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.

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 in the comments.

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 of a waterspout at sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read. That can’t be helped. And first the cloud reaches down toward the water from above and then the water reaches up toward the cloud from below and finally cloud and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth. The base of water he picks up from below is of course all the life he ever lived outside of books.

Frost speaks elsewhere of “the person who writes out of the eddy in his mind.” Great images.

As an aside, not only is this a really great metaphor, but it also strikes me as a killer opening paragraph. It starts with a kind of odd idea, but not too uncomfortable (I mean, I know what a bean is, but I haven’t looked at one in the ground in decades). Then the contrast of beans with what he really wants to talk about, poets. And waterspouts. What? Then a couple short prep sentences. Then the rolling polysyndetonic waterspout of a sentence to flesh out the metaphor and to be a sort of pillar in itself connecting the odd ideas at the opening with real-world experience down at the bottom of the paragraph. The language here mirrors the concepts in a very cool way.

This week’s installment at mlarson.muxtape.com.

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]

My second muxtape in an ongoing series of indeterminate length. Some static hiss on the last track, but it’s a hot performance.

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 not. And probably we’re not so deeply tied to this art because some work can be called “magnificent,” or because we identify a particular emotion inside some classical piece. We can go to the movies and get emotional. I think we’d say that the rewards we get from classical music go pretty deep. But I’m not sure we could say that reviews of classical concerts normally convey how deep and powerful those rewards can be. Whereas pop reviews pretty accurately convey what we get from pop, which among other things might mean — I think it does mean this, actually — that pop reviewing is easier. My own experience, writing both pop and classical reviews, is that I’ve had to work much harder to say what’s powerful in classical music.

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.

Public sculpture can be hit or miss, but I think the Sibelius Monument is pretty sweet.

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 Standard Operating Procedure by drawing on the hundreds of hours of interviews that Errol Morris used to make his documentary film of the same name. There’s some commentary on the mind-bogglingly poor management and bureaucratic indifference (e.g. “In the course of a month five different versions of the interrogation rules had been put into circulation at Abu Ghraib,” or the topsy-turvy relationship of Military Intelligence and Military Police, or the secrecy of the International Committee of the Red Cross even after its investigation found conditions “tantamount to torture,” or the willingness of people up and down the chain of command to look the other way when they saw the photos, or even saw it in person. This stuff is insane.).

But the photographs are the centerpiece. Most of the book details the incidents around the photos with lots of recollection from the military personnel involved, and talks more broadly about the nature of the photograph. It’s the iconography, how they encourage us to interpret the scene even though we have only that slice of time to judge—I’m glad the photos don’t appear in the book.

Were there a scale for jaded political cynicism, I’d probably rank in the 90th percentile, and I still find these stories really upsetting. But I’m glad I read it.

Really impressive linocuts + lithographs. See more of Edward Bawden’s artwork at BiblioOdyssey.

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 Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.

After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must *not* major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.