Art&Culture
03/16/08 -
the reel addict - Dear Mr. Ferrell, So let me cut right to the chase: you need to stop making sports movies. After KICKING & SCREAMING, TALLADEGA NIGHTS, BLADES OF GLORY, and now SEMI-PRO, enough is enough. Heck, I might even suggest you steer clear of films that rest solely on making fun particular professions, whether they be sports-related or not (i.e. ZOOLANDER, BEWITCHED, and ANCHORMAN). It’s not that you’re...
03/16/08 -
Project Marmite - Eleven years ago, I arrived in Paris by train with only a backpack and a guidebook. This time, I arrived by rail with a backpack and a guidebook. And, of course, my beautiful wife. Last time was a week, this time it was a weekend. As with so many other vacations I have been on, this one required getting up at stupid o’clock. Once we arrived at London’s Waterloo station the stress decreased,...
03/16/08 -
Lebbeus Woods - One thing for sure, Rem Koolhaas doesn’t hedge his bets. He also knows how to stick his neck out and not lose his head. He has perfected the old debating trick of disarming his critics in advance. Philip Johnson was also a master at this. Before anyone could criticize the pandering commercialism of his office tower designs, he would say, “I’m a whore.” Rem Koolhaas gives this tactic a European...
03/14/08 -
Chromewaves - Ahhh, ATX. Once again I find myself nestled in your soft, tortilla-like bosom. Ever since I decided to attend the 2008 edition of SxSW (which was about two minutes after the 2007 edition ended), I swore that I'd do this year right - badge, downtown hotel, RSVPs to all the day parties......
03/13/08 -
Hip Hop Linguistics - Whenever I think of Del Tha Funky Homosapien, I think of my trip to the University of Michigan. Back in ’97, my homie E and I took a road trip to Ann Arbor to holler at some young ladies that were students there. We got in late Friday night, kicked it at some keg party, and woke up the next morning to attend a football game. A couple hours and a half bottle of snuck-into-the-stadium Captain...
03/13/08 -
The Rock Blogger - I had just recently discovered Vic Chesnutt, the celebrated folk/rock songwriter from Athens Georgia, after learning that A Silver Mt. Zion, one of my favorite post rock bands, lent their orchestral stylings to this harrowing album. Recorded at the now legendary Hotel2Tango in Montreal, Chesnutt’s collaboration, which also includes members of Fugazi and Godspeed You Black Emperor, fits beautifully...
03/13/08 -
Comics Reporter - I bought these two comics at a local video store while waiting to get a prescription filled next door. There were two amusing elements to that purchase. The first was that the manager was inordinately pleased by my sale, as if he were relieved that at least a couple of the books had moved (they were among six or seven comics at the bottom of a rack with some newer manga/anime-looking magazines nearer...
03/13/08 -
The Root - Initially, I avoided The Wire because I wondered if it was truly drama or just TV intent on scaring white folks into voting Republican. Three seasons ago, I gave in to the buzz, and The Wire drew me in. I'm not from Baltimore, and I have never been there, but The Wire felt a lot like watching my old 'hood disintegrate. Race and class were complicated by politics and corruption. Lines between good...
03/12/08 -
Dead Metaphor - Thanks to a couple of fine Aussie gents I was able to lay my hands on this rather large stack of Australian zines a few weeks ago and I’ve finally managed to get through them all. Unlike virtually anywhere else on the planet (as far as I know), Australia seems to have a thriving paper zine culture. The only really good, new-ish music zine from the US that stands up to these at all is Mindless...
03/12/08 -
Wooster Collective - It was about a year ago that JR first told us about his “Women are Heroes" project, a collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières. Taking his trusty 28 millimeter lens, for the last year JR has been traveling to such countries as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Southern Sudan and Kenya, documenting the lives of a group of incredibly courageous women. ...
03/12/08 -
Tokyo Times - In an effort to promote the publication of his new book on decorative delectables, Japanese sushi chef and show off, Ken Kawasumi, opted to recreate Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with sushi. Which, while far from a facsimile, is still a fair effort considering it’s made of fish....
03/11/08 -
Pitchfork - We already knew that Kelley Deal rocked. The Breeders, her band with sister Kim, has been making some of the coolest music on the planet on and off for years. But did we know that Kelley Deal's bags rocked? No we didn't. Well, apparently they do, and she's writing a whole book about it! Bags That Rock: Knitting on the Road With Kelley Deal will be published by Lark this October. ...
03/11/08 -
Jewcy - Up until last week, the most interesting—you might even say fierce—competition on TV was the battle to win Season 4 of Bravo TV's hit series “Project Runway.” Would it be Christian “Young, Fierce, and Talented” Siriano, Jillian “I Can Make Twizzlers Look Sexy” Lewis, or Rami “Drapery” Kashou? Last Wednesday Christian emerged as the winner, but Ramallah-born Rami was a close...
03/11/08 -
desicritics - Here's a bit of shocking information: remember Aurangzeb? That jolly old Mughal who imprisoned various family members including his dad and his son, killed his brothers and generally went about making himself pleasant to his populace through the means of banning things like music and killing Sikh gurus?...
03/10/08 -
Lucid Culture - By turns fierce, fervent, brilliantly lyrical and subtly witty, this is an album that needed to be made and it’s a good thing Black 47 were the ones to do it. To say that this is an ambitious project is an understatement, but it works, brilliantly because frontman Larry Kirwan’s songs tell the story of the war through the eyes of those stuck over there fighting it: the songs here have a ring of...
03/10/08 -
Asylum - Junot Díaz received such a rapturous reception for his debut collection of stories, Drown, in 1997 that it must have scared the living daylights out of him. How to follow that? In preference to knocking something out in a year or two, he has ruminated, cogitated and gestated for a decade over his first novel....
03/10/08 -
Kotaku - Years ago, tattoos were considered quite the taboo for normal folk. They were usually reserved for the likes of bikers, thugs, sailors and circus sideshow performers. In the last ten to fifteen years, tattooing has become de rigueur amongst the alternative set, slowly spreading its inky wings to a larger part of the general populous....
03/07/08 -
BLDG Blog - As interesting for its form as for its content, the project pictured here is something called "Willa's Wonderland," a one-off urban design comic strip set on the urban fringes of Atlanta by LOOMstudio and Amy Landesberg Architects, in collaboration with artist John Grider and writer Julia Klatt-Singer. I've always thought that comic books – in fact, entire graphic novels – are an underused...
03/07/08 -
Fecal Face - There are artists whom we've loved for so long and yet aren't really up on the site that much. For some reason Maya is one of those artists... It's with great joy that we bring this NYC based artist to the Fecal. She's recently wrapped up a solo show at Fifty24SF here in San Francisco to coincide with a book she just released through Upper Playground and is preparing a show with Chris Duncan and...
03/07/08 -
The Auteur's Notebook - Conjuring a subversive audio/visual atmosphere that is neither dreamy nor exactly expressionistic, Paranoid Park nevertheless gets into the headspace of its young high school skater protagonist and treats with supreme respect what might be best described as a blown mind....
03/06/08 -
Walking Off The Big Apple - The Met arranges the grays thematically and, more or less, chronologically. After stating the thesis, well-made in the presentation of False Start and Jubilee, two paintings with the same subject, one with color and one with gray, the exhibit walks the visitor through the visual language of the artist - the objects (drawer, coat hanger, etc.), American flags in gray, the maps and targets leached of...
03/06/08 -
Artdaily - Opening on March 6, David Zwirner will present a new exhibition by Marcel Dzama. For the last decade, Canadian-born Dzama has shown extensively throughout North America and Europe. Transforming 519 West 19th Street into an odeum of imagination, Dzama’s ambitious fifth solo exhibition at the gallery will include single drawings, composite drawings, costumes, dioramas, and film. ...
03/06/08 -
9513 - Country Music is concerned with topics like life and death, sin and salvation, and the experience of the outsider and the lower classes. It should come as no surprise then that many fine country songs feature prisoners waiting to die. Here are 10 of the finest....
03/05/08 -
Lebbeus Woods - One thing for sure, Rem Koolhaas doesn’t hedge his bets. He also knows how to stick his neck out and not lose his head. He has perfected the old debating trick of disarming his critics in advance. Philip Johnson was also a master at this. Before anyone could criticize the pandering commercialism of his office tower designs, he would say, “I’m a whore.” Rem Koolhaas gives this tactic a European...
03/05/08 -
Keen & Graeve - Gary Gygax, best known as the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and father of roleplaying games, passed away today. He was probably only known to the most extreme geeks by name but you would be hard pressed to find anyone remotely interested in gaming who hasn’t been impacted by Mr. Gygax in some way. While D&D probably remains his largest accomplishment to date, he left his mark on the gaming...
03/05/08 -
Media Loper - This special Leap Day podcast features another vintage interview from the Medialoper vaults. Recorded in 1987, this is one of the more unusual Jonathan Richman interviews you will ever hear. How unusal? Well, I think it’s safe to say that this is probably the first and only time that Jonathan Richman was ever interviewed by a janitor....
03/04/08 -
LHOOQtius ov Blog - Conveniently located less than a half block from the Bowery Mission, ensuring your entrance and exit takes place on litter-strewn streets where you'll be accosted by one or more of the Bowery's colorfully authentic crazy, drunken vagrants, New York's imaginatively named New Museum is the latest in a series of art venues recently built or refurbished in a desperate attempt by the benefactors of...
03/04/08 -
ken levine - So I was walking down the street today…well more like sliding down the street...when I came across a stand for Girl Scout Cookies. Naturally I was delighted—I wait all year for this. So I go up to the stand prepared to buy some “Thin Mints” when I see this: Girl Scout Cookie 100 calorie packs. I was horrified. Girl Scouts shouldn’t know what calories are much less be counting them. Now...
03/04/08 -
Future of Music Coalition - Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor released the band’s (OK, his) new album this week in suitably experimental fashion. Theorizing that fans would be willing to pay extra for additional content, Reznor made the record, Ghosts I-IV, available in several varieties via his website. The basic package is free: nine songs from the album in a DRM-free MP3 format. For $5, fans get the full album...
03/03/08 -
the reel addict - Before I say anything, I do want to emphasize that I mean only the best. My words are not meant to cut. Given the underperformance of your most recent film, SEMI-PRO, at the box office this past weekend, my intentions are not to kick you while you’re down. If anything, it’s to attempt to pick you up off the ground, brush you off, pat you gently on your butt, and send you on your way in a direction...
03/03/08 -
peter and patty - Our lead up to this race was actually a build up for the Napa Valley Marathon. Since the half marathon in November last year we've increased our long run up to 20 miles and our weekly mileage peaked at 32 miles. We've run about 260 miles since then. It wasn't ideal. There was the usual winter sickness. There was travel. There weren't enough mid-week runs because work squeezed them out. But for us...
03/03/08 -
bounceback - And how to include the energy costs that the authors induced during their 100 mile diet? One of the reasons they put forth for attempting a 100 year diet is that it was ecologically unconscionable and wasteful to have fresh food, on average, travel 1500 miles to their plate. Yet, they seems to also log many miles in their car that year driving out to local farms for the small amounts needed to...
03/02/08 -
morley ron travels - Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, and the Grand Canyon National Park form a landmass where the bottom of Bryce forms the top of Zion, which forms the top of the Grand Canyon North Rim, speaking from a geological perspective. From a human perspective this is the most beautiful and impressive series of parks. We have spend 3 or 4 days in each one, and now are on the south rim of the...
03/02/08 -
feministing - It's a question that has haunted the movement for ages. It came up quite a bit for me when I was teaching gender studies at Hunter College. I could see that I was reaching the young women in men in my class--that they were moved to think about race and sex as constructs, sexism in the workplace, rape, sexuality as a spectrum not a binary (in other words, they were really "getting it")--but few of...
03/02/08 -
nz gardener - Last winter a good friend of mine gave me some green walnut liqueur made by his mother. (Actually, I think he gave it to me to try... and then I sort of "borrowed" the rest of the bottle.) Green walnut liqueur is a traditional Italian tipple that tastes like liquid cinnamon and is as black as squid ink. It's unbelievably delicious and, quite frankly, it's miraculous stuff to make. It's hard to...
02/29/08 -
cinematical - 2008 is not this generation's 1968. Let's get that matter straight, right away. Even if we can draw some parallels or see some similarities between now and then, the truth is that it was a very tragic year, and despite our penchant to fetishize the period and wish that our time could be so important and powerful, we need to pray no politicians are assassinated this year (the fact that one particular...
02/29/08 -
pitchfork media - Final Fantasy, meet the grim reality of bureaucratic bullshit. It exists even in Canada, believe it or not, and even within the country's state-subsidized healthcare system that is-- while certainly not without flaws-- still the envy of quite a few folks here in the U.S. Here's the sad tale [via Torontoist]: Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett recently went to renew the card that entitles him to health...
02/29/08 -
parlezmoipress - One of the most interesting things to me about the Misha Defonseca controversy that has occupied most of my blogging for the past week is the incredible role the internet and blogging has played in this story. The original book, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust, was published in 1997 by Mt Ivy Press. At that time the internet was nowhere near as commonly used as it is now and who could have known...
02/28/08 -
drye goods - When I was a kid, I could tell you the brand names of all the cigarettes that were made in North Carolina as well as the companies that produced them and the cities where they were manufactured. I knew that tobacco had been a dominant part of the state’s economy since Reconstruction, and was a major factor in the growth of the state’s largest cities – especially Durham and Winston-Salem,...
02/28/08 -
Stephen Bainbridge - Rachel Ray and reality TV. I’m not sure which is the lesser evil. But if they cancel Alton Brown or Giada De Laurentiis, I’m going to be seriously pissed off. (Of course, I’ve been PO’d at The Food Network since they cancelled David Rosengarten’s Taste program, which was the single best food and wine TV show ever.) On a serious note, I understand that the profit motive is driving the...
02/28/08 -
ken levine - Okay. This is going to be fun. Wild but fun. Not everyone loved NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN even though it won Best Picture. Bob Gale, a screenwriter who I have enormous respect for (among his credits: BACK TO THE FUTURE) is one of those naysayers. He had a few teeny-weenie logic issues and one or two questions. Here's his assessment and I know the comments are going to start flying. I'm just the...
02/27/08 -
Corduroy orange - Free range doesn’t actually mean much of anything. It’s unfortunate, but hens housed in a warehouse, not kept in cages, and given access to the outside through a door at the end of the warehouse that they never travel through are free range. The only difference between cage free eggs and free range eggs is that the cage free hens don’t have the door at the end of the warehouse, but since none...
02/27/08 -
just hungry - Japanese people love eating eggs in many ways. One of the most popular uses for the egg is to make a very thin omelette called usuyaki tamago (literally, thinly cooked egg). Usuyaki tamago is used julienned as a garnish, or as a wrapper for sushi rice and other things....
02/27/08 -
jets on green - Speaking of the Rapson Greenbelt, Inhabitat reports: "Modernist architect Ralph Rapson has managed to reinterpret this 60-year old design with the green panache of a 21st century prefab. The Rapson Greenbelt, an articulate series of prefab dwellings, is derived from a 1945 design called Case Study #4, which debuted back then as part of Arts & Architecture’s Case Study House Program. Today, the...
02/26/08 -
women artists of the world - I believe art has the ability to transform a community by helping to chip away at walls of prejudice and create a climate of acceptance, and women artist, through their artistry and vision of a more peaceful world, are especially suited for this task. To test my convictions, I decided to seek out women artists in a society dramatically different from the USA; I choose Prague, the capital of the...
02/26/08 -
terrierman - I don't breed dogs and am not particularly enammored with those that do, as most have no idea of what they are doing, do not work their dogs at all, and essentially treat the whole thing as a lark -- or a way to move up in the "pecking order" of the show-ring community. Breeding dogs is not a sport, and if you are not working your dogs a lot, please do nottell me you are breeing working dogs or...
02/26/08 -
the book pirate - The first is to look at this book as a coffee table book. It should sit on the table being picked up by friends and family who will flip through it while relaxing on the couch. It would make a good conversation starter. If this is how you view the book then there are so flaws. The first is that it is a small paperback book. Coffee table books are normally comically oversize, glossy, and contain many...
02/26/08 -
A Library By Any Other Name - Ok, I climbed outta my hole this morning and "discovered" cell phone novels...currently a huge hit in Japan...coming to your neighborhood bookstore...? My favorite light-weight news program CBS News Sunday Morning did a piece on the literary format. First off, let me make it very clear...this is adult (very adult) reading entertainment for the most part, so I am not a supporter of its content!...
02/26/08 -
1000 Papercuts - The popular A&E reality series Flip This House shows developers buying properties, fixer-uppers and foreclosures, renovating the property then turning it around for a profit. Tackling one of the most exciting aspects of today's high-stakes real estate market - the transformation of an eyesore into a profit-making beauty - A&E's hour-long "docu-soap" follows the travails of three real-estate...
02/26/08 -
Freehold 2 - Has the art of recitation gone out of vogue? I can remember as a schoolgirl being taught to recite mnemonics that would help with spelling or pronunciation of words newly encountered: “When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking,” we were taught to say. I remember as early as first or second grade, being taught how to make a formal introduction and the class having to practice it...
02/25/08 -
Bridget Johnson - I saw No Country for Old Men in one of the best possible ways: in an old, grand, one-screen theater from the 1940s, the last show of the evening (as it alternated with Citizen Kane), where the owners nuked real butter in the concession-stand microwave to pour over the popcorn. The velvety red seats with wooden armrests (before audiences got spoiled by cup holders), original architecture, and...
02/24/08 -
nedraggett - The first I knew about TVT, aside from the ‘TV’s Greatest Themes’ compilations that made their initial name, came courtesy of a little release of theirs in 1989 called Pretty Hate Machine, the debut album release of another entity equally well known for a three-letter name. I remembered looking at the cover art and all at KLA at UCLA and thinking, “Oh, another thing on Wax Tra…wait, this...
02/24/08 -
repeat the sounding joy - The boys normally are more summer fishers, the kind where you spend all day on the boat. Normally, I don’t go along because it’s a matter of fitting people into boats, and I don’t want to take up space at an event I’m not particularly good at. When it comes to ice fishing, fitting people into boats isn’t so much of an issue, and I’m welcome to come, but it’s cold. Being the big suck...
02/24/08 -
project marmite - As with so many other vacations I have been on, this one required getting up at stupid o’clock. Once we arrived at London’s Waterloo station the stress decreased, though. Traveling by train is much more civilized than air travel. Arriving at the station twenty minutes before travelling is all that is required. A quick check of passport and ticket sees you aboard the train. None of the scrum,...
02/21/08 -
majikthise - David Simon was a police reporter for the real Baltimore Sun before he started producing TV dramas. Simon also wrote two important pieces of long-form reporting from the streets of Baltimore, Homicide and The Corner. The latter, Simon co-wrote with Ed Burns, a retired Baltimore cop who also writes for The Wire. Simon's books challenged many of my preconceptions about the methodology of journalism....
02/21/08 -
Corduroy orange - I was driving on Monday afternoon and had the radio tuned to NPR, where I heard a snippet of an interview Terry Gross was doing with Dan Koeppel, author of a new book called Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. I was entranced and I stopped the car at Barnes & Noble so I could buy the book—the sort of quick purchase that I almost never make, but in this instance was glad that I...
02/21/08 -
Peter Suderman - Lost, like the war, began with a spectacular opening—a $10 million+ shock-and-awe pilot that you couldn't possibly ignore. And as it opened, it was sold on the basis of resolving a few key, central mysteries: What, exactly, is the smoke monster? How are all these dead relatives showing up? Are the survivors connected, and how? And what is the nature and origin of the island? And it was sold on...
02/21/08 -
plain stella jane - My Yahoo mail box was flooded with petition after petition on forcing Wikipedia to remove the pictures of Nabi Muhammad (s.a.w) on its site. At first, I was confused over this barrage of emails, most of it coming from a Pakistani email group. I decided then to just look into the link provided, hoping to be enlightened by the whole dramaIt is a drama. Like seriously, taken upon by our Muslim brothers...
02/21/08 -
wdrye goods - I grew up in North Carolina in the 1950s and ‘60s. By the time I was a teenager, the egregious sins of the tobacco companies and the serious health threats caused by smoking were just starting to come to light. So during my formative years I was steeped in a pro-tobacco culture before the anti-smoking movement really got underway. When I was a kid, I could tell you the brand names of all the...
02/21/08 -
counterfeit chic - So it is that when, as Counterfeit Chic readers will recall, Jessica suspected Chanel of knocking off her wittily inscribed scrimshaw bracelets, she went into action. First came her amusing scrimshaw response, a one-off "Ripped off by Chanel" bracelet. Then she launched a line of less-expensive resin bangles to satisfy her new fans. Now, Stiletto Jungle reports that Jessica has re-created her...
02/20/08 -
roiword - This month the Smurfs are celebrating a 50-year anniversary. The cartoon, which was the brainchild of Pierre Culliford (better known as Peyo), began in 1958 as a comic in the Belgium magazine Le Journal de Spirou. It was adopted into a cartoon in the United Stated in 1981, and inserted into NBC’s Saturday Morning Lineup where it successfully stayed for eight seasons. Internationally, the Smurfs...
02/20/08 -
the plugg - When I was a kid they were called comic books and I was forbidden to read them. They fostered “lazy reading habits” according to my mom and were “a waste of time and money” as far as my dad was concerned. To be fair, my parents were mostly right. Comic art was merely serviceable, if not outright crude, and the story lines were usually juvenile. But, then I was in a book store and saw a copy...
02/20/08 -
grow the hunt - I love archery and it’s my passion. I’m into it heavy and love to help people who want to learn how to shoot or just need a little help tuning their bow to get them back into action. This past weekend I met a young man that is about as enthusiastic about bow hunting as anyone I’ve ever met. He reminds me of myself when I first started shooting a long time ago. Bart bought a great bow two...
02/19/08 -
social consumer - One of the more intriguing requirements of my graduate program is the Montgomery Prize Competition. In essence, the contest tests a student’s ability to construct a lucid argument relaying the importance of a chosen object and it’s appropriateness for museum acquisition and display. Part of the task pairs the speaker (student) with a colleague in conservation, and the two work in tandem to assess...
02/19/08 -
life is a bowl of cherris - After a flight that was delayed for two hours, Celeste and I made our way (kid-free!!!) to Dubai on an airplane that made very strange and worrisome noises. We managed to land without incident, though, and made our way into the "City of Captivating Contrasts" in the United Arab Emirates. Our first stop was to the Mall of the Emirates to Ski Dubai. It's an indoor ski slope inside the mall. As we...
02/19/08 -
samurai frog - I watched Death Proof over the weekend; it was the first time I'd seen it since it was in the theater nearly a year ago. To my surprise, stripped away from the whole Grindhouse concept, it actually turns out to be about something. You wouldn't know, since Tarantino either can't quite handle his film or he's just doing his damnedest to disguise it, but it's more than a genre exercise. It's about...
02/18/08 -
photo allies - I was nervous, even a bit scared. I was with my friend, Regina. We are about the same skill level in surfing, but she surfs these breaks everyday and has been out in 20ft+ waves many times. Without her knowledge and experience, I would never have dared paddle out in those conditions. That day, I decided Sunset Beach was the best place for me. The waves had 12-15ft faces. The conditions were clean,...
02/18/08 -
euros ate my dollars - The unwelcome turn of events on New Year’s Eve was the first (and hopefully last) moment on this trip that I’ve genuinely feared for our safety. It was surreal: imagine riot footage you’ve seen on television, with protesters desperately scattering while being chased by cops wielding weapons. Not a scene I ever saw myself being a part of. When we’d safely made it back to the apartment,...
02/18/08 -
melanie's old country garden - If you've been gardening for many years then you probably have belonged to a gardening club at some time. Before the wonderful world of the internet, a garden club was one of the only ways to share gardening information with others who share the same obsession. In my own case, the gardening craze came upon me fairly early in life. I had a day job chartering vessels for a German steel company that...
02/15/08 -
straight from the farm - I know we all enjoy the coming of spring and the sooner the better, generally speaking. But without the cleansing freeze of a snowy blanket and many bitter cold nights, life cycles are bound to get wacky. For one thing, disease and weeds in the soil will live to see another day, rather than succumbing to the big freeze. This prospect is a daunting one indeed for the small organic farmer. It’s...
02/15/08 -
richard s wheeler - I have regarded The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as a bellwether film that would tell us much about the status of the traditional western story in this country. The film had everything going for it. The James brothers are heroes unequaled in our folklore. Generations of Americans have absorbed the story of the James gang, and have passed it along to later generations....
02/15/08 -
Whassup in the Milky - One of the most striking sights in the winter sky is the star-studded figure of Orion the Hunter. After the Big Dipper, Orion’s hourglass shape is perhaps the best known star pattern in the night sky. Once learned, it is recognized by most people without difficulty. Because it straddles the celestial equator, the constellation--or some part of it--can be seen from everywhere on the planet. The...
02/15/08 -
East Coast Bias - Dale Earnhardt Jr. no longer drives for the team that bears his father's name. This off-season, he moved from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsports, where he joins new teammates Jeff Gordon and two time defending champ Jimmy Johnson. How will Earnhard's fans react to the move? They've spent years hating Jeff Gordon, how he's Junior's teammate. Also, has Hendrick finally crossed the line of...
02/15/08 -
wolfish musings - Baseball Fans love to argue over who belongs in the Hall of Fame. Every fan has his or her own opinion both on players who are not yet in the Hall and on players who are actually in the Hall. We can spend endless hours arguing over the merits of Phil Rizzutto vs. Pee Wee Reese, whether Don Mattingly or Bert Blyleven really should be inducted or if we should induct players who were undoubtedly great...
02/15/08 -
berlins whimsy - Always willing to try something new, I decided to make some. It's really very simple: toast a layer of sesame seeds in a dry saute pan only until they begin to move around a bit and pop. They burn quickly so keep an eye on them---only toast them to a tan color! Let them cool a bit and place them in a mortar & pestle. (I have a Thai granite mortar & pestle that I use frequently for all sorts of...
