Sheeple

Notes and quotes from September 8 - 11

September 8
On changes in fashion:
http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2010/09/tavi_is_styling_part_of_a_fash.html?f=most-commented-cut-7d5
BY THENEWRAGSAREDIGITAL on 09/08/2010 at 7:55am
If I were in grad school, I'd write my dissertation about her.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/fashion/08Fashion.html?_r=1&hp
Among the changes are new top fashion editors in the ranks of W, Elle, Vogue, New York, Women’s Wear Daily, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s fashion supplement, WSJ — many involved in rivalries that make “The Devil Wears Prada” look like a children’s book. Where those editors end up sitting this week at Lincoln Center and other runway-show sites will be scrutinized by industry insiders as a declaration of their relative standing. “Front row seating at a fashion show is as much like the quote-unquote cool table at a high school cafeteria as anything I have ever seen,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details. “I want to see who gets the seat next to Lady Gaga.”
...
The press agent for one designer, who would not speak on the record for fear of offending one side or the other, said Vogue.com is also asking for previews of the major collections, tromping on the inside-baseball territory once owned by WWD, “and that’s a little bit scary.”
[previews are one way to get ahead of bloggers]
...
Each editorial move has been scrutinized like an upset in the midterm elections. Brandusa Niro, the editor in chief of The Daily, a publication that follows the comings and goings of the front row and delights in its own grudge match with WWD, said the “summer of 2010 post-apocalyptic mood in media” is a subject she plans to devote an entire issue to during Fashion Week, tracking the intricate connections and conflicts caused by the shuffling. She was particularly curious about the appointment of Peter W. Kaplan, the former New York Observer editor, as the new editorial director of WWD. He is not exactly known for his sense of style, she said.
...
Elsewhere, Deborah Needleman, the former editor of Domino, became the new editor of WSJ, and Sally Singer, a longtime top editor at Vogue, took over as editor of T: The Times Style Magazine. There are also new fashion directors at Glamour, Elle, Essence and Vanity Fair — positions that dictate front row seating at the shows.
...
Thank heaven for celebrities, the reality-show stars and the ubiquitous cast of “Gossip Girl.” They are the new buffers, with a caveat, as Ms. Niro noted. “If you put someone next to Glenda Bailey,” she said, referring to the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, “Anna Wintour might not like it.”
Worse, any seating faux pas will be instantly broadcast by the pack of journalists and photographers whose beat is the choreography of the front row. “It has been changing for a while, since Billy Boy and that funny little girl who was 13 and looked 97 came along,” said Michael Roberts, who was the Vanity Fair fashion director until June, when he was replaced. (Mr. Roberts, now a style editor at large for the magazine, was referring to the famous-before-their-bedtime bloggers Bryan Boy and Tavi Gevinson.)
[wonder how long Tavi remains relevant and not just a schtick]
On Studying:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.
...
The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.
...
When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.
...
“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”
Consider the Footnote
I see DFW's use of footnotes as gimmicky and compulsive. I don't see it adding to the story except as a way of being clever for clever's sake and forcing the reader to do more work than is necessary to read and follow the story. That's why I prefer the audio version. It blends the story and the footnotes together, which is what the author should have done if he had any courtesy for the reader; much like an artist who makes a patron petal a stationary bicycle to power their exhibit of electrical art, to "get the viewer involved in the work" or some other such bullshit rationale to uplift the artist's ego so that they can feel they got someone to do something to get them invested in "their vision."
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/news/infinite-jest/infinite-jest-for-apple-devices.html
infinite jest app or iPhone 17.99 by hachette book group
I heard on Obsessives/Obsession/ whatever the name of that show about OCD sufferers is, a therapist say that you can't control your thoughts. One woman is afraid that she'll take some garbage and eat it, and become unpure, that she will take a tissue or paper towel that has urine or feces on it and pop it into her mouth. It's the insane, intrusive thoughts that get her to compulse.
Profile of Shawn Fanning, in advance of the Social Network film that skewers him:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-parker-201010?currentPage=all
