Doing a little housekeeping around here. If this were 1996, I’d be displaying one of those “under construction” gifs.
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Welcome
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Monthly Archives: August 2007
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Friday, August 31, 2007
I like the watercolors of Stina Persson and the way she works in cut papers, papel picado. (And who knew there was a Guild of American Papercutters?)
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Thursday, August 30, 2007
I’d never heard of the Georgia Guidestones, a monument with six 20-foot slabs of granite standing upright, 100 tons of roadside attraction. Inscribed in 8 languages are 10 edicts:
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion - faith - tradition […]
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Thursday, August 30, 2007
A graphic exploring the connected approaches of the Specialist and the Generalist. [via michael surtees]
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007
I finally saw Paris, je t’aime last night, and loved it. (The first time I tried, the theater had a bizarre emergency closing.) Anyway, be sure to check it out if it comes to your neighborhood, and buy the DVD in November.
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007
ATL Creatives is all about what creative people are up to in Atlanta. It’s the brainchild of Eric Shoemaker and Rick Hill.
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Sunday, August 26, 2007
An interview with expert calligrapher Bernard Maisner, who does the usual wedding invitations, window signs, but has also had cameos in major films:
I did writing on-camera for a documentary film about the Oswald/Kennedy assassination by famed German filmmaker Willi Huismann. I had to write like Lee Harvey Oswald live on camera. Writing samples of Oswald […]
≡Cosmopolis (review: 1/5)
Sunday, August 26, 2007
The only other book by Don DeLillo that I’ve read is White Noise, which I thought was rather fantastic. Cosmopolis, on the other hand, I didn’t like very much at all. From the review in the Guardian: “Overall, there’s a sense of gridlock. Which is apt thematically, but tough on the reader.” Have to agree.
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Saturday, August 25, 2007
Something to listen to this weekend: This American Life, “Blame It on Art”. “The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure.”
Listen also: every other episode. I’m not sure how they keep the show so consistently good.
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Friday, August 24, 2007
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is coming to Atlanta on September 7. “These two great gamers, one Salieri, the other Mozart, have grown to despise and fear each other and in so doing alienate the only person truly capable of appreciating their own achievement and greatness.”
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Friday, August 24, 2007
Alright, here’s a rendition of my own personal info-designer chart:
20% easy access to both sides of the brain
30% curiosity about pretty much everything
10% drawing and writing treated as equals
15% a wee bit of perfectionism
10% tech savvy
15% sense of humor aka sense of proportion/balance
For those of you just tuning in, I’m talking about how Austin described […]
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Thursday, August 23, 2007
In Believer Magazine, The Official Guide to Official Handbooks: The Rich Legacy of Putting Others in Their Cultural Place:
Americans love to believe that with the right wardrobe and vocabulary, anyone can become anything. We also love the righteousness and special insight that come with being an outsider, from being turned away from the clubs that […]
≡Seven Types of Ambiguity (review: 3.5/5)
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is a rolling, interminable voyage through a literary version of modern life. Long, but worth seeing it through. The story is told from seven points of view, events mainly surrounding a character named Simon, who, depressed and still obsessed with a college ex-sweetheart, kidnaps her child while absently maintaining […]
≡Kurt Vonnegut on where the writers are:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
“I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments […]
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Del.icio.us is giving away free stuff, stickers and bookmarks and what-not. You have to snail mail them, so I’m all over it.
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
I just started reading The 4-Hour Work Week. I admit, in the beginning, I didn’t want to like it. Part of me wanted Tim Ferriss to be some shallow, cocky blowhard with a couple hundred pages of motivational fluff. But… he won me over by page 11 with a passing reference to J.B. Say, and […]
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Bruce Schneier interviews the head of the TSA, Kip Hawley. It’s a really good exchange. I like this bit about a kind of intentional internal sabotage that TSA conducts:
We also do extensive and very sophisticated Red Team testing, and one of their jobs is to observe checkpoints and go back and figure out—based on inside […]
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
One of my ongoing fascinations is with sense of scale. Here’s a couple other interesting thought experiments to understand the immensity of our universe:
Suppose that our Earth is the ball in the tip of a ball-point pen. How big would the Sun be, and how far away from the pen tip? First, Hold the ball-point […]
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Monday, August 20, 2007
These cool American propaganda posters from World War II are at once hilarious and frightening. I kept telling myself I was going to liberate them from from the Northwestern University database and put them on Flickr, but I just haven’t gotten it done (yet). You’re on your own (for now).
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Monday, August 20, 2007
A brief interview with William Gibson. Not a lot of new material, but I love this: “I’m a very pro-art kind of guy, but I’m not that visually literate. My inner redneck looks at something and says, ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’”
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Monday, August 20, 2007
The 2007 Portable Film Festival is in progress. “Everything in our programme is curated, free and portable thanks to our loyal community of film and mediamakers who submit their work to us from around the world.” That’s what I like to hear.
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Monday, August 20, 2007
A very cool bit of wisdom from Hugh MacLeod.
I remember Robert Hughes, the great art critic saying in his wonderful book, “The Shock Of The New” that the Conceptual Art scene that emerged in the 1960s-1970s was actually good for “Painting”.
Why? Because with everybody else scattering bits of string around gallery floors and calling it […]
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Monday, August 20, 2007
There’s an Amazon interview with Douglas Wolk about his new book, Reading Comics, and another recent interview with Newsarama.
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Monday, August 20, 2007
Octavo publishes old, significant books in digital form. I love me some rare books.
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
The Dvorak Zine is a 24-page web comic about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. Pretty cool. [via comics pundit]
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
Like my passing comment last week, David Lewis bemoans the comics memoir: “We know there’s a power to autobiography in comics—is it deniable?—but why are so many of You susceptible to it?” Tom Spurgeon offers a snappy, but thoughtful response, of course. I still think that non-fiction comics could use some more variety. Fiction, we’ve […]
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
Lots of good stuff for sale at Coudal’s Swap Meat. I’m partial to the Ghost Prints.
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
TMN has a great photo gallery up: Still Life by Martin Klimas. They’re wonderful photos of statues in the midst of shattering. The martial arts figurines are particularly enjoyable.
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Tuesday, August 14, 2007
A photo collection of handmade, miniaturized synthesizers from yesteryear. Those are some incredibly detailed models.
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Monday, August 13, 2007
The story of Clearview, a new-ish typeface designed especially for roadway signs. The slideshow is worth a visit as well.
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Monday, August 13, 2007
The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. And I want one.
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Friday, August 10, 2007
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Man, I’d love to make some gigantic wallpaper. Where to begin… [via not martha]
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