02/14/08 -
maki - One of Chevalier's signature songs was Valentine, which is about a girl called Valentine (pronounced val-un-tEEnu, not val-en-TEIN). It's here because, it's one of the most famous dirty songs ever! And yes, breasts feature prominently. It rather proves a pet theory I have, that you can get away with just about anything as long as you say it in French, which makes almost anything sound better. ...
02/14/08 -
dr meta blog - In the Shakespearian universe, villains are regularly described as dogs, but dogs are never, ever, characterized as loyal, or affectionate, or helpful. They're anything but our newspaper-fetching friends. On the contrary, dogs are "base," "unmanner'd," "thievish," "mangy," "hellish," "whoreson," "coward," "rascal," and "bloody." Shakespeare often uses the dysphemism "cur" for dog. Curs are...
02/14/08 -
Bats In My Belfry - I bought a skein on a whim from Angel Yarns earlier this year and was intrigued by it. Soft, slightly fuzzy and The Dawg went mad for it. Keep in mind there is yarn all over the place here and he’s never paid the least bit of attention to any of it but when I got the parcel from Angel Yarns as soon as I opened it, he zoomed in on the skein and tried to run off with it....
02/12/08 -
bnww - Lent is upon us. I’ve been talking a lot lately about the consequences of us being a Protestant vs. a Catholic nation. (At times I’ve even thought I should rename this blog — after Samuel Huntington’s book – ”Who Are We?”) Lent is a ritual that has lost a lot of importance in the Protestant churches, while being observed with fasting until very recent times in the Catholic Church. I...
02/12/08 -
sv moms - Four short weeks ago (although it seems so very long ago in some ways....), I started adventure boot camp. 5:30am, 5 days a week. I'm pretty darn proud of myself because I have only missed one day out of the 20 days and that was because we had my sister-in-law and brother-in-law in town (and were up late partying with them in the hot tub! A totally valid excuse, IMHO). A short list of life boot camp...
02/12/08 -
rabbit boy - Who doesn’t like Steve Martin? I’ve loved him in many of his later period movies (Roxanne, Housesitter and, once upon a time, Three Amigos!) but have never seen The Jerk. (”You’ve never seen The Jerk?!”) He’s very likable, sharp-witted, classy and, I kind of thought Bringing Down The House was funny…I know, I know. When it came to his stand-up comedy, though, I didn’t quite...
02/12/08 -
metro dad - When I speak to my friends, it’s clear that almost all of us were essentially raised by our mothers. Times were different back then. Even if both parents worked full-time, it was mom who always made the decisions. Dad was the working stiff. In my case, my mother was a newly-arrived immigrant. Therefore, I'm not quite sure whether her cruelty stemmed from ignorance of prevailing social norms in...
02/12/08 -
kiss me suzy - I Dr. Z, am also a Grammy voter. Now, I’ll be honest, I don’t really like music. All that singing and dancing, that’s just a bunch of nonsense. There wasn’t of this silly music business back when Paul Brown was coaching. There was nothing but stony silence, interrupted by brief flashes of incredible rage. It was a purer way of doing things. None of this gussied up foolishness with guitars,...
02/12/08 -
chekhovs mistress - Blogs do occupy the space of a pub and they do indeed spurt opinions and sometimes gossip all day – Isn’t that how people get along at a pub? Regulation comes in the form of oblivion; that is to say, from below instead of above. No editors, but if you don’t write well enough you won’t sustain an audience and will disappear (a great number of the oft quoted millions of blogs out there don’t...
02/11/08 -
11d - So, the looming spectre of poverty from divorce has pushed women to enter the workforce in droves. They need the insurance of a paycheck. That sounds about right. However, is full time employment good for all women? Hartford assumes that full time employment makes people happy. Writing legal briefs is better than baking cookies. Full time employment is great for people who do cool jobs, like...
02/11/08 -
Poligazette - Two movies. Both “monster” movies. One has a huge star. Maybe the biggest star in the world. In addition to a megastar in the lead, it has a megastar director. The biggest director in the world. The other movie’s got no one you’ve heard of. The star vehicle had a summer release. Humongous publicity and marketing. The other movie opened toward the end of January, a dead time in...
02/11/08 -
black fives - Today’s blog allows the same self-determination and self-definition independent of economic manipulation or necessity. Think “hip hop industry,” for example. Now think minstrelsy. Think “black face.” Think “rap face.” Are they the same? Who are we, really? Who says so, really? Who is buying the music, really? Who is selling the music, really? Who is making the big money,...
02/09/08 -
DragonCave - After a year of dying, too much of endings and beginnings, a long year of being nothing to myself, after years of dangerous migration across a world eclipsed by memory and exile, after years of wandering homeless in mountains and camping provisionally by oceans, years living nowhere before living too much here, too giving, after months of disintegrations universal and personal, I turn to...
02/09/08 -
Memphis Sport - The monster trucks rolled into the Fed-Ex Forum tonight and put on quite a show. I was there at 5 pm to enjoy the pit party and stayed til the party was over late into the night. The pit party was great. It gave you a chance to see all the Monsters up close, talk to the drivers, and get pictures and autographs. This gave me a chance to get one on one with the drivers and ask many a curious question....
02/09/08 -
New Fashion - All men are little boys when it comes to toggle coats. Grown-up men, even balding men, can sometimes be found in department stores fondling the horn buttons, looking at them the way they might a red sports car or Gisele Bündchen, as the outerwear antidote to a midlife crisis. “This will make me look young and hot again,” such a man may be thinking, “like Ethan Hawke in ‘Dead Poets...
02/07/08 -
the sledge hammer - Valentine’s Day is just around the corner now, and as the thoughts of (some) people turn to the subject of love, the seasonal sections of the stores have filled up with all manner of heart-encrusted merchandise. Back in the old days, it used to be sufficient to put out a few boxes of chocolates and other heart-shaped candies, and a selection of the noncommittal “friend” cards featuring the...
02/07/08 -
justwatch - I mean, if that doesn't ignite something in the cockles of your black shriveled little heart, I don't know what to do with you. I should kick things off by saying it was a pleasant surprise. I was so psyched when the trailers first started popping up, I was actually planning on catching it as soon as it came out, which I never do. Then I got scared off by tepid reviews. Which is just another...
02/07/08 -
louis proyect - At the risk of sounding like a complete philistine, I have to confess that I had more interest in Gustav Klimt as a mover and shaker in fin-de-siècle Vienna than as an artist. When I received a DVD of the 2006 movie “Klimt” from Koch-Lorber, it sat on my desk for a month or two. I finally decided to take a look at it when I discovered that the Neue Galerie, a nearby museum specializing in German...
02/06/08 -
mas folderol - There are other instruments -- I love the violin as an accent, the horns in Higher and Higher by Jackie Wilson -- and despite unfamiliarity, I'm sure they've got both their peccadilloes and twelve notes tuned to the same frequencies as the twelve on the piano or guitar. It's what you do with those twelve notes that makes all the difference and it's here that seeing things becomes important. One...
02/06/08 -
Toby's Blog - On January 7th, I left Chicago and the AIA/APA meeting to travel to Guatemala City. I had several goals during my time in Guatemala City. I wanted to learn more about colonial art – the religious and secular art and architecture created by the indigenous people during the Spanish conquest. Roughly, this era dates from 1530-1830. The opportunity to see this art at first hand is imperative to my...
02/06/08 -
policy next - I am nurturing a fervent hope that after many years of a president who spits on the White House lawn, a VP who tells legislators to "(blank) off" on the Senate floor, the success of "Girls Gone Wild", and the introduction of flip-flops in the workplace, that perhaps a vein of civility and class will make a comeback in mainstream American society. Thus, I put together a small series of tips on...
02/05/08 -
heretic - Cambodia is probably the poorest country that I have visited. It’s much more of a backwater than even Afghanistan. Their only industry is the silk trade. Silk crafts such as scarves, table cloths, clothing, etc. Not much else in the way of industry. Handicrafts such as statuary. Precious and semi-precious gems. Tourism must be one of the, if not the, largest industry for Cambodia. Phnom Penh,...
02/05/08 -
dynamic fitness - I've never been a big "workout partner" guy. Whether running or biking or lifting weights or swimming or practicing kata or hitting a heavy bag, working out has always felt like an inherently solitary endeavor to me, ever since my initiate days of pumping concrete-filled "DP" weights in my parents' basement. My few forays into "social" exercise--in triathlon clubs, boxing gyms, and martial arts...
02/05/08 -
mortar bend - The other night, we ordered a pizza from Hot Tomatoes in Williamstown, our favorite non-homemade pizza option. It was a chilly evening, which made the hot pizza box a welcome hand warmer on the short walk from the shop to my car. Cool night, hot pizza, tantalizing aroma. There is something special about going out to pick up a pizza. I remember doing it as a kid, going into the pizzeria with one...
02/04/08 -
themonarchist - How many poor souls made yet another new year's resolution promising themselves they're going to quit smoking? Hah! As a social smoker (and occasional drinker), I intend to carry on handsomely, thank you very much. With a few precautionary safeguards to protect the family from the pungent fumes, and a smoking jacket to keep the ashes and embers off my clothing, my resolution in 2008 is to take up...
02/04/08 -
Inhabitat - The project centers on the “Solar Drop”, an elliptical structure perched over the unused railroad tracks. The exterior is fitted with 250 square meters of solar photovoltaic panels and coated in titanium dioxide (TiO2). The PV system produces on-site electrical energy while the TiO2 coating works with ultraviolet radiation to interact with particulates in the air, break down organics and reduce...
02/04/08 -
anniesbritishblog - I spent the entire weekend trying to recover from my illness, and I am pleased to report that yesterday I was almost back to normal. Today I woke up feeling pretty good and more than ready to get out of my room and back out into the world. I spent the whole morning in the library, catching up on work, and this afternoon I went to Kensington Palace to do some sight-seeing. In case you don't know,...
02/03/08 -
beneath the volcano - It was one of those days when everything seemed to be happening. A deadline for a regular walking feature was looming close and calima and high clouds on Tenerife for the last couple of weeks had ruled out the chance of any decent photos, until yesterday. So the day started with a three hour hike along an old merchant’s trail on the island’s northern coast. Trouble was Spanish TV was screening...
02/03/08 -
Edwardian Promenade - To the Edwardians, everything had its place, and most importantly, everyone. For a society now transformed by the influx of wealth-sans-birth, a set rules were created to show who was in, and keep others out. Prior to the era, Britain’s ruling class of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was composed of scarcely more than three or four hundred families, whose wealth and power stemmed...
02/03/08 -
TheoFantastique - As I was reading last night a chapter on horror in the 1960s was of special interest to me as this was the decade in which I was born, and thus it was formative in my encounter with horror in the very early 1970s. At one point Skal references "Monster Culture, a phenomenon of horror-movie hoopla that began in the late fifties and continued into the mid-sixties." An interesting aspect of Skal's...
02/02/08 -
The Box Office Junk - He's always smiled a little too wide. He's always laughed a little too hard. And that's why we liked him. But when Tom Cruise acts overly cheery (and entirely arrogant) while talking about his cult religion of scientology, he comes off like a maniac. The clip above has been spreading around the internet like crazy over the past few days. Have you seen this video? Very creepy. But...
02/02/08 -
World Gone Mad - Brazil, with one of the largest Catholic populations in the world, has told that church to keep its nose out of government policy. Yeah! The church tried to sue The Brazilian city of Recife for it’s plans to distribute “morning after pills” to carnival goers this year. The Catholic Church lawsuit claimed the initiative promoted sex and provided “abortions.” (Can you imagine! Those...
02/02/08 -
megan mcardle - There's an interesting debate raging in this thread between the veg*ns and the meat-eaters. I find it interesting, because on the one hand, there are veg*ns claiming that veg*ns don't prosletyze, despite the presence of people doing just that upthread. On the other hand, what the veg*ns are talking about is a very real phenomenon: meat-eaters who are angry at you for not eating meat. Most...
01/31/08 -
expedient means - In case you are unfamiliar, the Music Genome Project is an attempt to organize music into over 400 attributes via a complex mathematical algorithm. They have developed musical genes, each corresponding to a specific musical characteristic, then applied the math to tens of thousands of songs. What you are left with is a genetic map of the “body” of music. It ignores lyrical content, band members,...
01/31/08 -
claudia rosett - This would all be great if UN peacekeeping actually produced peace. But the illusion that the UN is a grand force for good in this world deserves to be catalogued somewhere between World’s Most Amazing Scams and Believe It-Or-Not Best-in-Special-Effects. The reality of today’s UN is more like a cross between “Animal House” (the movie, with John Belushi) and “Animal Farm” (the book, by...
01/31/08 -
Self Sufficient Urbanite - I started by disassembling the drawer and laying out the wood so I could visualize how I wanted to lay out the project. Because of the shape of a brownstone, I decided to go with something approximately the size of a large shoe box, with two bird apartments on top of each other. I cut the wood to size, but quickly found that the wood was dense and brittle. I understand that this owes to the wood...
01/30/08 -
bicycle design - As most regular readers know, I am an industrial designer, but I do not work in the bicycle industry. As much as I enjoy writing about bikes a couple hours a week, my real job obviously has to take precedence over the blog, and any other bike related reading, when I get really busy. For the last week and a half, I was at a show where some of my new designs were released . Everything went well, but...
01/30/08 -
opera chic - Tinkering only slightly with his trademark production of Tosca (aka the oldskool-y one with Callas) , and with a lot changes in the singers stage directions, Franco Zeffirelli's new Tosca has won raves by the Roman audience and very flattering reviews in the Italian press. Now he's sometimes cranky and his 2006 Aida at la Scala was an example of how, given a big budget, Frengo can totally lose his...
01/30/08 -
Intern Life - Once is a film I watched yesterday, as my girlfriend lay around sick after she got home from work. I wanted to watch 12:08 East Of Bucharest, but she was not awake or feeling well enough to pay attention to subtitles. Which was fine. Once was in English. Only, once it began, I still needed to put on subtitles until I got used to the accents and the Irish brogue. Since most of the movie is music,...
01/30/08 -
A Guy Named Dave - I knew exactly where to go to be alone and think. I had been there just before Christmas and so I knew it would be a quiet place. I got on the tube but happened to miss my stop. Guess I didn’t need to go anywhere to get lost in thought after all. The London rain was nice and cold and only made better by the fact that I didn’t have my warm coat any longer-- it went home with my sister a few days...
01/30/08 -
Ari's Planet - In the morning, on my search for a hotel room, I saw a dog and a cow who were friends. Both were warming up in the sun. Cows basically stand around in the sun for the first few hours in the morning to warm up. The dog rubbed heads with the cow, then sat down next to it. Both cast long shadows on the white wall behind them. I crossed the river and looked for Hotel Minerwa, which also had been...
01/30/08 -
Photo Luminations - What is photography? A great question to fill many idle hours! You tell me you that you, as a new and enthusiastic photographer, are confused. Is it photography only if one uses "traditional" tools like film and wet chemistry in a darkroom? Is it photography when one uses digital cameras and media? Is it photography when one uses Photoshop not only to process an image, but to combine images or...
01/29/08 -
Loquacious D - I’m not gonna lie. I hate winter. I haaaate it. Despite having a January birthday, and being Canadian-born and bred. For years I’ve been convinced I’m not genetically predisposed to this sort of climate. (Yes, even though I live in Toronto, where it isn’t nearly as cold as some other parts of the country, it’s still too cold for me.) I complain about the cold, whinge about the wind,...
01/29/08 -
Metroblogging Seattle - Ars Technica recently had a fascinating article on the Kindle leading off, "A novelist turns to Amazon's Kindle e-book reader to "beta test" his new novel. Is this the future of fiction?" [#] This is a fascinating and innovative approach to editing, I think. It taps into collective intelligence through the internet to improve a process normally made offline, and that is awesome. Dare I say, it...
01/29/08 -
A Foolish Interruption - January limps depressingly to its close to the accompaniment of yet more priggish suggestions that if we will not limit our alcohol intake the crudest of economic sanctions will be applied. Should this nonsense come to pass, the only honourable response will be to revive the ancient mysteries of the moonshiner....
01/27/08 -
wolfish musings - The world is a changing placing. The changes are happening very rapidly and will continue to increase at an ever-increasing rate. Let me give you an example: If you took someone from 3000 years ago and suddenly dropped him in 1708 (300 years ago), he would find that the world has not changed all that much. Sure, there were some social changes and technological advances between the two time periods,...
01/27/08 -
francobolli del mondo - More than 130 stamps in half a century: No other Greenlandic artist has created stamp designs for POST Greenland for so many years, and to such an extent, as Jens Rosing. To many collectors, Jens Rosing almost has become synonymous with Greenlandic stamps, an area on which he has left a significant mark through his work. “The Grand Old Man”, who turned 80 years in 2005, made his stamp debut...
01/27/08 -
scottcarless - The recent spate of suicides in the UK has claimed the lives of 13 young people, mostly in their teens. The culprit is of course the culture of online social networking without which these people would be happy and of course alive. ? I’m not exactly a fan of social networking sites, I consider them to be a vacuous waste of time, more so than this eminently unreadable weblog I keep here, but...
01/25/08 -
gammonline - Although backgammon is generally placed within the family of board-games known as 'race games', in theory and practice, backgammon shares many similarities with members of the 'war games' family, such as chess. The definitive characteristic of race games, is the reliance on random number generators employed to govern the movement of the gaming pieces. The engines of backgammon are the dice, which...
01/25/08 -
wolfwater - I think Library 2.0 led to a lot of librarians losing their way and you can see that in the huge number of library blogs, Flickr account and MySpace pages that haven’t been updated in months or years. It’s valuable to know how to use this stuff, but the focus should never be on the tools. Never. I know they’re fun to play with and it’s exciting to see the cool things other libraries have...
01/25/08 -
Keep Cool - Don't get me wrong, when you're good—like with Battlestar Galactica or Eureka (and I'll even give you credit for Doctor who, despite that being a BBC show you just imported)—you're a phenomenal destination network. But let's be honest here, there's not a lot of "good" on your schedule. The Stargate franchise is stale, Flash Gordon (left) is a derisible, stillborn remake, and ECW Wrestling...
01/24/08 -
nature travels - Traveling through Sweden on a cold winter’s day, you may well spot a succession of lone figures perched incongruously out in the middle of a lake, surrounded on all sides by a huge empty expanse of glassy ice, clutching a tiny fishing rod in one hand while gazing hopefully down a small round hole. You may be forgiven for thinking that these strange displaced anglers, levitating as if by magic...
01/24/08 -
scribblings from sarajevo - We arrived on time in Dubrovnik, and our driver was waiting for us. When we told him where we were from, he said, “Kansas City is where they had that big chemical explosion last year.” It seems KC makes international news at times. We were shown our apartment, which had one bedroom and a twin bed in the kitchen. Unfortunately, there was no ventilation, so we had to heat each room with the single...
01/24/08 -
Happily Home - What does make sense is to research foods that I can grow myself. Maybe I don't eat three, three course meals and a snack each day. Maybe I have herbal tea for breakfast, an egg and a handful of berries for lunch, and rabbit stew with acorn flour flat bread for dinner. All of those items can be or have been produced on my property. An article by a Maine Locavore stated that the future of local...
01/23/08 -
consciously insane - I had a lecture the other day in which T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' was compared to the way Public Enemy sampled from James Brown. I've been considering whether anybody has created the perfect ode to any song or musician - through sampling, covering or referencing. In my opinion, sampling and covering might make great songs, but they can rarely recreate one properly. There's a song played a lot on...
01/23/08 -
dr meta blog - Jane Austen's private life has been thoroughly explored for events of dramatic interest. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago, that pictures the nude novelist reclining on a green baize fainting couch. One would have supposed that writers of fiction and especially film directors would have seized on the opportunities that...
01/23/08 -
beetqueen - All one has to do is walk down a grocery store aisle to see that the cheapest foods available for mass consumption, also contain some of the most unhealthy ingredients around. I think it is an absolute travesty that it is cheaper to buy a two liter of soda than it is to buy any type of juice. The average cost of juices that actually have 100% fruit juice (even though they are still from concentrate...
01/22/08 -
Tree Hugger - The structure, which looks similar in style to the traditional upside-down boat, not only looks like a marine vessel but is built like one too. It was constructed using the same methods and supplies that the company uses to build any of its custom-design boats. Instead of drywall and vinyl siding, this home is made mostly of wood and epoxy....
01/22/08 -
gay tv blog - More than just being a good song though, I think I feel affection for it because "Family Ties" was a great show, and it aired during at time when my own family was such a disaster that I could only imagine how fantastic it would've been to have the Keatons as my parents. So what makes a great TV theme song? Is it just the song itself, or is it compounded by the emotional connection you have to...
01/22/08 -
Vixen Vignettes - I agree that the person who is hosting should always have enough for their guests to eat and drink, but I just think it's common courtesy to show a little gratitude for being invited. Another analogy: You don't go to a wedding without getting a present. In fact, even if you do not attend, you still have to get a present! Now I had a 'little' shindig earlier this month. The shindig turned out to...
01/21/08 -
fly ball fever - You sometimes hear the rationalization that there is nothing wrong with it - lots of dog breeds were created by crossing existing breeds. This is true. Lots of breeds were created this way. But it takes many, many generations to evenly distribute and set the desired characteristics. You don't just mate two different breeds and call the puppies a new breed. The puppies that result from a first...
01/21/08 -
Enjoy Books Blog - Bill Bryson highlights the major feature of Shakespeare's life (or whatever we know of him) - scant facts as we know. For example, it is rather strange to know that for nearly eight years of his life - nobody knows where Shakespeare was - before he actually surfaced as one of the most prominent play writer in London. Or, that there are hardly a dozen writings of Shakespeare in his own hand writing...
01/21/08 -
sons of steve garvey - I had to chuckle when reading "how to get into the ballpark" was "overwhelming and intimidating." Longtime SoSG readers know how dissatisfied we are with the convoluted and inefficient parking lot system introduced, to widespread derision, by Frank McCourt last year. I haven't seen any news that McCourt's Labyrinth (sounds like a Guillermo Del Toro movie) will be back for 2008, but I am not at all...
01/20/08 -
Poetic & Chic - Can one woman’s personal style actually change a generation? In the case of Astrid Kirchherr, it did. Yesterday’s episode of Fresh Air on NPR featured an interview with Ms. Kirchherr which should not be missed. In 1960, Astrid Kirchherr met a group of young (some even underage) boys who were playing in a rock band on the Ripperbaum in Hamburg, Germany. According to Kirchherr, this was not an...
01/20/08 -
Yellow Submarine - My hubby and I rarely watch a movie. We rent or go out to watch a movie may be once every two months. The new movie rental offering on iTunes seems to be a good match for us. When I heard that you can watch the movie on the iPod, I got even more excited because I have a DLO HomeDock Deluxe which is the middle man between an iPod and a TV. The whole thing seems to be too good to be true. First of...
01/20/08 -
Ahole in Hawaii - OK, here it is. My very first post.....and it's about pole dancing. No, my friend, not stripping. Of course it does have a little of the naughtiness of stripping, but more clean. (Yes, you can remove your clothing if you want, but only down to your bra and panties, or a bathing suit). If you need justification for taking one of the classes just remember that everyone has a right to feel sexy. I...
01/18/08 -
edge of grace - For nearly ten years now, under the guidance of Tamarack Song, the school has offered its unique Wilderness Guide Program, a program unlike any other that I’m aware of, one that takes people from a life in civilization and casts them into the woods for one year, to live and learn from that best of teachers: Experience. That includes the experience of nature itself, the experience of one’s own...
01/18/08 -
Screw Adorno - The concept of narrative in film is highly contentious and relies heavily on the viewer and theorist’s bias for its analysis. For example, Adorno of the Marxist Frankfurt School would ascribe to the view that the overall narrative of every film is that of conformity and standardization as film exists as a product of the cultural industry which in turn serves capitalisms best interests, and to...
01/18/08 -
bring back glam - Over the weekend, Steve "Sex" Summers of Pretty Boy Floyd announced a special one-off show (in Los Angeles) with the band's original members. By all accounts, this means Kristy "Krash" Majors and Summers will share the stage again for the first time in years. My guess is the set will be heavy on material from the Leather Boyz with Electric Toyz era -- and not much else. In related news, Black n'...
01/18/08 -
American Scene - This cynicism resembles courage. But really, who doesn’t want to believe that the tragedies of the inner-city are intractable? David Simon thinks he’s constructed a critique of capitalism, but in fact he’s prepared an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference. If you’re outraged by The Wire, do you then … go and support the election of your own Tommy Carcetti? Or...
01/18/08 -
sirius knotts - It should be said that before coming to the church this article was originally addressed to, I had never before heard of the Archko Library. I’m an avid reader with a voracious appetite for theology, but it had never come to my notice. I grew up in Bible-believing, Bible-preaching fundamentalist churches, but it was never mentioned from any of the numerous pulpits I’ve been audience to....
01/18/08 -
dr meta blog - Three substantial floors littered with such artlessness. What a dreadful, terrible squandering of space and opportunity. The unifying principle: a conspicuous antagonism to craftsmanship. Every single piece of work left with rough edges and bad joins and unpainted surfaces, as though not to complete the task is fundamental to the aesthetic. If there is an aesthetic other than fakery. I...
01/16/08 -
tapeworthy - The original Rent, which won 4 Tony's and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, even survived long enough to be revived at the same time AND will surpass that run as well. The Rent Remix revival playing in London that opened to abysmal reviews (youtube clips of the remixed songs after the jump below) is closing Feb. 2nd 2008 after opening this past fall. Oh man, I will admit, after I finally saw Rent...
01/16/08 -
Orangutans - Although the orangutans here are very fortunate to live in this sanctuary they will never be released into the wild. Many of them were born in captivity specifically to be used in Hollywood for entertainment purposes. And, like everything else in Hollywood, when they no longer could be used for entertainment purposes they were put aside. Usually in small cages. Where they had to live until...