Reggae plays in the background at Shawn Fanning’s huge 40th-floor apartment, directly over San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. It is late at night. Parker stretches back on an easy chair and bemoans what he sees as the scarcity, in contemporary culture, of revolutionary thinkers on the level of, say, Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac. “They were capable of folly,” he says, “and willing to take risks in terms of their message. We live in an extremely repressive era, and we fail to realize how repressive it is, because we’re told that all these outlets for rebellion, like listening to rock music, are no longer satanic. Smoking weed—that’s sort of O.K. and acceptable in some circles.” To Parker, the implication is that people in his position have almost an obligation to do what they can with the tools at their disposal—software and the Internet—to free up society through disruptive technology. As he muses, it is clear that he sees entrepreneurship and invention as handmaidens of social transformation.
Parker had been trying to explain himself while he wandered the streets on that hazy night, attempting at length to find Fanning’s apartment (even though the building is the tallest in the neighborhood). “I think the best way to describe me is as an archetypal Loki character,” Parker begins, “like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’m like the prankster or Puck in mythology. He’s not trying to cause harm, but rather to pull back the veil that masks your conventional, collectively reinforced understanding of society. This renegade thing was very clear at Napster. The point was that the emperor—the content industry—had no clothes.” He hesitates. “This all probably sounds incredibly pretentious and narcissistic.”
It does. But even as Parker alternates between putting himself down and pumping himself up, he can rely on most of his friends to speak glowingly. Says Peter Thiel, “I’ve told Sean he may be the long-lost grandson of Howard Hughes—a brilliant entrepreneur who is somehow transforming the United States and yet is not understood by society. Sean is one of the great serial entrepreneurs of his generation, someone who is really changing the world and turning the wheel of history.”
...
Actress and activist Trudie Styler, who is married to Sting, invited Parker and his then girlfriend to a retreat for philanthropists and activists that the couple hosted at their Tuscany estate last year. There, Parker met Laura Ziskin, who produced the Spider-Man movies and co-founded a charity called Stand Up to Cancer. “It turned out Sean has an interest in immunology and a belief that it is the next frontier in cancer research,” says Ziskin. “He had talked to as many people about it as I had!” They’re now friends. Styler found herself impressed: “He was just so lovely with everyone, and kind. A higher being. I’m very fond of him.” (Parker also fraternizes in the most elite precincts of global governance and policy—but in his own way. At the World Economic Forum in January, he was disappointed in the quality of the nightlife in Davos and speculated with relish that he could throw the all-time-best forum party if he took over a big local venue and brought in some of his rock-star friends.)
...
A lover of the good life, Parker maintains a collection of elegant white shoes, a closetful of Tom Ford suits, and a $100,000 Tesla electric sports car he never quite seems to have time to drive. He divides his nights between a San Francisco apartment and a palatial (rented) New York town house. Among its many amenities: a full, mowed lawn on a patio on the third of its five floors.
...
Today, Parker spends most of his time finding and managing investments for Founders Fund, Thiel’s venture-capital shop. His current passion: a London-based music company called Spotify, which he thinks can finish the job that he and Fanning started with Napster—this time, legally. (Spotify lets you listen to music from almost any artist on any label, gratis, through ad-supported streaming.) Not everything Parker touches, however, necessarily turns to gold. A little while back, he was shelling out money in an unsuccessful bid to expand a hand-painted-clothing company. He was also briefly brainstorming with a group that included his old crony Shawn Fanning and the 18-year-old founder of Chatroulette, Andrey Ternovskiy, about how to turn that voyeuristic live-video networking site into a full-fledged service. Oh, and when he’s home in New York he takes piano lessons from Sean Lennon.
...
The road, he points out, has been rocky. “It hasn’t been some kind of fairy tale for me. All of my success has been born of failure. Your childhood dreams are always tales of glory; reality is a lot messier and more dramatic.”
Jimmy Fallon's Workout Routine:
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/10/george-wayne-jimmy-fallon-201010
What keeps you grounded amid “Fallon-mania”?
The show, because it’s a lot of work. I meet new people every day who are great celebrities and musical guests. I usually wake up at about 8:30 A.M. I work out with David Kirsch.
Who probably has you on some irrigation diet—or, better yet, on the Scientology “purification rundown.”
No, I do actually have this lady from Food Matters who sends me meals to my apartment at night. I drink a lot of water. And lately I have changed my gin and tonics to vodka sodas. I can’t drink during the week anymore.
Tell me about it. That is why I drink only Veuve Clicquot mimosas at all times.
I used to be able to do Jägermeister. I can still do it when I have a couple days off.
Michael Lewis on the financial crisis in Greece:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/09/michael-lewis-talks-about-the-banks-that-brought-down-greece.html
