolved.
What is tragedy?
Brooklyn residents answering the question, “What is tragedy?”
(via Gowanus Lounge)
Manifestations of Frances
Frances is not so much an entity as she is an event.
The very image
sexy women, body image, and men
Seeing attractive women in magazines makes men more self-conscious and less inclined to ask a woman out.
To try and figure out why men get such a body-image knock from viewing images of beautiful women, the researchers ran a similar study with 143 male undergraduates. This time, the guys were divided into two groups, one viewing magazine spreads of sexually idealized females and the other viewing the same layouts with an average-looking boyfriend added to the photos next to the sexy woman, along with captions about how the female models are attracted to the average-looking men.
Men who looked at sexualized women reported being less likely to ask a woman out on a date or to interact with her. These men who were less romantically confident also were more self-conscious about their bodies.
Everyone’s terribly excited
Some candid shots of the core team on election night. Notice the lack of people milling about. The calm air. The lack of booze. A few bottles of water on the table. Muted.
In another flickr group, the Guardian invites anyone to contribute a message for Obama. Small curated view here.
sleeping amazon
“It’s all about hope”
From The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Robert Wilson and Bernice Johnson Reagon)
I am but mad north by northwest
Not a flux transfer event, but brief, bursty and very dynamic nonetheless.
Studs Terkel. Gone. Today.
Chicago Tribune photo by Charles Osgood. May 16, 2007.
“I’m still in touch, but I’m ready to go,” he said last year at his last public appearance with the [Community Media Workshop], a nonprofit that recognizes Chicago reporters who take risks in covering the city.
Write about him later, okay?
Meantime: Rick Kogan, in the Chicago Tribune.
And: Division Street: America.
Obnoxious
She had that North Boul Mich (Chicago) look, which is to say that in fact you can be too rich and too thin. She drove a Beemer. And I’m sure her bumper sticker was tongue-in-chic.
“I fake it so he buys me stuff.”
Bleah!
Cheapening the Human Experience
Overheard, one girl to another: “I almost cried when I read that poem on your MySpace.”
refugees
The refugee situation this summer seems to have escalated.
We are the new
Have You Seen Religulous?
We saw it this afternoon at the Magnolia, here in Dallas. The theater was full, and it was being shown on two screens. It’s a splendid film, and what a lift it gave us to be among those who are willing to look at absurdity and see it for what it is. I imagine many will say: “I thought it was great–except for the parts about Christianity.” This speaks to a central point of the film, which is that believers of all sorts are ready to laugh at and ridicule the beliefs of others, even as they show themselves to be blind to the incredible aspects of their own. I hope this film encourages more people to reject the thought that “all doubt (and questioning) is of the devil.” But failing that–I hope it brings a renewed sense of purpose to those who already see the dangers represented by beliefs that undermine the power of reason while reveling in the prospect of a looming apocalypse.
Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male
Sasha Baron Cohen was escorted from a fashion show in Milan on Friday.
After a few minutes of darkness while Baron Cohen, or Bruno, was escorted off the catwalk, the show started again. Models had kept their cool but the designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of the show.
What Happens When We Die?
The Human Consciousness Project is undertaking a study of near death experiences.
When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases - as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they’re able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn’t functioning.
Cinema of Dreams, Dreams of Cinema
I dreamt about watching a film with Alek, but I cannot for the life of me recall whether it was a dream-version of an actual film or whether it was an imaginary film we watched.
A new reason I’ll miss David Foster Wallace
Here are the concluding paragraphs from his short talk, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays:
What Kafka’s stories have . . . is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, “unconscious,” which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka’s humor–not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane, is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get–the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell [students] that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward–we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komish. (64-65)
I’m in love with my country
I never thought I’d see this happen.
It occurs to me . . .
. . . that I may have been in one of them hypnagogic states you hear tell of.
a question.
Twice in the past 5 years, I have heard a voice whisper my name in my ear. This happened as I was in bed, waking up. I was awake so it wasn’t a dream. I’m pretty sure the voice was female, and no, I’m not schizophrenic. Anyone else ever experienced anything like this?
Double-Taker
(via BB, which means you have probably seen this already.)
The Power (and Limits) of Imagination
Observation offered last night courtesy of a dear friend in New Orleans: “It takes a lot of imagination to live in New Orleans because . . . there’s . . . not much here. Luckily I have a strong imagination.”
R.I.P Nagasaki
His left hand points to the direction of the blast and his right hand points to where death came from.
63 years ago today Nagasaki burned and 75,000 people perished with one bomb.