01/16/08 -
golden state - I must pick a nit with Mr. Safire. I, for one, think of the Web as “print.” I fully understand that it is just a collection of electrons and that it is absurdly ephemeral. Not to mention a parody of “self-publishing.” (I know, Mr. Safire, “No sentence fragments.”) The vast majority of Web writing is trite. Most is awful as writing. But it is writing nonetheless. And the result is...
01/15/08 -
Frontal Cortex - What's interesting is that the brain scans reflected these subjective reports. In fact, when people drank more expensive wines a part of the prefrontal cortex called the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) got significantly more excited. The scientists argue that the activity of mOFC can be used as a neural correlate for pleasure, so that more expensive wines not only tasted better but actually...
01/15/08 -
art bistro - A decade ago, environmentally friendly clothing brought to mind hemp smocks and Birkenstocks. But today, eco-fashion is low-rise, boot-cut jeans; little black dresses; Versace; and Armani. With the help of name-brand designers and celebrities, environmentally friendly fashions are getting noticed and are poised for mainstream acceptance. Companies like Nike, American Apparel and Eileen Fisher...
01/15/08 -
Singing to the Plants - Isuma Independent Inuit Film — the word isuma means to think in Inuktitut — produced The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) in 2000. Acted entirely by Inuit people, with dialogue in their native language, the film was a retelling of an ancient Inuit story of jealousy and murder: propelled by a primordial patricide, an evil spirit entered into a tiny Inuit community, manifest as the bitterness, jealousy,...
01/14/08 -
andy biggs - Case in point. How can I create black and white images that can be enlarged to 40×60″? The only thing I can come up with is that I need to go back to shooting with a large format camera. But talk about completely impractical for wildlife photography. I am moving away from the more literal color type imagery, in favor of more moody black and white images. So I have come up with a plan for 2008....
01/14/08 -
our news brooklyn - AVG’s usually put the player into another place, whether it be another city or another world. Also, players have the convenient ability to do things physically unimaginable in real life, a way to break away from reality to a world of fantasy. A perfect example would be in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where the protagonist can ride a government-made jet pack, equipped with a semi-automatic...
01/14/08 -
codeink - It also brings up an important point that I have noticed subtlety while being a member of the scientific (more specifically, biological scientific) community. Basically, there seems to be a general lack of respect for vegetarianism (with some exceptions). However, what you learn from a book like The Bloodless Revolution is that vegetarians are generally in good company (excluding all those Nazis...
01/13/08 -
pandagon - Midwives will generally, if trained well at least, send thee to a hospital if anything goes wrong, but otherwise, why not do it at home? You can probably even get a midwife these days who doesn’t reek of patchouli. I’m forced to conclude that a lot of the defensiveness around this subject has less to do with repulsion at the bad argument strategies of midwifery proponents, and more to do with...
01/13/08 -
texas holdem - First, the claim that trans-fats is responsible for 500 deaths a year in New York City is skeptical at best. It’s claiming that the trans-fats caused the heart disease, yet overlooks any other possible factors, including hereditary factors. For those of you who graduated from Racine Unified, that means it runs in the family. It’s another example of what will happen the more the Nanny State...
01/13/08 -
whiskey fire - So let me get this straight: because of a Hollywood film and a trashy small-c celebrity, it's time to lock girls back in the house? Oh, goody. If not for feminism, the Spears girls may well have been the Bronte girls. Good to know. I'm actually not in disagreement with Flanagan's central assertion: that the onus of adolescent sex falls upon girls more heavily than boys. But, you know, there's...
01/11/08 -
Uber Geeks - So when the Wii was finally released, I have to admit, I was a little unimpressed. I mean, it had none of the ridiculous 3D projection or full on 3D image viewers that had me excited to begin with. It was just another system. But it did have a cool controller and looked sleek, similar to an Apple product (my white iBook and Wii are long lost brothers). I’d never been an early adopter of a gaming...
01/11/08 -
desicritics - The death of Qurratulain Hyder marks the end of an era of the finest writing in Urdu. Hyder, also known as Ainee Apa, dominated the world of Urdu literature for over six decades. She started writing as a child and published her first novel, Meray Bhi Sanam Khanay (later trans-created as My Temples, Too), when she was 22 years old. The novel set a new trend in Urdu literature: a voice of modernity,...
01/11/08 -
becky works - I was really surprised to hear one of them come up with the idea that “Ring around the Rosie” was really written about the Black Plague. Evidently one of the English teachers in junior high told the kids that the ring in the song was the ring that occurred with the sores accompanying the plague, and that posies were carried to conceal the smells associated with the dead and dying. Their teacher...
01/10/08 -
ye olde comic - That's right, the comic book industry collapsed, and there was a very real sense that it might never recover. Miraculously, it has survived for another decade, but unfortunately those who forget history (or remember it and are as equally greedy as those who came before them) are doomed to repeat it. And so, years from now, we could look back at 2007 as the year that killed comics. So instead of...
01/10/08 -
ms adventure - We were pretty lucky with our experiences eating in India. We didn’t experience any of the chronic bowel problems I’ve heard about, though we invented a new acronym for what we sometimes did experience - SBE - Sudden Bowel Evacuation - which hit every once and a while and afterward we were fine for a day or two. Even writing it I’m a bit superstitious since saying it could sometimes provoke...
01/10/08 -
Greenridge Chronicles - We just had a couple of days of incredibly warm and sunny weather, with temperatures of at least 7 or 8º C, and since it was still technically Winter Break up here in Canada (I think I like the breaks more than the kids do - I cling to them till the bitter end) I headed out to the garden centre, then out to the garden. I was able to do this childlessly (ooh, cool word) because the kids were staying...
01/09/08 -
Academic Librarian - Nostalgia is often an underlying motivator behind tales of decline. Back in the old days things were always simpler or cleaner or purer or calmer or safer. Locally, there’s no doubt this is true. Trenton, New Jersey, where I live, was most likely safer 60 years ago than it is now. On the other hand, the air and water in many factory cities in Britain are probably cleaner than they were 150 years...
01/09/08 -
2Blowhards - I suppose most of you correctly guessed the last three cities -- San Francisco, New York and Seattle. San Francisco because of its setting and perhaps because of the pyramidal Transamerica building. The New York picture shows the famous Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, though the latter might be harder to recognize because many people aren't familiar with its night time lighting schemes....
01/09/08 -
John lundberg - I was excited to learn that most of our presidential candidates have released lists of their favorite books (yes, I'm kind of a dork). Does this provide us with some more personal insight into their character? Probably not. But it gives us insight into how the candidates want to be perceived. The right answer to "What's your favorite book?" can help define a political persona while the wrong one...
01/09/08 -
3 Quarks Daily - Such moments are staged so freshly that you have the sense, in a way similar to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (though perhaps not as fully achieved), of a film finding a magical way to make the experience of other times, other forms of consciousness, palpable. It's something the best period films do, and even if it's always all a fake, there is something about the way movies can record being-in-the-world...
01/09/08 -
Book Blog - It saw the digital world and the book world become slightly less uncomfortable bedfellows. Shelfari, LibraryThing, and GoodReads brought social networking to book lovers, e-books continued their long and arduous journey to popular consumption, and publishing in general proved itself more savvy online. That’s not to say the more disturbing trends didn’t continue—independent bookstores dropped...
01/09/08 -
Corduroy orange - I save my carcasses in the freezer. One carcass isn’t enough to make a decent pot of stock, I think; might as well save it until I have some more. And then, when I have enough, I’ll often look at them and think, I just don’t have the time to deal with them right now; I’ll do it later. I finally gave myself a proverbial kick in the pants over the weekend and used my beef and lamb bones...
01/07/08 -
scatts - Quality. Well, the ingredients seem to be okay, not perhaps as good as they were but good enough for what it is. The construction of the sandwiches though……the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a head-on collision with a freight train about sums up most of what I get served. I guarantee that if the team who set-up McD in the UK were to come over here, assuming they are all still alive and kicking,...
01/07/08 -
New Criterion - Last week, the New York Philharmonic’s Executive Director and President Zarin Mehta announced that his orchestra accepted an invitation from Pyongyong to play in the communist dictatorship of North Korea. As the orchestra performs Handel’s Messiah this week, our city is alive in jubilant anticipation of Christmas. It is also an occasion to consider whether Mr. Mehta’s own jubilation at the...
01/07/08 -
Inhabitat - Probably one of the most complex transit systems in the world, the public transportation system in Tokyo can only be describe as massive. The public transportation system in Tokyo is bases on a combination of light rail, ferry, bus, and the famous, and privately owned, subway lines of Tokyo. To put the sheer magnitude of the Tokyo public transportation lines in perspective, if you were to combine...
01/06/08 -
Inhabitat - What would you call a skyscraper that works like a tree, makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy, and changes with the seasons? Perhaps it’s time to propose a new word: treescraper! Biomimicry - the art of drawing inspiration from nature’s designs - is a strategy often found in green architecture, and here’s a tree-inspired super structure that exemplifies healthy and high-tech design...
01/06/08 -
feministing - The book has 61 women’s stories and pictures. There are eight year old girls in track suits and old women in ruffled blouses and police uniforms and lots of black and hats and dashikis and ponchos and hockey uniforms and…and…and… There is really something for every reader here. The variability of the women creates this beautiful tapestry of contemporary womanhood—sometimes very traditional,...
01/06/08 -
pharyngula - is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. zf_pharyngula.jpg …and this is a pharyngula stage embryo. • a longer profile of yours truly • my calendar • Nature Network • RichardDawkins Network • facebook • MySpace • Twitter • the Pharyngula chat room (#pharyngula on irc.synirc.net) scarlet_A.png Random Quote (Complete listing) Particulars...
01/04/08 -
Just Watch - I really enjoyed both of these films, and although I kind of agree with this opinion of the former, and concur with a smart man's opinion that "the fat kid gets kind of annoying after a while" about the latter, I cannot help but applaud Apatow's success. I applaud it because of what it signifies as an indicator of the trajectory of our culture. It means that the freaks and geeks are taking over the...
01/04/08 -
archidose - Of course Hollywood films that depict the destruction of New York City are nothing new, as can be seen by this recent list prompted by Will Smith's stroll through a deserted Manhattan. The timing of the two movies mentioned above may just be a coincidence, though rarely in Hollywood are things so detached. But rather than delve into the Hollywood grist-mill and the playful competition that studios...
01/04/08 -
stuartbuck - The similarities are obvious just by considering the fact that both in 1861 and today, most blacks lived in the Black Belt and especially in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Also notable are the absences of blacks in the northern mountainous regions of Arkansas, and of Georgia up through Appalachia. Fewer blacks lived in the coastal regions of Mississippi and Alabama. Then...
01/03/08 -
politics theory photography - The exhibition is showing through mid-January at Cicero-Galerie für politische Fotografie (Berlin). The six photographers are: Mehraneh Atashi, Gohar Dasthi, Ghazaleh Hedayat, Shadi Ghadirian, Hamila Vakili and Newsha Tavakolian. As The Guardian piece makes clear, the six all are trying to complicate what are common, overly simplistic views of the place of women in Iranian society and politics....
01/03/08 -
Brussels Journal - The traditional view of English history is of the long, slow progress of freedom, from a past of feudalism and an omnipresent peasantry though some strange sublimation by which England created a form of freedom from which derived the industrial revolution, the rule of law and the greatest empire the world had ever seen and then on to a socialist society (Marx). Before the Civil War and the rise of...
01/03/08 -
The Monarchist - The current brouhaha over smoking has made everyone painfully aware of tobacco’s effects on the body, but it has also obscured a more profound reason for smoking’s popularity: its relation to the soul. As the heyday of smoking passes into the ashheap of history, it is meet that we reflect on this connection. The soul, of course, is a complex thing. Long ago Plato suggested that we consider...
01/02/08 -
Heroes Not Zombies - It’s amazing how in medicine as well as in philosophy (and I suspect in science too) the passions, or emotions, are frowned upon. There’s a belief around that “the truth” can only be discovered by the dispassionate, the disengaged, the distant, but Robert Solomon argues strongly against that. In fact he argues for the central importance of a passionate life. He doesn’t use the language of...
01/02/08 -
podblack - Creativity in biological nomenclature was something I learned about in the mid-90s, when I heard of a news report on a beetle named after Darth Vader. A genuine article, a newly-discovered beetle; indeed the product of research and study… so-called for his shiny head with a slit across the front, like the Sith Lord’s helmet - Agathidium vaderi. It doesn’t stop there though. What about a...
01/02/08 -
blog critics - A legendary 101 Strings album, arranged with loving enthusiasm by Monty Kelly (hot on the heels of his Sounds of Today breakthrough), this effort validates its existence by offering supercharged interpretations, not mere covers, of the Fabs' celebrated psychedelic transformation - a transformation paradoxically made possible by their extended use of orchestration. If critics are correct in assuming...
01/01/08 -
us performing arts - A tradition that I find charming, inventive and entrepreneurial is that of the corner street performer. You find them in every city, literally on the corners or in the subway and train stations. They are musicians, actors, comedians, jugglers and dancers. Just like in traditional theater venues some of these performers are absolutely "top notch" and others either need a little more seasoning or...
01/01/08 -
cheese foodie - One of the most important steps in the making of cheese is the aging process. It can be nearly absent, in which case so-called fresh cheese is produced. That’s consumed right away and there are many fine cheeses of this type. But the majority experience aging of various lengths. It isn’t just the amount of time a cheese is aged, however, that contributes heavily to the flavor and consistency...
01/01/08 -
splodge - There was a reason I was there: that being the hosting of an eclectic exhibition of the works of the renowned 18th Century artist William Hogarth. The exhibition was called ‘William Hogarth: Portrait Of Eighteenth Century English Society’ – ok, so not the most inspiring of names for an art exhibition. Not being an aficionado of the art-gallery scene, I was kind of nervous as to whether my...
12/31/07 -
art history today - Visitors to Bilbao soon become aware of its greatest cultural asset: Frank Gehry’s architectural marvel, the Guggenheim Bilbao. Near the end of the long taxi ride from the airport, the car suddenly drops down into the town and this stupendous building dominates the cityscape. Opened in 1997, I’m visiting it in its ten-year anniversary, an event celebrated by a mammoth exhibition devoted to...
12/31/07 -
conch scooter - "This is a jewel," my buddy said to me, after we stopped to stretch our legs on the way in to Key West. We swapped machines and he took off on the Bonneville this time and I plunked myself down on the GTS. Then, a dozen miles further down the road we stopped alongside the Key West "International" Airport, and took in the sea and the sun and the motorcycles we had just parked. "Ah yes," he said. "The...
12/31/07 -
im-BROHL-yoh - So I heard on the news last night about this woman who was sacked after refusing to move to the back row during a traditional Maori farewell. She was now bringing her case to the Human Rights Tribunal, and seeking $116 344 in compensation (for 2 years lost wages, $10,000 humiliation costs). I heard her statements in the courtroom in disgust. She stated that it was gender vs culture. and that if...
12/30/07 -
2 blowhards - Unless you live in or near California, it's quite possible that you never heard of a painting movement known as the California Impressionists. California began to attract the attention of artists not long after Gold Rush days. But from the 1890s till the 1930s the California Impressionists flourished, almost in defiance of painting trends in France and the rest of the United States. Even now...
12/30/07 -
Bookslut - Casey McKinney is the Founding Editor of Fanzine, a "general culture" webzine that was launched in August 2005. Now, I had a sort of ulterior motive in choosing McKinney as this week's Heartthrob. Yes, by all means, he satisfies the Heartthrob requirements in every which way (What are they, one might ask? Wouldn't you like to know...), but he can also answer or at least point to an answer to a very...
12/30/07 -
powerlineblog - There are few living artists who have a more direct channel into what Gram Parsons called the Cosmic American Music than Van Morrison. Offhand I can think only of Aretha Franklin and Solomon Burke. Of the three, Morrison is the only one who has a running love-hate relationship with his fans. They (we) love him; he hates them (us), or at least so it seems. He is a brilliant, eccentric, enigmatic...
12/28/07 -
Inhabitat - Moscow’s rapidly growing skyline will soon feature an eye-popping new addition: Crystal Island, which will be the world’s biggest building when completed. Sir Norman Foster’s mountainous 27 million square feet spiraling “city within a building” will cost $4 billion and it is scheduled to be built within next 5 years. The Crystal Island will be Lord Foster’s second large scale project...
12/28/07 -
AnArchitecture - Regularly, the phrase "mass-customisation" comes into design journalists' minds. Beginning from web-project like the Nike-ID site where people can customize the appearance of their shoes, to the Freitag bag configurator, people start expressing their individuality not only by choosing a brand (name) but by their own taste. Nike-ID, costomers can customize their shoes The customer gets an...
12/28/07 -
Fantasy Art - Is Digital painting a valid art form? Is using Photoshop or Corel Painter cheating? Would I ever sign my name to something created on the computer? If I digitally painted, could I say that I did it, or that I helped the computer do the rendering? Also, since there is no original after the image is done, could I ever feel that the image was ever more than just a color study? And what about using...
12/27/07 -
NurseSean - I have a brand new friend to play with: The Starbucks Sirena: It is a super-duper, BMW designed, Saeco built, espresso machine! I have been shopping around for a high quality (but not prosumer level) machine that I can play with on a daily basis. I have had a long history of coffee drinking that all started when I was fifteen years old. I’m steel reeling at the fact that I am twice as old...
12/27/07 -
Frontier Blog - Like many cities, Munich started out as a small town enclosed by a wall and then expanded beyond it. The ‘inner city’ occupies such a small area that everything is close and easy to visit, and you’ll get a sense of the orignal wall, indeed, the gates still remain. The river Isar flows through the city and it is generally a very green place. The enormous Englischer Garten, is a park with a...
12/27/07 -
Interactive Architecture - One project that caught my eye from Regine’s posts covering the VIDA awards was David Rokeby’s Cloud Installation currently suspended in the Great Hall at the Ontario Science Centre. One hundred identical sculptural elements, arranged in ten by ten grid, are rotated at slightly differing speeds by computer-controlled motors. The elements slowly shift in and out of synchronization. When the motors...
12/26/07 -
pandagon - This article is quite possibly the pinnacle of choadery masquerading as science. The good professor, in an effort to prove yet another special way that women are born inferior to men, decided to “prove” that womenz got no sense of humor, because humor is aggression and men are more aggressive and testosterone and hand-waving and just believe it because by repackaging tired stereotypes as science...
12/26/07 -
Shakespearesister - Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn't respond to men's catcalls or smile when they say, "Cheer up, baby, it can't be that bad." We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn't apologize for it. We use it for the woman who...
12/26/07 -
Greg - As the art market began heating up and becoming much more fashionable a few years ago, I started to wonder what the effect of all this demand would be on the art that was produced. Surely, 95-plus percent of the objects and paintings would not ever be made, projects wouldn't be conceived, much less realized, in the absence of an insatiable-seeming market. Sure, like Morris Louis and Clyfford...
12/26/07 -
Cruft Box - Grilling is cooking meat by the direct application of high heat with a gas burner or an electric heater. Grilling is simple since temperature is easy, but doesn't bring any new flavors to the party. BBQing is cooking meat by the direct application of heat with charcoal or wood. The burning of the fuel adds flavor to the meat. BBQing requires more skill since the flames must be managed to...
12/26/07 -
Ablogistan - Hip hop is apparently becoming very popular with the youth of Afghanistan. Some in Afghanistan may see this as a sign of progress, others may see it as more Western encroachment on Afghan culture. I think it's the former and, as a Halfghan myself, find it fascinating. Between 1996 and 2001 the Taliban completely banned music and dance in Afghanistan. It's difficult to even fathom a world in which...
12/26/07 -
My Life In India - I have swapped the posh Juhu life to move in with my friend Cheryl who lives in the slums of Jogeshwari, a former dairytown transformed into a giant slum, more or less, by the urban sprawl of Bombay megacity. Luckily the process occurred about thirty years ago, giving it immunity to government landgrabs, meaning sweet, sweet housing security for Cheryl, who has been having trouble finding a place....
12/25/07 -
Soul Flex - Have you ever been listening to music and realized that it’s missing something? You can’t tell what it is, yet you just know that if something were added, the song would become a masterpiece. I believe I have figured out what the missing element is, or at least what it is for jazz music. THE VIBRAPHONES!!! Vibraphones (also known as “vibes”) are a mallet percussion instrument much...
12/25/07 -
Daily Writing Tips - Sheridan’s 18th century play, The Rivals, featured a hilarious character called Mrs Malaprop, who was apt to drop a verbal clanger whenever she opened her mouth. That’s where we get the word malapropism from, though its real origin is in the French phrase mal à propos, meaning inopportune or not to the purpose. When someone uses a malapropism, it’s because: * they’ve used a word...
12/25/07 -
England Expects - I have to say I am not entirely sure what to do with them. He got them on the German Friesian island of Langeoog, on the 13th May 1945 a week after VE day. According to his diary, "across to island of Langeoog in AM. An island still all in Boche hands. Saw Poles and prisoner of war camp." ...
12/24/07 -
Or so I thought - So, I thing genealogical research, while it may be fun, is a kind of a mug’s game, and probably no more valid than a belief in that if you are playing Monopoly, you are somehow, by default, involved in the stock market, or assuming that the purchasing of lottery tickets should secure you a little retirement nest egg. On the other hand, I really liked, and maybe even loved my grandparents,...
12/24/07 -
Money-Law - I love It's A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946). It's a gorgeous film and a moving story of conflict and redemption. And it's utterly free. Just click here to start the credits rolling in black and white on your laptop. The film was not particularly successful when it opened in theaters. It became a classic years later when it fell into the public domain and TV stations began playing it over and...
12/24/07 -
2 Blowhards - I'm finding it fascinating that raw milk has become a flash-point issue -- one of those possibly-unresolvable conundra that many establishment people wish would just go away, yet that permit some underlying feelings and convictions to show themselves off in more glory than they often have a chance to. A little background: In most states, it's against the law to sell or buy raw (ie.,...
12/21/07 -
Dragoncave - When you go through a major life-changing event, you art changes. I've been hearing that a lot, in recent months, and I agree with it; hearing it from other artists who have been through powerful, intense processes, death, grief, loss, life-threatening illnesses, and more. The concensus is that it changes you, it changes your art, it changes the content and topics of your art, it can even change...
12/21/07 -
Just Watch - In the lost years of my misspent adolescence, I had a good friend who went through a very serious phase that is perhaps best titled "Man, it would have been awesome to have been Jack Nicholson in the '60s and '70s!" As a result of this, I've seen pretty much all of Jack's work from the boom years before the orange glasses and the crazy pills and whiskey got the best of him. There's no doubting...
12/21/07 -
Archi Adventures - Having started architecture school with a background in gestural drawing and figurative painting, my first semester quickly became one slightly absurd (but necessary) exercise in "issues of representation." For my first project I chose to combat tradition by drawing 1/4" sections that spanned the 25 feet of our studio pin-up space. Later on I created an installation out of wood, canvas,...
12/21/07 -
Ben Muse - King Island is a small rocky island in the Bering Sea, just south of the Bering Straits. For many years it was home to a small group - perhaps 200 people - of Inupiat Eskimos. When they were on the island, they lived in the village of Ukivok, which clung - impossibly - to the sheer rocky south side of the island. But they didn't spend the whole year on the island. In June they migrated to...
12/21/07 -
Don's Life - The short answer is ‘yes’. Much of the pure, gleaming white marble sculpture that we now admire was certainly coloured in some way. The question is how was it coloured: a delicate wash, or bright, glaring hues? When I was in the States, I went to an exhibition in the Sackler Galleries at Harvard, which offered some examples of how Greek and Roman statues might have appeared with all...
12/21/07 -
Overcoming Bias - "For skeptics, the idea that reason can lead to a cult is absurd. The characteristics of a cult are 180 degrees out of phase with reason. But as I will demonstrate, not only can it happen, it has happened, and to a group that would have to be considered the unlikeliest cult in history. It is a lesson in what happens when the truth becomes more important than the search for truth..." ...
12/19/07 -
About Last Night - Regular readers of this blog will recognize the name of Louis Kaufman, the great American violinist and art collector who made the first long-playing recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, played on the soundtracks of Gone With the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Psycho, performed with Aaron Copland, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud, bought the first painting...
12/19/07 -
Russia Blog - The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) web site has interesting information about a popular winter sport. Below is a breakdown of the number of male ice hockey players in each of the leading ice hockey playing countries (the women's numbers are listed as well at the site). Male Players Age 20 & Over Junior Players Population (million) Canada 113,610 357,962 33.1 United States...
12/19/07 -
Beer Mapping - If you like beer and you like maps, then you may have found the right place. beermapping.com is a project by someone who likes knowing exactly where he is and how far he needs to go for good beer. At this point, there is only one individual working on the code that is making the Beer Mapping Project function. But that one person is supported by many friendly craft beer lovers who offer suggestions...
12/18/07 -
Outer LIfe - They say some aboriginal people fear cameras, worried a photograph of them will steal their souls. I feel the same way about advertising. My mental space is my soul. It's me. I guard it jealously, but there's an obvious difficulty with that. Just as my body isn't a closed system, needing nourishment in order to survive, my mental space must remain open to new ideas in order to thrive. I...
12/18/07 -
3Quark Daily - Though you should never live in the past, one must, with reverence and humility, acknowledge and give thanks for what has led to the present. To the past we owe—everything. And from that past comes our society and culture, tragic and bruised, undoubtedly, but trailing clouds of glory too. Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality arose from wanderings in the Lake District, close to mountain water,...
12/18/07 -
feministing - Earlier this year, we reported that states were starting to refuse abstinence-only funds. You know, because they don't work. Well, it seems that the trend is catching on: 14 states are now straight up refusing federal funds for abstinence only education. (Two more states are applying for funding but saying that they'll use it for comprehensive sex ed--making them ineligible.) The reasons...
12/18/07 -
The Moderate Voice - This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for the highly visited site Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog. Book Review of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook By Jessica Schneider There is an old joke among writers, poets mainly, about how one of the worst types of poems is that...