The Germans have gotten stuffed every which way. They not only bought American subprime-backed securities and Greek government bonds, but they were also buyers of Spanish condos, and lenders into various megalomaniacal Icelandic private-equity deals—they bootstrapped these Icelandic tycoons. I don’t think there was a bad investment that the Germans didn’t make. I think it was their fundamental strength that enabled them to weather all these shitty investments. They have been generating such surpluses and wealth for so long that they can afford to squander some of it. It is also indicative of something that I haven’t really thought through. Whatever it is that makes Germans really good at making cars renders them less capable when dealing with American investment bankers. It’s like global finance and global manufacturing are two different aptitudes and occupy separate headspaces. So they’re really good at the math S.A.T. and not so good at the verbal S.A.T.
So the question is: Why aren’t they suffering more? There has always been this engine of prosperity underneath their financial activity, and although that engine is affected by what is going on in the world, it is not affected in the same way that an economy premised entirely on financial manipulation is affected. The funny thing is, one of the subplots of this slow disintegration of the European Monetary Union [is] that this whole institution was put together to contain Germany. By welding all of Europe together, the general idea was to make Germany less threatening by making them a part of a larger European enterprise.
Instead, it has made Germany more frightening in a couple ways. First, by opening all European markets to German manufactured goods, it created a big market for Germany to sell into, thus making it easier for them to become big and strong. Secondly, and more insidious, by essentially putting Germany in the position of the stiffed creditor of its European counter-parties, it changes the tone of relations between Germany and everybody else. This tone of relations seems to be shifting rather rapidly from still feeling ever so slightly guilty about the Holocaust to being pissed that everyone owes them money and is not paying them back. What we are looking at is a morally indignant Germany, which is kind of a new thing. In my lifetime, I can’t remember a time when the Germans were allowed to be self-righteous. And now they are justifiably self-righteous, because everybody screwed them. It is creating a climate where German politicians tell the Greeks they need to sell the Acropolis.
...
Here the U.S. is dolling out trillions of dollars to automakers, homeowners, and banks. Would there be a scenario where the U.S. Treasury goes bankrupt?
Yes. I say that glibly. It’s not that hard to see us getting to a moment where we are essentially restructuring our debt. I think it is a long way off, but how can it not happen? We are so indulged by our creditors. Even though we have grotesquely mismanaged our financial affairs, people are willing to lend us money on terms that they would not lend on to anybody else in the world. It’s unbelievable to me that the U.S. Treasury can borrow 10-year money at around 2.5 percent.
The Chinese are willing to lend back to us all their surpluses basically for free, and we keep running these deficits. The benefits are just too great to our society for us to turn away. I assume what will happen is that we’ll continue to do it until we get to the moment where we can plausibly say, “Whoops, we can’t pay you back 100 cents on the dollar.”
Roberto Bolaño:
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article07221001.aspx
The Roberto Bolaño craze has been in full swing for a few years already. It is to the point that publishers are publishing anything they can find (Bolaño died at age 50 in 2003). Lost works are creeping out of their hiding places. First came Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer. Now there is a novel about a board game called The Third Reich. All this from the drawers of his desk — God knows what will be revealed should someone finally stumble into the man's attic or basement.
...
Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño's executor, called Antwerp the "Big Bang" that created Bolaño's subsequent literary universe. That would mean the fragmentary jottings from Antwerp later expand into the dense 900 pages of 2666, Bolaño's magnum opus of crime and horror revolving around the small town of Santa Teresa. In a few literal ways this is probably true. Crime and violence are the twin stars in Bolaño's works. They are already there in Antwerp, the narrative of which (if there can be said to be one at all) centers on the murder of six kids at a place called the Calabria Commune campground.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/10/spain-roberto-bolantildeo
Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death. The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer, reported La Vanguardia.
The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel 2666.
The Wylie Agency, the literary agency, which recently took over the Bolaño estate, declined to comment about the reports. The novels apparently came to light when piles of documents, notebooks and diaries left behind by Bolaño were being sifted through.
It follows the discovery of another novel, entitled The Third Reich, which was shown to publishers at the Frankfurt book fair in October.
Audio books to get:
