that I'm not updating my blog. Know that in NY, I've arranged for a cable model. So, on June 2 or 3, I'll resume updating at the rate you've come to expect (more than this).
1. My hotmail address is no longer working. I have no idea why.
2. I've been *#$^& sick. Slept all day for three days straight.
3. I haven't checked my voice mail in days. I know people are trying to get in touch. I'm so @**$*#)!@ sorry.
Gary Baseman, whose art I linked to last month, currently has a show in Minneapolis: Open Wounds, And Other Paintings About Vulnerability. More of his work can be found here.
Baseman's art reminds me of my recent (rough, rough) fiction, obsessed with the body and its vulnerabilities.
-the NYer's Zizek profile is finally online
-what if we performed a live autopsy on a giant humanoid robot?
-two of the most linked-to article on the web: big bro. extraordinaire and um, chimps might be human
-Shakespeare and brain imaging
-"Liquidising goldfish 'not a crime'"
-so much more when I get around to it.
There's an ad in Vice for a pair of sunglasses I want, but the ad doesn't include a brand name, only a small logo. Can anybody place it?
"The teens agreed to be part of Bryan Zuriff and David Schulhof's new reality series for the WB, which chronicles young socialites on both coasts."
Trapped in LA w/out internet. I'll try my best to post soon.
link via fiendish is the word
"But at the same time," he added, "it has struck me that it's the best time I've ever known to be a young writer. There has always been a myth that first books are in hard times. But today all acquisition editors are looking for something new and put an outsized value on the new. The best programs provide an ideal apprenticeship for young writers." [more>]
THE VICE GUIDE TO BEING TOTALLY CRUSHED OUT! Excerpt:
B: BORROWING Borrow a book or a movie just so you have the excuse to see him again, or even conveniently leave something like a sweatshirt at his house. This is a no-fail plan, because if he sees your sweatshirt lying around, he?ll have to think about you and be reminded of your charm (plus you left pheromones in it). Forced thinking is good, even though it?s commonly known as ?mind rape.? Of course, the plan backfires if you decide you don?t like him. Then you have the annoying burden of meeting up. You could then decide in a Zenlike way that it?s ?just a sweatshirt? and leave it as a relic for him to pine over forevermore. Mix tape: Billy Bragg, A New England
daily still-in-need-of-a-sublet-"…Other people's cigarette smoke will not kill you."
-Laura Domela's art (via coudal partners)
-2 NY Times articles on blogging: Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It and A New York State of Blog (about gawker.com)
-Globe Alive lists live people as search results.
-Online Dictionary of Playground Slang (via geegaw)
-if Simpsons characters mated… (via geisha asobi)
-quantitative analysis of facial attractiveness (via muxway)
-Personality changes throughout life (and, via quasimeta, yet another personality test)
daily i'm-drinking-good-spirits-etiquette books for women (via amberglow)
-Kings of Africa (via dublog)
-"The purpose of this page is to put all controversy aside and just provide information to help you get the most enjoyment out of your dog." (via everlasting blort)
-I still haven't seen the new Radiohead video.
-art by Yoshiki Hori (via geisha asobi log)
-make music with your hands, a PC, and a webcam (via girl hacker)
-"Why not put a fish tank in a the top of a full tower case?" (via 6 different ways)
-the 9 types of girlfriends (via the presurfer)
According to the soulmate calculator, I'll have to meet 420,547 American single males between the ages of 18 and 45 before I can meet my mate.
Or, to speed up my search, I can put to use some of the site's dating advice. To increase my "meeting frequency/exposure," I should "give [my] lover framed pictures of [my]self and make him/her display them in his/her office." Or, "If [I am] stuck in an unwanted relationship, [I should] refer to [my] lover as 'a friend' when he/she is not with [me]."
The site, solvedating.com, assumes that dating, like a mathematical problem, can be solved -- as can love. Its author writes: "I have created a mathematical model that could predict and explain all human behavior pertaining to love." Click here for the mathematical model. Or, read pieces of its resulting manifesto:
"Men prefer women who are shorter than them. Women prefer men taller than them. [That] explains why men prefer younger women and women prefer older men."
"Very moody people will fall in love faster and more frequently. [That is the] reason why people use wine, scented candles, lingerie, and romantic music."
"Crack or heroin addicts will have a harder time falling and being in love."
Even though the applied math is eye-catchingly wrong, I don't really think this site's a joke.