12/18/07 -
Deafening Silence - I don't normally spend much time at HuffPo, but Instapundit had a pointer to an interesting series of posts the other day. Blonde, blue-eyed D.C. mom Danielle Crittendon decided to spend an entire week living her life while robed in a full black abaya. She reported her experiences in three parts: 1. Does this burka make me look fat? It looks like laundry day in a mourning Victorian...
12/18/07 -
2 Blowhards - The scandal raised by former Senator George Mitchell's report on steroid and other drug use in professional baseball raises an interesting question: why exactly are sports fans upset by performance enhancing drugs? Granted, our society honors professional athletes and is worried about illegal drugs, so it's possible that this is ultimately an anxiety about making drug use seem glamorous or simply...
12/17/07 -
The American Scene - At the end of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay on Knocked Up, she casts Juno in a favorable light. The best moments in Knocked Up are those that suggest the world doesn’t have to be this way—that of course women can possess playful inner lives too. There aren’t quite enough of them. You leave feeling that what poor Debbie—and Alison—really wants is not a husband who knows to bring...
12/17/07 -
Gaping Void - The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn't I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever? You don't know if your idea is any good the moment it's created. Neither does anyone else. The most...
12/16/07 -
The Monarchist - BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS AND SWEAT, no class of humanity had pietas like the peasant. In the face of their brutal reality and the constant challenge of their basic survival, unrelenting sacrifice and devotion were their lifeblood. Hard work, religious piety, devotion to others and reverence for the natural order, they knew what it meant to be anchored to the earth. They had gravitas. That's our...
12/15/07 -
arkhitekton - Every architect’s favourite Dr. Evil look-a-like, Jean Nouvel, reveals all in a personal interview. Learn about his seasonal dressing habits, his small “pets”, and his love of silence. Apart from that, he does get to express why his architecture is so evocative: there is the desire to analyze and understand the world but this should not prevent us from expressing something, from inventing,...
12/15/07 -
Midd's Musings - This painting by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) of Saint Jerome deep in study surely is one the painter’s best examples of his use of deep, rich colours and his attention to detail. Why most renditions of Saint Jerome by painters and illustrators find him in his study is that he was commissioned by Pope Damasus the 1st to revise the Latin text of the Bible, known as the ‘Vulgate’ that is still...
12/15/07 -
money miscellany - I think I can safely assume that when some people see that this post involves Christianity that they will either navigate away from the site or send me a nasty email, especially since this is on a personal finance/economics site. I know too many people that think if you have the temerity to believe in Christianity then you have the intellectual capacity of a dried prune and you have nothing of value...
12/14/07 -
Feministe - Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to ”w00t.” ”W00t,” a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher’s online poll for the word that best sums up 2007. Right....
12/14/07 -
Books For Kids - All "top ten" or "best of the year" lists are subjective, but with this disclaimer I can recommend the books below for those who want to give exceptional books to the young readers on their Christmas lists. These books are drawn from the short list I did for the Philadelphia Inquirer published in their Book Review Magazine secion last Thursday. Many of these books have been reviewed earlier...
12/14/07 -
Black Five - Posted by: Claude Johnson in NBA Retired Players, Superior Man, Will Smith, Definite Major Purpose, Speed Wealth, Science of Success, Pro Athletes, Racism, Nike, Lessons, African Americans, Think And Grow Rich, Millionaire Mind, Claude Johnson This gets detailed, but go easy on yourself and keep reading. It’s important. It applies to everyone. You won’t hear so-called leaders talking...
12/12/07 -
Its Food - After our article about the cookbooks of Heston Blumenthal the other week, today we’re moving onto another of my foodie heroes, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh is best known for The River Cottage TV series, where Hugh gave up life in “The Smoke” and re-located to the country to live as a smallholder. As the years have passed Hugh has moved on from the tiny River Cottage and now runs...
12/12/07 -
Met Opera Blog - You would think that since the Met has an opening night almost every week during the opera season that opening night jitters wouldn’t exist. Not so. From the moment you walk into the opera house you can sense the excitement. Singers quietly pace back and forth in the hallways, sounds of “moi, moi, moi” drift from the dressing rooms, and the stage door reception area is literally knee...
12/12/07 -
Messing About in Boats - How does a rowing boat get a name like "Pony off a Lemon"? First let me digress. One of my favorite blogs is Cap'n JP. I love his accounts of life on the Thames as they make me nostalgic for London and my rowing days. I grew up close to the Thames and got into rowing as a teenager. I have always loved being on the water and had no access to sailing so rowing was a substitute. A lot of...
12/11/07 -
New Criterion - Pablo Picasso was a fraud. So says Tom Wolfe, who does not like Picasso. This much was becoming clear. Picasso, according to Wolfe, “left school just before they taught perspective.” He had to shroud his backgrounds in “fog.” He was a sorry excuse for a draftsman. He rendered “hands that look like the asparagus you get in the store.” That priapic doodler. That asparagus-handed...
12/11/07 -
Concurring Opinions - Lessons in Irony: AMC’s Mad Men and the Advertising World posted by Deven Desai MadMen2.JPGMany have noted that cable networks produce some of the better if not the best shows on television of late. The Sopranos arguably started this trend but other shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Dream On opened the way for more creative shows. Recently Battlestar Galactica and The Wire (possibly...
12/11/07 -
Absolute Arts - This isn't the story that I had planned to tell about Art Basel Miami Beach 2007. It's the real story. As I approached Exhibition Hall D outside the box office to buy my $65.00 permanent, four-day pass to the fair, I crossed paths with Miami Beach artist Alfred Perez. "Can I give you a card for my show?" he asked. "Sure," I said. He told me that his show was running from three until seven...
12/10/07 -
Church of the Customer - What does a cult brand look like? Well, here's one example. Westvleteren A religious order of silent monks in Belgium creates a cult beer. It's called Westvleteren. You must make an appointment to buy it. To make an appointment, you call the monks' Beer Phone. Yes, it's called the Beer Phone. The monks may talk while on the Beer Phone. You may buy only two cases at a time. The beer is sold...
12/10/07 -
Mark Culter Design - There are many pieces of the puzzle when creating a room but, for me, one of the most important is an Area Rug. Nothing is more central to creating warmth, style, and color. And quite often, nothing is more complicated to purchase. There are so many choices that I thought I would give you some basics to start your search~ Ashleigh Construction Methods Rugs can be made in many ways with a...
12/10/07 -
NeoNeoCon - If you ever get a chance to see “Au Revoir Parapluie,” I strongly urge you to do so. The work is impossible to describe, although this NY Times review (and this post of mine) try. It’s playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through next weekend, and then on to various non-US venues. Let’s see: there’s dance, acrobatics, circus, slapstick, music, mime, and scenery; part Twyla...
12/09/07 -
Junk Food Science - How often have we secretly feared that our love of Italian espresso might give us a heart attack? Leave it to Italian cardiologists to get to the bottom of this! A study just published the journal Circulation, led by Maria Giuseppina Silletta, MSc, examined the records of 11,231 Italian cardiac patients enrolled into the GISSI (Gruppo Italiano per lo Studio della Sopravvivenza nell’Infarto...
12/09/07 -
Crooked Timber - Talking of music, can it really be 4 years since we asked what the most annoying Christmas record is? Well, since then, youtube has enabled us to play them for you. So, instead of most annoying, this year I’d like your favourites. Here are the rules. The recording must be recognisably related to Christmas, must be non-traditional in some hard to define way, and while jokes are entirely welcome,...
12/09/07 -
The Moderate Voice - A version of what became Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign slogan existed in the late-1940s. In an Irving Berlin Broadway musical of that period, after Eisenhower had become a national hero for his work as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, an ensemble sang a satirical overview of prospective 1948 presidential candidates, finding each deficient but one. “We...
12/08/07 -
Pajamas Media - Charlie Wilson’s War is entertaining - but not in a good way, writes film critic Kyle Smith. He gives the “historically suspect” and “dramatically aimless” film written by The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin —which opens on Dec. 25— only 2.5 stars out of 4. Support Pajamas Media; Visit Our Advertisers By Kyle Smith I somewhat enjoyed “Charlie Wilson’s War,” but I’m glad I...
12/08/07 -
Alpine Institute - I posted my wrap-up on the Kilimanjaro climb on the AAI dispatch page, and now that we’re in South Africa, and I though I would give you an update on the latest here. After the climb of Kilimanjaro, we enjoyed getting some R & R on the beautiful beaches of Zanzibar (described in the last dispatch). That was a really good experience – so refreshing – and afterwards we flew from Zanzibar...
12/08/07 -
2 Blowhards - Michael Novak on National Review Online offers this link to an article by Richard Dawkins that rambles on about Awful, Terrible Religion, Awful, Terrible Tony Blair and George Bush and Awful, Terrible Sexual Jealously. Here are some observations on the latter topic that caught my eye. Returning to the original topic of sex outside marriage, I want to raise another question that interests...
12/07/07 -
Slacktivist - There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs. That's an apocalyptic passage. Some day, Jesus is saying, all will be made known and everyone will get what they deserve. Like every...
12/07/07 -
Gizmodo - The final Google trends for 2007 were officially announced yesterday, with the iPhone and the late plastic buxom wonderkid Anna Nicole Smith bracketing the Top 10 fastest-rising search terms. If you compare this to the first Google ranking ever, you will either conclude that the world is a better, calmer place now or that the human race is getting dumber by the year:...
12/07/07 -
Powerline blog - If you cross New Orleans rhythm-and-blues with gospel music of the deep south and add a generous dollop of genius to leaven the mix, you might come up with the one and only Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard. Today he turns 75. Richard started recording at the age of 19 for RCA. On his early sides he imitates the popular rhythm-and-blues artists of the early '50s. But through luck...
12/05/07 -
Goldwater Library - An object collected from what is now Mali has blood in its coating. Certain ceremonial objects from the Dogon and other cultures of West Africa are known for their dark patina. There is plenty of ethnological evidence that the thick coating on these wood sculptures, which are often in human or animal shapes, contains blood from animals sacrificed as part of the ceremonies. But the presence...
12/05/07 -
Johnson Won's Space - When people in England played a small plastic ball on a table with round wooden bats a hundred years ago, perhaps it had never occurred to anyone---and indeed nor to anyone even three decades ago--- that the game would play such a vital role in the Olympic Movement and be used someday as a powerful weapon in diplomacy leading to the re-opening of Sino-U.S. relations in the early '70s, contemporary...
12/05/07 -
Adventures in Reading - yarnspinner.jpgI am having more trouble today writing a post than I normally have. For the most part, my Internet writings are a result of rather spontaneous writings that I post (and often later return to and cringe at typos and where my mind was traveling too fast for my fingers). However, today for whatever reason I am struggling to say anything. So here goes nothing! The above paragraph...
12/05/07 -
Dragon cave - I often do this in black and white, rather than in color, I'm not certain why. I shoot exclusively in digital color now, so all the source images are in color; but in compiling a new piece, I feel drawn to work in black and white. Plainly, I might be influenced by one of my acknowledged photography masters, Jerry Uelsmann. You know his work, even if you don't know his name; you have almost certainly...
12/05/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - Since my early parole from jail -- where I’ve done forty of a ninety-day sentence for public lewdness – will take effect on the condition that I attend group therapy, I hardly demurred. It wasn’t the first time I’d been invited into a behavior mod routine, and I entered it gladly, full of powerful knowledge: I could resist any amount of reprogramming while making a fine show of compliance....
12/05/07 -
bbr blog - Every year, about the same time, an unceremonious and initially somewhat unexpected ritual takes place. It is known as the stacking of the LBV (Late Bottled Vintage) Port in the supermarket aisle; unceremonious given the fabled pedigree of this fortified wine and unexpected given the fact that its global production is relatively small; 10 million cases in total. And yet the two major players,...
12/04/07 -
ALL THINGS PAKISTAN - Fahmida Riaz is Pakistan’s premier female poet. She became a sensation in the early 1970s when her bold, feminist poetry created a stir in the convention ridden world of Urdu poetry. Riaz was expressive, sometimes explicit, and politically charged. She created a completely new genre in Urdu poetry with a post-modern sensibility. Later, she remained prominent with her defiance of General Zia’s...
12/04/07 -
Radar Online - The opening reception for the infamously aloof artist Banksy was met with mixed hipster reviews on Sunday. New Yorkers lined up around the block outside of the Vanina Holasek Gallery, waiting in the snow for admittance to the tiny, three-story space decorated in rattraps, spray-painted blood, and spectacularly priced graffiti art prints. Straight from the Bankrobber Gallery in London, the collection...
12/04/07 -
Vazahagasy - This subheading, Coastal versus Plateau Malagasys, implies competition and conflict. This is a fair representation of the situation; there is much suspicion and bad feeling between the groups. In simple terms, the ethnic groups of the plateau are largely of Indonesian origin, so that many people have glossy Asian hair and Indonesian features. The Coastal groups are largely of African...
12/03/07 -
Austro-Athenian Empire - The Romantics are suing the makers of the game Guitar Hero for including a cover of their song “What I Like About You” in the game. Why? Did the game makers use the song without permission? Nope. They had permission. The Romantics So what’s the problem? Well, it turns out that the cover sounded too much like the original, and so “infringed the group’s right to its own image and...
12/03/07 -
Roads Less (But Often) Traveled - Public Space(s) As a somewhat migrant student this semester that has found coffee shops with outlets a more suitable way of working than sitting in a hot and stuffy studio with 3 foot high partitions, I am on the constant prowl for my own piece of public space. What is fascinating to me is the variety of public spaces available to the nomadic architecture student, depending on his/her...
12/03/07 -
Pandagon - Courtney Martin has an interesting review up of Robert Jensen’s new book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I really like the review, and she captures a lot of the thoughts I had when I saw Jensen give a speech on pornography—basically a combination of knowing he’s right on one hand, but also feeling he overplays that hand. He’s absolutely right that there’s a huge...
11/30/07 -
Gizmodo - During the past week, many readers have asked us to compare the physical traits of the second-gen Sony Reader and the all-new Amazon Kindle. (If you feel a bit behind, catch up by reading our full Amazon Kindle review and verdict from last Friday.) The Sony Reader is much smaller, and weighs three ounces less than the Kindle, but the screens are exactly the same size, and use the same E-Ink...
11/30/07 -
Megan McArdle - If you're going to have good cooking gear, you need some recipes to cook with it. I lean heavily on Epicurious, but I also have a lot of cookbooks. A lot of cookbooks. Here are the ones I use all the time: 1. Julia Child I consider three of her books absolutely indespensible: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volumes 1 and 2), for when you have a lot of time to do something perfectly;...
11/30/07 -
Cracked - If the Bible had been written by King Leonidas and the rest of the Spartans from 300, it would probably read pretty much the same as it does now. It turns out, the Bible is already chock full of ass kicking. Here are the verses that make us want to take to the streets and put some unbelievers to the sword. #9. Exodus 2:11-12 Sure, Moses was a great leader, an emancipator of his people and...
11/29/07 -
Just Watch - OK, before we get to the meat of this post, two funny stories. Over Thanksgiving, The Cousin for Me and I were talking about moviegoing, specifically a) whether going to the movies by yourself is lame (verdict: it's not) and. b) how much it sucks going to the movie with a mainly old-people audience (quite a bit... but there's an upside...for reasons I'll explain later). Anyhoo, TC4M ended up...
11/29/07 -
Washington Bureau - Shopping1 Many of us from the West tend to have different kinds of wardrobes. We have work clothes. We have weekend clothes. We probably have party clothes. And in my case, I have a pretty wicked assortment of Halloween costumes, although nothing to match the closet of Paris Hilton, who seems to be shopping in Shanghai this week. Generally speaking, Chinese do not go in for this stuff. Chinese...
11/29/07 -
Feministe - When class is cancelled at the last minute, I can hop on a train to Prague for the end of the week, and then on to Munich for the weekend. Prague is gorgeous, although it’s freezing cold here. And, since my greatest talent in life is attracting weirdos (the bad kind, not the quirky interesting kind), I’ve already spent one night in a sketchy old woman’s Jesus-festooned flat on a rock-hard...
11/28/07 -
Shane Lavalette - Orson Welles is generally known for his 1938 radio broadcast of the science fiction novella War of the Worlds. If not for that, then for co-writing, directing, producing and starring in Citizen Kane (1941), commonly referred to as “the greatest film ever made.” Orson Welles is, however, not so known for his last major film, F For Fake (1974) – a pseudo-documentary and playful meditation...
11/28/07 -
Making Home Made Wine and Beer - I just thought that this is pretty cool. A Patron saint for beer makers. Saint Arnold was born to a prominent Austrian family in the year 580. Even back in those days the Austrians were famous for their love of beer, and admired for their brewing prowess. Beer was a proud Austrian tradition that was not wasted on young Arnold. As a young man, Arnold entered the priesthood and began moving...
11/28/07 -
The Olive Press - The young man runs towards the charging bull. The crowd cheers loudly, much louder than normal. The bull looks confused. Expecting to have impaled his foe he now finds he is behind him. The performer has dived over the top of the bull, rolled over and is now back on his feet. This is a different kind of bull fighting. It is bloodless, more acrobatic than the conventional style and growing...
11/27/07 -
A Mars Odyssey - The use of this technology is not only essential for the future of curbing the spread of infectious diseases,” explains John Haynes, public health program manager for the NASA Earth Science Applied Sciences Program. “NASA satellites are also a cost-effective method for operational agencies since they are already in orbit and in use by scientists to collect data about the Earth’s atmosphere.” The...
11/27/07 -
Hospital Impact - This is easily the most frequently asked question I get at healthcare conferences. I usually answer this by asking another question: what's the best way for the hospital to utilize the web to engage your stakeholders? The web is quickly becoming the place where conversations happen and perceptions are being formed. And new technologies make it easier than ever to be a part of that conversation....
11/27/07 -
A Cosmopolitan - I was away up north by Barrie yesterday (about a two hour drive - while speeding, from where I am in Waterloo) helping out a friend of one of my professors as part of his experiment. His whole plan is to bring archaeological techniques into forensic searches of houses since sometimes house fires can be used to disguise murders. Since current fire marshal sweeps are not as effective he was...
11/27/07 -
Crooked Timber - Deadline Hollywood says a deal may be struck. Writers strike may be settled by X-Mas! If not, let them write graphic novels! (Guardian article about "film-makers themselves branching out into graphic novels, incorporating that art form as an alternative storytelling tool rather than simply an adjunct or cash-in." Eh. Sort of interesting.) But what if you want to combine your love of graphic novels...
11/27/07 -
2 Blowhards - I know next to nothing about opera. I know next to nothing about music, as my four years as a lazy grade school and junior high school band zillionth-chair clarinet player attest. Therefore, no one can truthfully accuse me of being an Opera Snob ... though I am more vulnerable to being tagged as a blowhard for some obscure reason. Nevertheless, I'm here to pontificate on the staging of opera...
11/27/07 -
Marginal Revolution - First, you are welcome to challenge the premise that there is in fact less respect for parents in the United States. But if it were true, what might be the possible mechanisms? 1. American parents have less time to discipline their kids, in part because women are more likely to work, wages are higher, and there is a general rush and hurry. 2. American culture is less closely tied to the...
11/26/07 -
Felix Salmon - Pinot Contest Last night, a dozen or so friends and I discovered one of the best-value wines in America. I'll tell you what it is in a minute. But first, it's worth explaining how we came to that conclusion: Michelle and I held a Pinot Contest at our apartment. The structure was pretty much the same as the wine contest we held last year: each contestant brought two identical bottles of wine....
11/26/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - Surely the American public supports the Hollywood writers in their labor struggles and fervently hopes that the writers’ strike be made permanent. Writing is work, and work is a dignified contribution to society. Making someone write for CBS’s drama Cane is an inhumane labor practice and I hope this strike puts an end to it once and for all.Angelsanddemons All joking aside, the Hollywood...
11/26/07 -
Ben and Alice - Douglas Hofstadter's new book I Am a Strange Loop places him firmly in the Daniel Dennett camp of philosophers on the mystery of consciousness: the camp that believes that "consciousness is an illusion" is enough of an explanation to settle the matter. I think this dodges the question. Of course consciousness is an illusion; but since we don't understand how that illusion itself is experienced,...
11/26/07 -
Greg.org - As the art market began heating up and becoming much more fashionable a few years ago, I started to wonder what the effect of all this demand would be on the art that was produced. Surely, 95-plus percent of the objects and paintings would not ever be made, projects wouldn't be conceived, much less realized, in the absence of an insatiable-seeming market. Sure, like Morris Louis and Clyfford...
11/26/07 -
Pro Game News - Those who organize protests about violent video games would do well to realize that the net effect of said protests is inevitably to cause the game to sell even more copies than it would have with no attention. Seth Scheisel says as much in today’s New York Times: "Manhunt 2 has received free publicity and media attention it would have never enjoyed were it not for the presumably unwitting...
11/26/07 -
Praxeology - I saw Beowulf today – in 3D, which is definitely the way to see it (well, I suppose IMAX 3D is the way to see it, but there’s no IMAX venue in Auburn), and I suspect 3D will become a more and more frequent format for big-budget action movies. (The theatre showed three previews for upcoming 3D films: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, a Journey to the Centre of the Earth remake, and – for some reason...
11/22/07 -
feministe - Belgium is one of the most under-rated countries in Western Europe. I’ve been twice now — both times sort of by accident — and I’ve never failed to be fully impressed. Brussels is a surprisingly dynamic city, with great food (the mussels in Brussels are famous for a reason), fantastic cultural and political life, and, in my humble opinion, the most beautiful main square this half of the...
11/22/07 -
Brad Plumer - His bottom line: Corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated like people. So they shouldn't be taxed (because the corporate income tax is inefficient and inequitable) or held criminally liable for wrongdoing (because it's unfair to make everyone in the company suffer for the crimes of a few—note that many low-level Arthur Andersen employees are still out of work). But, Reich says, companies...
11/22/07 -
shakespeares sister - My using the word cunt to describe myself and a man using it to describe another man are fundamentally different contexts. To pretend that this difference is not patently fucking obvious is what August calls a fabricated belief. No one with two brain cells still knocking together honestly believes that white people using the n-word as an insult and black people using it for any reason are equivalent,...
11/21/07 -
cadeveo - So lots of people have been talking about this Jay-Z video, Blue Magic. Mainly, they are pointing out the fact that he’s flashing Euros. Being hip-hop’s poster-boy of the most successful hustler, showing Euro’s probably signifies that Jay’s committed himself to surviving. Mayhaps he’s sending a message to all the rest of us, too: “Switch your money now if you want to save your livelihood.”...
11/21/07 -
book chronicle - I had great hopes for Karen Elizabeth George’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (1984). A Gothic grammar companion – what could be more appealing? While most grammar usage books are not exactly the most riveting of reads The Deluxe Transitive Vampire barely comes in at slightly amusing (and that is only because of the...
11/21/07 -
Fine Wine Blog - With demand on the up and supply remaining static, getting hold of premium champagne is becoming increasingly challenging - particularly the larger bottles which are extremely popular during the festive season. This year we could only purchase 150 double magnums of our house champagne, such was the limited production at the supplier, Mailly Grand Cru……….. and they have almost all gone. ...
11/20/07 -
pandagon - Faludi’s book has two parts, the first documenting the bizarre patriarchal response to 9/11, with the violent insistence that a terrorist attack from a bunch of misogynist fundamentalists somehow necessitates a response of abandoning a commitment to women’s equality at home, and the second part where she establishes the background of the particularly American version of the tale of chivalry,...
11/20/07 -
2Blowhards - In any case, the film muffs basic storytelling over and over again. (At one point I whispered to The Wife, "I wouldn't have let this script in the front door, would you?" "No way," she whispered back.) Just a few of many examples: Because we see so little of his rise to the top, we're never sure what to make of the Denzel character. One face-off, one rival murdered -- and voila, it's settled. Denzel...
11/20/07 -
Corduroy orange - We’re getting to the end of local apple season. Most orchards still have some available, so stock up now to help get you through the winter. If you find yourself inundated with apples, a pot of applesauce is a great way to use up many at one blow. This year has been a good one for me in terms of scouting out varieties of apples. It started out poorly–I didn’t get to the orchard in July or...
11/20/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - Not so long ago, the Dish found itself on a major nostalgia trip, as readers sent in countless YouTube music video clips from the 1980s. More so than even the Best Movie Lines, this meme seemed to get your nostalgia/pop-culture juices flowing. So we decided to give you what you wanted and hereby invite every sick, '80s-loving Dish readers to vote for their favorite 80s videos for Thanksgiving...
11/20/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - The two images above come from distant eras when that rare and coveted underground fungus, the truffle, was in more abundant supply than at present. The gatherer on the left, in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval herbal treatise at the Bibliotheque Rouen (thanks to BibliOdyssey), seems to have happened upon a trove of squash ball-sized truffles, positioned conveniently above ground. More realistically,...
11/20/07 -
Ali Eteraz - 1. Practicing Muslims. This person is a theological believer in Islam and the limit of his/her thinking, ethics, morality and reason do not exceed beyond the Quran and Sunnah (although these people may disagree with one another on methodology and approach). Being a practicing Muslim does not have to mean that this person is necessarily interested in imposing his worldview upon all other people...
11/19/07 -
Anything Glob - I remember clearly the first time I saw the young painter Mathew Cerletty four years ago on Ludlow Street. He was standing by the pool table at Max Fish, dressed in an impeccably clean pink sweater. As an awkward ice-breaker, I said something rather stupid to him: “Pink is the new gray.” Cerletty politely smiled. He was fresh from mounting his first solo show in New York down the street and...
11/19/07 -
Online Lunch Pail - One good thing about my persistent poverty is that I'll never have to buy a house in a rich suburb and have to deal with right-wing municipal governments breathing down my neck. Oh, wait. I have to deal with it anyway. Never mind. In Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, an affluent suburb of Detroit, even those who can afford to live in that community aren't safe from an overbearing city government....
11/19/07 -
Gawker - dinaw "As a 39-year-old fiction writer, you can imagine how much time I spend fretting about the plight of under 35-year-old fiction writers," 'Homeland' author Sam Lipsyte said in his introduction to last night's '5 Under 35' event, hosted by the National Book Foundation, which will dole out National Book Awards later this week. When the laughter died down, though, Sam backpedaled: "Actually,...
