PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

May 21, 2003

May 21 2003

Costa Rica

Holy crap! I’ve finally posted my pictures from the trip. I spent a week in Costa Rica earlier this month, watching monkeys and lying on the beach.

3 editorials

May 19, 2003

May 19 2003

Down with the banshee

Over the weekend, I learned that Ann Coulter—vacuous she-devil-cum-spokeswoman of the conservative regime—grew up in Connecticut and did her undergrad at Cornell.

I grew up in Connecticut and did my undergrad at Cornell.

And though our paths diverged when she continued on to UMich, I still feel dirty knowing that I was in the same environment for twenty-some years that was responsible for spawning this modern day hellmouth of radical Christian vitriol. Could an errant (probably druken) tryst with the Young Republicans have converted me into one of her boobish followers? I shudder the thought.

Do you feel lucky?

 

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  • Roger Ebert talks about how to read a movie.

    This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class."

    I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them.

    This article also contains the most information-rich paragraph I've ever read online...it's like an entire film class in 12 lines. Fascinating stuff. One of the points is that, generally, the right side of the screen is more positive. In a later comment, Ebert adds:

    In all the years with Siskel and on all the incarnations of the show, I always quietly made sure I was seated on the right. When Roeper came aboard, the producers insisted I "belonged" in "Gene's seat." Sentiment won over visual strategy. Did I really think it made a difference? Yes, I really did.

    Also, he should do this online...post film stills and let people leave comments, discuss, etc.

    (link)

  • A list of fifty great arts video available on YouTube, including Joy Division playing on Granada Television in 1978, Jack Kerouac reads On the Road in 1959, and Jackson Pollock making one of his drip paintings in 1951.

    (link)

  • Jonah Lerher on daydreaming and the human brain's default network. Creativity, especially with regard to children, might be stifled by too little daydreaming and too much television.

    After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. "It was a very automatic reaction," she says. "Television was what they did when they didn't know what else to do."

    The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored -- at least, when a television was nearby -- they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

    But television isn't the default network that Lehrer is referring to:

    Every time we slip effortlessly into a daydream, a distinct pattern of brain areas is activated, which is known as the default network. Studies show that this network is most engaged when people are performing tasks that require little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious text. Although such mental trances are often seen as a sign of lethargy -- we are staring haplessly into space -- the cortex is actually very active during this default state, as numerous brain regions interact. Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to contemplate its internal landscape. This is when new and creative connections are made between seemingly unrelated ideas.
    (link)

  • If you've spent any time at all walking around Manhattan, you've likely run across Joe Ades, the English gent hawking vegetable peelers at the top of his lungs on a bit of sidewalk. An occasional part of his current routine is a laminated copy of a profile of him that Vanity Fair published in May 2006. No surprise: Ades is a character.

    Mayhew and the patterers might have been surprised at just how far Joe has taken this gent thing. At the end of each day he returns with his gear to a commodious three-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue, the home that he shares with his present wife, Estelle. (In spite of the polished ways of the patterers, their typical abode was the "vagrant hovel.") Then it's out again for an early dinner in a style unheard of in London Labour. Six nights a week, accompanied by Estelle, he hits some of the biggest-name restaurants in town-Elio's, Jean Georges, Milos, Centolire. He never has trouble getting a table. In the soft light his hands glow pink from the half-hour hot-water-and-nailbrush treatment he performs as part of his evening toilette.

    (link)

  • I love the linear version of the Word Clock. Completely impractical but lovely.

    (link)

  • Who would have thought ten years ago that Hollywood's biggest action stars would be Tobey Mcguire (Spider-Man), Matt Damon (Bourne), Elijah Wood (LoTR), Christian Bale (Batman), Johnny Depp (Pirates), and maybe even Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man)? No Stallones, Schwarzeneggers, or Van Dammes in that group.

    (link)

  • William Drenttel opines on the all-white-male jury of an Adbusters design competition:

    Nearly a decade into a new century, I believe it is unacceptable for a design organization, foundation, board of directors, magazine or other enterprise, to mount an initiative with an all male panel of judges -- or, put another way, "white, native English-speaking men from the U.S., British Isles or Australia." Such behavior is no longer acceptable and should not be tolerated by a community of designers (or any other community). Designers around the world should just say no.
    (link)

  • COLOURlovers, the site that takes inspiration from colors in the real world to make design palettes, today has a collection of palettes inspired by some wickedly vibrant bruises.

    (link)

  • A chart from Wired in 2005 shows how Star Wars influenced the later development of movies, games, TV programs, and the like.

    The Star Wars empire has grown into one of the most fertile incubators of talent in the worlds of movies (Lucasfilm), visual effects (Industrial Light & Magic), sound (Skywalker Sound), and video games (LucasArts). Along the way, some of the original Lucas crew has gone on to become his biggest competitors.

    The Flash interface is really annoying and not useful...the whole image is a better way to look at it. Very Mark Lombardi. (via vc)

    (link)

  • Great Wall of China

    Name: The Great Wall of China
    Date of construction: 6th century B.C. through 16th century
    Built to keep out: Invaders from the north
    Status: Tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage Site
    Little known fact: You actually can't see it from space.
     

    Green Wall of China

    Name: The Green Wall of China
    Date of construction: 2002 through ~2050
    Built to keep out: The Gobi Desert
    Status: Mixed
    Little known fact: Prior to the Wall's erection, the Gobi was advancing south at 3 km per year.
     

    Great Firewall of China

    Name: The Great Firewall of China
    Date of construction: 2002 (and even earlier) to present
    Built to keep out: Ideas
    Status: Trivial to circumvent but still annoying
    Little known fact: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Skype, and MySpace all self-censor their services for use in China.

    Great Wall photo by mooney47.

  • I could read about con men and tricksters all day.

    "I could sell shit at an anti-scat party," he says, "you have to figure out someone's wants and needs and convince them what you have will fill their emotional void." A con man is essentially a salesman -- a remarkably good one -- who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim's desire to believe he has an edge on other people.

    It requires avid study of psychology and body language. It's an amazing paradox--a con man has incredible emotional insight, but without the burden of compassion. He must take an intense interest in other people, complete strangers, and work to understand them, yet remain detached and uninvested. That the plan is to cheat these people and ultimately confirm many of their fears cannot be of concern.

    The particular fellow profiled in that piece has also written a book called How to Cheat at Everything.

    (link)

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