Community

I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed out loud at a New...

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:34:39 -0400

I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed out loud at a New Yorker cartoon until now.

"In a way, [Girls] matters more than the shows that came before it. When those shows were on the air,..."

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:42:00 -0400

“In a way, [Girls] matters more than the shows that came before it. When those shows were on the air, there was more diversity on screens all around, so we didn’t notice it as much, it didn’t seem as glaringly missing.”

- # Where (My) Girls At? | The Hairpin

Jenna Wortham is right: I don’t care if Lena Dunham’s real-life friends are all white, but insofar as she’s Saying Something – and all the coverage about the platform HBO is giving her makes it clear she is doing just that – it’s disappointing/unacceptable that the cast is so white. That’s just not what life looks like, even for privileged twentysomething New Yorkers.

Especially for privileged twentysomething New Yorkers.

Mike Daisey: Some Thoughts After The Storm

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:32:05 -0400

Mike Daisey: Some Thoughts After The Storm:

Credit where it’s due – Mike Daisey’s hubris has finally come back to earth, and he has written a thoughtful and unqualified apology. It’s a great read, and I think required of any of us who piled on with an opinion about the original dust-up.

"[The Shins’] approach became the new standard for indie rock. Bands like Grizzly Bear, St...."

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:56:01 -0400

“[The Shins’] approach became the new standard for indie rock. Bands like Grizzly Bear, St. Vincent, and Bon Iver represent different facets of the genre, but they share a tendency to foreground melody and to present an accessible version of musical beauty. So a generation raised on the dissonance and refusenik ways of bands like Sonic Youth gave way to the campfire kids. The spirit of that earlier strain hardly died, though—it just mutated into a version of dance music that kicked into gear a year after “New Slang” with LCD Soundsytem’s “Losing My Edge”.”

- # Sasha Frere-Jones, nailing it.

"But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that..."

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:46:38 -0400

“But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all. It’s close enough to make an iPhone today and have it on a U.S. store shelf next week.”

- # Letter from China: Apple, China, and the Truth

This is a really, really great post on the This American Life/Mike Daisey retraction from Evan Osnos, the New Yorker’s man in China.

What has been so frustrating to me about Daisey’s narrative is that it encourages feeble thinking about the much larger problems of globalized capitalism, problems which Apple is really dealing with a lot better than most companies its size.

Osnos points out another way Daisey gets the story wrong: by mistaking China for an exoticized other, a land of naïfs. In the end, I wonder if Daisey’s narcissism and intellectual laziness epitomize the real subject of his story: America.

Okay, look, this is a really effing good video and exactly what...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:15:52 -0500

Okay, look, this is a really effing good video and exactly what they need to show his base, which I’m pretty sure is basically me: young progressives who are as discouraged by the President now as we were inspired in 2008.

You watch this and you think, “maybe he didn’t turn out to be such a milquetoast dude after all?”

# The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today (by BarackObamadotcom)

This is a great Tumblr concept. artdetails: Charles Sprague...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:53:34 -0500

This is a great Tumblr concept.

artdetails:

Charles Sprague Pearce, Lamentation over the Death of the Firstborn of Egypt (detail)

(via cnide)

wnyc: From the BBC, a satellite picture of the capsized Costa...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:31:22 -0500

wnyc:

From the BBC, a satellite picture of the capsized Costa Concordia.

-Jody, BL Show-

Is it okay that it’s beautiful?

How 'Radiolab' Is Changing the Sound of the Radio

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:25:14 -0500

How 'Radiolab' Is Changing the Sound of the Radio:

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, writing about much more than radio: a whole new media culture that’s grown up in the last few years that prizes thoughtfulness, quality, production, and aesthetics. A neat little argument and even better idea.

This! This. stephieluv: Introducing our new game called: “Don’t...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:41:00 -0500

This! This.

stephieluv:

Introducing our new game called:

“Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends.”

The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check.

Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from twitter/fb/texting and to encourage conversations.

Rules:

1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.

2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.

3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.

4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.

5) If the bill comes before anyone has flipped over their phone everybody is declared a winner and pays for their own meal.

Variations/house rules:

-Starting the game after everyone is seated.

-In the rare event that multiple people flip their phones simultaneously, the bill is split between said players.