11/16/07 -
Waking The Midnight Sun - We have been living in a 1984-Brave New world for quite some time already. The Deputy Director of National (that is, corporate power) Security, Donald Kerr simply confirmed this all the more baldly recently with his little hypnotic suggestion about changing the definition of “privacy:“ Definition Changing for People’s Privacy By PAMELA HESS WASHINGTON (AP) — As...
11/16/07 -
Simon Bedak - Those of us who prepare gourmet beef cheeks or fried cow arseholes chilli do have a feint idea whereabouts and on which particular end of the beast these items should be cut from. But what about the those other fucking bits you don't need for a Trembling Lower Lip Stew? Well, you could write the answer down on the back of your hand next time you wish to impress a butcher. Alternatively, you...
11/16/07 -
Babalu Blog - Thanksgiving (el Sanguibin) with my big, fat Cuban family is always a wonderful and fun celebration. As Cuban refugees who are now proud American citizens, we are mindful of just how much we have to be thankful for. In my family, while we’re waiting for the birds to fry, (oh yes, we do!) we have appetizers and play games. It’s noisy. Sooo noisy! In that talking-yelling-over-each-other way that...
11/16/07 -
sean's russia blog - “Fire and arson,” writes Cathy Frierson in All Russia is Burning!: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia, “carried intense symbolic and material meaning as part of Russia’s search for a modern identity. When Russia joined the European experience of “high modernism,” uncontained fire in the hands of recently emancipated peasants came into view for educated...
11/16/07 -
Dragon Cave - It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed...
11/16/07 -
Feministe - Tim Hanford at Slate reports on a study of coffee shops by an economist, Caitlin Knowles Myers, which found that women waited, on average, 20 seconds more between placing their order and receiving their coffee than did men, which held even after adjusting for the complicatedness of the drink: She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops (PDF) in the Boston...
11/14/07 -
Bloggasm - November 13, 2007 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Religion, Books, christian, media To receive favorable publicity for a cause, one simply needs a Hallmark card. A journalist named Karen Hunter offered this small bit of wisdom when she appeared on a January 31 episode of CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now.” Hunter was one of three who participated in an “Out in the Open Panel” that discussed...
11/14/07 -
Ablogistan - Hip hop is apparently becoming very popular with the youth of Afghanistan. Some in Afghanistan may see this as a sign of progress, others may see it as more Western encroachment on Afghan culture. I think it's the former and, as a Halfghan myself, find it fascinating. Between 1996 and 2001 the Taliban completely banned music and dance in Afghanistan. It's difficult to even fathom a world in...
11/14/07 -
Greg - The economic and ecological and aesthetic far-sightedness of Enzo Mari's 1974 Autoprogettazione still blows my mind. Translated variously as "self-projects," and "self-design, self-made," Mari's collection of designs for furniture you could build yourself with just a hammer using cheap, off-the-shelf lumber anticipated several key design principles that resonate right now: DIY; sustainability;...
11/13/07 -
SLSO - Art is always political. However, in every social order, the question remains: Does culture control politics, or do politics, rather, control art? For every artist, the answer to that question is an existential one, signifying the meaning and form of creative activity. In the experience of artworks, whether painting, music, or literature, it is essential to examine their natural relationship to...
11/13/07 -
Humiblog - The only other Brandi to truly compete with Cognac when it comes to name recognition is Armagnac, from the French region which contributes to its name. In essence, it is basically the same product, and even made from the same grapes. With a different distilling technique, however, Armagnac differs, if ever so delicately, from its Champagne cousin. Tariquet Le Legendaire Armagnac As you...
11/13/07 -
Get Your Fix - Untitled I, 1979, by Willem de Kooning, is on display in the President's Office, Main Hall, University of Montana, M-Fr, from 8 to 5pm, except holidays. Run, don't walk, to view this de Kooning non-objective masterpiece painted late in his life. What a rare treat for Missoulians to be able to see such a work in our fair town. For those of you who require a clear narrative to their art,...
11/12/07 -
Good Wine Under 20 - After Pinot Days this summer, I was afraid I'd never find another good pinot noir under $20. Then I found the Navarro Pinot Noir that's in my Thanksgiving picks for this year, and now I'm happy to report another find: the 2006 Veramonte Pinot Noir Reserva. I received this as a sample from the winery, but you can get your own bottle for around $15 from most merchants. The grapes for the 2006...
11/12/07 -
Robert Amsterdam - At the beginning of November, President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded a Hero of Russia medal to the American-born spy George Koval, who was the only KGB man to infiltrate the Manhattan project. Koval, who worked under the codename "Delmar", died in Moscow back in 2006, and there has been no other official reason for the timing of this posthumous award. According to the Kremlin press release,...
11/12/07 -
The Van Der Galiën Gazette - We are all bound up in a tragedy and we struggle to find our way out. That is the moral of the near-real-world story presented in Redford’s latest foray into politicized fiction. Rather than being a partisan anti-war screed as some on the right in the U.S. are presenting it, Lions for Lambs strips away the name-calling and cheesy stereotypes that infest debate over national security policy since...
11/11/07 -
Argentor Rules - I decided to try something new this week, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you think. Maybe because I also study Art History, I find it easier to think in terms of works of art, especially in regards to concept and theory. So this week I have decided to use art to understand Stoller’s modes of rationality. Also, I am working under the assumption that these aren’t works...
11/11/07 -
Happiness Project - FlanneryoconnorEvery Wednesday is Tip Day. This Wednesday: Eight writing tips from Flannery O’Connnor. As part of my current obsession with Flannery O’Connor, I recently finished the volume of her collected letters, The Habit of Being. Her letters were fascinating, and among other thing, included some interesting advice and observation about writing. O’Connor was a very idiosyncratic...
11/11/07 -
Amy Welborn - A couple of weeks ago, I read The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, reprint edition from the NYRB publishing house. Originally published just a couple of years after World War II, it tells the story of the war in England on a very, very, very small scale. It’s a most fascinating book, with an introduction provided by David Lodge. (Who, besides his Catholic, academic and mid-life...
11/09/07 -
Ben and Alice - posted by Ben in New York City at 8:37 AM NYC Time The other day, my sister, who is due to give birth to a baby boy any day now, wrote me with a question: Hi, It is a bit strange to e-mail about this, but... Would you feel comfortable telling me your thoughts re: circumcision---we have that decision coming right up. I can't really imagine doing it....but wanted to know your...
11/09/07 -
Cheese Foodie - One of the most important steps in the making of cheese is the aging process. It can be nearly absent, in which case so-called fresh cheese is produced. That’s consumed right away and there are many fine cheeses of this type. But the majority experience aging of various lengths. It isn’t just the amount of time a cheese is aged, however, that contributes heavily to the flavor and consistency...
11/09/07 -
Yop2 - Originally, Inuit throat singing was a form of entertainment among Inuit women while the men were away on hunting trips. It was an activity that was primarily done by Inuit women although there have been some men doing it as well. In the Inuit language Inuktitut, throat singing is called katajjaq, pirkusirtuk or nipaquhiit depending on the Canadian Arctic region. It was regarded more as a type...
11/08/07 -
Dr. Terry M. Trier - I find few things more satisfying in life than whittling wood. There is a certain kind of distinct pleasure you get when a sharp knife meets wood. The end result doesn’t have to be anything special to appreciate this subtle joy of carving. Whittling a sharp point on a stick can be very satisfying and I think it appeals to an instinct that extends back to an ancient tool-making past when a sharp...
11/08/07 -
terella - With a long coast line and a ten thousand year history of sailing, fishing has been an important occupation and industry. The Norwegian fishing industry is represented by a diversified ocean-going and coastal fleet of more than 7,000 vessels employing approximately 14.000 people. In addition the processing industry consisting of nearly 800 units and a fish farming industry holding over 2,900 licences....
11/08/07 -
cruftbox - Grilling is cooking meat by the direct application of high heat with a gas burner or an electric heater. Grilling is simple since temperature is easy, but doesn't bring any new flavors to the party. BBQing is cooking meat by the direct application of heat with charcoal or wood. The burning of the fuel adds flavor to the meat. BBQing requires more skill since the flames must be managed to...
11/07/07 -
Gords Poetry Factory - My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life....
11/07/07 -
Brian Malaquias blog - Let me set a scenario up for you. I am sure you have see those Sam Adams commercials. I love them!!! You know the ones I am talking about. The commercials with the brewer with the big red beard standing next to huge vats adding a bit of yeast to this batch, and a dash of hops to that batch. As you are watching you are thinking to yourself, I couldn't possibly be able to do this!! It must be way...
11/07/07 -
Beatties Book Blog - These three novels, briefly reviewed here, have little if anything in common I guess, except that they are all fiction, and that each is a well-written, outstanding even, example of its genre. With eleven previous best-selling novels to her name, four short-listings in the Romantic Novel of the Year Awards, and her previous title Gardens of Delight winning that Award, Erica James could...
11/06/07 -
The Moviezzz Blog - If directors had batting averages, Stanley Kubrick would be in the hall of fame. Few directors turned out as consistent films as his. Over his entire career, he pretty much never made a bad film. I've seen all of his films (with the exception of FEAR AND DESIRE) and have loved them all. Last week, a big box set of his films was released. Reviews have been great. There is the issue over whether...
11/06/07 -
DCist - Though most of us no longer sit at typewriters nor face blank pieces of physical paper, there's nothing more daunting than a blank screen and the notion of putting something meaningful on it. Compound that with the idea of doing that for approximately 200 pages and you begin to realize why a lot of novelists end up neurotic, tick-ridden, booze-and-drug addled wretches with plenty of failed relationships...
11/06/07 -
tele read - Writers on the Web are nothing new—as far back as 1995 I myself was pushing my book NetWorld online, complete with a free first chapter—but it’s refreshing to see more and more of them paying attention to their readers rather than just tacking up PR spiels, bios and the inevitable links to booksellers. The real question I have is, “How long until savvy writers pester publishers to let...
11/06/07 -
The Frontal Cortex - The rules of the wine tasting were simple. Twenty five of the best wines under twelve dollars were nominated by independent wine stores in the Boston area. The Globe then assembled a panel of wine professionals to select their top picks in the red and white category. All of the wines were tasted blind. The result is a beguiling list of delicious plonk. But I was most interested in just how...
11/05/07 -
Super Touch - A lot of strange art has passed through the walls of the UK’s high temple of contemporary vision, the TATE MODERN, but Colombian artist DORIS SALCEDO’s newest installation, a 548 foot long crack in the gallery’s main entrance hall titled “Shibboleth” raises the bar. Created by opening the concrete floor and inserting the cast texture of a rock wall from her native Colombia, the giant...
11/05/07 -
Coyote Blog - Activist: A person who believes so strongly that a problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to ... getting other people to fix the problem. It used to be that activists sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some semblance of honor. However, our self-styled elite became frustrated at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters...
11/04/07 -
Praxeology - Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation wasn’t on economics or history or political philosophy; it was on the Greek atomists. Specifically, it was a systematic comparison of the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus. Marx-Atomic Perhaps ironically, given his later reputation as arch-determinist and arch-materialist, Marx takes the side of Epicurus, the anti-reductionist and proponent...
11/04/07 -
Kim Grant Mosaics - I have just returned from a 3 week trip to Seoul and France. Absolutely fantastic!!! I love to travel and although we have travelled since having the children, it’s not quite the same as travelling without them. It’s much easier and alot more liberating! ;) This trip was my first big trip away from the kids, so it was a little difficult at first, but I had a blast. Once I got onto that...
11/04/07 -
kikos house - Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 was written in 1804–08. This symphony is one of the most popular and well-known compositions in all of European classical music, and one of the most often-played symphonies.[1] It comprises four movements: an opening sonata allegro, an andante, and a fast scherzo which leads attacca to the finale. First performed in Vienna's Theater an der...
11/02/07 -
james lomax - I like the way photography is a medium that intercedes between the world and myself, as it does for everyone, and then we use that as a meeting ground for discussion. We had some great discussions on my Photography MA. The same point applies to literature, but it’s more direct and that gets problematic. You deal more closely with the realm of emotion and feeling, with for example characters in...
11/02/07 -
great hobby world - Coin collecting has been a popular hobby around the world for many years. While hoarding coins due to their value goes back to the beginning of coinage, coin collecting as pieces of art was a later development. Known as the "Hobby of Kings", modern coin collecting is generally believed to have begun in the fourteenth century with Italian scholar, poet and early renaissance humanist Francesco...
11/02/07 -
The Belmont Club - A higher resolution image can be found here. It is still widely visited. People come, though they are no longer the grieving parents of the 1920s, nor the grandchildren of the 1960s wondering at an event which was already beginning to assume the aspect of legend. The notes of the Last Post and the British version of Reveille are still sounded by Belgians at Menin in fulfillment of a promise never...
11/01/07 -
ArtBlog.net - Probably very few people make art for purely formal reasons. I even get that sense from Ad Reinhardt, who seemed to work with an idea of formal purity rather than formal purity itself, and a parochial idea at that. Certainly anyone using recognizable form has poetic associations with those images or there would be no reason to put them in. Art has long been inspired by stories and histories, to the...
11/01/07 -
The Moderate Voice - For a music head like myself, there is nothing quite as liberating as not having to listen to commercial radio – which more often than not means stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, a thuggishly monopolistic media conglomerate with a conservative political streak. Clear Channel owns over 1,100 AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations, 11 satellite radio channels and more than 30...
11/01/07 -
Social Sense - There is a saying that goes like this: “If you can keep you head, while everyone around you is losing theirs — then you don’t understand how bad the situation really is.” The statement is probably more truthful than it is humorous, because our society has evolved — and continues to evolve, faster than most of us can cope with those changes. In the 1970’s, sociologist Alvin Toffler...
10/31/07 -
mp3 adrenalin - Hip Hop culture is again being attacked by the major news outlets, which of late began with Don Imus, when his virulent racism was spotlighted after his hateful remarks against a college basketball team made up mostly of Black women. However, some capitalist news outlets appear to have embraced Hip Hop in revolutionary Cuba. It’s not that this should be a confusing turn, not for those...
10/31/07 -
Wine Under 20 - It should be a highly pleasurable process of trial and error that no one can really do for you because taste is a subjective thing. You may love pizza with chardonnay, even though this breaks almost every "food pairing rule" that I know. I don't; but you just might. If you still fee that wine and food pairing IS rocket science, there is a new company that wants to help you: Wine That Loves.......
10/31/07 -
Sunnye Side of the Web - This is a difficult book to rate. It's easy reading -- obviously written more to entertain than to inform -- and it's highly biased against the subject yet presented in such a way as to pretend to be balanced. It is character assassination in print. The subtitle, "The divided soul of Clarence Thomas" is not proven by the discourse. It is obvious that Thomas has a very clear idea of who he is and...
10/31/07 -
th eamerican scene - The populism has to be relatively modest, but has to address systemic problems that the public finds deeply unacceptable. Indeed, the general level of satisfaction that the majority enjoys may unexpectedly feed into deep frustration and impatience with government failures: the more personal contentment, the higher one’s expectations rise about satisfaction in all areas, and there is nothing more...
10/31/07 -
peak talk - Whenever I am asked about Dutch movies I say without hesitation that the best one ever made was Soldier of Orange (1977). It was at the time the most expensive movie production ever made in Holland and it launched the international careers of both Rutger Hauer and Paul Verhoeven. With this movie Verhoeven - who went on to achieve Hollywood fame with 'Basic Instinct' - brought his unique brand of...
10/31/07 -
idle think - When does historical writing go from being historiography to history? — or in other words: when do we stop regarding a piece of historical work as a piece of academic writing on some historical event, and start regarding it instead as a primary source in itself? The most straightforward way to think about this might be to consider Thucydides (widely regarded as one of the earliest historians...
10/30/07 -
The Moderate Voice - How did the bus get there? Of all the questions (pseudo and real) that Sean Penn’s latest film, Into The Wild, is so manifestly trying to provoke- and in a semi-retarded hippy-cum-tree hugger sort of way, this most basic and elemental plot point is never addressed. But, more on that later. The film is based upon the 1996 nonfiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer, about a spoiled rich white...
10/30/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - Do they give acting awards to dogs? Perhaps they should in the case of the television program Inspector Rex—Kommissar Rex—an amazing German Shepherd (or series of Shepherds) who helps the Criminal Bureau solve murder mayhem in Vienna. See Rex get jealous when a woman comes onto the home ground of his detective owner. Watch in amazement as Rex uncovers evidence in the grounds of Schönbrunn....
10/28/07 -
dennis bauer - The synthesizer riff in this 1986 track is as fist-pumping as music gets without involving an actual instrument. We're not clear on what he's counting down to, but somebody's about to get their ass kicked. If we were wrestlers and it was 1986 again, we'd totally have this as our intro music. The Only Way It Could Be Better: The song takes a sharp decline after the chorus, when it slips from the...
10/28/07 -
the green belt - Yesterday, I asked what color saffron is (yellow) and why everyone keeps talking about the Burmese monks "in their saffron-colored robes" when, pretty clearly, they don't wear saffron-colored robes. I got email from a weaver-and-dyer who said "Saffron's dye is a beautiful bright, clear yellow and the monks' robes are dyed with turmeric or some other natural vegetable dye readily available in their...
10/28/07 -
sign and sight - There are few places where a history stretching back thousands of years is more legible than the site of the Gothic St. Kolumba church, destroyed in WWII, in the centre of Cologne. Archaeologists started excavating the area of rubble in the 1970s. Apart from the church ruins dating from around 1500 and the chapel of the "Madonna in the Ruins" which was built inside them by Gottfried Böhm in the...
10/26/07 -
BCL Books - Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent...
10/26/07 -
James Lomax - A friend said to me a few months ago, “why photography”? I didn’t know how to reply, because he didn’t clarify exactly what he meant. Was it supposed to prompt some kind of self-reflection, or a more simple declaration of why I like it? I don’t think he realised himself how the question could be considered in different ways, but it’s the kind of thing I like doing and after gestating in...
10/26/07 -
Mcqesq - I have always wanted to own and operate an indie record label. Of course, as is my usual luck, I’m thinking about doing this at a time when the whole concept of the record label as a business model is in question. Recent articles on the music industry have asked whether record labels will continue to survive in the face of digital distribution, piracy and the trend of established acts (and...
10/25/07 -
Blog Critics - » Album Review: Million Seller Hits of Today Written by Simon And Garfunkel by 101 Strings » CD Review: Johnnie Taylor - Stax Profiles » CD Review: Christopher O'Riley -- Home to Oblivion: An Elliott Smith Tribute Beatlemania - has swept the world - has embraced the young and old - has epitomized the great social changes in today's attitudes. And, above all, the music of the Beatles...
10/25/07 -
Parkway Reststop - Here are a few observations and thoughts that popped into my cruller during the round trip drive between New Jersey and Georgia. Over-the-Road Trucks and Truckers There sure are a lot of them. I see trucks on the highway every day, but I don’t see as many as I did between Jersey and Georgia. There’s probably a good reason for that, but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe because the New...
10/25/07 -
Absolute Arts - Over the last week I've had several suggestions for blogs. One is to speak more about the larger world of art and larger issues in contemporary art. The other was to talk about my own work. I think I tend to avoid the first issue because it can become so contentious. I've avoided the second most often because I don't want to make a habit of using this forum as advertisement for my own work. The...
10/24/07 -
Guy Kawasaki - In 1966, Daniel Siotnik began designing the ILLIAC IV to incorporate 256 processors, each of which would execute the same instruction on different data (SIMD). Burroughs Corporation began construction of the machine at the University of Illinois, but moved the project to the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in 1971 due in part to fears involving the project’s military-based...
10/24/07 -
Turkmen Friendship - Characterized by two coinciding histories since its first cities were founded six thousand years ago, Iraq has experienced both the pinnacles of world civilization and large scale destruction at different times in its history. Subjected to unyielding violence and ruin, Iraq currently has the world's attention. Yet its rich cultural narrative continues in the work of its artists. Conscious...
10/24/07 -
Eat Local Challenge - To begin to integrate local eating into your day-to-day life, you need to do a little research: Where do your nearby market gardeners sell their wares? Are there buying clubs? Community-supported agriculture plans? Farmers’ markets? How can you get hold of meat, seafood, eggs, and grains that are grown or caught sustainably in your area? Who has apples and strawberries in season? This is...
10/24/07 -
Lauren of Arabia - I leave for Egypt in one week! Yemen has taken its toll on me. All of my friends are Yemeni, Syrian or Egyptian. I have become drawn into a close knit circle and am learning more and more of how Yemenis think, and what have I decided? This is truly a bizarre culture for me. It is now normal for a man wearing a bleached white galibeya and large dagger to pick me up in his car to go smoke...
10/24/07 -
Art-Machine - Pulp media and genres tend to get a lot of flack for churning out cookie-cutter works. And with good reason. From time to time, it can seem that the most profitable segments of the entertainment industry are working from a Chinese menu – one from column A, one from column B, and a side from column C. It does, however, take a certain artistry to be able to work within such strict guidelines,...
10/24/07 -
Pandagon - I feel almost sheepish after watching the final episode of the 3rd season of BSG that I had to get hit over the head with an anvil before I realized that one of the reasons the show is so compelling is it’s a long, often elegant (but occasionally clunky) dismantling of the hazy concept of free will. As much as I hated the set-up of Lee Adama’s speech (why bother with the mistrial crap and...
10/23/07 -
get your art fix - Colin Powell stood before the United Nations on February 5th, 2003 to make the case for war against Iraq. Instructions had been given to cover Picasso’s Guernica, usually displayed at the entrance to the Security Council, with a blue cloth because American officials believed the display of Guernica would have sent “mixed messages.” Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times: “Mr. Powell can’t...
10/23/07 -
Chaos Fold - As a writer, one not celebrated by any great awards or known beyond a small circle of dear friends, I can appreciate Ebert’s reluctance to admit such a seemingly infantile form into the pantheon of high art. It is a distinction that took many years to be reached by film, television, graphic novels, and many other forms of former folk-devils. Art is subjective, at its very core. I live in...
10/23/07 -
Blogabout - Our first stop was a town called Timaru. The town didn’t boast much by way of tourist activities, so after chatting with the information center worker for a bit, we headed out of town and towards Mt. Cook. On the way, we stopped near the water for lunch. The day was overcast, but the weather was pleasant. I had packed a sandwich, and Timo made one in the back of the van while cranking up the music...
10/22/07 -
Scottlan - After a morning at the Cao Dai temple and a stop at a fairly nice and inexpensive cafe for lunch we made our way on an extremely bumpy road to the Cu Chi tunnels. I thought the tunnels were used by Americans but I was misinformed. The tunnels were dug by South Vietnamese communists who were resisting the capitalists. The tour cost 70,000 dong, around four dollars. It started with a black and...
10/22/07 -
Glory Ho - Last night, a guy named Ota couchsurfed his way into our world. A Czech hitchhiker who lives on the sale of domain names, English-teaching, an organization called TongueSwap (which you should totally check out) and his unfloundering optimism and flexibility. What an education Ota was. We learned how light colored clothing (makin g you appear clean and safe) encourage cars to stop. How a...
10/22/07 -
The Curvature - On Nooses and White Reactions I haven’t yet written about the recent string of noose incidents. I don’t have a good excuse for that. Today, though, the Times has an article about those instances which have taken place in NY, and I’m using it as a reason to get up of my ass and open my mouth. Over the past few weeks, seven nooses have been found, left for blacks to find as obvious...
10/20/07 -
Ed 38 - Several times that I've gone to the movies, the projectionist either has left the sound off or the half the movie is missing on the screen. I get annoyed when I have to miss any portion of the movie to complain about what the projectionist should be doing. Also, the clean up crew has become lazy. The floors are usually nasty and very sticky. If I'm paying the money I'm paying, I don't want to deal...
10/20/07 -
neva vegan - Like I said yesterday, I’m having trouble trusting my words at the moment. Those of you who know me, know that I have a lot on my plate at the moment and it’s making it hard to be the blogger I’d like to be. So forgive me if I misspeak here. More than a decade ago I moved into a group house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, before that neighborhood was so trendy and yuppified. I was...
10/20/07 -
Writing Life - I've been observing the world with interest and concern for over half a century now and certainly one of the most startling changes I've seen is the sexualization of children. Long gone are the childhoods of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Kids today stop being kids at what ... 8? At any rate, by middle school many boys are acting like studs and many girls are dressing like vamps, so no wonder somebody...
10/18/07 -
The Labyrinth - “What about Chavez’s push towards socialism?” I asked them. “Socialism is about sharing,” one of them answered. “If I have three shirts, and you have none, I should at least give you one of mine.” By Venezuelan standards, it wasn’t a particularly remarkable conversation. We had many others like them - some quite favorable toward the country’s revolutionary turn, and others...
10/18/07 -
i amf ashion - One of the sources of inspiration for Halloween I believe are movies. Last year it was probably Marie Antoinette and Memoirs of a Geisha. So I tried to think of all the thematic movies out this year.... there weren't that many:Harry Potter, Spider Man- too cliche. Finally, I settled on the Pirates of the Caribbean and Hairspray. For Pirates, you can either go for Kiera's whole Chinese pirate look...
10/18/07 -
english teacher 365 - Johnson was undoubtedly one of the most important English writers of the 1700s. It's long been traditional to refer to the second half of the eighteenth century as “the age of Johnson”, just as the first half is often called “the age of Swift and Pope”. In fact, Johnson is one of the most quoted prose writers in the English language in most dictionaries of quotations, with only Shakespeare...
10/17/07 -
Infosports - WORLD cricket is all but paralysed. The ruling body cannot make a decision that is not compromised. Bowling has been reduced to throwing, umpiring to the art of convenience, racial abuse to a point of view. Player behaviour teeters on the brink of violence. Money is power and principle has no currency. Andrew Symonds continues to be racially abused. The Board of Control for Cricket in India...
