The Lake, The Hood & The Golf Course
After we’d talked for a while, we got in my rental car and went for a drive around his ward. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not for us,” Knowles said, as we rode through Harbor Shores. “It’s not for poor people.” I had asked Knowles if he slept at City Hall, and he took me by his house, which he said he rents for about $250 a month. “I don’t sell dope,” he volunteered, explaining how he pays his rent. “I come out and hustle — electrical jobs, cutting grass, whatever.” […]
When I dropped him back at City Hall, Knowles got out of the car and said goodbye, then poked his head back in the passenger window. “Hey,” he said, “can you spare a couple of bucks so I can get myself a bag of chips and a pop?”
This is an excerpt from Jonathan Mahler’s Simon-esque piece on Benton Harbor, Michigan, for the NYT Magazine a few weeks back. The bit above is from a conversation Mahler has with an unemployed Benton Harbor resident who is also a city commissioner for one of the city’s poorest wards.
For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in the area and my family has lived there for a few generations. The article is a longer piece focusing on the city’s socio-economic problems and new divisions over a golf course and property development on Lake Michigan called Harbor Shores, which is hoped to improve the impoverished city’s attractiveness for future investment. The only problem is that most of the developers and proponents for Harbor Shores are affluent and white, while most of Benton Harbor is impoverished and black – oh, and the golf course was built on a chunk of the city’s one nice park at the lakefront.
It’s a feature worth reading and not just because it’s about the clashes between a city’s residents and a group of well-intentioned (if not woefully ignorant) outsiders that believe they can solve deeply-rooted problems of poverty and crime by introducing the game of golf. I like to think it’s also because Mahler turned my old stomping grounds into a moral fable for today’s social, cultural and economic divisions.
Eva Zeisel dies, age 105
Eva Zeisel, known for her playful and graceful ceramics, has died at the age of 105.
“She’s a conduit to pure things,” Mr. Klein said in 2007. He recalled that Ms. Zeisel, who had a strong appreciation of the history of decorative arts and a personal acquaintance with most of the modern design movements of the 20th century, told him never to try to create anything new. Asked how to make something beautiful, he said, she replied, “You just have to get out of the way.”
We have four or five of her pieces and they please me every time I see them.
Because, there you are
One of my favorite parts of Hillman Curtis’s book on Creating Short Films is that as soon as you turn the camera on, the person you are interviewing is there. You don’t have to do anything. They will show you who they are. I may not be remembering that part exactly right, but I’m not going to look it up, because it’s true.
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
awesome image out of context
via Rocketboom
New Christmas Catalog Price List
There are a bunch of good’uns.
Swimming Like a Dolphin
Franky Zapata uses a flyboard to zoom in and out of the water and leap through the air.
It’s like a jetpack for water.
(via ★jkottke)
Excerpt with minimal context
She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “Did you get the graham crackers?”
“Yes,” he answered.
She moved toward him in her old slippers. He thought they looked like rabbits.
coming out of sleep
I like my sentences like my women: with colons.
your inner fish
These are fantastic.
(thanks, Rich)
What does it feel like to be alive?
Mich Kemeter on the Taft Point in Yosemite, CA is walking unprotected a 30m /99 feet long highline both ways.
(via ★slyoyster)
Life in a Day
Any of you watched Life in a Day? I watched it this afternoon as part of my Funemployment. I liked it, put together by many, “directed” by the Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony). I’d like to see other directors take the 4,500 hours of video submitted and do their own take. A sort of “Aristocrats” for directors.
I put a post up before it happened. I didn’t see anyone familiar in the film.
Test Your Morality
That autism quiz seemed to go over like gangbusters so here’s another quiz for a lazy pre-holiday afternoon.
This is a scientific test sponsored by the BBC to help scientists with their science. It’s all highly scientific and not at all a dumb personality test that you take to see how you stack up against friends.
(Takes about a half an hour. Sign up for a throwaway log-in [BBC iD] required.)
I scored pretty middle of the road except for my below average sense of wrongness & disgust and my above average sense of avoidance. AKA I don’t think what you did is wrong, but I don’t want to associate with you either.
The wording of the results is a bit odd…
[Your low sense of wrongness] suggests that you are not very sensitive to actions that break your moral code, and you are quite tolerant things you don’t agree with.
