Category: people
Kicking the Habits of Double-Glazing
The first week of living in a new place is somewhere up pretty high on the list of things that don’t get any easier with practice. Like a new anything, after the initial infatuation wears off, what’s left is this: the realization that what worked before is no longer valid here. Here, in a new…
Number Stations
Our dear pal, Alec (aka Catigator), contributed a track to this compilation, titled cooly-enough: Number Stations File under experimental and have a listen:
The Graffiti
in Barcelona is colorful, artful, so expressive and anything but:
Designer: Justin Lund
Old pal, Justin Lund, is a gifted designer and is featured in this short film:
The Irony of Beauty
This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…
Sycamore Review: Zach Falcon
ZACH FALCON was born and raised in Alaska. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quiddity, the 2009 Bridport Prize Anthology, and the Bear Deluxe Magazine. He lives in Iowa City where he is working on a novel.
Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal
#henrydarger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger hats off for the tip from
Is Better the enemy of Good?
To some, the answer to this question is “no”. The same ones who believe better is always the goal, always, at all costs. There is a time and place for that, surely. Nonetheless, good has been under attack for far too long by the ones who perhaps misinterpreted the message. The same ones who are…
Walls of Time
I just love Ricky Skagg’s version of this tune but, before performing it himself, Peter Rowan tells the story in the clip below of how he and Bill Monroe wrote this tune after having driven all night on their bus traveling north from the Grand Ole Opry:
The Perfect City
David Byrne is spot on with his thoughts for a perfect city: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009 By David Byrne There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way…
Go Malamud
Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud: Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong. By the People is an inspirational and education piece…
Neil Postman
From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…
Pinballistic De-Evolution
Jason Kottke mentioned this post about the economics of pinball, which brings up questions about more than just what our all-time high scores were: Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with ramps and elevated flippers, but even more importantly because it brought a new…
My New Digs
Above is a pic of the living room in my new apartment in the Born district of Barcelona. El Born is a small village within the city, fashionable but very authentic, where luthiers, glass-makers and designers have their shops and studios and where pensioners play cards, young people hang out and chat at the edge…
Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire
Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…