10/17/07 -
Branemrys - Lewis Carroll has a fascinating argument about the existential import of propositions in the notes to what would have been the second part to the Symbolic Logic. (Only Part I was published in Carroll's lifetime. Part II seems to have gotten as far as galley proofs, but most of these were lost.) First Carroll has some salutary advice against dogmatism on the matter: ...I maintain that any...
10/17/07 -
Jgrab1 - We’re living the sweet life. This can be a problem when you need to kick the habit.My doctor told me something recently I did not want to hear: sugar and I were through. It had been a nice relationship, but all good things must come to an end, and we had to part company. Tell the bitch to pack up and get out. This is hard for me. I enjoy good wine and (more rarely) good beer, but I don’t...
10/17/07 -
russian film - An auteur with many styles, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky is an extravert filmmaker whose imagination often needs a wake-up call from the outside. He has banked on the literary classics (Turgenev's Nest of Gentry and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya); genre stereotypes (Romance of the Lovers); other directors' concepts (Akira Kurosawa's script for Runaway Train); and his own past (his 1994 Ryaba My Chicken is...
10/17/07 -
wine jabber - The menu looks like the result of a mid-American focus group’s idea of Italian cooking. It has all the usual suspects. Meatballs? Please. Breaded and fried calamari is so ubiquitous to be a joke, even if it is tasty. The NoRTH “bruschetta” has not much more than the name in common with any bruschetta I’ve had in Italy. The zucca chips app (pumpkin chips) has a parenthetic “Yum!” on the...
10/17/07 -
movering - In all those fashion shows like What Not To Makeover With Your Queer Eye they are always so emphatic about the importance of going through your closet and THROWING OUT everything you haven't worn for a year. Just GET RID OF IT, they order (probably in a British accent). I'd slowly been coming around to this point of view (goodbye, 2001 Old Navy tank top that made me look like a distorted banana!)...
10/15/07 -
the digerati life - I’ve always thought that people buy knock-offs to save money, not to spend themselves into debt. I suppose these simple beauty tips aren’t for everyone. On the topic of fakes, I wrote a post not long ago about the perils of buying counterfeits. We already know that people buy fakes to get better deals and minimize costs, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that, unless you cross the...
10/15/07 -
knots tied in strings - But not because the vendors were particularly supportive of the 1984 Ronald Reagan-George H. Bush presidential re-election ticket. No, not when the button in question was surrounded by other kitsch paraphernalia from the turn of the 1980s, like old Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles merchandise. It’s because this once dreadfully uncool piece of electoral advertising has now become a...
10/15/07 -
lines and colors - I had the good fortune of growing up with a remarkable small museum, the Delaware Art Museum; which, in addition to being founded on a large collection of Howard Pyle’s work and serving as a focal point for the art of the Brandywine School of illustrators, has other treasures; notably the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art; the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art...
10/14/07 -
appellation beer - Sure the 200-plus beers that will win medals today at the Great American Beer Festival are “country class” (and maybe world class), but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll wax romantic after settling in with a pint or two of one of them. No, nothing’s wrong with the judging process - I agree with Michael Jackson’s assertion that the GABF (and World Beer Cup) approach to evaluating beers is...
10/14/07 -
BooksPlease - I have read several of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination and so far had not found them to be too scary. I had come to the book with great expectations that I would be terrified, so to some extent it was a relief to find that the tales did not freeze my blood, although I do think they are gory and sickening. Today I have changed my mind, now that I’ve read The Pit and the Pendulum. This...
10/14/07 -
pink slip blog - Even for those in professions that are generally familiar - like lawyer - how confident can you be in explaining your day-to-day if you're anyone other than Jack McCoy on Law & Order. (Is he an Assistant DA or an actor. I was going to write Sam McCoy there for a moment - the character is played by Sam Waterston.) Actor. There's another profession we get. (Although 90% of the working actors are...
10/13/07 -
bovine bonanza - The Maasai are a cattle people who believe that all the cattle on earth belong to them. Cattle form the basis of their entire culture, being the main form of sustenance, wealth and power. The strong bond formed between the Maasai and their cattle has necessitated a semi-nomadic way of life for them as they follow the seasons in search of grass and water for their herds. This classifies the Maasai...
10/13/07 -
georgina kelman - Last week was time for the annual July jaunt to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts! Beside visiting friends and neighbors, swimming in the delightful waters off Cape Cod Bay, and eating enough lobster rolls to satisfy my Nova Scotian heritage, it was a good opportunity to visit some of the terrific exhibitions now on across the state. Beginning in the charming town of Dennis and the Cape Cod Museum...
10/13/07 -
wine library - The physical act of drinking wine is pretty cut and dried, involving lips and tongue and throat. Most people make this “interior” connection with the usual exterior liquid conveyor, the wine glass. But the use of stemware (and even more modest drinking drinking vessels like wooden cups) is a relatively new phenomenon, especially in the countryside. Prior to the advent of the age of an elegant...
10/11/07 -
La Gringa en Cusco - The first four days of classes are over, and we're all pretty settled in with our families now. Cusco is really nice, although a bit colder than I'd anticipated. We took a trip to a market in town yesterday and bought some essentials - hat, mittins, scarf . . . all things I had at home but thought I wouldn't need. It's actually not bad outside, maybe 50s or 60s, but none of the buildings have...
10/11/07 -
Writers - Winston Churchill said it best when he wrote - “Writing a book is an adventure: to begin with it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a master, and than it becomes a tyrant; and the last phase is just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude - you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” Writing your first novel is a daunting task. It is a dance; a balancing act between...
10/11/07 -
The Beer Guy - A Sausage Making Primer Making sausage at home isn’t hard. The basic thing to remember is that sausage is essentially just ground meat mixed with salt and seasonings of some kind. It doesn’t have to be stuffed into casing and it doesn’t even have to be formed into patties. The basic idea is to take tough cuts of meat and grind them in order to make them easier to cook and eat. You can make...
10/11/07 -
Feminist review - Was Cleopatra black? For many nineteenth-century sculptors, she was a “black queen in a white body,” as Charmaine Nelson illustrates in her provocative and theoretically informed study of “neoclassical” sculpture and the issues of race-color, identity and subjectivity these works of art reveal. For literary scholars, the subject of nineteenth-century art might call to mind the coteries...
10/11/07 -
Duane moody - So, I spoke briefly on Friday about the girl that was sued by the RIAA who lost, and now owes upwards of $200,000 for downloading and sharing a few songs. Now, while I am do agree that there should be some regulation, and that nothing should just be totally free, I think that this whole war against those that share music has gotten out of hand (as evidenced by this case). In fact, what is forgotten,...
10/11/07 -
Naval warfare - Hello out there! The purpose of this blog is to spread the word that Naval History is interesting and worth knowing. After searching the net, I couldn't find a single place that dealt solely with the subject of Naval Warfare, so I decided to create one. I will be posting pictures and text of various ships and will then describe what part those ships played in Naval Warfare and Naval History. For...
10/10/07 -
Wherestherevolution - I had a few summer wishes that hadn't come true until very recently, which is why I have been obnoxiously clinging on to the passing season. Among these, raspberry picking, blueberry picking, peach picking, one last trip to the beach, one last BBQ, one last road trip. Well you've seen some of these happen lately (hello raspberries! nice to meet you BBQ!). It's too late for me to pick blueberries...
10/10/07 -
Zombiefightsshark - NOTE: Let's be clear about one thing, none of these are bad songs (save for one). It's just time for them to go due to their near-constant presence on the radio, as well as their overuse in movies and television. It's been a great ride, but that ride has to end. "Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison - So overplayed, it's lost all meaning; unfortunate Julia Roberts connotations; Orbison has many other...
10/10/07 -
Ed38 - Lately, I just don’t have the desire to go to the cinema. It’s gotten to be way too expensive of an experience; and it’s no longer as much fun as it used to be. Now that the movies are coming out faster on DVD there’s not much of a rush to head out to the movie theater and try to catch a showing. Also, a lot of the movies I really want to see on the big screen have been playing at the...
10/09/07 -
YOP2COM - Originally, Inuit throat singing was a form of entertainment among Inuit women while the men were away on hunting trips. It was an activity that was primarily done by Inuit women although there have been some men doing it as well. In the Inuit language Inuktitut, throat singing is called katajjaq, pirkusirtuk or nipaquhiit depending on the Canadian Arctic region. It was regarded more as a type of...
10/09/07 -
Heroes - Some books you can gobble down quickly like fast food, but some just need to be sipped and savoured. I’ve been carrying around and reading The Joy of Philosophy by Robert C Solomon (ISBN-13 978-0-19-516540-1) for the last two or three weeks. Got some strange looks from people on the train who could only see the first part of the title…….”The Joy Of” (bet they never worked out the next word...
10/09/07 -
Cameo Garrett - Those Russian dolls...What are they called? the ones that are painted on egg shapes which stack inside eachother? I worked for a Jewish family once that had a painting of them, with a saying something to the effect of: "We are Jewish inside", or "Inside, we are Jews". I don't know a lot about that family's history, but I do know that the mother and her sister were survivors of the Holocaust. From...
10/08/07 -
Movies - Why do many people look to movie stars for answers to some of life's most challenging questions? While we have great respect for the art of acting, as explicated from Stanislavsky to Strasberg, the latter of whom we knew well and were fond of, we have never understood how the usual snippets who decide to become actors ascend in the minds of the public from being initially generally regarded as...
10/08/07 -
Taste Tests - Last month, I attended The Joy of Sake event at the San Francisco Hilton. The Joy of Sake is the largest sake-tasting event outside of Japan, and it's been held annually since 2001. This year, the event was held in San Francisco, Honolulu, and New York on different dates. Usually the event costs $70 per person, but luckily for me, my friend and former college housemate Lauren got two free passes...
10/08/07 -
Wheelchair Dancer - On Wednesday, I will be attending a rather formal dinner at a restaurant that has been rated as one of the nation's best -- it is certainly one of the destinations that one mentions, in the Bay Area at least, with a hushed tone of respect. In my previous life, I would have been stressed out about what to wear so that I looked as important and powerful as everyone else might seem. I would have...
10/06/07 -
Lifehack - Art is a great status symbol in modern society and because of that it can be quite intimidating to the casual viewer. For many the first impulse is to blow it off, to see it as a worthless plaything for the rich and boring. This is too bad, not only because art can be a great source of pleasure in our lives, but because even a passing acquaintance with art can enrich and deepen our understanding of...
10/06/07 -
Thoughts - The joke goes something like: ”We just heard the new quartet by [insert name of avant-garde composer]. It was supposed to be a quintet—but they couldn’t fit the DC-10 on stage.” That’s the rap given most 20th century concert music. Ugly, shrill, a pain in the ears. Sure maybe some of it is meaningful and revolutionary, maybe some of these composers are brilliant. But they’re...
10/06/07 -
Snarkerati - Massive dehumanization, totalitarian government, rampant disease, post-apocalyptic terrains, cyber-genetic technologies, societal chaos and widespread urban violence are some of the common themes in dystopian films which bravely examine the ominous shadow cast by future. A dystopia is a fictional society that is the antithesis or complete opposite of a utopia, an ideal world with a perfect social,...
10/04/07 -
montee wilson - Most Christians have matured beyond the knee jerk rejection of any art that does not have a Cross firmly planted in the middle of whatever medium is being utilized. However, many are still troubled by art that reflects darkness, tragedy or sin in a realistic manner. It doesn’t seem to occur to these people that God didn’t have quite the same scruples, as the Bible contains stories of rape,...
10/04/07 -
slaves of golconda - I’m not entirely sure I was supposed to, but I fell in love with the pure, chilly landscape of rural Russia and the representation of life pared down to its fundamental simplicity. Makine creates the most gorgeous images to evoke this static, frozen world; the ice breaking on the lake with the sound of a harpsichord as a rowing boat is pushed out into it, ‘the fragile lace of early morning...
10/04/07 -
Clokeei - While we have great respect for the art of acting, as explicated from Stanislavsky to Strasberg, the latter of whom we knew well and were fond of, we have never understood how the usual snippets who decide to become actors ascend in the minds of the public from being initially generally regarded as likely ne’er-do-wells to being considered the most readily available font of insightful advice on...
10/03/07 -
lacity beat - It was a mismatch. Avenue Q’s young, struggling New Yorkers could never afford a vacation at Steve Wynn’s. Although the show’s style is hardly realistic, its themes are true-to-life, rejecting spectacle and escapism. Maybe Wynn wanted to expand the Strip’s theatrical tastes – but after barely six months, he gave up. This was wonderful news for us. Avenue Q is now on L.A.’s Grand...
10/03/07 -
the walters - We are social creatures, after all, and if we had not behaved kindly toward our fellow hairy ancestors, we wouldn't have survived to ruminate on it today. It's that simple (almost). And since language came along fairly late in the evolutionary game, Haidt hypothesizes that there is a non-verbal "moral intuition" that guides us instinctively, before the wordy part of things—our "moral judgment"—ever...
10/03/07 -
laughing squid - Back in June on my way to Foo Camp in Sebastopol, I came across one of the eclectic sculptures created by urban folk artist Patrick Amiot (see my previous write-up on Patrick Amiot). I had heard that many of his sculptures could be found on Florence Avenue, the street where he has his home studio with his wife and fellow artist Brigitte Laurent. Recently Lori and I were visiting the Russian River...
10/03/07 -
The Saatchi Gallery - 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' These immortal questions, asked by Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897-8 masterpiece now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were never so pertinent as they are today, and most especially as far as that great nation, the United States of America, is concerned. Still the only true superpower, despite the rise of China and other nations,...
10/03/07 -
the american scene - I’m reasonably sympathetic to some of the points Kilbourne makes, although I think she takes a bit of a “kitchen sink” approach (there are plenty of non-white women in advertisements, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an ad glorifying domestic violence). But I certainly think it’s reasonable to be concerned about the message we’re sending to pre-teen girls by showing numerous...
10/03/07 -
This Modern World - I had to cut four minor chapters of Who Hates Whom to get it down to the pocket size my editors and I were shooting for. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was highlight hotspots that usually get little attention, and I think generally the book manages that, but there are always a few things you’d like to squeeze in. Thing is, the mainstream press in most countries tends to highlight...
10/01/07 -
culture kitchen - As your resident latina I feel the need to weigh in on the moniker "Hispanic" as in "Hispanic Heritage Month". Actually, people have been asking me off-blog about the 'hispanic vs. latino' and I just have to weigh in. If the opening of this post is any indication, and if you are too lazy to peruse our archives, you will see that not once have I used the term hispanic to descibe myself nor my...
10/01/07 -
brian micklethwait - I have been reading Bill Bryson’s recently published short biography of Shakespeare, and I now flirt with the laws of copyright by reproducing a gob of it here. As always with these longish book quotes that I reproduce here, any objections from author or publisher will result in instant removal. But, I make no money with this blog, and I cannot believe that an excerpt like this one that follows...
10/01/07 -
secret society - [Okay, sorry, couldn't resist. Let me make it up to you -- here's a link to the awesome trailer. You don't get fanservice like that every day, let me tell you.] Promoted from the comments on this thread: In my opinion, a lot of the Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes that became standards were appropriated by jazz musicians the same way TBP appropriates their covers: in a kind of lovingly...
09/30/07 -
Cathedrals of California - Earthquakes play a major role in the history of California’s cathedrals. In the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, among the thousands of buildings destroyed were Old St. Mary’s Cathedral (1854), St. Francis Pro-cathedral (1849) and the pro-cathedral predecessor of Grace Cathedral. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 doomed Oakland’s Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales (1893) and...
09/30/07 -
Accidental Hedonist - Sometimes cooking is pure joy - relaxing and gratifying. Ingredients are effortlessly assembled, the cooking time is perfectly measured and the dish turns out exactly as you envisioned it. You feel like the King Midas of culinary world - whatever dish you touch turns to pure gold. Who needs restaurants when you can cook such great food? Of course, there are times, when the opposite happens. Every...
09/30/07 -
Automotive News - MINI has been in the news lately with regards to the forthcoming Clubman model, the much awaited MINI Cooper wagon. Much like the internationally-inspired wagon concepts, the new Clubman will feature a rear-hinged access (suicide) door plus an extended wheelbase for much-needed extra interior room. Undisguised interior and exterior spy shots have already made their way onto the internet and it’s...
09/28/07 -
four starters - For example, my parents tend to look for busy restaurants as an indicator for quality. I’m fairly sure lots of people do that. I leave the conclusion of why this leads to incorrect quality assessments as an exercise to the reader. While people on vacation may be excused for not putting too much thought into their dining decisions, (big) businesses doing the same thing is a real headscratcher...
09/28/07 -
katranna - The author's thesis, in short and in her own words is that "Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged...
09/28/07 -
spluch - Hawaii tow-in surfing team Garrett McNamara and Kealii Mamala have just returned from Alaska where they became the first - and possibly last - surfers to successfully ride glacier- generated tsunami waves of up to 25 feet. Their tsunami surfing experience took place at Child's Glacier on the Copper River, in South-Central Alaska, located near the town of Cordova, Alaska. Sheer ice faces of over...
09/28/07 -
Culture And Society - The wood history Woodcarving is an art and India has been a traditional producer of woodcarving furniture for ages. Production of woodcarving is developed on a commercial scale, which is carried out by many Indian artisans from generation to generation. India has abundant collection of woodcarved furniture, out of which some has been explored and a lot remains to be discovered. It has a rich old...
09/28/07 -
gardening savvy - It’s all about annuals. If you want to make a dramatic difference in your garden this spring, you gotta get annuals. Flowering annuals have long been the gardener’s favorite. They are affordable and produce a bounty of brightly colored blooms from spring to frost. Large or little, formal or festive, bold or blah — whatever your landscape style, adding annuals is almost effortless and...
09/28/07 -
libertarian alliance - A few weeks ago, I wrote about this grand old city, now mired up to the nostrils and sinking, perhaps terminally, into the slough of State-sponsored euroculture-capitalism, and not the Libertarian sort. (Left-wing Soviets controlling it and its hinterland, and Stalinist MPs of various sorts, will not help.) What comes after 2008? Nobody seems to have a blinkiing clue! This is a pity, for Liverpool...
09/26/07 -
land of persia - Carpet and rug weaving in Iran (Persia) dates back to 3500 years in the bronze age, according to some experts. The oldest evidences of this art date back to the third to fifth centuries AD discovered in Eastern Turkestan, and hand-weavings of the Seljuks of Asia Minor. Carpets from Safavid dynasty (1501-1736) in the 16th century are also some of the earliest products in the history of...
09/26/07 -
muscle car restoration - The idea of installing a powerful engine in a post WWII mid-size car was introduced in 1957. The American Motors (AMC) Rebel showcased AMC’s new 327 in³ V8 255 hp with a 4-barrel carburetor (fuel injection was to be optional), thus making it the first American budget-priced and intermediate-sized, factory hot-rod hardtop sedan. The Rambler Rebel came with a manual or automatic transmission, and...
09/26/07 -
the valve - In his own defence, then, Conrad suggests that Marlowe’s narrative (which is, give or take some brief moments, everything in the book from chapter 5 onwards) is only three hours worth of jaw-jaw. That doesn’t sound so bad. As it happens I’ve been listening to a nicely done talking-book version of the novel, released under a Creative Commons licence on the excellent LibriVox website. ...
09/25/07 -
the conglomerate - The professor was Austin Tappan Wright; the book, Islandia. Wright, who was born in 1883 and was killed in a car accident in 1931, was a graduate of Harvard Law (his father had been dean of the graduate school at Harvard), and worked for Brandeis's law firm before moving on to teach corporation, partnership, and maritime law, first at Berkeley and then at Penn. From the obituaries that appeared at...
09/25/07 -
tapas articles - Apart from the beautiful and varied landscape, the heat of the andalucian sunshine and the passion of the people, Andalucia is well known throughout the world as a very social and friendly place especially when it comes to enjoying food. Andalucia, the largest and southernmost region of Spain is famous for its gastronomic culture which involves long lazy lunches and many hours socializing over a...
09/25/07 -
where is Ben - After purchasing seven books about Route 66, I can make some solid recommendations for what I've found to be most useful. The books below are the ones I would recommend to PHOTOGRAPHERS, not necessarily the general public. That is assuming a photographer wants to know what they should expect to SEE and how to get there without too much energy expended reading about the details. Here are the books...
09/24/07 -
clean plate club nyc - You’d be forgiven for thinking “Australian cuisine” is an oxymoron, especially considering the country was settled by the English, and not only that but English miscreants, meaning the food should by all reason resemble the cafeteria fare at the Tower dungeon. Thankfully, as in America, indigenous cooking largely replaced and improved upon English dishes in Australia (for which aborigines were...
09/24/07 -
beautiful horizons - Now that Fidel Castro is about to exit the world stage a marvelous book about him and his contemporaries has been written by Patrick Symmes. Its called "The Boys from Dolores" and is a look at the schoolboys who attended the Jesuit High School, Collegio de Dolores, in Santiago - Cuba's second city - in the forties. The residents included the Castro brothers, Ramon, Raul, and Fidel and Symmes has...
09/24/07 -
fermentation blog - Tough to tell the difference. And this is par for the course with wine packaging. Now, there are exceptions. Mouton, with it's new art on each new vintage, would be a perfect example of defining the time, but only the most sophisticated wine drinker would notice the implications. Add to this the fact that you can't assume the vintage of a wine indicates the year it is being drunk and you see the...
09/23/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - In any case, the reason Words and Rules is such a favorite of mine is that in it, Pinker manages to squeeze a shocking amount of intellectual juice out of something seemingly quite dry: the nature of regular and irregular verbs (walk--walked/go--went) and regular and irregular noun plurals (kid--kids/child--children). It is truly a tour de force: one of those rare small books (like Language, Truth,...
09/23/07 -
ronan fitzgerald - It’s quite cool then to read of them going to Ibiza and having acid house dawn upon them. For people who like dance music and indeed for the papers and TV producers these kind of stories are like a favourite fairy tale (”tell it again Uncle Oakenfold!”). Perhaps this is because the birth of the UK rave scene and its massive subsequent boom all seems to have happened out of such a hodge podge...
09/23/07 -
literary comments - In one portrait, entitled “The Artist’s Father,” Jacobson gives us an image of a quietly confident, yet somehow stern and imposing figure clad entirely in black, set against an almost equally dark background. With a full beard and hands folded before him, the man in the painting seems to be waiting for something, perhaps for those viewing the painting to ask him a question. What impresses me...
09/21/07 -
vashax - There is not one single history of rock music. There are several. There is the history of the hits. Most books on rock music are histories of the hits. The charts decide, i.e. the masses decide. Marx would have loved it, except there is a catch: the masses tend to buy what is publicized by the media, which is what corporations pay money to publicize. Marketing decides the charts. Invest a few...
09/21/07 -
culture kitchen - American history is full of interesting characters, many of them immigrants who came to America from Norwegian farms or German industrial cities. America has always been nervous of immigrants, and cherished its natives as long as those native Americans weren’t Native Americans. Yet it is from the immigrant that the native (as opposed to Native) Americans are born. And the stories of immigrant...
09/21/07 -
scuba teacher - Knowing where to shoot a fish so that it is killed instantly or dies very quickly is extremely important if you want to be an effective, conservation minded spearfisherman. To shoot a fish in its kill zone requires skill, good aim, and experience. If you think you can just go out and buy a speargun and accurately start shooting fish, you’re sadly mistaken. You must be able to aim your speargun,...
09/20/07 -
feministe - Yeah, Bill Maher is funny, but he’s a real ass when it comes to women. His latest tirade is against breast feeding, which he thinks is disgusting and compares to masturbation. But don’t get him wrong, he loves titties — as long as they’re attached to a thin female body, and as long as they’re there for his pleasure. For all his complaining about conservative nutjobs attacking science...
09/20/07 -
Creekside - Statement of the artist, Abdellah Derkaoui : "I want to express my total heartfelt sympathy with the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who suffered the greatest crime against humanity under the Nazis. Nobody can deny that more than six million people were massacred during the second world war by the devil Hitler and his Nazi henchmen." Continued here. At the time, many westerners were...
09/20/07 -
chris abraham - Senator Barack Obama is right. "Acting white" anti-intellectualism isn't the exclusive domain of African Americans. Growing up in Hawaii, there is a vibrant acting white anti-intellectual culture, except in Hawaii it is called "acting haole." Either way, it keeps kids from "talking haole." Speaking and writing -- communicating -- in standard English with a broad vocabulary and the ability to convey...
09/20/07 -
The Moderate Voice - By my reckoning, The Juice has squandered four lives so far: Lives One and Two went poof when he skated after the so-called Trial of the Century for the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman. Life Three concluded with a $33.5 million wrongful death civil judgment against him, little of which he has paid, while he left behind Life Four when he walked out of a Las Vegas...
09/20/07 -
ross dawson - With the New York Times recently dropping all charges for its online content and now Rupert Murdoch openly discussing making the Wall Street Journal Online free, it seems that the days are likely numbered for paid subscriptions to online newspapers. It is also useful to remember that there are now 169 free daily print newspapers around the world with a total circulation of 27.9 million, according...
09/20/07 -
samurai dave - For nearly 5,000 years, the Great Pyramids of Egypt have instilled wonder and awe in mankind. In the last half a dozen centuries, they have also become a tempting lure for many to climb them - especially the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Pyramid climbing has been a temptation ever since the limestone casing of the Great Pyramid collapsed from an earthquake during the Middle Ages. Among some of the more...
09/18/07 -
emmas african adventure - I have been in S.A. for about 10 days now. Initially I was staying in a very small town called Scarborough , next to Table Mountain Nature Reserve. I had initially expected to start working on a seal, penguin or shark project immediately but I think there was some confusion about what projects to put me on so I ended up working in a dive shop, Pisces Divers, in Glencairn, for a few days in return...
09/18/07 -
Books Reviews on Buddhism - In the 1930s Carl Jung, later to endorse Mein Kampf and flying saucers, provided a woolly "psychological commentary" on the text. In 1960 Timothy Leary, LSD evangelist, produced The Psychedelic Experience: a manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead--a surprisingly lucid guide to taking acid, rendered absurd by linking it to "Tibetan" stages of death and rebirth. Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs,...