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Cryptonomicon
War and Peace
Audio books not available at the library or at all:
Infinite Jest
Finnegan's Wake
Gravity's Rainbow
Library books to get again:
Carroll, Sean, From eternity to here [sound recording]
Troyat, Henri, Divided soul; the life of Gogol
Lipsyte, Sam, The ask [sound recording] : [a novel]
Lipsky, David, Although of course you end up becoming yourself
Marx, Karl, Grundrisse
Sorkin, Andrew Ross, Too big to fail [sound recording]
English reporter in los angeles, Chris Ayers, Death by Leisure:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/28/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview25
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/arts/13iht-booklun.1.20174374.html
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Leisure-Cautionary-Chris-Ayres/dp/0802143652/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283972801&sr=8-1
Link Mania:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/08/rodney-king-marry-jury-member
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Bolano#cite_note-11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/07/sons-experience-in-french-school
http://www.bolanobolano.com/
http://infinitezombies.wordpress.com/
http://ijustreadaboutthat.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/james-joyce-ulysses-audio-book-1922/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/28/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview25
http://www.amazon.com/Lose-Friends-Alienate-People-movie/dp/B001Q3M66Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283982093&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Toby-Young/e/B001IYV902/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
http://www.amazon.com/Sound-No-Hands-Clapping-Memoir/dp/B003IWYJ8Q/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2
September 9
Google's Signing Bonuses:
http://gawker.com/5634212/googles-utterly-mental-signing-bonuses
Schmidt had a point; even Google's own employees had grown tired of coworkers' petty complaints about how, for example, the chocolate frosting on free brownies stuck to their fingers, or how free gourmet restaurants were reduced to one per building.
Zuck zuck zuck:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-08/mark-zuckerberg-at-harvard-the-truth-behind-the-social-network/full/
Pinky regeneration:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/09/09/pinky.regeneration.surgery/index.html?hpt=C1#fbid=iJAyeS3R7SI&wom=false
Linkfest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodie_Foster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Schrader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaphet_Kotto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frankenheimer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renny_Harlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Schrader
http://gawker.com/5632881/the-gawker-guide-to-fall-movies?skyline=true&s=i
http://gawker.com/5632501/what-to-listen-to-this-fall?skyline=true&s=i
http://gawker.com/5634034/lourdes-leons-first-day-of-high-school-totally-normal-says-paparazzo-who-recorded-it
Comment by AnnaZed at 02:24 PM:
Strange choice for a wealthy parent to make I would say.
My daughter went to LaGuardia for her freshman year and then we got her the hell out of there. The academics are appallingly rudimentary. No child can even hope to get into a decent college from that academic base, so it's like performing arts trade school basically. The boys are predatory in ways that would astound even the most seasoned New Yorkers, the edifice is filthy and crumbling, there is not a square of toilet paper in the entire school, the bathrooms (like in every other NYC public high-school) are also bizarre Lord-of-the-Flies style supervision-free zones and the arts education is not really all that great.
Any wealthy parent with any sense would put their child in a decent private school and have tutors or classes (like at Stella Adler or something) for the arts preparation. It's also not all that hard to get into really, they have thousands of students.
http://gawker.com/comment/28888365
Top ten survivalist apps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone
September 10
Joaquin Phoenix is still here:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/movies/10imstill.html?nl=movies&emc=mua1&pagewanted=2
The multiplicity of roles Mr. Phoenix performs in “I’m Still Here” brings to mind Todd Haynes’s similarly titled “I’m Not There.” In that multistranded 2007 film, Mr. Haynes used different actors, men and women, black and white, to represent Bob Dylan or, rather, the multiple identities (folkie, mythmaker, rocker) that this shape-shifting singer has assumed over his career. By contrast, “I’m Still Here” takes the shape of a celebrity-profile documentary, with the attendant narrative strategies (battered old home movies to represent the past) and visual clichés (shaky camera work, bad lighting). Although not as formally audacious or intellectually exciting as Mr. Haynes’s film, “I’m Still Here” nonetheless also makes the case for identity or, more accurately, identities as both constructed and protean.