- Feel free to invoke penalties/strikes systems.

Notes:

- No touching or messing with anybody else’s phones.

- You don’t have to stack the phones. This was done for picture taking purposes.

- I realize I should perhaps think of a different name for this awesome game. Because I don’t mean to imply that everyone who checks their phone during meals is a di*k.

- I recommend not being such a stickler or hardass on people about the rules and even initiation of the game. Basic premise is to just get people open to the idea of staying active and attentive to one another. But if someone has to take a call; they have to take a call =).

- Have fun! It’s really more of a fun concept in this new age high tech life of ours. Conversation is the spice of life.

(via Stellar/@shanselman/blkgirlblogging)

Love this illo by Vivienne Fleisher, from the front of...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:16:00 -0500

Love this illo by Vivienne Fleisher, from the front of yesterday’s Sunday Review in the Times. The article itself is in my wheelhouse, too —

Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on… But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

# Pico Iyer on The Joy of Quiet

This video of a door-to-door salesman came across Stellar today,...

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:47:04 -0500

This video of a door-to-door salesman came across Stellar today, and I was dumbstruck: it’s an incredible barrage of race-based humor from start to finish. And, of course, it keeps his white customers “in stitches.”

Twenty-first century minstrelsy, completely unvarnished. For all that’s changed in the last hundred years, this one thing remains exactly the same, almost line for line. I don’t even know what else to say about it, other than to simply let it speak for itself at the moment.

(via ★interesting)

woollypedia: ben franklin’s daily schedule (thank you,...

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:46:00 -0400

woollypedia:

ben franklin’s daily schedule (thank you, yum-and-yuk!)

Makes me think of Murukami, too:

His running balances out the rigor of his writing life, which involves going to bed each night by 10 p.m., then rising between 4 and 5 a.m. and sitting in the quiet, early morning to “wait to catch what’s coming.” His writing process requires “stepping into the darkness,” where he observes, remembers, and writes down what he sees. His early books, he said, originated in an individual darkness, while his later works tap into the darkness found in society and history.

I saw this on Saturday morning, thought, “That’s...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:14:02 -0400

I saw this on Saturday morning, thought, “That’s what Jad looks like. Now I’ll know him if I run into him,” and promptly ran into him about two hours later at a bookstore in Fort Greene. Radio is magical.

newzed:

The Obsessive Pleasures of ‘Radiolab’

"The very idea of a specifically French history museum is ideological, Mr. Offenstadt added. “To know..."

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 09:54:13 -0500

“The very idea of a specifically French history museum is ideological, Mr. Offenstadt added. “To know about French Algeria you need to know about Algeria before France arrived there,” he explained. “If we need any history museum, it would be a world history museum, not a French history museum, to give us a real perspective on who we are, and what is France today.””

- How can you not love this country?

# Sarkozy’s History Museum Plan in Paris Stirs Controversy

"Omnia California, to paraphrase Julius Caesar, is divided into three parts. To the north lies San..."

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 14:29:00 -0500

“Omnia California, to paraphrase Julius Caesar, is divided into three parts. To the north lies San Francisco: cultured, affluent, gracious, refined, environmentally sensitive, ethnically harmonious. To the south lies Los Angeles: vulgar, bursting with cupidity, violent, racist, ferociously noncerebral, ecologically flayed. Hideous. Farther to the south lies San Diego, which has a zoo.”

- Joe Queenan, in SPY magazine, February 1994. The next paragraph is gold, too:

When a traveler from the East Coast announces that he is making a trip to California, he is expected to express revulsion if his business takes him to the cultural cesspool of Los Angeles but to leap into paroxysms of ecstasy should his business take him to the shining city on the hill where little cable cars run halfway to the stars. (Should he announce that his business is taking him to San Diego, people will usually tell him to visit the zoo.)

It’s ultimately an apologetic for L.A., of course, finding San Francisco to be “a bit of a joke.”

slaughterhouse90210: “He was one of the numerous and varied...

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 16:04:22 -0500

slaughterhouse90210:

“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Fifty

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:48:00 -0500

I’m terrifically late to this meme, but I had some free time over the holidays AND AM PLEASED TO BESTOW UPON YOU A LIST OF MY FIFTY FAVORITE ALBUMS. A couple notes before we begin, then stayed tuned for highlights and hard-hitting analysis after the show.

