January 2013
1 post
I'm trying to remember last time I saw a phone... →
IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Karr, a 51-year-old Texan, to answer the calls made to a phone booth located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, 15 miles from a highway. He spent 32 days camping beside the phone booth on the desert playa in scorching heat. During that time he answered over 500 calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning...
October 2012
1 post
September 2012
5 posts
“Tikkun”
– Los Angeles Review of Books - Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, The Young-Girl And The Imperialism Of The Trivial
Why be drawn into reading yet another interesting essay on the stunning LARB site? In the opening paragraph they mentioned Tikkun a magazine I buy at the Elgin Street store in YOW called Mags...
Dennis Perrin: All Crowds Left →
UPDATING my confusion:
Seems I’m confused alright, just checked after Dennis tweeted me, Vanity Fair always shows the current date at the top of blog posts and not the date it was made available online.
I’m a bit confused as Dennis says he was at the remembering for Alex Cockburn in his September 27th note but James Wolcott, who Dennis notes was there and one of a few he rode back...
A State of Wonder: Stuck on a Truck @ Toad Suck →
a-state-of-wonder:
Last weekend, twenty-five men and women in Conway, Arkansas, put their hands on the red, waxed body of a Ford F-150 truck—four days later, only one person was left standing. The winner drove the prize home. The Stuck on a Truck competition, as the event is known, started in 2001 as part of the…
I can’t figure out what’s weirder the competition or the...
Forbrydelsen →
I’m watching Forbrydelsen, en anglais the killing. I’ll maybe watch the AMC copy of the original later or maybe I won’t. I’m usually very disappointed in knock-offs made mainly for the 2 upper parts of North America.
August 2012
8 posts
Geoff Hughes →
Jesus H Christ I love cities - specially really big ones. I was in love with NYC before I first arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1960’s and NYC - f Bloomberg - still seems to survive even authoritarian shmucks like him and have charmers everywhere.
A delicious piece of puff pastry to read with your... →
I had a difficult time getting past the line, “A writer before he was a politician, Mr. Obama is a voracious consumer of news … ” , but pressed on none the less and had only my confused view on the guy confirmed; which is likely best summed up by that disdainful neologism, a coronet of Yinglish - apologizes Leo Rosten - shmegegge ( http://bitly.com/a6yZEE )
Kelly Macdonald - IMDb →
Why do I like - love - the BBC TV series The State of Play other than the usual, now awfulness, of anything the Crowe guy does?
‘cause Kelly speaks like she should: as a Glasgow lass.
July 2012
26 posts
Mosquitoes to thrive in wetter, warmer Arctic →
Here are some examples of Aedes nigripes, one of the common species of Arctic mosquito, found all over Greenland and northern Canada, showing the range in size of females. If the Arctic gets warmer and wetter, mosquito populations are likely to thrive. (PHOTO BY LAUREN CULLER)
Short Arctic night becomes a challenge when... →
And I thought the only problems with the high latitudes was insomnia.
“The Olympic Village is occupied by two classes of citizens: those athletes for...”
– And you can add hockey for the 5 ring Winter debacle, aka The Olympics.
Reeves Wiedeman on the Olympic class system: http://nyr.kr/P5z0tr (via newyorker)
Perfect Sense →
Watching Perfect Sense again must be ‘cause it’s a perfect summer evening here in this part of North America. Lovely summer smells, beautiful street sounds, stunning sunset. Perfect for my urbin senses.
Winston Churchill in his swimsuit, 1911/1922 |... →
Winston in old fashion swimming costume reminds me, for some reason, of an old joke:
Clement Attlee during his time as PM after WWII is in the House of Commons toilets, using the urinal. In walks Winston who proceeds to pick a spot to relieve himself as far from Clement as possible.
Clement says: “Winston I never thought you were shy. Why so far from me?”
Winston responds”...
Is this the anniversary of the 1st maned moon...
It seems it is but it also seems to have been surpassed by a current day horror. To bad the landing was actually significant and to be surpassed by a sadly to regular awfulness. What is to be said? I don’t know …. .
Oh well as you get old who gives a shit, eh. Below is a picture of the home I watched the moon landing from; out the back on a black & white tiny TV in awful humid...