From the site author's personal homepage (previous link):
I have passed up some good women in the belief that she exists. Yes, they will make good wives and mothers. That's like settling for a "B" or "C" grade. I need at least an "A". After gathering their profiles and crutching their numbers in my wife model, I find that they are "not statistically significant".
Our purpose is to provide a one-stop shop to find all the "best of" books, music, and movie lists. But wait! Not only are we providing the lists, we're also providing a way for you to keep track of the books you've read, the CDs you've listened to, and the movies you've watched from the lists. You'll have an easy way to see what holes you need to fill in for each list.
"Developed by Dr. Harold Edgerton in the 1940s, the Rapatronic photographic technique allowed very early times in a nuclear explosion's fireball growth to be recorded on film."
via the solipsistic gazette
NY: May 14 - 20
LA: May 20 - June 2
NY: June 2 - July 24
I'll still be on the web, but my posts may be less frequent.
"We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes—only a million times actual size! Now available: The Common Cold, The Flu, Sore Throat, and Stomach Ache. "
link via Incoming Signals
Poetry Moodmatcher: Verse to Suit You
daily obscure-little-girls-Simulations of Prosthetic Vision
-the first draft of Infinite Jest
-more stop motion studies
-reality hacking (via Coudal Partners)
-the perception depository, looking at primitives
-The Monster Walks: Gargoyles and Grotesques in NYC
-Britney as Barbarella in Japanese tea tv commercial (via fimoculous)
-Someone with Windows: download this, report back
I've been twice informed that my links are now indistinguishable from my text. I'm sorry, I'll work on it.
daily storm-brewin'-the world's first sea floor resort complex (via six different ways)
-Time slows for people sho stop smoking
-worst banner ad ever, via B.A.'s Weblog
-The Codex Seraphinianus "is a highly idiosyncratic magnum opus by an Italian architect indulging his sense of fancy to the hilt."
-In time for my trip home: the NY Times reviews L.A. dining.
-Echocloud, a music recommendation engine
-surgical instruments from antiquity (via fiendish is the word)
-calories burned during various sex acts (via fiendish is the word)
The BBC is shortly to announce the 100 most popular novels in English, as voted for by the British population. Discovering the nation's favourite-ever work of fiction in The Big Read will go on for months until the final Top 10 are given their own discursive showcases in October. We thought it might be more entertaining to discover which books make people's blood boil, and bring out their most attractively teeth-grinding qualities.So draw near, gentle reader, as 50 leading lights on the literary, political, opinion-forming and media scene identify their worst reading experiences, confess their hatred of global superstars from Shakespeare to the authors of the Bible, and administer a good kicking to victims across the literary spectrum, from Jacques Derrida to JK Rowling.
AS Byatt: Novelist
Belle Du Seigneur by Albert Cohen
It is the most narcissistic and pretentious book I've ever read; it's so self-indulgent and its eroticism is sickly. It is dreadfully slow and it is far too derivative of Marcel Proust.
Joan Smith: Author
Possession by AS Byatt
It's a kind of schmaltzy Mills & Boon romance dressed up with cod Victorian poetry to make it seem more profound, but there's no emotional depth in it at all. It's incredibly shallow and trivial.
Johann Hari: Young Journalist of the Year
The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis
It reveals what a disgusting, malformed, literary dwarf Martin Amis is. His whole approach to life - that if you write good prose you are morally superior - is so ridiculous and snobbish.
Identity Theory interviews Matthew Derby on his new collection, Super Flat Times (link goes to Derby's book website). Derby did his MFA at Brown while I was at school there, and my writing-friends who took his courses loved him like no other. From the interview:
i did look at the film Logan's Run a great deal while writing the book, and not enough people are comparing SFT to that (hint: more people should do this). I tried to study some depictions of the future that seem dated and outmoded from a contemporary perspective, because i wanted to investigate the space in which our idea of the future (which is a thing that, by definition, doesn't actually exist - it is nothing more than a conceptual repository for the narrative arcs we make for ourselves) comes up against our actual experience of the future as it crystallizes into the present. i think we deal with the relentless disappointment we experience as the illusion of the future becomes the reality of the present by guffawing at our past illusions, when in fact those depictions are the only real-world evidence we have of our past aspirations. there's something very heartbreaking and true about these artifacts.
my preferred pictures of lightning and tornadoes:
tornado links:
The Tornado Super Outbreak
Tornado Project Online
Tornado FAQ
Tornado Warnings (Iowa is expecting tornadoes tonight)
Tornado Chasers
lightning links:
track lightning across the US
the electrum project
lightning protection research programs
Lightning Kills, Play It Safe
Virginia Thunderstorms and Lightning
related entry, April 27, 2002
-Buddhist Action Figures
-Moses Action Figure
-Scatology Dolls
The Gargoyles of Notre Dame
"This collection of antique French postcards creates great excitement every time it's shown publicly."
