September 14, 2010
New Wave and the New Age: a Blondie Songwriter's Mystic Trip.
Touched By Your Presence, Dear: Ex-Blondie songwriter and bassist Gary Lachman (aka "Gary Valentine") blogs (and is interviewed) about his books on Jung, Steiner, Ouspensky, and Sixties mysticism, and his time spent toiling in the fields of Crowleyana and The Gurdjieff Work.
“Fashions fade, style is eternal.”
Advanced Style: 'Proof from the wise and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age.' Advanced Style is run by Ari Seth Cohen who in his own words: "Roams the streets looking for New York's most stylish and creative older folks. Respect your elders and let these ladies and gents teach you a thing or two about living life to the fullest." Debra Rapoport and Maayan Zilberman also collaborate on the site. Also worth checking out, Advanced Style Videos, a more in depth look into the lives of the wonderful people featured on the site. Made by Ari Seth Cohen and Lina Plioplyte these videos allow our wonderful friends to share their own voice and opinions about personal style: Tziporah Salamon, Thrifting with Debra, Going to the Movies with Debra, Debra's Hat, Design with Debra, Debra on the Importance of Colour, Hattitude!, Mary, Doris' Treasures.
How to Get 5 Million People to Read Your Website
Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, gives advice on successful viral marketing. via [more inside]
I am a Nigerian prince...
The next level in outsourcing: "He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date."
That'd make one hell of a trapeze
Ghost Writer
One of the hottest authors of the 1910s had been dead for over 200 years before she ever published a word. Patience Worth, as channeled through the ouija board of St. Louis housewife Pearl Curran, published several novels and scores of poems before the death of her link to the material world in 1937.
"is content less teachable than style?"
In the final pages of his book, drawing up the merits of programme writing, McGurl ultimately falls back on the one thing the programme really does teach: technique. Countering Eliot’s dictum that ‘art never improves,’ he proposes that literature might, rather, resemble technology or sport, in which ‘systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance.’ Hasn’t ‘the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool’ and its systematic training in the ‘self-conscious attention to craft’ resulted in ‘a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period’? It has. If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.Get a Real Degree by Elif Batuman is a critique of creative writing workshops and a review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Louis Menand wrote a review of the same in The New Yorker which was both more appreciative of the book and creative writing programs. It was discussed previously on MetaFilter.
Gulf Cooooooooooooooon!
Night of the Living Trekkies. They have trailers for books now! (SLYT) Trekkies + Zombies = two great tastes that taste great together.
Australian history through objects
Objects Through Time tells the story of immigration and the changing ethnic diversity of New South Wales, Australia through "movable heritage" - that is, artifacts and objects with historical resonance. While almost ignoring 50,000 years of aboriginal occupation, the site does a nice job of both familiar topics through a fresh lens (e.g., Captain Cook's "secret instructions"), but also takes pains to look at those lesser known topics which may be more accessible through material culture than through texts. [more inside]
You, … were human after all
"For me, the high point of the lyrics was rhyming ‘attitude’ with ‘I’ve been screwed’."
Carrie: The Musical, is legendary for closing after 5 performances and being perhaps the biggest instant flop in Broadway history. It has also achieved cult status, with fans demanding the performance rights be released (they've been held back since its Broadway closing). [more inside]
Hopalong Air Flight 58, now boarding
Aviointeriors SPA, an Italian firm specializing in aircraft seats, has patented and is marketing the Skyrider, a new saddle-style design of seat that reduces the pitch (distance between rows) by some 28% from 81 cm to 58 cm (32 inches to 23 inches). Reaction has been mixed, to say the least.
I’VE BEEN WORKING ON MY QUEEN MUSICAL!!!!
“The purple glow in the sky — that was so eerie”
Lookout Mountain Laboratories (Hollywood, CA) was originally built in 1941 as an air defense station. But after WWII, the US Air Force repurposed it into a secret film studio which operated for 22 years during the Cold War. The studio produced classified movies for all branches of the US Armed Forces, as well as the Atomic Energy Commission, until it was deactivated in 1969. During this time, cameramen, who referred to themselves as "atomic" cinematographers, were hired to shoot footage of atomic bomb tests in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and the South Pacific. Some of their films have been declassified and can be seen here. [more inside]
How Many More Times
"Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature."
Auto-Tune the News #13
The Gregory Brothers auto-tune Charlie Rangel, Anthony Weiner, Ron Paul, Tinky Winky, and the President to Weezer's Memories (SLYT)
A New Name For Corn Syrup
The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make corn syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns, and web sites, (Previously) promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient "corn sugar," arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer "confusion" about the product. (VIA)
"I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side.''
Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as Informer. This week, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two year investigation that revealed that iconic Civil Rights photographer Ernest Withers was also a paid FBI informant. The timing of the report is awkward.
Religious Search Engines Yield Tailored Results
As reported on NPR's All Tech Considered ("Tech" and "Religion"?) on 9/13. "In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet" by using religion-based search engines. And folks are worried that Goohoo results might be biased? (SNPRL - Single Nat'l Public Radio Link) [more inside]
"leverages advanced semantic technology to make Web publishing and community engagement easier than ever"
"If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds." Launching this week at the DEMO Conference, Primal addresses "a core problem with the Internet: our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to easily manage and consume it." [more inside]
These are the shit
SHIT COMICS: A deep resource of comics/cartoon arcana, lore, links, history, news and more. Why not check out some Beibers, early 20th century cartoon tips, ULTIMO, A Voyage To The Moon, Never aired Dan Clowes Commercials, James Kochalka Number One , A Pekar Family Circus, and venturing vegetables. (Strange and occasionally NSFW)
Who you are is not what you did...
Taylor Swift to Kanye, one year later: "Your string of lights is still bright to me." (Original incident.)
World Map, the animated and youtube versions
Which countries have the highest proportion of people living on $1/day? $2/day? $200/day?
Which countries have the highest rates of book borrowing?
Highest circulation of daily papers?
If you just want to see the quick summary in youtube verion of a lot of this data, see the youtube Money video by N.A.S.A. [more inside]
Restoring Awesomeness
Not more then a few days ago, the reddit community started a campaign to call Stephen Colbert to hold a rally tentatively called Restoring Truthiness in counterpoint to the recent Glenn Beck "Restoring Honor" rally. Today redditors put their money where their keyboards are through direct action and broke the previous records and servers by donating $46,983 $92,004 to the school-teacher funding DonorsChoose.org in Operation Truthy Classroom obliterating records set by Hillary Clinton's donation campaign (which has been active since 2008) in less the eight hours. (Previously, and more previously.)
Not your average family movie
Before the Left Behind series, there was A Thief In The Night, a 70's B-Movie that scared countless young church-goers witless. [more inside]
Solid Proof
In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G.S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with papaverine to induce a penile erection... The way in which this information was first reported was completely unique and memorable (possibly NSFW) [more inside]
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