To this end it’s telling that Mr. Phoenix, in an early scene of him turning in his celebrity credentials, as it were, says, “I don’t want to play the character of Joaquin anymore.” To judge from his gut and the dreadlocks sprouting on his head, he has already quit playing the manicured media commodity who, in keeping with the false intimacy of the entertainment sphere, is known by his or her first name (Joaquin, Julia, George). That Joaquin hugs Jay Leno like a long-lost friend, smiles at the paparazzi shrieking his name on the red carpet and receives a kiss from John Travolta, as Mr. Phoenix did at the Golden Globes. This Joaquin is fat, fuzzy, obnoxious, whiny, seemingly talentless and definitely not Regis-and-Kelly-friendly.
California anti-paparazzi law:
http://jezebel.com/5628406/the-scary-kate-moss-video-that-sparked-a-paparazzi-crackdown
http://www.abanet.org/forums/communication/comlawyer/summer99/sum99boese.html
Dubai:
http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/9419
The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet.
Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: “This is a desert area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you take on the desert, you will lose.”
Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates’ water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It’s the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.
...
She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. “Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you’re out,” they said. She says: “The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!” There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai’s most famous hotels.
By:
http://www.johannhari.com/
W. Gibson Zero History review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/books/review/Thomas-t.html?src=me&ref=books
As always, Gibson’s writing is thrillingly tight. One chapter begins with this: “Inchmale’s spirit-beast, the narcoleptic stuffed ferret, still frozen in nightmarish dream-waltz amid the game birds, was waiting near Cabinet’s grumbling lift.” This is a disorientating world of nouns, mirroring our own world, where nouns — things, that is — are dizzyingly paramount. This prompts interesting questions. Does “patination” make things more valuable? Is the market constantly undermining itself? And if all things were knowable, where would that leave us? The only other writer who is as good at chronicling our contemporary milieu, in which the world of things eats itself like an ouroboros, is Douglas Coupland. To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future, because it seems the present is becoming the future faster than it is becoming the past.
Birth Caul:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caul
In medieval times the appearance of a caul on a newborn baby was seen as a sign of good luck.[3] It was considered an omen that the child was destined for greatness. Gathering the caul onto paper was considered an important tradition of childbirth: the midwife would rub a sheet of paper across the baby's head and face, pressing the material of the caul onto the paper. The caul would then be presented to the mother, to be kept as an heirloom. Some Early Modern European traditions linked being born with the caul to the ability to defend fertility and the harvest against the forces of evil, particularly witches and sorcerers.[4]
...
The most common portent of good luck in recent centuries is that the baby born with a caul will never drown, the second most common myth, from Scotland, is that the child will be fey, or psychic. Another British myth is that the child will travel its entire life and never tire.
Review of C by Tom McCarthy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/books/review/Egan-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1
Still, the book’s lingering resonance owes less to its strenuous intellectual girding than to the mystery the story nonetheless retains. Like life, which we overinterpret at our peril, this strange, original book is — to its credit — a code too nuanced and alive to fully crack.
C
By Tom McCarthy
310 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95
Songs:
Pat Benatar -- Hit Me With Your Best Shot
bat for lashes
Kim Carnes - Bette Davis Eyes
David Bowie
Death of Stevie Ray Vaughan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Ray_Vaughan#Death
On August 26, 1990, a sold out concert of 30,000 at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin, featured an encore jam with Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jimmie Vaughan and Robert Cray. On August 27, shortly before 1 a.m., a helicopter carrying Vaughan en route to Chicago crashed within seconds after takeoff.
September 11
Microwave protection:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4572960.html
Use of metallized knitted net fabrics for protection against microwave radiation
United States Patent 4572960
Metallized, particularly nickel-coated, knitted net fabrics are suitable for protecting the eyes against microwave radiation with very little adverse effect upon the field of vision, particularly when the mesh width of the knitted net fabrics amounts to <0.25 ?, preferably <0.1 ?, ? being the wavelength of the radiation to be screened off at the upper frequency limit.
Find a way to integrate this into taser-proof clothing and you've got protection against over zealous law enforcement using new post-taser active denial systems. Or perhaps the nickel-coating can double as a layer of conductive material under a non-conductive layer (which seems to be how the taser-proofing works-- see Thor Shield).

