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daily expectations-stereo images (via everlasting blort)
-Banraku and Karakuri puppetry (via the highly recommended dublog)
-finalists from scene 360's "everyday life" contest
-Baryshnikov Will Play Heartthrob in 'Sex and the City'
-Fifteen ways to leave your lover
-Japanese psychiatric art (via geisha asobi)
-First gay public high school set for NY (via reenhead)
-MTA Unveils Virtual Subway (via the morning news)
-how to describe things to blind people
-"RedPaper is the world's first collaborative newspaper, powered by people just like you. Buy breaking stories and insight posted by real people all around the world for just the change in your pocket. " (via magnetbox)
-A good weblog I hadn't noticed before
-The Routine Autopsy: The Procedure Related in Narrative Form: A Guide for Screenwriters and Novelists (via the eyes have it)
daily more-Not book reviews. Book cover reviews. (via iconomy)
-the pitfalls of having a literary pseudonym.
-new, cheap self-publishing
-"The Age of Grief," a wonderful novella by Jane Smiley, has been made into a movie. "Anatomy of a Scene" is the documentary of the making of the movie.
-AllMovie.com lets you search films by theme, tone, style, and more.
-Upload a scanned image of a font and What the Font? will tell you which font it is. (via burnt toast)
-Collage and Assemblage by James Michael Starr (via iconomy)
-the Astor Cube prank (via presurfer)
-strange candies.
Photographs by Manabu Yamanaka, via kottke
daily life-and-death-211 Euphemisms for Death and Dying
-pictures of animals mating (via geisha asobi). (My suggestions for clicking: 1 2 3 4 5)
-Women Can Ovulate More Than Once a Month
-Angelina Jolie on sex and self-mutilation
-mefi post on x-rays and art (also see my April 26 post on x-ray art)
Itchy robot recently linked to an amazing site: the Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair's write-up. Among the science fair winners:
"My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey."Life Doesn't Come From Non-Life"
Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes."Women Were Designed For Homemaking"
Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences shows that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker.
 | critic's Hulk comparison | paper |
 | a computer-generated Gumby on steroids | The New York Times |
 | "…I heard the computer-generated title character described as 'Shrek on steroids,' and I only wish he were so lifelike." | slate |
 | evokes a seething Harryhausen gargantua, or Kong himself | The Village Voice |
 | "Toss a plastic toy figure across your yard, and you'll have a good approximation of what this film's $140 million-plus budget bought its producers." | San Jose Mercury News |
 | King Kong on nuclear bananas/a bionic beach ball | The Washington Post |
 | no more believable than the animated Br'er Rabbit walking alongside Uncle Remus in Disney's 1946 "Song of the South" | Los Angeles Times |
 | right between the creepy snowman from "Jack Frost" and that strange camel-kangaroo hybrid from last summer who claimed to be Scooby-Doo/ a hairy and very angry avocado | Sun Publications (Chicago, IL) |
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
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)
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
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
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
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.
daily my-stomach-hurts-You cruel, cruel pescetarians. Fish do feel pain.
-before and after makeup; where can I find that makeup? (via geisha asobi log)
-Giornale Nuovo on collages
-Joyce and jogging
-phancy.com's got Bjork mp3s
-Joss Whedon's ten favorite Buffy episodes
-Freak Watchers Textbook
-Combat stress. Combat stress.
-Museum of The History of Psychological Instrumentation (via speckled paint)
-foods that affect your bowels
Sometime in the history of advertisement, a think tank decided that we like eating anthropomorphized food. Instead of gaining our empathy, smiling food with human eyes would make us hungry; instead of making eating feel like murder, eating would be playful interaction with a willing cast of characters.
The candy aisle in convenience stores looks like a class portrait, rows of grinning faces; the think tank must have been right, or else anthropomorphic food wouldn’t still be so popular. But projecting human qualities on our pets saves 
them from being carved up for dinner, and—for me—singing and dancing food either elicits empathy, or repulsion for the food that would sell out its brothers and sisters.