I'm leaving for New York in less than a week, and tonight I've begun my digital packing. I'm spring-cleaning my IE favorites folder, which requires time; while my apartment is the tenth level of hell in Dante's unabridged Inferno, my favorites folder is immaculately organized, with folders ranging from "anti-capri pants" to "philosophy blogs" to "ugly stereos." The goal for tonight: go through all the folders relevant to my novel, and make web archives of all the sites I'll need when writing my novel this summer, without broadband internet access.
As I'm doing this, I'm also listening to music, selecting what songs, from my 15 gig iTunes library, will go on my 5 gig iPod. I'm not going to waste packing space on CDs.
It's hard work. I feel like I'm writing a crappy semiotics paper at 4 am, five hours before its deadline: nauseated by coffee, headachy with stress, and getting leg cramps from sitting still.
daily i'm-still-hoping-learning to love you more, art assignments (via amberglow)
-How do people walk with these? And are they real? (via daze reader)
- freeze dry taxidermy services for cats, dogs and all family pets. (via geisha asobi)
-blog deceptions that geegaw remembers (scroll down to may 6)
-Which Ivy League university is right for you? I had to change my answers three times to get Brown instead of Harvard.
-BlogMatcher is a program that helps people find weblogs that match their interests and find like-minded blogs.
more later. gosh yeah.
Everlasting Blort links (merci) to the Donley School menu, full of anthropomorphic food fun.
Last week, I argued that anthropomorphic food consists of an almost-paradox. We make food seem more human so we feel less guilty murdering it. I think the naivitee of these kids' drawings grasps, on some unconscious level, that tension. In drawing no. 1, the fruit is human and happy.
Then we slice it. The kid obviously feels its pain.
If vegetables are both human and food, then they can eat each other.
The idealism here is obviously ironic.
You can't split them apart = 'til shit do we part.
This one doesn't have anthropomorphic food, but why is the chef locked in the tree, where the stinging bees will soon return? Obviously, a commentary on the bloody murder of pigs or, as my boyfriend suggested, the French.
Here's a fun dancing chicken, also taken from the menu:
It wants to fly away, but its little wings are useless. It can only dance, hoping to distract you from killing it.
Do we really want to kill something that can dance?
Or, the real question is: don't we? The child artist, in her deep simplicity, understands that anthropomorphic food is simply food made human.
Related entry: we eat what we are, April 28, 2003
Over the past couple weeks, I've often realized that I'm in love with Speckled Paint. I've never felt this way before about a blog: daily, I check to see if I'm still on its blogroll, I fantasize attending a blogger-only party and meeting its author (or: I would only ever go to such a party to meet him), and, today, I bought 200 Blog-shares of Speckled Paint stock. And, I've been wondering, why didn't I realize sooner Speckled Paint was my true, one and only, blog love?
But I just learned Speckled Paint is dead.
daily sublet-my-life-before and after life: a baby portrait, a current portrait
-Do family members reincarnate together?
-online paint by numbers
-um, think before clicking here: congenital anomalies
-beautiful images of retinas, lenses, and fibers
-the quickest way to know a blogger: read his first post and his 9/11 post (via kottke)
-"Sir Elton John is to take a musical version of Interview With the Vampire to Broadway." (via ghost of a flea)
-Faulkner's days in Hollywood
-Maybe lightning doesn't strike twice, but how about three times? Talk underway for Grease 3.
-A word repeated over and over will lose its meaning. So will a body part. (via geisha asobi)
-Dante's Inferno Test is up and running again.
-Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene (I haven't checked it out yet, so I can't promise that it's good.)
-book deals can suck
-images of mites (via speckled paint)
-"Are you a history buff, or just want to know more about artificial limbs 100 years ago?" (What did you expect after the "or"?)
-more, more, more and more later.
While the West Wing solidifies our schoolboy notion that West is Left and most TV characters are registered Democrats, TV shows still vote pro-life. Pregnant TV teens keep their babies. Think back to that annoying blond who shagged Scott Foley's character on Felicity, or that more annoying blond on Reba. Both of them are, or were, on WB shows. But last night Everwood, one of the better WB shows, featured a pregnant teen in what was supposed to be, according to its ads, "one of the most heartfelt and provocative episodes of this critically acclaimed drama."