09/18/07 -
brother peacemaker - If people found a drug dealer in their neighborhood I would imagine they would call the police or the Drug Enforcement Agency or some agency authorized to remove the cretin. Most people wouldn’t hesitate to eliminate the source of the drugs negatively affecting their neighborhood. And most people would have the discretion to separate the drug dealer on the corner from the pharmacy down the street....
09/17/07 -
jerusalem diaries - Without getting into an arcane description of the Shmittah laws that is way beyond the scope of Jerusalem Diaries, suffice it to say that observance of the Shmittah year is confined to Jews living in or visiting Israel, and is one of the very tangible ways that life for Israelis and Diaspora Jews diverges, at least once every seven years. Every seven years, the Torah tells us, the land must rest...
09/17/07 -
smirky pants - Ciao from Perugia, Italy. I was in Florence over the weekend and started musing about art. How could one not? That Botticelli really knew his way around a paint brush, didn't he? Anyway, I once received an invective in the form of email from a young woman from the art/party circuit in New York City. I was told that all I was doing was ripping off Roy Lichtenstein and that his estate ought to sue...
09/17/07 -
to live and eat in la - I’ve been wanting to attend the tofu festival since I’d first heard of it years ago and last weekend I got my chance. I can’t say that I was overwhelmed by it’s greatness, I was expecting something better. My favorite point was getting to catch about 5 minutes of the Taiko group playing their amazing drums. It was super hot and sunny out and there is nowhere along the few festival blocks...
09/16/07 -
ca litr eview - I began to run in the streets of Rome after some years jogging around other capitals–Washington, Panama, and Moscow. My Foreign Service colleague Yale Richmond wrote some years ago that I was the first jogger in Moscow (he being the second), and I dare say he was right. Certainly I never saw another runner as I jogged passed the old log houses behind our embassy, and around the track in the...
09/16/07 -
jabberwocky - Then, a few months ago, I read about his latest book, What is the What? and was too intrigued not to take the plunge. Six years in the making, it’s the ‘fictional memoir’ of one of Sudan’s Lost Boys, Valentino Achak Deng. It opens with a violent robbery in his adopted home in Atlanta, and reflects back on his journey to this point in time, from his small village in remote Sudan to refugee...
09/16/07 -
obsessed with film - Arnie, of course, always said he’d be back. But the big screen return of a small army of other 1980s action heroes has come as more of a surprise. Already we’ve had the Austrian Oak dusting off his leathers in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Sylvester Stallone going one more round in Rocky Balboa and Bruce Willis up against another batch of global terrorists in Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Fast of...
09/13/07 -
world tour - Our bus drove out onto the steamy tarmac of modern Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul. It came to a halt in front of a tiny propeller plane that would fly me and my fellow passengers to my next destination on ‘The LL World Tour:’Flyin’ High Bucharest, Romania. The aircraft looked like it was built in 1973—the gray leather seats were worn around the edges and super shiny in the...
09/13/07 -
roman catholic blog - Some of you may have read the Vanity Fair article on Arthur Miller's son, Daniel. Daniel Miller was born to Arthur Miller and his third wife, Inge Morath, who Miller married on February 17, 1962. Daniel was born with Down's Syndrome, and because of this, Arthur Miller institutionalized his son, rarely visited him (though Inge Morath went to see him regularly) and never mentioned him again to most...
09/13/07 -
secret society - John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet occupies an odd space in the topography of the contemporary jazz scene. There's a certain family resemblance to groups mining the post-Steve Coleman math-jazz vein, except that with Claudia, many of their most disorienting rhythmic contusions and collisions are layered over a simple 4/4 or 3/4 grid. John's music is complex, but he doesn't bludgeon you senseless with...
09/12/07 -
DOTD - Boxing is undoubtedly a violent sport. It is simply two men in a ring trying to hit each other and evade being hit. Injuries are common, hence the need for "cut men" in each fighter's corner. Blood is a common sight, as are huge welts and bruises. Some people have a problem with companies such as HBO making money off of a violent form of entertainment. But you rarely hear such things about other...
09/12/07 -
A Child Prodigy - I am constantly amazed at the way expat British people, recently moved to Singapore, speak of the country I grew up in. It is not what it was, by a long way. It is saddening to be told that all those forces that were just beginning to take hold when I was in school, have now triumphed, and become the dominant culture. A nation once known for breeding sophisticated "gentlemen", is now best known...
09/12/07 -
trash culture connoisseur - Entertainment critics and people prone to intellectual snobbery are very quick to complain about rock music when it becomes clichéd. However, they seem to miss the biggest cliché in that culture: nihilism. Many, in fact, refuse to believe that rock can exist without a self-destructive mentality of “live fast, love hard, and die young.” Personally, I can’t think of anything more trite and...
09/11/07 -
Great American Cooking Project - I live in a hip part of Brooklyn and make in the neighborhood of $30,000 a year. I have a fantastic apartment, friends who are always up for an evening of (...), and a major clothing habit that is currently in remission (one day at a time). I avoid eating out on my dime, never order in, and always pack a lunch (when I can make it better at home, why wouldn't I?). I'm a member of the Park Slope Food...
09/11/07 -
Ruthless in the Suburbs - "I need more money" my husband grumbled through the car window, as my kids and I sat waiting beside the corn maze. Tiny streams of sweat rolled down his face and dripped to the ground. In an instant, his right hand whipped down to slap the back of his right calf, leaving a splat of blood and a flattened mosquito in its wake. "You must be joking" I replied, digging into my bag and handing him...
09/11/07 -
Splintered Sunrise - Skidoo is one of those pictures that a lot of people don’t believe exist. Having seen it, I can testify that it does, and it must be the oddest thing Otto Preminger ever made. It’s hard to credit that a crowd-pleasing director like Preminger could have made Skidoo, but then a lot of strange things happened in 1968. We open with car-wash owner Tony (Jackie Gleason) and his wife Flo (Carol...
09/11/07 -
pop culture beast - In the last ten years, MTV has gone from a cultural icon to to cultural wasteland. Gone is the respect of being a pioneer in the music video industry. A home for music lovers to see their favorite bands latest videos. Now, it is 23 and a half hours of brainless garbage and 30 minutes of music video clips on the ever increasingly tepid TRL. They can't even be bothered to show the entire video anymore....
09/11/07 -
Food Container - Tea has been consumed in China for centuries, but other cultures are rich in history of this popular beverage as well. Two of those countries, Russia and England have developed decidedly different traditions over the years. It is said that drinking tea began in China where over 5000 years ago, leaves from the plant accidentally fell into water being boiled for drinking. Needless to say, it was...
09/11/07 -
insomnia - If you've never been inside a Japanese game center, and if you are not old enough to have seen what Western arcades looked like in their heyday, you will perhaps find it difficult to accept this claim that I am about to make here. Besides, I don't have any relevant statistics to back it up, and though I could certainly do some research and come up with some myself, frankly, I have better things to...
09/10/07 -
Travel Junkie - Every Tena has to have some traditional ropes, called spirit ropes or Leo, on board. Nowadays these ropes, that are made of cotton, are only used to catch manta rays. Sturdier and thicker plastic ropes are now being used to hunt for whales. Another concession to modern times is the use of engine boats. These are not directly involved in the hunt, but are used to spot the whales and then help getting...
09/10/07 -
the american scene - Ten years ago, a relatively prominent English folk musician asked a relatively new and little-known American band to join him in writing and recording some music based on traditional sources – well, really one traditional source, the notebooks of song lyrics that Woody Guthrie left behind at his death in 1967. The English musician was Billy Bragg and the American band was Wilco, and what’s...
09/10/07 -
feministing - Karrine Steffans’ New York Times bestseller on her life as a “video vixen” is—unsurprisingly—a very quick read and a titillating tale of her brief relationships with various hip hop big hitters (JaRule, DMX, Ice T, Kool G Rap, Usher, Bobby Brown etc.) and famous athletes (Shaq). It falls short, however, of the cautionary tale that Steffans’ purports to want to have created. Granted,...
09/08/07 -
Buddy's Bemusings - The plot is right out of Hollywood, circa the 1960's: a group of generals conspire to eliminate the secretary of defense in a bold coup that undermines the civilian leadership in the midst of an unpopular war. It could be called, "The Night of the Generals," except all of these events in our plot occur during daylight hours and in the glare of television lights. And the plot has nothing to do...
09/08/07 -
Unlocked Wordhoard - Anxiety about the new Zemeckis Beowulf movie is starting to jitter across the medievalist world. Ancrene Wiseass has identified a new disorder: Beowulf Anxiety Syndrome (BAS), which is probably best defined as the sense of foreboding before the release of a new Beowulf movie. LLCoolCarlIII is referring to the Zemeckis film as "Breastowulf," in the tradition of medievalists calling Seamus Heaney's...
09/08/07 -
My Blog - It was the best of operas, it was the worst of operas; it was a time of beautiful music, it was a time of headache inducing screeching.... Over the past two weeks or so I went to see two operas. One was a 4-part, 20 hour epic from the 19th century, and the other a 40 minute sliver from the 21st. Well, as they say, they don't write em like they used to. The first opera (or maybe set of operas)...
09/07/07 -
curious expeditions - Wooden figures hang limply from scores of shop ceilings along the cobbled streets of Bohemia. They are mass produced, or hand made, or well-worn antiques, and they are simply everywhere. Should one wish to see the stringed actors in action, they merely have to look up to discover the hand-painted theater signs strung across the streets, chipped and fading as if from another time. The marionette...
09/07/07 -
Mom's Cancer Blog - I see that New York's Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is promoting the exhibition Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics, to which I've contributed four original pages from Mom's Cancer. The show will be up September 14 through January 14, 2008, with an opening reception on September 13. Unfortunately I won't be there, but I know some people who might make it and report back to me. "The...
09/07/07 -
Althouse - We get the basic proposition that Bush is playing for the good opinion of history or that that's his excuse anyway for the low opinion in the current polls. We get the surprise in the second clause that it's Bush himself speaking, and Althouse laughs to see her President referring to himself in the third person. We get the expression of perplexity: it's impossible to figure things out as they unfold...
09/06/07 -
Greg.org - Ugh, Lee Rosenbaum's op-ed in the LA Times is so wrong in so many ways, even Tyler Green can't keep track of them all. She opines on the looming crisis facing museums ["Public collecting is endangered"!] who can't buy any more art because it's gotten too expensive: It has always been hard for museums to compete with private collectors, but driven by the scarcity of great old works and an...
09/06/07 -
MarketNews - With all of the media attention as of late, one would think that things like online video and social networking take the cake when it comes to leisure time spent online. But this isn’t the case. According to research firm Parks Associates, casual gaming actually leads the online leisure activity race, with 34% of U.S. adults admitting to playing games on the 'net weekly. Video clip watching is...
09/06/07 -
Just TV - In the latest round of Henry Jenkins’s hosted discussions on gender & fandom, Abigail Derecho raises some good questions about how scholars studying contemporary television narrative complexity like Lost fail to acknowledge parallels with and debts to soap operas. I commented that in my work on the topic I do try to point briefly to the roots of soap operas, and in my book Genre & Television I...
09/05/07 -
Jon Swift - Obituaries for film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman hailed them as cinematic giants. Bergman was called "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera" who brought "metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen." Antonioni, we were told, "challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague...
09/05/07 -
Rambling Librarian - I'd almost forgotten I had them scanned. I remembered them only after yesterday's dinner at Dan Ryan's Chicago Grill with Walter and Vanesssa. It started with a conversation with Vannesa's mother Quite unplanned, Vanessa invited Walter and I to look at her home music studio. Over at her home, we met her parents. Her mother then showed us some paintings they'd collected over the years. We had an...
09/05/07 -
Media Morgue - Well the man burned (again) this year and this time the the Borg (the Burning Man Organization) made sure that he went up with all the pomp, and precision one would expect from a multi-million dollar party in the middle of nowhere. And thanks to the Current TV network, an independent media company led by former Vice President Al Gore, I could watch this year's burn from the comfort of my easy...
09/03/07 -
Faboo Mama - I'm always in awe of people who want complain about children's books. I mean, I got other things to worry about. If I spent most of my time complaining about books that sucked (Coulter, Hannity and O'Reilly sludge come to mind), then I'd have no time for important stuff. As far as kiddie books are concerned, it seems to me that most of them that receive complaints are usually pretty good books, but...
09/03/07 -
The Wine Wanker - A couple of months ago I got sent a case of of wine from KariKari Estate in the far north of New Zealand and from Silver Bay, their second label, which sources grapes primarily from KariKari but also from Nelson and Gisborne. It is not the first time I have heard of these wines (and those I have talked to generally hold them in high regard) but it was the first time I have had an opportunity to...
09/03/07 -
The Sartorialist - So I'm walking down the street in Soho the other day and see a young lady that would be great for a photo. I introduce myself but she is already talking to me like she knows me. While she is talking (how was Sweden....blah, blah) I'm completely distracted trying to figure out how I know her. Finally she mentions that I had taken a photo of her last February at the Proenza Schouler/Target sale at...
08/31/07 -
KPBS Movie Blog - Forget that Labor Day tradition of heading to the beach to celebrate the three-day weekend and summer’s end. Avoid the crowds and the heat by heading to an air-conditioned theater and checking out the latest Mumbai noir gangster film by India’s Ram Gopal Varma. Varma’s Ki Aag is part of an ongoing series put on by the local organization Goldspirit Films. For Labor Day weekend they will be...
08/31/07 -
Potable Curmudgeon - Michael Jackson unexpectedly visited Rich O’s Public House in November, 1994, a tad more than two years after it first opened, and if I hadn’t been drinking much of the same day as an obviously weary Beer Hunter made pre-arranged appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company and the now defunct Silo, I surely would have been too nervous to properly function in the role of host. I’ll never know...
08/31/07 -
Capoerista Blog - My capoeira journey began when I was in 8th grade. I can clearly remember the first time I ever heard the word capoeira. I was hanging out at my house with my best friend when he said that he found this new martial arts style. He had watched a movie about it, and it was the coolest thing he ever saw. I asked him to show me some moves, and he started to do his “version” of the ginga. ...
08/31/07 -
Leaky Pen - Before leaving TW I spotted a giant display of Ayn Rand's books translated into (simplified) Chinese--including a biblically large edition of Atlas Shrugged--at the flagship Eslite bookstore in TPE, near the 101 Bldg. Ironically, the Ayn Rand display was sitting alongside a pile of books on Deng Xiaoping Thought, and although I was looking for something by a writer who was neither a pseudo-red nor...
08/31/07 -
Philately of Today - The Danish Bicoloured series dating from 1870 – 1905 intrigued me ever since at the age of 6 I started collecting stamps. Being Danish and living in Denmark it was natural for me to collect postage stamps from Denmark and following the widely used AFA catalogue I also made an attempt to identify the few samples I had of the 4 øre blue/gray and 8 øre red/gray. All the other values were not within...
08/31/07 -
Baking for Britain - And so we dance a graceful minuet across the country, to take our places within another of the eighteenth century’s spa pleasure resorts – Bath. That’s Bath with a capital B, home to the famous Roman baths, and spa holiday destination to Regency high society. We have the dandyish master of ceremonies, ‘Beau’ Nash, to thank for Bath becoming a beacon for those who came to revive both health...
08/29/07 -
Skeet on Mischa - What a bummer for Rob Zombie. A work print version of his latest film the reimagining of Halloween leaked online. Yet it’s not the version that’ll be in theaters this Friday according to this article from CHUD. It seems as if the leaked version of the film was Zombie’s initial cut of the film before extensive re shoots occurred early last month. One has to wonder if the leaking of the film...
08/29/07 -
Blog of Sound - It’s hard to believe that some of the greatest, most influencial punk bands all cut their teeth in one New York club. What may have started as a country, bluegrass, and blues venues is distinguised as the birthplace of the punkrock movement. But just the name CBGB is a staunch reminder of bands like the Ramones, Blondie, the Talking Heads, and Television. Imagine CBGB never existed and you could...
08/29/07 -
Dustin goes to Uruguay - While cruising me from site to site between Paraguay and Argentina, Pablo, my driver for the weekend, commented, "You don't waste a single minute of the day, do you?" Then, after considering which rock star first said it, declared, "I guess you have time to rest once you die!" At exactly the moment when the word "die!" left his lips, Pablo, while going 70 mph in his small Renault sedan, hit an...
08/29/07 -
Tube Talk - Dear TV aficionados, I’m willing to risk your mocking and hate mails to admit this one secret. I don’t understand the mass appeal of High School Musical. In short, I don’t get it. Making this admission in a world where everyone else is singing the songs from High School Musical, having High School Musical theme parties, and lusting after the film’s star, Zac Efron, is a scary prospect....
08/29/07 -
Bradniess - What a course! I got to the start line nice and early at 6am (I hate being rushed!) I quickly got my number and went to the bathroom. If I've learned anything from running races, get to the restroom as fast as possible, the lines can get long. I went back to my SUV and put on my number, ate the last of my Cliff Bar, drank some more water and read over the course description one last time. One...
08/29/07 -
Alien Romances - Well now! Isn't The Great American Novel what we all feel we're doing when we write? Of course, we know it isn't so. Problems of genre-prejudice aside, you don't write "the great American novel" on purpose. Perhaps someone else on this co-blog will examine the concept "great" and the concept "American" in depth, and "novel" is a whole subject on its own, but today I wanted to examine what makes...
08/28/07 -
Jen In Translation - I’ve never been to a country that didn’t have fried dough. If you’re aware of one, let me know, and I’ll make sure to never go there. I’m convinced that fried dough — particularly the kind made at street stalls and festivals — is one of the most important characteristics of a culture, and I don’t know why I’d need to bother with a society that hasn’t even had time to develop this...
08/28/07 -
Bad Dogs and Such - I think we probably already know the Official Bad Dog Position on whole thing, right? Vick oughta be shot. No kidding. I'll do it - if you're a federal prosecutor with the power to set that up, the email link is on the left side of the page. So the disgust is a given. But some folks seemed a little perplexed - why are so many people so hung up on this vileness? Well, here you go. We are...
08/28/07 -
P1 Start - In a recent post on his blog, Ebert responds to comments made by writer-director Clive Barker, the man responsible for some of the greatest horror novels of the 20th century, films such as Hellraiser, and a fantastic video game from 2001 called Undying, made at this year's Hollywood and Games Summit. Barker fired back at Ebert for his earlier, more vague comments that video games cannot be considered...
08/27/07 -
Pop Culture Dish - When it comes to the rock 'n' roll stars of the 1950s, it's easy for some to overlook Fats Domino. Elvis had the swivel hips and the swagger, Chuck Berry had those classic guitar licks to go with his duckwalk, and fellow ivory ticklers like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis spiced up their piano skills with theatrics (playing with their feet, jumping on top of their pianos or setting the damned...
08/27/07 -
Tao of Photography - A young photographer recently asked me one of those "deceptively difficult" questions one encounters from time to time. While not quite in the unanswerable category that questions such as "So, what is life all about?" fall into, I was nonetheless hard pressed to give a quick respond to this question: "What are the most important lessons you've learned on your way to becoming a fine-art...
08/27/07 -
Travel Pod - My latest dose of perspective was a gift. To be specific; his name was Gift, and he was a young Zambian social worker here in Livingstone. While I sat at an internet café, waiting for letters from friends or family, Gift walked in and sat at the computer next to me. Within a few minutes we were making small talk where I learned about what he did, and he learned a bit about me. I told him (with a...
08/24/07 -
Jo Swift - The sociologist Jean Baudrillard suggests that the 'Cult of Celebrity' is part of a larger trend towards living in the 'ecstasy of communication'. We are bombarded by a succession of surface images in the media that do not connect with reality. As a result, the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary disintegrates. In effect, the beauty portrayed in images of...
08/24/07 -
Bibliobibuli - Columnist Umapagan Ampikaipakan asks a very interesting question in the Star today: where's the Great Malaysian Novel? Such a novel would be, he says: Epic in nature, but not in proportion, it would be universally regarded as required reading. It would be a source of inspiration, an ideal to strive towards. I'm not too sure what he means by "source of inspiration" and he doesn't...
08/24/07 -
The Intrepid Art Collector - Today in East Hampton, I saw a realtor’s ad for an “affordable starter home” priced at $1.2 million. Clearly, the term “affordable” is relative. In the art market, “affordable” usually means something under $10,000, but I know plenty of people who find even $1,000 to be a stretch. Here, then, is the first installment of "Taste Without a Trust Fund" -- a new monthly feature where we'll...
08/24/07 -
Outside Report - The Don Imus "incident" is turning out to be a near-watershed moment for African-Americans. I can't remember the last time when our collective criticisms of a white person have been so effectively turned against us and caused us to be so reflective. Ever since the Imus incident and the ensuing conservative complaints about "unclean hands", African-American leaders have been criticizing and attacking...
08/24/07 -
World Wide Rant - For years, I visited the brick-and-mortar Blockbuster stores, renting movies first on videocassette (ask your parents, young ones) and then on DVD. I completed the membership form everytime I changed cities, each instance just slightly less painful that the government security clearance application I had to fill out a few years back. I dealt with deadlines and late fees and a computer...
08/24/07 -
Crooked Timber - I recently visited the British museum for the first time. The very little I saw really was astonishing. I found it surprisingly moving, in fact – especially the Rosetta Stone, for whatever reason. But despite the sense of amazement, I also had the gnawing and depressing feeling that the last 3500 years of human history really just boils down to one damn war after another. Another (related) feeling...
08/22/07 -
News Critics - In America we don’t really produce great rock and roll bands. Great rock bands are more of an English thing. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Smiths, U2 (–ok, so U2 is Irish, Americans don’t know the difference anyway). In fact, next to men dressing in women’s clothes, creating (and anointing) great rock bands is Britain’s greatest...
08/22/07 -
Chocolate Obsession - A while back I mentioned my Charles Chocolates Hazelnut and Candied Orange Peel bar and the horrible mishap that removed it from its box and rendered it a mystery bar. At the time I said I was looking to get my hands on another bar of theirs (Milk Chocolate With Caramelized Rice Krispies) before reviewing the first and now I have both and have eaten a good bit of each as well. Both Bars: Charles...
08/22/07 -
Uberkid - To many die-hard fashionistas, Los Angeles has always been considered the less sophisticated, dressed-down, in your face, suburban, over-celebrity conscious little sister to New York, which has consistently retained its place amongst the world's fashion capitals. However, our visit to L.A. has revealed an interesting mix of local designers and boutiques combined with the glossy global brands along...
08/22/07 -
Art Knows - Further evidence, if any were needed, of the global nature of the bull market for art came from down-under this week when Warlugulong 1977, (left) a painting by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, one of the most respected 20th century Australian artists, sold for Aus$2.4 million (US$2.1m, £1.03m) more than double the previous auction record for an indigenous Australian painting. It was originally...
08/22/07 -
Cook & Eat - So, I had these fava beans. And I needed to figure out what to do with them. When I bought them at the market, I was going to do a simple mashed fava bean spread for some little grilled toasts. Simple and yummy. And, quick, if you discount the time it takes to prepare the fava beans in the first place. Prepping favas is one of those things that is really more work than it should be. There are two...
08/21/07 -
David Brass Rare Books - Jack Kerouacs On The Road turns fifty this year. Madonna, who hits the half century mark next year, is in better shape. According to a piece in today’s issue of the New York Times, the novel is Still Vital. Viking, which is issuing a 50th anniversary edition as well as a publishing for the first time in book form a version based upon the 120 foot long scroll that Kerouac fed through his...
08/20/07 -
Inside Collecting - Professional football remains king of the American spectator sport scene, but baseball's status as top dog in the world of sports collectibles goes unchallenged. And no single piece of sports memorabilia illustrates that status like the 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card. While you might be familiar with Wagner's collectible card, many people don't know about the shortstop's stellar 21-year career....
08/20/07 -
The Adventure Blog - For many climbers Everest is a lifelong dream. One that most people never get to realize, and those that do generally only get one shot at it. But what happens when your one shot comes, and your dream is taken away not because you're sick, or not strong enough, but because your lead guide decides, arbitrarily, that you can't make the summit? That's just what happened to Betsy Huelskamp who joined...
08/20/07 -
My Art Collectibles - The weather has been really strange lately worldwide. There's flooding in some places and drought in others. It's been terribly hot and humid where I live. Thank God for air-conditioning. Not only does it keep people functioning but it also helps to protect sensitive items like fine artwork and art collectibles. I have temperature and humidity-controlled dry cabinets too. Great for small items. After...
08/17/07 -
ImageGuy - Life is too hectic. Too much to do. My wife and daughter finally returned from Florida but my daughter left the next day on a boat trip through the New York Canal System. It’s an annual thing. My editing work has been consuming on top of just keeping up with walking the dog and living as a bachelor for the last few weeks. So this is the first chance I’ve had to do a blog post in over two weeks...
08/17/07 -
- I was reading the, rather excellent, Infinite Dial blog last night and it made me smile. Over in the States they're having some trouble with their version of digital radio, HD Radio. Unlike DAB in the UK, HD Radio basically allows them to squeeze a digital version of the station and usually an extra station within the FM frequency. So an analogue listener gets their station and a digital listener...
08/17/07 -
Gaming Today - It would have been bad news for all those individuals under the age of 18—yet another reason to reach “adulthood,” to buy a video game. That is, if Judge Whyte had decided against the video game industry....
08/17/07 -
Echoes in the Wind - Elvis Presley came to mind the other day. I noticed a mention on one blog or another over the weekend that, come Thursday, Aug. 16, it will have been thirty years since his death. I never quite got Elvis, at least as far as any real emotional connection went. By the time I was listening to rock and pop, the years when he set the standard for rock ’n’ roll – either with what he recorded in...
08/17/07 -
Lester Hunt - This is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. A student in my course on philosophical ideas in literature wanted to write his term paper on it, though I had not read it myself. I figured, what the heck, I really ought to read it – students keep bringing it up as an example of a work that offers a challenging critique of war and the military ethos. So I’ll read it. I am still staggering from the shock of...