Since the logic of advertisements is most obvious when it fails, I’ve always felt I’m in a good position to understand the logic of anthropomorphized food. But the logic seems over-determined, and I’ve had a hard time coming up with one coherent theory. Here are my ideas, most of them based on conversations with my boyfriend:
1. By anthropomorphizing food, we’re ascribing food will power. Food wants to be eaten, as much as, or more than, we want to eat it. So, anthropomorphized food might be assuaging two different kinds of guilt—targeting our culture of obesity, and telling us to feel less guilty for over-eating, or addressing our unconscious guilt over eating animals by making us, on some level, believe all food is happily devoured.
2. By making food human, we ignore its production. Fruit with eyes and legs isn’t picked off the tree by migrant workers; instead, it jumps off the tree, into a cart, and hitchhikes to the nearest market. Anthropomorphic food is an obvious 
instance of what Marx called commodity fetishism, in which "the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer."
3. Or, the logic of consumption is best expressed by a much older logic—that of cannibalism. The Aborigines ate their enemies to incorporate their powers, and omophagia, one form of cannibalism, was practiced to preserve the life force of ancestors. Consumption is more appealing if it seems like acquisition rather than the erasing or disappearance of goods. (The cannibalism idea was much better articulated by my boyfriend.)
4. Maybe humanized food has to do with the pleasures of narrative. If the items on our plate are a cast of characters, we can turn eating into a story. Narrative psychologists say humans understand themselves by making stories -- that stories are central to thinking and feeling. If so, we’re apt to find stories, and hence characters, everywhere.
5. Children have a special need for stories, and cartoons cater to it by turning all kinds of objects and animals into characters. Anthropomorphic food, always cartoonish, offers us a pleasant opportunity for regression, for associating food with the comforts of Saturday-morning childhood.
6. Or, maybe, we’re all just repressed hunters. We give cats plastic mice, and advertisers give us talking food. Opening a bag of M & Ms is our substitute for tossing spears at antelopes.
***If you have thoughts or links to anthropomorphized food products, or know of any relevent advertisements or ad campaigns, please leave a comment. Here's a list of the campaigns and products I know of that star human-like food, but I know there's a lot more out there:
-Prego Pasta Bake Sauce
-Pizza Hut, Gary The Garlic
-Foster Farms Chickens
-M & Ms
-Runts
-Gobstoppers
-Frosted Mini-Wheats
-French's Mustard "funny food face"
-Frulatté
-Snapple
-Sour Patch Kids
-Kool-Aid
-California Raisins
-Pillsbury Doughboy
-Lemonheads
-McDonalds, Mayor McCheese and The McNuggets
-StarKist, Charlie the Tuna
-Slim Jims ("Eat Me!")
-Planters, Mr.Peanut
-those ads with the hot dog running for its life (name? brand?)
-older campaigns
One of the net's great untapped porn sources: before and after pics.
-before and after liposuction
-before and after buttocks implants
-before and after breast reductions
-before and after breast lifts
-before and after breast augmentations
-before and after breast asymmetry correction
-before and after penis enlargement
-before and after pec implants
-before and after face lifts
-before and after nose jobs
-before and after chin implants
-before and after botox
also:
-a good nose job
-facial feminization surgery
-Rhinoplasty (nose job) tutorial
xray art by Bert Myers
xray art by Steven Myers
xray art by Sheila Pinkel
xray art by George Green
xray art by Daniel Buxton
xray art by Hugh Turvey
xray art by Wolfgang Reichmann
History of the xray.
Buy xray art here.
Related entries: XXX-rays, April 5, 2003; Floral Radiography, May 21, 2002.
Body Art
-To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, turn your DNA into art.
-Roxanne Wolanczyk's organ surveillance art.
-Yves Klein's Untitled Anthropometry.
Embody Art
-Body Art.
-Classic Mayan Beauty Tips.
-Bob Carey's self-portraits.