Against other WB shows, last night's Everwood counts as progress. But just barely. Dr. Brown, our protagonist, finds himself unable, given the recent death of his wife, to perform the procedure. "I don't know when life begins . . . but I do know when life ends," he says. So, the abortion is finally performed by Dr. Abbott, Dr. Brown's comical foil and town villian. The message: Abortions cast moral doubt on the characters who perform them, and the only morally safe option is to pass off their responsibility to a character we've already been taught to dislike.
And, at the show's end, Dr. Abbott addresses the moral doubt cast upon him. He steps into Confession and kneels. "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned." When will TV characters have the right to be pro-choice?
daily hoo-ha-ow-Suicide Prevention Products for Psychiatric and Correctional Facilities (via sharpeworld)
-The Living Almanac of Disasters
-"Philosophers (22) average IQ 173; Scientists (39) 164; Fiction writers (53) 163; Statesmen (43) 159; Musicians (11) 153; Artists (13) 150; Soldiers (27) 133." (via incoming signals)
-a timeline of food (via incoming signals)
-It's hard to find old tv ads on the net-- until you find Retromedia. (via scrubbles)
-"Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall and British rocker Elvis Costello plan to marry…"
Identity Theory interviews ZZ Packer, who's teaching at the Workshop next semester.
RB: Could you have stayed at Iowa?ZZ: Could I have? I am actually going to go back for one semester, to do a teaching segment there. So I will be back for one semester. But could I live there? (long pause) Probably not. That's a qualified no. There are things that are great aspects of it, a university town, you have this small town atmosphere, you can walk everywhere and people can know each other and yet you have some of the advantages of a big city, cultural stuff and a reading population. So that is a great combination. Iowa, in particular is on writers' tours —NY, Boston, DC, San Francisco and in between there Iowa City. (laughs)
Give peace a chance.
Fark's current photoshop contest topic: popular sayings and idioms.
For Geoff, a mefi post: Designing a space colony?
"Welcome to this tiny face composer, or should I say de-composer?"
daily my-kidneys-are-kicking-"Marijuana, pornography and illegal labour have created a hidden market in the United States which now accounts for as much as 10% of the American economy, according to a study." (via spitting image)
-antique rat and mouse traps (via sublimate)
-Broken 1000 Faces (via speckled paint and geisha asobi)
-"All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun." (via geisha asobi)
-From the BBC: Einstein and Newton 'had autism'
-The Daily Show's Bush v. Bush debate (via cheesedip)
-"Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens." (via Dublog)
Feral Robotics: Dog Report
Elizabeth McGrath's Taxidermy Toys
Jeremy Dennis loves his toys.
Above, the Bad Ass Dolls. Elton, far left, is "the first GAY DOLL in US history! Whether you're gay or straight you'll LAUGH OUT LOUD when you hear him!" Hear Elton speak.
"An American toy company has begun selling a talking doll of the Iraqi Information Minister, widely known as Comical Ali."
Also: Vintage Toy Ads.
I love celebrity lookalike websites, trying to practice one type of deception -- the deception we're willing to pay for, that of the lookalike -- and actually practicing another -- one we don't want to pay for, that of the non-lookalike trying to pass for the lookalike.
From left to right:
-It's Italy's Andie Macdowell!
-Brad Pitt ("This guy is a dead ringer for Brad, 'Sexiest Man Alive.'"), after facial reconstructive surgery.
-Sharon Stone has her eyebrows waxed by Vulcans.
-Tony Blair wins a spot on his junior high's student council.
-Barbara Streisand turns goy.
Related entry: Can I Sleep With Them?, October 8, 2002.
On Doodles: art by Rachell Sumpter (via the excitement machine) and a selection from "Images That Lead Us to Parallel Realities" (via speckled paint).
daily i'm-pro-biotics-Artistic and Psychological Experiments with Synesthia
-Incoming Signals responds to my question (I'm friggin' flattered) and returns with some links.
-today's best out of context sentence: "Taylor says he suffers 'mental anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, pain and suffering and loss of appetite' since eating the salad."
-I'm the last to link to it: butterfly alphabet
-the art of explanation (via Dublog)
-erotic fertility festivals (via Daze Reader)
-Geoff, weren't you at one time interested in this type of medical curiosity?
-online yoga (via Idle Type)
-Catherine Zeta-Jones smokes, even while pregnant