[Note 1] This is not a list of my favorite artists’ best albums, nor is it a list of what I consider to be the greatest albums in my collection, nor still a list of the albums I listen to most frequently. I ended up enjoying this process because I simply asked, “which do I love more?” as I fine-tuned things. That’s a tricky question, as it involves myriad vagaries - longevity, admiration, sheer familiarity - that can’t always be sussed out with a sort of desert-island elimination thought experiment. Love/favorite is something transcendental. I like that. It’s also frequently embarrassing - I would have you believe I’m refined enough to love more than what I discovered between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, but this list gives the lie to that pretense. Again, it’s not my judgment as a connoisseur, just my favorites. How very Generation Me of me.

[Note 2] The above got overlong, but I’d just add that I especially loved this because I feel tenderly toward (and, in the iTunes era, protective of) the album as a form, and this list gets at all sorts of things about what makes albums great apart from a few good songs or the greatness of a given artist. I love the art form of the album; this is a small, smiling homage to it.

69 Love Songs – The Magnetic Fields, 1999.
Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? – The Unicorns, 2004.
Pinkerton – Weezer, 1996.
Funeral – Arcade Fire, 2004.
Ys – Joanna Newsom, 2008.
Talking Heads 77 – Talking Heads, 1977.
Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys, 1966.
Have One on Me – Joanna Newsom, 2010.
Johnny Cash at San Quentin – Johnny Cash, 1969.
The Milk-Eyed Mender – Joanna Newsom, 2004.
Bitte Orca – Dirty Projectors, 2009.
i – The Magnetic Fields, 2004.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel, 1998.
I Am a Bird Now – Antony and the Johnsons, 2005.
The Beatles (The White Album) – The Beatles, 1968.
Summerteeth – Wilco, 1999.
The Mysterious Production of Eggs – Andrew Bird, 2005.
Weezer (The Blue Album) – Weezer, 1994.
Abbey Road – The Beatles, 1969.
Night Falls over Kortedala – Jens Lekman, 2007.
Return to the Sea – Islands, 2006.
Take Offs and Landings – Rilo Kiley, 2001.
Castaways and Cutouts – The Decemberists, 2002.
Charm School – Bishop Allen, 2003.
Wild Like Children – Tilly and the Wall, 2004.
Chutes Too Narrow – The Shins, 2003.
Mass Romantic – The New Pornographers, 2000.
Marry Me – St. Vincent, 2007.
Mermaid Avenue – Billy Bragg & Wilco, 1998.
Paper Television – The Blow, 2006.
Riot on an Empty Street – Kings of Convenience, 2004.
Come on Feel the Illinoise! – Sufjan Stevens, 2005.
The Execution of All Things – Rilo Kiley, 2003.
If You’re Feeling Sinister – Belle & Sebastian, 1996.
I, Jonathan – Jonathan Richman, 1992.
A Ghost Is Born – Wilco, 2004.
Fashion Nugget – Cake, 1996.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, 2005.
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood – Neko Case, 2006.
The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967.
Reconstruction Site – The Weaktherthans, 2003.
The Modern Lovers – The Modern Lovers, 1976
OK Computer – Radiohead, 1997.
Soviet Kitsch – Regina Spektor, 2003.
Biggest Blues Hi-Fi – Camera Obscura, 2002.
LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem, 2005.
Dragonslayer – Sunset Rubdown, 2009.
The Concretes – The Concretes, 2003.
You Think It’s Like This But It’s Really Like This – Mirah, 2000.
American Water – Silver Jews, 1998.

[Post-game] i (#12) is the first album I wouldn’t defend as a relative masterpiece - the first of many. The White Album (#15) holds an incredibly high place solely on account of my fondness for the memory of playing the LP as a kid, dancing around the family room to ‘Ob La Di, Ob La Da,’ and hearing the record skip when I jumped off the coffee table. I know, it’s weird that Joanna Newsom is all up in there (#5, #8, #10), but here comes my shtick about albums: she cares about the form of the thing so she scores well here (also, she’s easily the artist I most admire these days). Another album thing: I’m not the Decemberists fan I once was, but they’d surely do better on a list of my favorite artists than they do here (only Castaways and Cutouts, #23). Despite Colin Meloy’s prog-rock fixations and sprawling records, none of them stick with me in the way that these fifty do. Same thing goes for Belle & Sebastian. Last: I never really got Radiohead. Now you all know, and can judge me for it.