There are technophobes in every age

Segment of Harvey Pekar article re-written for 2017:

Younger colleagues revered Mr. Pekar as much for giving them their earliest breaks as for his personality quirks. They now speak fondly of his raspy voice, his fixations on work and money, and his general disregard for modern [psyonics.]

“He would still send [e-mails], long after no one else was sending [e-mails],” said Josh Neufeld, who drew Mr. Pekar’s stories for 13 years. “Sometimes he would [text me or send me a script via instant message.] Most of the time he would send it [as an attachment — an e-mail attachment.]”

The Strokes

Welcome again to 2001.




The Strokes, Is This It, released September 25, 2001.

Arcade Fire: The Sprawl II

Tiesto

Marble House

Heartbeats

One blog

I've been on blogger for 9 years now. I've seen it grow from an independent company headed by Evan Williams of Pyra Labs to another ubiquitous arm of Google's information gathering machine. I remember reading Evhead's posts on blogger's blog talking about the late nights that stretched into the morning, adding features for devoted users, all for free. I got a complimentary Blogger hoodie for signing up as a Blogger Pro and paying an annual fee. They sent the hoodie soon after selling the company and after Google made the service free again, eliminating the need for a Pro account. I made blogs for different subjects, for commenting on news articles I read to commenting on the stock market and hedge funds, posting links to mashups and videos to links to Rothko prints. I've had years where I've posted hundreds of blog posts, and years when I've barely posted 20. Going into my 10th year of using this service, I've decided to consolidate all of these blogs into one. Think of it as a boxed set of blog posts, comprising many different genres and styles. I'll use this as a catch-all for my interests. I'll explore labeling the old posts, or at least the new ones. This is what a blog was supposed to be for, and I've resisted it for a few years now, but finally it will return to a list of links and thoughts and news, all tied together by the author's whims and desires, just to get something out there, for himself if not anyone else.

I Just Had To Die

This is Now

Fever Ray and The Knife

The Knife is a Swedish band who has been around forever and won a ton of awards. Fever Ray is Karin Andersson's (one half of The Knife) solo project. Videos follow.



Note that all of their videos share the same themes. Some examples: masks, symbolic language, man's place in nature.

Live blogging The September Issue (on delay)

I wrote up my thoughts as I watched The September Issue documentary about Anna Wintour creating Vogue's September 2007 issue, the important one with all the ads.

--In the midst of Anna's meeting with Neiman Marcus I realize that this documentary was filmed in 2007, at the end of the economic high times, and I am watching the end of the golden age of magazines.

--Anna hops into a private limo and asks to stop at Starbucks. She looks pretty lonely, her body language is all closed off. Perhaps that's how she is, or perhaps it's because she's self-conscious about the camera next to her. And I didn't realize that The September Issue could also be subtitled Anna Wintour, as the documentary is as much about her as the magazine.

--Watching Grace shoot the girls, I realize I like props. There are none in this first shoot. Any fashion imagery I've seen has had props, but maybe I haven't seen Vogue.

--Watching this I realize I'm not interested in fashion, I'm interested in cut and fabric, great cut, great fabric. Flattering cut, excellent fabric. All of the other stuff is marketing-- the seasonal stuff, the shows, what's in, what's out.

--During the twenties shoot I wonder where they get their influences. Why do they have to go back to older times, why not create something new? Who is creating these themes? It's as if in the endless churn to create new styles every season, they have to get their ideas from somewhere, rather than wait until the ideas are new to create something. And I realize I like things that have a lot of effort put into them-- a shot of them painting the eyes of a woman in the twenties shoot-- something that takes a long time to set up. Certainly not like a live blog.

--When Sienna Miller comes in there's one photographer taking her picture and I wonder if he was tipped off or hired to be there to make her seem more important.

--And Anna is valorized as being a key innovator for recognizing celebrity culture and being one of the first editors to feature them on fashion magazines.

--Of course, Sienna Miller is British, and Vogue is British.

--Anna comes to a meeting with her sunglasses on and I wonder if it's partly or mostly for the cameras, as she takes them off when she sits down, almost embarrassed to be wearing them inside a windowless conference room.

--The whole place seems devoid of people, as if there are only a dozen people working in the office.

--And I realize now why live blogging is so popular-- you can see the timing of things. And the problem with not publishing these is that I don't publish the times. Pausing now to get laundry.

--Now I'm thinking that I could start a new blog called live blogging the movies.

--In Paris during the couture, I recognize one of the models as Lily Cole, from the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassis. She walks and the camera focuses on her, as if to say hello, here I am. And I was thinking about the industry that supports fashion, the models, the public relation firms, the magazines and editors, and here she is, a model, working on becoming an actress. It's too bad the movie didn't do too well.