How did Le Corbusier get that nasty scar? →
“Le Corbusier apparently got the scar while swimming in Saint-Tropez bay in 1938. He had been staying at the architect Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027. He got trapped under a yacht’s propeller-blades as it passed over him. As he lated (sic) recounted the incident in a letter to his mother, in his characteristically clinical tone … “
Unposed and Posed
In this photo, we see, standing from left to right: Jacques Lacan, philosopher and psychoanalyst; Cecile Eluard, daughter of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard; Pierre Reverdy, surrealist and cubist poet; Luoise Leiris, wife of gallery owner Michel; Pablo Picasso, artist and playwright; Zanie de Campan, actress; Valentine Hugo, artist and wife of great-grandson of Victor Hugo; Simone de Beauvoir,...
The Amazing Amnesia-Inducing Spiderman - By Eileen... →
I mighta mentioned this fact already, that a lot of filmed entertainment is made to be forgotten. People have a hard time with that concept. But it’s an important working class entertainment function, a way to blank your worried mind and lift your depressed spirits; you go into a theater for a couple hours and come out again refreshed and able to carry on. Many affluent types meditate to get...
: Anti-heroes →
lareviewofbooks:
We live in an age of failed institutions and political upheaval, our society is left with nothing to worship – except perhaps the anti-hero. The individual that will make a difference, no matter what. Recently, the storytellers of television have created lead characters that are complicated…
Andrew O’Hagan reviews ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ by... →
”…if you were a working-class boy in the 1970s, badly written books about fucking – quickly followed in the 1980s by badly written books about shopping-and-fucking – were the kinds of book your mother read, and so, to be fair, did your father, and to be even fairer, 400 million other people.”
Somali pirates →
I’m rereading William Langewiesche’s Vanity Fair piece, from 2009, on the taking of the Ponant in and about the Gulf of Aden. This time I’m reading online and tracing the vessel’s position etc. when it was taken as well tracking it now on MarineTraffic.com
“Call of Duty: Lacanian Ops”
–
I’d be torn in choosing amongst these 3 games, if they’d ever materialize: The Curious Class Obsession of Martin Amis, Being Jonathan Franzen, and Call of Duty: Lacanian Ops. Though I’m pretty sure I’d pick Žižek’s fun over Amis ponderousness or Franzen’s...
“Winston Churchill’s widow smashed up an insufficiently flattering portrait...”
– Now you see them: the eternal allure of lost art | Art and design | The Guardian
June 2012
1 post
Walking The Broomway 2012 →
The mysterious path connecting the mainland to Foulness Island, that may well pre-date the Romans.
Robert Macfarlane says in The Old Ways:
“… the Broomway, allegedly ‘the deadliest’ path in Britain and certainly [is] the unearthliest path I have ever walked. The Broomway is thought to have killed more than a hundred people over the centuries; it seems likely that...
April 2012
1 post
Bridging the Dignity Gap - Guernica →
“… as governments relate to their citizens” a strange phrase which, to my mind, has some of the haughtiness of pre-French Revolution panache to it … . A sort of recognition that governments aren’t of the people in fact no matter where they are?
March 2012
22 posts
Nunavut youth: immersed in booze, weed, boredom →
It’s always good, I guess, to have these situations quantified, that is measured. Least so for citizens who base some of their responses to what they see around them on, what we in the empirical world call, fact.
Boredom the ultimate killer of initiative or the thing that “… lies at the root of man’s cultural advance” (John Sisk, The End of Boredom)? And, as noted in...
The Myth of the “Knowledge Economy” →
Oh shit more cold water on B. Obama’s apparently mindless dreaming or is that policy. Amazing go into debt, quite large debt, and get nothing for it. What’s the expression: “only in America?” Cockburn uses the right word helot but I suspect most what do they call them in the states, oh yeah college educated folks would know the word from Adam, course they also likely...
Chinese working to reconstruct... →
Hmm, seems the barbarians have slid into the Empire and may actually end up building the barrier the bamboozled buffoons think they need to protect themselves. In other words the free and the brave seem to be being handcuffed by their own ideology.
“Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its...”
– Capitalism: A Ghost Story | Arundhati Roy
“So it was, or is that is: A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the...”
– Historic Heat in North America Turns Winter to Summer : Image of the Day 