Hey, that was fun. For me. Hat tips to Rosie and Ezra, of course. Check their lists out - they have better taste in music than me, anyway.

"I have nothing against [the iPad]. I love the notion that “this is a book that remembers it has a..."

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:00:00 -0500

“I have nothing against [the iPad]. I love the notion that “this is a book that remembers it has a body.” When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.”

- Jonathan Safran Foer on his stake in the material form of the book. Kottke writes, “Foer’s new book is called Tree of Codes and he constructed it by taking his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and cut out words to form a completely new story.” The book itself is die-cut page by page so that it forms something like a sculpture.

I love that last sentence of his quote. Foer is at once uncommitted to the book, yet aware of how the demands commodities place on us aren’t solely burdensome – somehow they also make us who we are in some fundamental way.

# Jonathan Safran Foer Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art

[via Kottke]

# Geoffrey Crawley, 83, Photographic Scientist The above photo...

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:33:00 -0500

# Geoffrey Crawley, 83, Photographic Scientist

The above photo is a rather famous photographic hoax from 1917 – the Cottingley fairies, it’s called, and the man who debunked it died last week. He was both an utterly compelling and ultimately obscure figure; his obit is a great read and a great example of why so many people make the obituaries their first stop in the morning – check it out.

What I wanted to comment on, however, is – well – how obviously fake those fairies are,amiright? And yet it took Mr. Crawley, our debunker, seventy-five years to ultimately prove it. Which gets me thinking about the technologized eye.

Basically: in 1917, all the media people consumed were several orders of magnitude less precise than what we have today. Newspapers and magazines still used drawings and lithographs. Cinema was hardly a decade old and in the throes of the silent era. Photography was a burgeoning art form, but not something the public regularly encountered.

Instead, media – lithographs, contemporary cinema’s melodramatic vernacular, minstrel shows – invited extrapolation, imagination, to cover the extra bit of distance from what was depicted in fact to what was conjured in the heart and mind. The American philosophical taste for Spiritualism, mentioned in Crawley’s obituary, both contextualizes this trend and is contextualized by it: people were creating spirits from the mundane in the theater, and so it made sense that spirits might exist in the mundane when they left.

I’m arguing that not only were people embellishing reality, but they perceived reality differently as a result of their embellishing habits. It’s not just that they translated the melodrama of the screen into the texture of their daily experience, but that their experience seemed more like cinematic melodrama. Thus, the Cottingley fairies are fantastical – clearly too fantastical to the modern eye – but in a visual economy whereeverything is fantastical, the “real” face of the girl and the fantastically-drawn fairy aren’t so clearly different.

Maybe it’s helpful to think from our present context. Today, my iPhone has 326 pixels per inch. I watch 1080i video and every bar I visit has hi-def television. My eye is so accustomed to precision that, after only a year of hi-def video being commonplace on YouTube, the low-res 360p setting seems impossibly grainy.

With an eye so shaped by technology, it’s immediately apparent to me that the girl in Cottingley fairy photo is really there while the fairies themselves look different in myriad ways – they lack dimensionality, are clearly drawn by hand, are posed unrealistically.

That’s the technologized eye. I immediately perceive the artifice of that long-debated photo, and I’m sure many of my generation do, as well. But it’s not just the resolution of individual images or media at issue here.

I’m well out of my depth at this point, but that acuity is shaping how I perceive the world around me. Here, it’s easier to see looking back: folks in the 1920s couldn’t make this differentiation between the girl and the fairies, so there are all sorts of other distinctions they couldn’t draw in their visual experience of the world. In turn, they imagined all sorts of lesser fairies. Not just imagined, but experienced as real. The world was full of enchantment because the visual culture made it so. Today, my technologized eye is similarly making the world into something particular; because it’s my own eyes, it’s harder to say exactly what that is. But by pursuing the question, I’m learning that my world is under its own particular enchantments which, while they go by different names, are every bit as fantastical and every bit as real as that of the fairies.