Did this one on the train from work—warming up for the Newspaper Blackout Contest.
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Monthly Archives: July 2008
≡It All Ends
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Working from a Wall Street Journal I took from the office this afternoon.
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
“And, anyway, money is not the only ingredient; to have subsidized a Bach, or Fulbrighted a Beethoven would have done no good at all. Money may kindle but it cannot by itself, for very long, burn.” —Igor Stravinsky
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
Against Intellectual Property is a worthwhile paper summarizing IP law, some libertarian arguments for and against, and why IP can’t be justified.
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Remembering the genius whom Stanley Kubrick stole music from, a nice remembrance of the life and music of György Ligeti. Ligeti is well-known for Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes and his piano etudes like Devil’s Staircase. And lots of other good stuff. I also came across an interesting video of a visual listening score for […]
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
George Orwell has a blog, or will starting on August 9, when each entry of the Orwell diaries will be put online 70 years later to the day. I think this will be awesome. [via maud newton]
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
A worthy bit from The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:
The opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other […]
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Monday, July 28, 2008
Innocent people should never talk to the police. Take the 5th. Very good advice from a couple of law school lectures. [via waxy]
≡Weekly muxtape, inclement weather edition
Sunday, July 27, 2008
My fourth muxtape is ready for your aural pleasure.
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Sunday, July 27, 2008
These photos of a leopard killing a crocodile are amazing. Apparently it’s the first time this has been witnessed or recorded.
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Some nice visual storytelling by the woman who fought the system in Toronto and unpaved her driveway. Lovely results one year later.
≡More bad parking/driving
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
I couldn’t make it up if I tried. I saw this tonight. Only about 30 feet separates this from the worst parking I’ve ever seen incident earlier this year. There must be some sort of psycho-electro-magnetic field in this parking lot that disrupts human motor functions.
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Simply Noise generates white noise and pink noise. I was surprised by how nice it is.
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
We often buy “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the product’s faux-entertaining site refers to it as a “nutritious blend of oils.”… In fact, we just bought the “light” version of it, which is therefore some sort of simulacrum of the original.
There’s some great naming suggestions […]
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Medical students who study art develop better observation skills and make better diagnoses.
≡Robert Frost on creative growth
Monday, July 21, 2008
I’ve been flipping through The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and came across this marvelous bit:
No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet’s germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than […]
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Sunday, July 20, 2008
I stumbled on a video of Glen Velez playing a frame drum. I saw him in a workshop a while back when I was in college. Insane skills. We also did some overtone singing, but one of the coolest things I remember was him improvising a little solo with shakers, with all kinds of mind-bending […]
≡Weekly muxtape, never edition
Sunday, July 20, 2008
This week’s installment at mlarson.muxtape.com.
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
How to be a snob when drinking alcohol: “There are guidelines. First, if you’re faking it, everything is faint—you want to talk in terms of hints, notes, and shades. Give the impression that you only barely caught this delicate wisp of a flavor because you were concentrating so intensely back in Step 2.”
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
A picture of the Jefferson Bible. This is the kind of awesome thing that people did before electricity/tv/internet (Jefferson Bible on Wikipedia). The last chapter in the Jefferson version has such a great ending.
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
When you are outside drawing a tree, YOU are choosing what is in focus, what is not—there is an exchange between subject and viewer. That is the art. To be present in that moment.
[thanks, austin]
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Some are saying Halo Kid is the new Star Wars Kid (already some remixes out there). What I find so fun and lovable about these videos isn’t the mocking, but just seeing someone so completely, enthusiastically lost in their own creativity and imagination. Give Halo Kid’s cardboard weapons a look (they’ve even got working reload […]
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008
András Schiff did an 8-part series of lectures on all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas.
≡Weekly muxtape, citrus edition
Sunday, July 13, 2008
My second muxtape in an ongoing series of indeterminate length. Some static hiss on the last track, but it’s a hot performance.
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Sunday, July 13, 2008
Classical and pop reviews 2, Greg Sandow’s follow-up to his previous post on the topic:
Certainly we’re not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven — whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or […]
≡Weekly muxtape, dream edition
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The first in a series of themed weekly amusements. Get your fix while you can at mlarson.muxtape.com; I forgot to post earlier this week and I’ve got a new edition coming in a few days.
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Friday, July 11, 2008
Public sculpture can be hit or miss, but I think the Sibelius Monument is pretty sweet.
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Friday, July 11, 2008
Schrödinger’s cat found its way into a comic with five randomly generated endings. [via waxy]
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Thursday, July 10, 2008
This fall, I’m thinking about running in the FATS Forty 40-Mile Ultra Trail Run or the Pine Mountain 40-Mile Ultra Trail Run. The most I’ve ever run in one stretch is about 17-18 miles, and that was a couple years ago. I have done day-hikes in the 30-35 mile range several times, though. I figure, […]
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Thursday, July 10, 2008
I don’t remember how I came across these pictures of rare clouds, but they’re really cool.
≡Standard Operating Procedure (review: 4/5)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?
By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn’t want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.
Philip Gourevitch wrote […]
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Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Really impressive linocuts + lithographs. See more of Edward Bawden’s artwork at BiblioOdyssey.
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Tuesday, July 8, 2008
And I quote, HARPERCOLLINS TO PUBLISH COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS!, end quote.
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Monday, July 7, 2008
Dan Roam has shared the “Napkin Tools” from his book. (I wrote a wee review of The Back of the Napkin a while ago). New offerings in PDF format include the Visual Thinking Codex, the SQVID, and the Rule.
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Sunday, July 6, 2008
I stumbled on a couple music reading lists on Amazon. Daniel Levitin suggests 11 books to read on music. Songwriters on Songwriting could be good and I’m especially curious about The Art of Practicing.
And Alex Ross wrote a top twenty guide for 20th-century music, both books and recordings. I’m curious about John Cage’s Silence and […]
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Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Singing, Ringing Tree is a sculpture in Lancashire, England that makes wooooing and oooooohhhhing sounds as the wind blows over the hilltop.
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Saturday, July 5, 2008
Tsar Bomba was the biggest man-made explosion we’ve ever had, back in 1961. The mushroom cloud in the video of the Tsar Bomba explosion went almost 40 miles up.
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