Simon Biswas, The Light of Day
A short documentary of brief interviews with elderly New Yorkers:
I don’t have answers, even at this stage of the game. I have no answers.
Beautiful and heartbreaking.
(thanks, Chris)
quote out of context
He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.
Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
(From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Via Brian Beatty.)
Some kind of lesson
Last night demons took possession of someone dear to me. The demons smashed things up, and they cracked up the yarrow stalks I use for I Ching readings.
On my way out the door, I felt the smack of my I Ching volume in the small of my back.
Today I am smiling.
There is a load of yarrow nearby, and the sun is shining. I am cutting yarrow stalks.
from the comments
Carole Corlew quoting Royal Brightbill:
The Pig
A reporter invited to a roast pig dinner on a hog farm was amazed to see the main course had three wooden legs. He asked the farmer about it.
“Oh, that was the best pig I ever had,” the farmer said. “A few years back, my house caught fire while I slept. He ran through the flames to wake me.”
“Is that how he lost his legs?”
“And just a couple of months ago, I fell in an alligator-filled bayou. He jumped in and pulled me out.”
“But what about the legs?”
“My friend, a pig that valuable you just don’t eat all at once.”
Somewhere on Wall Street a dog was barking.
Dueling Banjos
If cool is a species of bullshit obscurity, culture is now divaricate enough that we can all be cool. It’s not gold anymore. More like corn.
— name (@georgelazenby) December 28, 2011
Taco Bell be having they shit look good on commercials but that shit is sick!!
— Te-Aria (@PEANUTBIOTCH) December 29, 2011
Smell Them; You’ll Know.
Fade from black to black.
NPR’s Winter Songs: Bill T. Jones on Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’
As cold weather descends on most of the country, we’re asking for winter songs — songs that evoke the season, and the memories that come with them. So far in our [NPR] series, we’ve heard some lighthearted or slightly wistful tunes, but this next song goes to a far icier place. It’s the choice of the celebrated dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones.
His winter song comes from “Winterreise,” — or “Winter Journey” — by Franz Schubert. It’s a song cycle about a solitary traveler in a savage winter whose heart is frozen in grief. Jones chose the last song in that song cycle: “Der Leiermann,” or “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.”
“For me, it’s the musical arrangement underneath,” Jones tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block. “It speaks about a bleak landscape. And this bleak landscape takes me back to a day when I was in fourth grade out on the edge of town, looking at a snow-covered highway many, many yards away from my window — I should’ve been paying attention, but I was dreaming.
Tim Tebow & Why Faith Makes Us Nervous
If you all haven’t already happened upon it, Chuck Klosterman wrote an absolutely fascinating essay for Grantland describing the significance of Tim Tebow and why he seems to be so polarizing as a professional football player. It’s mostly about Tebow and football, except that it’s not – it’s about so much more than that:
I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West. I’m sure a few hardcores might, but not many. However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume this assumption infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he’s so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to. Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere. It seems like the thinking that ran this country into the ground.
I don’t think I’ve read such a straight-forward and correct explanation for why I get so nervous in a culture preoccupied more with feeling something than knowing anything. Also, I’m fairly convinced that some of the best writing happening today is on Grantland, the little sports website that could.
from the comments
Sarah, I tell people to just tell me the end of the movie. I never want to be in a dark theater again waiting for supernatural occurrence and be treated to the ending of “Don’t Look Now.” Yes, it was full of signs and portents, a sightless woman seeing, red hoods and skin cut on glass, flowing blood. A portent reader straight from the woods not accustomed to screens and artifice never saw it coming. The real portents and conclusions are seamless, as natural as twilight moving into night and easing back into dusk. The ones we construct and splash in the outsize are the nightmares.