-"Artists, designers and people who have been to art school are a staggering five times more likely to suffer body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a mental illness characterised by a distorted body image and a preoccupation with slight or imagined defects in physical appearance than other mentally ill patients." [more>]
-Things Andrew Had No Intention of Telling Hannah (via kottke)
-Re-Code: create barcodes that make store purchases cheaper (via mefi)
-Getting the Picture: the Art of the Illustrated Letter
-man attacks string sculpture with scissors
-Joelogon's Foolproof Guide to Making Any Woman Your Platonic Friend (via the presurfer)
-and not on that note, Girls kissing! (via SixDifferentWays)
-photography of Geisha and Maiko girls (via speckled paint)
-"By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. " (via the right side of my brain)
-carnivorous plant photography (via Dublog)
-gallery of demons (via bifurcated rivets)
-Yahoo! News' most emailed photos
-attempts at explaining common English expressions (via the presurfer)
-Rumsfeld's poetry:
The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.
—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing
Back at home, I have two wonderful dogs, Tillie and Sammy. So, when I read about Dog Island, I immediately thought of them: would they be happy there?
Over 2,500 dogs are already enjoying a better life at Dog Island. Separated from the anxieties of urban life, dogs on Dog Island live a natural, healthy and happy life.
They live with almost limitless space, and tens of thousands of rabbits, rodents and other natural prey. Surrounded by thousands of other dogs, this is the only place for them to be truly social and create healthy families.
My dog is very high strung and often gets into fights with other dogs. I can control this now, but what happens when fights break out on the island?
Fights break out occassionally, but this is not a real issue, because eventually, the dogs learn to get along. Every now and then some dogs gang up and kill and then eat another dog, but this is just natural, and it's okay for it to happen now and then, but normally this is not the case.
-teenage angst fest: it's a contest to find the most humiliating piece of teenage writing out there
-ny city culture, up in smoke
-apathetic online journal generator: "I just don't have much to say recently. I've just been letting everything wash over me these days. Today was a complete loss, not that it matters. That's how it is. I feel like a fog, but it's not important. I've just been sitting around not getting anything done, but shrug."
-every insult there is, is here.
-how to stimulate death
-am i annoying or not . com
-the stella awards, for "the most frivolous [and] successful lawsuits" that [could only] happen in the US.
-most coveted book covers
-That last link was found at kottke, which has a lot of other good links this week, including one to a free literary map of NYC
Everyday, since I was 12 or 13, I've seen 1:11 and 11:11 on my alarm or computer clock. I never see 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, etc. Only 1:11 or 11:11.
A few years ago, my friend Michael said 1:11 and 11:11 are numbers you make wishes on, and so, two to four times a day, I make the same wish (always the same wish).
I wouldn't mention this -- I store away my obsession with, and exposure to, 11:11 under "personal superstitions." But today, cleaning out my favorites folder, I found a site that I swear I've never seen before.
Some of you have recognized this symbol as something of significance, yet have been unaware of its true meaning. With the advent of digital clocks many years ago, the significance of 11:11 began to make itself felt, often appearing on clocks at times of accelerated awareness. For those of you who have know that 11:11 was something special, we now need you to come forth into positions of leadership. For you are important parts of the key.
It's pretty ridiculous. But I decided to do some web research, and see what else people have to say about 11:11.
NVisible, some kind of religous cult, has a 11:11 forum for people to share their experience of seeing 11:11. Also, their website informs us, "The Doorway of the 11:11 opened on January 11, 1992"--which is creepy, because that's around when I started seeing 11:11--"and is now scheduled to close on November 11, 2011." They also have a page of intense New Age-y articles on the subject.
And, this is the most amazing page I found. Absolutely crazy:
After the mid 1980s adjudication of the Lucifer Rebellion, and with the beginning of the Correcting Time, the 1,111 Loyal Secondary Midwayers have found more purpose in life.Under the direction of our Planetary Prince, Machiventa Melchizedek, answering to Christ Michael's call and His mandates for this planet, the Midwayers, and many other Celestial Personalities are ready to assist us in our spiritual, social and technological, educational, ecological and economical progress.
The Midwayers 11:11 time prompts are now being received world wide -- directed at anyone potential mortal assistant who might dare to form an association with these brilliantly minded, and greatly learned creatures who exist "just outside our facet of time".
"The Search for 11:11" details my association of decades with these valiant and trustworthy creatures. Its 260 pages relate to my discovering who they are, and the many ways in which a platoon of Midwayers and a lone mortal can make themselves useful and for the benefit of many.