08/17/07 -
Grandma's Gone Surfing - What he told me was that, as I suspected, my timing was all off. I am catching the waves too late. I'd be going and he'd yell at me, Don't go, too late! And I did and it was. So I tried it his way, just waiting, starting to paddle later though all my instincts told me to go. His way I saved a lot of paddling energy and got waves just by doing nothing but paddling four or five strokes. When I...
08/15/07 -
VIKRAM KARVE - Are you in the habit of “grabbing a bite”? Do you ever eat in the office while continuing to work or just skip meals altogether? Do you multitask while eating? Do you have power breakfasts, working lunches and business dinners? Do you eat fast and hurriedly, finish meals well ahead of everyone else and eat in bigger bites without savoring the taste of food? Can you vividly recall the taste of...
08/15/07 -
Little Professor - Reviewers have been trotting out adjectives like "pleasant," "sweet," and "charming" to describe Becoming Jane; immediately after seeing it, I was thinking "cute" and "frothy." Like most biopics about artistic types, the film cannot find a way to dramatize the actual creative process, so it turns to correspondences between art and life instead. As a number of critics have already pointed out,...
08/15/07 -
Cobb - I mean it's relatively easy to pick them. OJ Simpson, R Kelly. Pick a black dysfunction, give it a name and some large fraction of the black middle class will betray the race before the cock crows three times. Is this inevitable? Perhaps so. Perhaps more than any other social force on the planet, the American popular mainstream culture is the most seductive and destructive of ethnic traditions. If...
08/13/07 -
NY Brain Terrain - I've been getting a lot of reading done this summer (note that by "summer" I mean since June 1st, as opposed to the recent summer solstice, June 21st), which, if you know my history, is quite surprising. Usually the heat knocks me off my feet, leaving me with only enough energy to hit the "power" button on the remote control. Not this year, though! Unfortunately, the heat has sapped a lot of my...
08/13/07 -
EdenDale - I worked on the biggest game show flop that Merv Griffin ever created. You have heard and will continue to hear about how he created Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, but I'd hazard a guess that not many people will be talking about Ruckus, described currently in his wikipedia entry thusly: "Arguably, Griffin's oddest game show was Ruckus (1991) with comedy-magician The Amazing Johnathan as host of...
08/13/07 -
The J Train - Look, guys, I officially no longer give a shit. Reunite, break up, go on tour with the London Symphony and end every night with an on-stage circle jerk for all I care. You've just lost me. Oh, you had me until recently. I caught the reunion tour with Sammy--the lineup that I'll always think of as "my" Van Halen--since I had the chance to see the tour opener in Greensboro. Yes, it was the same show...
08/12/07 -
Plugg - Last Friday I spent ninety minutes watching the opening night of a locally filmed documentary called Finding Normal. The movie, by Brian Lindstrom, follows several drug and alcohol counselors as they work with groups of recovering addicts, many of them ex-cons. With its basis in the grim world of addiction and street level recovery, Finding Normal sounds like it could be a real slog. It’s not. A...
08/12/07 -
Pet Relocation - If there's still any doubt whether the pampering of pets is getting out of hand, the debate should be settled once and for all by Neuticles, a patented testicular implant that sells for up to $919 a pair. The idea, says inventor Gregg A. Miller, is to "let people restore their pets to anatomical preciseness" after neutering, thereby allowing them to retain their natural look and self-esteem. "People...
08/12/07 -
Idea Exchange - The last several weeks have brought a wave of turmoil to the world of sports. From Michael Vick’s dogfighting indictment to NBA referee Tim Donaghy’s gambling issue to Bud Selig’s decision to follow Barry Bonds in his pursuit of the home run record, the three commissioners of their respective professional sports leagues have tough times ahead of them. Even the Tour de France has become a...
08/10/07 -
Spout - Roger Ebert says video games are more like sports than works of fine art. So when a movie becomes interactive, does it lose its status on the art ladder? Last week, I followed a link from Fimoculous to Wired’s GameLife, where blogger Chris Baker attempted to quell the anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the game community by posting a game review written by Ebert for the magazine. If you just read that...
08/10/07 -
Chronicles of MC - There’s little doubt that 2007 will go down as biggest reunion year on record for music, with artists from The Police to Crowded House’s respective members getting reacquainted with each other. Now, England is preparing to launch another invasion with a trio of reconvening acts from different ends of the spectrum. One is a bunch of middle-aged women masquerading as “girls,” another is a band...
08/10/07 -
Book Slut - A pair of new books by Americans living in Italy soothes the sting of my stasis. Doerr’s I’ve already mentioned, and it’s a gem. A writer from Idaho, Doerr returns home from the hospital, where his wife has just given birth to twins Henry and Owen, to discover he’s won a year’s writing fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Across a turbulent Atlantic, some time later, the family...
08/09/07 -
Left in the West - As you all no doubt know, Barry Bonds is now the all-time home-run record holder. Knowing that I'm a huge baseball fan, you've all probably been breathlessly waiting for my commentary on Bond's new status, and I admit I've been struggling to organize my thoughts on the matter. The problem is that this record was the Holy Grail of records for me as an adolescent baseball fan, and I would spend...
08/09/07 -
Senor Enrique - Photojournalists are not usually received with a welcome mat, especially by those involved in controversial stories. These main characters may not want anyone from the media around or anywhere near them. This is one of those times in which a certain amount of aggressiveness becomes an absolute necessity. Val suggests that "you must say to yourself: it's my job; it's my duty; it's my right and it is...
08/09/07 -
Blog Cabins - It's really a privilege to be able to watch Ben Kingsley in action. Now, I know that sounds like some rabid gushing, but it's not quite. Instead, Kingsley could be likened to a Christopher Walken, who (aside from also being a pretty talented guy, despite his inability to say no to anything) is a good actor, but is even more of an onscreen presence. Good luck explaining the appeal of Walken (should...
08/08/07 -
Criitical Mass - The future is digital, and that's partly my fault. I've spent my library career as a technophile, and I'll continue to play that role. But it's one thing to promote access to electronic information as a common good and quite another to insist that a discipline's needs are well-met by replacing a well-known, beloved form with an incomplete, disembodied, fletcherized stream of "information." Earlier...
08/08/07 -
Sarcastig - Why is it, I wondered after a recent comment from my good friend Lani, that I watch so many "serious" films? And what is it that makes a film "serious"? It's not a strange question. Many people around me don't understand why I watch all these films in black and white, all these films from directors whose names they don't even know. It's put all the more starkly into relief now with the passing of...
08/08/07 -
Mr. Greenfingers - Do you want to have beautiful flowers but do not have a garden to plant them in? There is hope out there for your flower desires. If you have a window you are set. What you need to purchase for your window is a wooden box or container. You are not limited to keeping your arrangement on your window, it can flourish on a small patio or doorsteps and they will bring instant beauty through the summer...
08/07/07 -
Aesthetic Grounds - Since I coordinated a contest for a mural in the freshman architecture studio at Georgia Tech in 1976, I have been involved in public art and public space. After 30 years, how did the public art establishment get cornered into public bathrooms and terrazo floors with their limited public art dollars? It's time for public art to be front and center of new spaces and buildings again. A few years ago...
08/07/07 -
Ionarts - Busoni - Ferrucio Benvenuto Busoni (1866-1924) - might be best known for his Bach transcriptions that offer pianists genial versions of a rather romantic Bach to play. One might be excused to think that his name is, hyphenated, "Bach-Busoni". There are probably more recordings of his Bach transcriptions in the catalogs than "just-Busoni". But this highly Germanic Italian composer who straddled the...
08/07/07 -
Style Bubble - I don't usually delve into the economics side of fashion as I'm not about to spout off about something I know little about. I'm not about informing or educating anyone. However, the subject will crop up when there is blatant injustice being done here. Steinberg & Tolkien, one of the oldest and most established vintage emporiums on King's Road in London is being forced to close on the 24th September...
08/06/07 -
The American Scene - One of the (many) pleasures of AMC's summer series Mad Men is how it encourages the viewer to be a sort of armchair Karl Marx, going over a previous era for the ways in which the present age is visible in it, and the ways in which that era is visibly growing out of itself. Creating a show about advertising men at the end of the 1950s no doubt looked like a delicious opportunity, but that opportunity...
08/06/07 -
BCMusic - Some bands have been larger than life since day one... I think U2 is the epitome of the statement. When they came onto the scene in the late 70s and early 80s their unique blend, a kind of post punk rock and roll with plenty of political statements in epic arena rock format, there was no doubt they had the vision for something huge, and indeed they became something huge. After much artistic...
08/06/07 -
Trivial Matters - Today I learnt that Thai boxing isn't Thai. It is Cambodian. "You like Pradal Serey (Khmer Boxing)?" my driver,a young enthusiastic man,asked me. "Yes," [I lied, well I didn't quiet know what it was] I said. "Do you?" "Yes very much", he beamed I seemed to have hit a chord here - for my usually quiet moto driver started to spurt out large continuous sentences in broken English about the sport - it...
08/05/07 -
Free Jazz - This awful piece of music is part of guitarist Jeff Richman's tribute series, for which he aligns fusion guitar heroes of the highest caliber, like Mike Stern, Larry Coryell, Eric Johnson, Steve Lukather, Greg Howe, Frank Gambale, Robben Ford and Richman himself. They each receive a Coltrane tune, which they then masterfully destroy, demonstrating their own lack of musical insight, talent and taste....
08/05/07 -
World History Blog - Although soccer is not THE sport in the US, the history of soccer in US is one of the longest around, right next to that of the English or the Scottish. After the English set out to form a set of rules for the game of soccer, these were soon taken to the new World, where Americans learned to love this rising sport, right next to another game that grew strong roots in the US back then: baseball....
08/05/07 -
National Parks Traveler - A short newspaper article caught my eye awhile ago. It had mentioned that the movie production for National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets had asked permission to shoot at the Mount Rushmore National Monument in a place called the Hall of Records. I had never heard of the Hall of Records. I probably would have forgotten about the news article except a Park Service friend of mine came through town, and...
08/03/07 -
Chef Ability - Barbecue tips can cover a broad diversity of subject matter; from how to cook and achieve perfect results for hamburgers, cuts of meat, steaks, kebabs, chicken and vegetables, what type of grill is best to use and what type of sauces and seasonings to create an incredible flavor. Although a number of great barbecue tips may not be able to help turn any griller into an expert in barbecuing, here are...
08/03/07 -
Bluegrass Blog - I am convinced something needs to be done to restore a sense of order and fairness in the world of performance rights. Too many small bars, coffee houses, restaurants and other venues have given up hosting live music due to onerous licensing fees, which do not directly benefit the musicians whose music is being covered since these fees are paid to all members according to a formula based on overall...
08/02/07 -
CultureGrrl - You'd expect no less from a museum whose director's name is Gates (as in, stepson Bill Gates), but the Seattle Art Museum, which I visited a few months ago for the Wall Street Journal (here and here), has the most sophisticated and sensitive use of technology in its galleries of any museum where I've touchscreened. Mimi Gardner Gates wanted technological enhancements that aided visitors unobtrusively,...
08/02/07 -
Cooking With Amy - Not long ago I was in North Carolina visiting a beautiful garden at the Biltmore estate. I asked the gardener if it was organic and he got very agitated. "Let me get on my soap box" he said. He then proceeded to explain that most pesticides in the US were organic and that just because something is organic doesn't mean it is free of pesticides and that some organic pesticides are not very effective....
08/02/07 -
BC Books - One of the greatest questions of the modern world concerns whether our recoverable oil supplies will decrease faster than we can replace them with economical new energy sources. If we can keep up, then civilization can continue relatively unchanged and make the leap to the next stage of development. If not, then our modern civilization will face a resource shortfall that could spell the end of our...
08/02/07 -
BLDG Blog - The novels of Patrick McGrath are often described as Gothic. They unfold across foggy landscapes and rolling moors, on marshes dotted with isolated houses and dead trees. There is a lot of rain. McGrath's characters are frequently deformed, crippled, mad, or somehow undefined, both psychologically and sexually; they are sinister, if naive, and quietly aggressive, weaving conspiratorial plots around...
08/02/07 -
Duck of Minerva - For members of generation X like myself, Star Wars is one of the constitutive myths of our childhoods. The Force, lightsaber duels, the Millennium Falcon, "I am your father," "he's my brother," "I've got a bad feeling about this," and so on . . . this is what we grew up with. And because Star Wars was such a mega-hit, the characters and tropes and themes spawned a whole slew of allusions and...
08/02/07 -
Kiko's House - Jerry Garcia did not seek out fame. A gentle soul who just wanted to play music, fame found him. And despite a long career as an extraordinary guitarist that brought him adulation, gold records and eventually wealth, happiness remained elusive and fame finally killed him. Don't get me wrong. Garcia, who was born 65 years ago today, was of course the master of his own destiny. But in addition to...
08/01/07 -
Firedoglake - Brook’s got guts. Because frankly, his topic - the fate of the best and brightest graduates of our top-flight universities - sounds like a subject for whiners. Who cares about them, right? They’ll do fine on their own. What do the lifestyle and career choices they make after college have to do with the well-being, moral and material, of the rest of us? A whole lot, Brook has me convinced. Their...
08/01/07 -
Resurrection Song - I couldn’t help but walk out of The Simpsons Movie thinking, “Damnit, I just paid seven dollars for this? Not to mention the overpriced medium beverage and pretzel bites (which, admittedly, were nice and fresh).” To say I was unhappy would be like saying Carter was a bad president, and I’m not in for that kind of understatement. I had planned to avoid it--convinced that it couldn’t be...
08/01/07 -
Comic Fodder - "Ever been to the San Diego Comicon?" Somebody asked me that fateful question one day in 2003, and it started an annual vacation tradition that calls for Yours Truly to go from 105 degree Las Vegas summer to 85 degree San Diego, and smile while others around me complain about how hot it is. At 123,000 people, the Comicon sold out every day. With the contract for the San Diego Convention Center...
07/30/07 -
Pandagon - Natalie Angier’s new book The Canon is out, and I really want to get around to reading it when it shows up at Half-Priced Books, but in the meantime, the release reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read her 1999 book Woman: An Intimate Geography for a long-ass time now, ever since Lauren recommended it to me probably over a year ago. For those who are sick to the teeth of the Steven Pinker/David...
07/30/07 -
Cooking With Amy - Did you know that mangoes are the most popular fruit in the world? There are more than 2,500 varieties of the fruit and when you consider where they are grown it's really no surprise. Mangoes are grown throughout Asia and Southeast Asia, India, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, and Latin America as well as Florida, Hawaii and California. Mangoes come in a variety of shades including red, orange,...
07/30/07 -
Gardening Ideas - Some people will plant their own vegetable garden so they can have fresh, quality produce. However, sometimes the backyard garden doesn’t work for everyone. Some gardeners will use special gardening techniques that will help them get the most from a smaller garden. Another option for gardeners is using vegetable containers. We will discuss different ideas and techniques for getting your quality...
07/29/07 -
Natural Living - Our hectic schedules are crammed with crises, to-do lists, issues marked urgent and overflowing in trays... Far away from everyday events, at your core, lies a place of quiet, calm, serenity, and stillness... Feeling connected to life and your core can be an everyday and effortless activity. Should you meditate? The short answer is "Yes!" So if that's all you wanted to find out, you can stop...
07/29/07 -
Tom Wark - Dunn is one of the most respected winemakers in America. He built Caymus Special Selection. He defined the meaning of mountain-grown Cabernet. He helped put Howell Mountain on the viticultural map. He consulted for the likes of La Jota and Pahlmeyer. His Dunn Vineyards Howell Mountain Cabernet was identified by Jim Laube as one of a very few produced at the time to be a 5-star wine and among the...
07/29/07 -
Thinking Pictures - What strikes me as most interesting about the comparison has hit me only in hindsight. In our review I gently criticized the album for its inclusion of moments of graphic violence in some of the schmories, elements that have been easily and deftly removed by other authors; in Tomie de Paola's Favorite Nursery Tales, for example, the story of the Three Little Pigs is no worse off for having the wolf...
07/27/07 -
PID - As part of last month's Book Expo America, the NBCC and Bookforum held a panel at the Paula Cooper Gallery to discuss the state of book reviews. Just this week one of the panel’s participants, Lindsay Waters (executive editor of the humanities at the Harvard University Press), sent his extended remarks — entitled “Poisoning the Well“ — to the NBCC blog Critical Mass. I wasn't at the panel,...
07/27/07 -
MusicMedia - It's easy to get lost in all the drama surrounding the Congressional Royalty Board battle now going on between SoundExchange (referred to henceforth as “The Executioner”) and Internet radio. There are plenty of issues there and I don’t think they will satisfactorily get worked out in the coming months. “The Executioner” wants to avoid the wrath of Congress and streamers want to wake...
07/27/07 -
Sugartune - After “suffering” through three albums of music that was more slickly-produced hard pop than the straight-ahead punk rock, Ramones fans were rewarded with a return-to-form production titled “Too Tough To Die”. After firing drummer Marky (due to his diminished abilities brought about by alcoholism) and replacing him with the newly-christened Richie Ramone, original drummer and now producer...
07/26/07 -
National Parks - Is it appropriate for the National Park Service to transform portions of the prison on Alcatraz Island into a cabaret with scantily clad dancers, all in the name of luring younger generations to the parks? Should corporations be allowed to rent out portions of parks -- at no profit -- for lavish parties? These are hot-button topics to some, but elicit a shrug of the shoulder from others. Within...
07/26/07 -
ORAAT - In grade three or four - it was so long ago, I can hardly remember - we had a class called Art Appreciation. Each week we received a post card size print of a noted artist and their work. As we gazed upon the cards, we heard schmories of the lives of the artists. We were transported to a different time and place. These three I share today are the ones that are etched into my brain. The first is a...
07/26/07 -
2Blowhards - What aesthetic qualities is this building selling? Let me suggest a few answers: Blue-green silveriness, reflectiveness, grid-iness, the shock of one large funny angle ... In other words: expert play with chic geometry. Are you surprised to learn that Edward Larrabee Barnes was once a student of Walter Gropius, one of the Very Bad Guys in Tom Wolfe's essential "From Bauhaus to Our House"? This...
07/25/07 -
Cinematica - Chief exec Robert A. Iger wrote a letter to US congressman Edward Markey about the subject, which the congressman has made public. Iger claimed that smoking in future Disney films would be "non-existent." He also says that anti-smoking announcements would show up before any future film where smoking is shown. Personally, I'm not sure how he can have it be both non-existent AND showing up, unless he...
07/25/07 -
TravelBlog - There are a few basic necessities that any living creature must have in order to live a healthy and happy life. These are food, shelter (and in our case clothing), water, and for social creatures, community. And computers, automobiles, cell phones, iPods, gasoline, er, wait just a minute here! I've been tricked, it's a scam! Scratch those last several items. First things first. We must eat before...
07/25/07 -
Gardener - Sustainable Organic Gardening begins with building of the soil. If plants do not get all of their vital nutrients, they weaken. One way to get increased plant productivity is to purchase organic soil amendments and conditioners. When the plants are healthy, they store longer, taste better, are more resistant to insect attacks, and grow a lot more. Their resistance is heightened to the drought,...
07/24/07 -
Subtraction - It’s still too hard to locate online versions of recent television commercials. When McDonald’s, say, runs an ad that I want to talk about here, I don’t know of a particular place where I can go find a link for it. Sure, the more notable ones make it to YouTube, but sometimes it’s the mundane ones that don’t that are more interesting to discuss. There are two that I have in mind: one,...
07/24/07 -
Mindingthecampus - Hundreds more on last year's list bear similarly outlandish and grandiloquent headings, and the fixation on race and sex prevails throughout. Indeed, the remarkable thing may be the ironic effect these edgy and breathless titles have when clustered together: monotony and conformity. After a few pages, the entries blur into a litany of loaded terms and academic cliches. After all, who wants to learn...
07/24/07 -
Book Slut - For the man made famous for causing crowds of listeners to blackout during his graphic readings, Palahniuk's latest attempt, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, will, at the very least, allow his listeners to remain conscious. To call it “a tamer novel” would do it a disservice, though it is more thoughtful, more hypnotic, than some of his previous attempts. The truth is, we’ve all...
07/23/07 -
Obsessed with Film - Once upon a time, such a thing known as a director’s cut was an object seldom seen, a rarity that was a cause for celebration and invited the curiosity of cinephiles the world over. With the DVD culture of today, much of the meaning has been robbed of this once-special term; with the infamous “double dipping”—re-issuing—of home videos in the modern market place, it often takes “special...
07/23/07 -
BCMusic - Summertime has always been filled with all kinds of outdoor activities, including everything from bungee jumping to extreme skateboarding, but one of the most popular activities is one that requires very little special equipment — swimming. And when you combine swimming with the right conditions - specifically the addition of moonlight - it forms the basis for one of my favorite "guilty pleasure"...
07/23/07 -
Backcountry Blog - The cellular telephone - a marvel of modern technology. Cell phones have gone from a novelty to a necessity for most and even to a nuisance for some. They've saved lives, and in a recent case it helped Portland Mountain Rescue to give coordinates to some lost climbers on Mount Hood so that the climbers could self rescue. When I go backcountry skiing in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, (my backyard)...
07/20/07 -
Kenyon Review - Anyone can appreciate the desire to hold in the hands a book that was written, printed, and read hundreds of years ago. Maybe one’s own absence from the age of the book’s creation increases the sense of wonder. Maybe it’s the sight of fraying bindings, the texture of costly paper, the lingering perfume of dust and extinguished intentions, or the sneaking suspicion that you can (even if it’s...
07/20/07 -
Aspect Art - The painting commonly known as the Mona Lisa was painted between 1503 and 1506 in Florence, Italy, by Leonardo da Vinci. It is painted in oils on a panel of poplar wood. This painting may well be considered the most famous in the world. The subject’s smile– variously described as enigmatic, serene, secretive, and seductive—has been duplicated and parodied relentlessly during the past five...
07/20/07 -
Keepers of the Flame - In the early seventeenth century Scotland’s King James came to power, succeeding Elizabeth I to the crown of England. James was a great moralist and high on his list of Things to Purge were the Antichrist, Witches, their assorted demonic consorts, and henbane of Peru, otherwise known as tobacco. Witches could be tortured, tried, and burnt. Demons and tobacco posed a slightly greater challenge, so...
07/19/07 -
BCBooks - Before his death in January of this year, Ryszard Kapuski was often mentioned as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet Kapuski wrote almost no literature in the conventional sense. He was, first and foremost, a journalist – and how could a reporter deserve the most coveted international award in literature? But to mistake Kapuski for your common garden variety journalist...
07/19/07 -
Social Science Research - This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but...
07/19/07 -
Digital Photography School - It’s a question that’s been asked a few times in our forums over the last few months so while I’m not a Pro Wedding Photographer I thought it was time to share a few tips. I’ll leave the technical tips of photographing a wedding to the pros - but as someone who has been asked to photograph numerous friends and family weddings - here are a few suggestions. 1. Create a ‘Shot List’ Get the...
07/19/07 -
The Bluegrass Blog - With the July 15th deadline for the new internet radio royalties fast approaching, webcasters were starting to despair. But they are breathing easier today. Yesterday, at a congressional hearing, Jon Simson (executive director) of SoundExchange promised that the new rates would not be enforced (report via Wired.com). Internet radio will stay online as the two sides negotiate new rates. One of the...
07/19/07 -
CoffeeGeek - Signature drinks remain a little controversial within barista competitions. Some believe that they are a great outlet for creativity, whilst others argue that they have nothing to do with pushing great coffee forward and are an unnecessary part of the routine on stage. Personally, I love them, and take great pleasure in the challenge they bring. They are one of the things I will miss the most when...
07/19/07 -
Sinclair's Musings - The average Bollywood film isn't that great. There is a fundamental silliness to most of the genre. Fortunately a huge number of Bollywood films are made, enough that no matter how many standard deviations it takes there will be some gems. Those gems are worth finding. Unfortunately, it is a difficult genre for the Western film enthusiast to engage with. Tartan Asia, Premier and East Asian cinema...
07/18/07 -
CultureGrrl - In what seems like a breach of faith with Dutch contemporary artists, the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, a government agency, will gradually sell on eBay some 1,000 works, many of which were previously purchased for the national art collection as part of the government's program for subsidizing the output of professional artists. Another 300 works, considered of better quality, will...
07/18/07 -
Tom Wark - It appears that the European Union is on track to institute a variety of winemaking and wine marketing reforms, assuming the top winemaking countries don't find a way to shoot them down. What I find fascinating is the rationale for the opposition to the reforms. Among the reforms: -The EU will remove 500,000 acres of the "least viable" vines. This is roughly the amount of all of the vines planted...
07/18/07 -
TravelBlog - Well, the Yukon is huge, amazingly beautiful, and majestic. Everything is on a grand scale: dozens of lakes and rivers, hundreds of miles of spruce and lodgepole pine, and mountain ranges on the horizon. For a few days, we’ll be close to the border with British Columbia and will then travel southwest to cross the border into Alaska and go to Skagway. We hear that it’s a tourist town, owned...
07/11/07 -
PopMatters - The last time Mika played Miami, about two years ago, the pop singer performed a record company-sponsored, 20-minute showcase set. His meager crowd encompassed a handful of publishing people, some musicians, “and my grandmother and my great aunt and my Lebanese relatives, my Miami hipster friends, a tiny selection of people from every scene in Miami,” says the Beirut-born, Paris and London-bred...
07/11/07 -
digital Photography School. - My first foray into digital photography was with a small Canon point and shoot camera. I immediately fell in love with the medium due to being able to take large amounts of shots at no cost, being able to see shots immediately after taking them and the ease at which I could use the images in different ways. However there was one one aspect of digital photography that I immediately began to hate...
07/11/07 -
Style Bubble - The National Martime Museum from the 25th July will be celebrating all things nautical, a theme used probably more repeatedly than others, in their exhibition 'Sailor Chic'. It will look at how fashion has been naval-inspired for over 150 years with pieces from Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and Yves Saint Laurent to the older archive pieces like Queen Victoria's son's sailor suit. ...
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