--And then I think that cities are just playgrounds for the rich. Maybe I'll have to watch this again and really live blog it, turn it on and post these things or re-write them and post them in real time as I watch.

--Because this is a new form of commenting--instead of commenting after watching a video, you should be able to comment while you are watching it, and watch other's comments fly by like Twitter tweets.

--Now we're looking at Grace taking a picture of a Lady Gaga type wig and a model who is concerned about taking a bite of a mini cake because her courset is too tight. Grace assures her that it won't make a difference.

--It's a week until the magazine will be ready and I think this is no different from releasing a website. The only difference is that it isn't printed. Instead of all this paper, the work will be done on large HDTV monitors and computer screens. And there won't be a centralized office, but teleconferencing and web video. You can be in Paris, London, and New York at the same time; telepresence.

--With the other stuff that's been manufactured for this film-- the sunglasses in the boardroom, the friction between Grace and Anna, I wonder if the struggle over the cover image is really that much of an issue.

--When she talks about how her siblings are amused at what she does, I wonder if she means they think it's a joke.

--She looks like a woman trapped in a business that may have lost its luster for her as soon as the clothes stopped being marketed towards her.

--Vogue is in the same office building as Gourmet used to be.

--Grace is talking about how Anna saw the celebrity thing before everyone else did, frustrated that her shoots were bumped for 22 pages of Sienna. But if Anna was so fashion forward with celebs, is she as aware that print is breathing its last breaths and pretty soon an issue will be nothing more than a web page?

--Grace, very pomo, gets the cameraman in one of the shots.

--100 pages up from last year and pages won't matter, unless they're web pages.

--I don't think I've seen Anna eat once in this whole movie.

Mt Eden Hide and Seek

Here's his remix of Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek, which I like much better than the original.

Mt Eden

Discovered Mt Eden, a New Zealand DJ who makes some nice dubstep mixes. Interviewed by Central Beat Collective.

Capturing this moment in time

Elliot Smith playing in the background I read Tavi's summary of Blogs versus Magazines while thinking that she still has years of time to become a better writer. In 10 years she'll still be young, while I'll be... old. In 20 years she'll still be young while I will still be... old. Hell, give her 25-30 years to still be young as 40 seems to be young in the grand scheme of things, while, yes, you guessed it, I'll still be... old. I've got about 3 years left to be young before I start getting old. So no time like the present to publish, right?

What would Salinger's blog be like? I wrote a comment on the Times article about his recently unsealed letters:

Someone should do the world a favor and burn all his unpublished writing. In an age where Nabokov's index cards for the Original of Laura are ripped from his rigor mortis-suffering hands to be published against his will at death, and the Jung family releases a limited edition newly translated Red Book exposing their great grandfather's private visions, do we really need another dead author's unpublished drafts polluting the mindscape? Why not give the man his privacy and make way for new voices?

Surprised to see that 5 people recommended it.

Related to burning manuscripts (and artists who died suspiciously, i.e. Elliot Smith), I recently found out about Nikolai Gogol, a Russian realist writer who burned the sequel to his career-defining book because he was worried about the sinful nature of his work. From Wikipedia (which we all know is the definitive source of all knowledge):

...he intensified his relationship with a church elder, Matvey Konstantinovsky, whom he had known for several years. Konstantinovsky seems to have strengthened in Gogol the fear of perdition by insisting on the sinfulness of all his imaginative work. His health was undermined by exaggerated ascetic practices and he fell into a state of deep depression. On the night of February 24, 1852, he burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of Dead Souls. He explained this as a mistake, a practical joke played on him by the Devil. Soon thereafter he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later.

I found a book that talked about his life and put it on reserve at the library: The Creation of Nikolai Gogol by Donald Fanger, which mentions Gogol and the Devil, by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, which might offer more information if I could find it anywhere, as well as The Anguish of Mykola Hohol A.K.A. Nikolai Gogol, by George Stephen Nestor Luckyj, which is also out of print.

Word of the day: cynosure. According to Merriem-Webster, it's "one that serves to direct or guide; or a center of attraction or attention." Fanger's book called Gogol one as he seeked to define himself, and extensively the entirety of Russian culture, through his literature.

Joker

This is now a dubstep blog