I agree with the latter but can’t I be sensitive to others’ actions while having a broader moral code? If I don’t consider those actions wrong then, almost by definition, they don’t break my moral code.
Different factors such as religious belief and personal wealth can influence our attitudes to the action and behaviour of others.
Yeesh. That’s a loaded statement.
So! Who’s the best Flocker? Scientifically speaking.
Take The AQ Test
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger’s report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.
I scored 26.
trusting the machine
Isn’t it really a perennial problem? It’s just the authority is an algorithm instead of a human being:
High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
headline of the day
White House Declares No Extraterrestrial Encounters — Yet
Afghanistan – touch down in flight
I have lived from 2006-2008 in Kabul doing my civil service for a humanitarian aid organization. This March I had the chance to go back with my fiancé to show her the place I love and to capture the beauty of this country with our cameras.
Unspeakably beautiful.
(via stellar)
Miranda July, It Chooses You
Each day this week, the Book Bench will feature an excerpt from “It Chooses You,” by Miranda July. The book, to be published on November 15th, recounts July’s adventures with a series of strangers she met through the classified ads in the PennySaver. The encounters helped her finish the script for her film “The Future” — and one of the strangers played a key role in it.
Lucy tweeted this miraculous find, and I’ve enjoyed very much what I’ve seen so far. Here are the links to each excerpt:
Michael. Large Black Leather Jacket. Hollywood.
Andrew. Bullfrog Tadpoles, $2.50 Each. Paramount.
Pam. Photo Albums, $10 Each. Lakewood.
Joe. Fifty Christmas-Card Fronts, $1. Los Angeles.
…
Sheila, I see a Freecycle version of this in your future.
Hidden Mothers
This was a practice where the mother…often disguised or hiding often under a spread…holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.
Hidden Mother : Tintypes and Cabinets Flickr Group
(via Roslyn Cook / Retronaut)
from someone else’s comments
Two cannibals had killed and were eating a clown,one of the cannibals asked the other,Does this taste FUNNY to you? This has nothing to do with the story,just wanted to tell a cute joke today,
an iPad that doesn’t work
Our bodies, our flock: Parthenogenesis.
I’m sorry to have neglected “Our Bodies, Our Flock” for so long (previously), but I’m lazy. Here’s a new one for you, on parthenogenesis!
Humans, like all mammals, are incapable of performing parthenogenesis.
Jason Molina – Don’t It Look Like Rain
The wolf outside my door don’t need
Anymore of my blood
Of my bood
She don’t wait for nothing
nothing anymore
She’s watching for nothing anymore
Moon above my light
Starts fading out
I live for nothing anymore
I live for nothing
Louis Mensch
People like this delightfully baffle me, but I do wonder why they always seem to be British:
Then July brought Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the culture select committee, from which she emerged a surprise star. Within minutes, however, Piers Morgan was taunting her live on CNN for misquoting him to the committee, and subsequently extracted a public apology. Somebody else evidently also took exception, because she received an email from a pseudonymous investigative journalist claiming to have proof that she took drugs and danced drunkenly with the musician Nigel Kennedy in a nightclub in the 1990s, in full view of journalists, while working as an EMI press officer.
Her response will probably be studied by students of political spin for years to come: “Although I do not remember the specific incident,” the MP wrote in a press release, after reprinting the allegations in full, “this sounds highly probable.” She went on, “I’m sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young. I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night.”
from the comments
One of my favorite books, Kiln People, is about a society where you can create clay copies of yourself to do various tasks (menial, dangerous) while you do something else, then at the end of the day you download their memories back into you. This got me into a really creepy conversation with a friend about the difference between experiencing something first hand and remembering something. If the memory is yours (these clay copies have your personality, tactile sensations, everything) what are you losing by not experiencing it? Each moment is fleeting, at what point does something become memory instead of experience? Your senses take a measurable amount of time to transmit information and your body to physically react to things. Something 1/100 of a second ago, something 1/10 of a second ago, something 1/2 a second ago, something 5 seconds ago?
I think a harder question might be: would you rather travel the entire world asynchronously by surrogate and inload the memories, or travel 1/100th or 1/1000th as much but experience it all first hand in real synchronous time? I’m not sure which I’d pick.