from the comments
For me, holding a grudge is like expecting the world to conform to my view of it. So I don’t hold them. But everybody encounters the stuff that grudges are made of, and when I do it always leaves me with a sense that a mystery is hovering at the edge of my vision. My impulse always is to make things right, but experience has shown me that my desire for that is not always sufficient cause to make it happen. For me, moving on can often just mean becoming very good at looking away, and away, and away.
good advice out of context
I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a penis?” The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If there is just a slight hesitation, then it probably does look like a penis.
via Paul Kafasis
The Sword Maker
Korehira Watanabe is one of the last remaining Japanese swordsmiths. He has spent 40 years honing his craft in an attempt to recreate Koto, a type of sword that dates back to the Heian and Kamakura periods (794-1333 AD). No documents remain to provide context for Watanabe’s quest, but he believes he has come close to creating a replica of this mythical samurai sword.
(via Product by Process)
tweet of the day
Amy said
I figured it out. Time is short. We’re getting older. I’m resorting to violence first.
Don’t Forget Your Umbrella.
I really struggled trying to pick which images to post from this collection of vintage Tokyo subway manner posters. I feel remiss not including the Santa Says You’re Probably Drunk poster. Or the Hitler Is Inconsiderate of Others’ Personal Space poster. Or the These Sumo Wrestlers Are Basically Just Fucking poster.
There’s a real obsession with left-behind umbrellas here. And chewing gum, which can apparently fell even the superest of superheroes.
(via)
The torch gives enough light to see a couple feet in front of you
Frank Chimero posted the talk he gave at the AIGA National Conference in Phoenix:
There is a reach to knowledge and skill. You know what you know, and through time and effort and diligent focus, you’ve also come to realize a few of the things that you don’t know. You begin to understand that those unknowns are within reach if you stretch a bit. That’s learning. And then the thought occurs to you that puts the fear of God in your bones: there are things out of your reach, (Important things! Crucial things!) that you will never know that you don’t know. It’s a darkness too dark to pierce.
Don’t worry, it’s hopeful too.
tweet of the day
tweet of the day
The Van Dyke Parks Department
Van Dyke Parks’s Arrangements, Volume 1, released this past week, highlights 1960s and 1970s collaborations with Arlo Guthrie, Lowell George, Bonnie Raitt. And: Dean Martin’s son Dino. And: Beau Brummels/Stoneground frontman Sal Valentino. And: other wonders. I love it.
I also love it that in recent years Van Dyle Parks’s collaborators have included Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom, and Skrillex.
“I notice that so many of my peers, aging ingénues, rock stars, are moving along in life into their wrinkles with an adoring audience that’s aging as well, and the plain truth is that I wasn’t condemned by that because I’ve never had to be somebody to do something,” says Parks. “I don’t have a five year-plan. I just hope the phone will ring and it will bring an opportunity to dominate my life.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for hipping me to Michael Slenske’s Interview interview with Parks.)
Grandma’s vagina
I do not fear death
I found Roger Ebert’s essay on mortality (excerpted from his new book) to be quite a lovely catalyst for reflection.
from the comments
I believe it is possible to love others more than one’s self. Is that healthy? Perhaps not, but if it isn’t I have no idea of how one might define such health. The fact that I might long to die as quickly as possible doesn’t mean that I therefore long for everybody to join me. Knowing I am loved, I would set aside my choice (if able to do so). If I believed my presence burdened others in a way that outweighed potential pain caused, I would go.
A sad feature of suicide is that it can come to appear in one’s mind as an inviting doorway. A person can even begin to rely on the comfort that doorway represents. No bad thing in one’s life, then, is ever larger than those few steps required to reach that passageway. It’s seductive, and it generates a kind of empty courage — an ability to go blank in the face of danger. But sometimes that ability to be fearless generates, ironically, a pleasure in life that makes one want to hold onto it for a while. Hence my reference to Dostoyevsky’s story.
quote out of context
Ian McEwan makes a telling point. “What I believe but cannot prove,” he says, “is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death.” His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife “divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere.” The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.
The London Riots
Word.
Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.