So far, the best page on 11:11 is this kid's ; it has a decidedly non-religous bent.
other 11:11 sitings:
11:11 merchandise
the 11:11 cult
111 and other triple numbers explained
Portal 11:11 (in Spanish)
11:11 googlism
scary 11:11 story (not real, right?)
quartet 11:11
random 11:11 google hit
11:11 magically (?) appears in a photo
Fox's Married by America may be the last step in the evolution of reality TV. The show embodies every permutation of the reality genre: contestants vie for an eligible bachelor, become couples and live in a Big Brother-style house, and, each week, try not to get voted off. Next week, the couples who survived Meet the Parents. And, finally, in a month: Who Wants to Marry a Stranger.
Not all of the elements mesh well. What couple gets ousted each week is decided by a triumvirate of harpy shrinks, and the ousting has a forced and tired solemnity: the camera pans slo-mo as the woman removes her ring and hands it to the man, who then stands and brings it to the host. The shrinks nod with fake compassion. And the set, a living room, makes the ring-exchange more casual than the show's music intends.
But, still: I think Married by America is one of the most riveting hours on TV. Its subject is love, the bliss of new relationships, but its tone is stark and ominous. It tracks the couples into their bedrooms, where women plead for a kiss from their cold partners, where men admit they're not yet in love, where new partners have their first, clumsy sex. It's emotional and sad and over-orchestrated and sort of brilliant.
17th-century poet John Dryden [wrote]: "Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally'd."Just how they are allied, of course, is a matter of intense interest, to the mentally ill, their families and their doctors. An entire smorgasbord of relevant topics, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, theatre, musical and dance pieces -- many of them performed by troupes whose members are themselves victims of mental illness -- is now underway (until March 30) at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.
Produced by the Workman Theatre Project and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, it's being billed as the world's largest festival of Madness and Arts. [more>]
Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I'm one of those people. Here's why:
1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.
2. Mental illness can inhibit creation, but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.
3. Madness may be an interpretation of stimuli that fails to rely on conventional contexts for understanding stimuli. Art may be, in part, the process of making things new. Then, both rely on disassociating from convention-- but one is a partial disassociation, still able to reference itself in terms of convention, and the other is a disassociation so complete, reference is impossible.
related entry: And, still not Van Gogh, May 25, 2002.
I'm getting a lot of google hits on the topic, so here's a DIRECT LINK TO MY BHHS/TOXIC POST. I'll keep this link at the top of my page for at least another week.
Other articles: 1 2 3 4
I went to BHHS (class of '97), and welcome feedback from fellow classmates.
In the meantime, here's an exchange between me and my friend Sam. I think he makes some good points.
To Sam, Feb.13
Neurotoxins: reminds me of White Noise, in which the airborn toxic event had little emotional effect on me. I feel a sense of unreality, or, more precisely: we expect a causal relationship between events and feelings. Neurotoxic exposure should trigger hypochondria, anxiety, fear of death, etc. But, in my case, it triggers nothing; it's like a failed chemistry experiment. Maybe my h.s.'s toxicity is too abstract, or maybe I get through every day using defense mechanisms, denial, and I see no reason not to enlarge denial's scope.
To Nathalie, Feb. 15
. . .I totally understand your blank reaction; the whole thing's so abstract that it's impossible to assimilate.
I think the real danger, though, isn't hypochondria, isn't in the existence
or absence of some kind of empirically verifiable mental symptom. Rather,
the danger is taking this on this as some kind of symbol, as a narrative
signpost, rather than just some bizarre thing that happened. High school is
such a potent time, so to find out it was literally contaminated -- it
sounds like a literary device. I mean, the airborne toxic event in White
Noise was itself a metaphor, so perhaps that's part of why you would
associate the two.
To Sam, Feb. 17
Tonight, watching Buffy after reading your letter, I realized that the Hellmouth is located right under Sunnydale High. I guess the narrative of "toxic/evil high school" is already in place; but I think, if I do adopt the narrative, the elements will be correspondent, not causal.
pentimento (pen-tuh-MEN-toh) noun, plural pentimenti. A painting or drawing that has been painted over and shows through it.
gormless (GORM-lis) adj., also gaumless. Dull or stupid.
ugsome (UG-suhm) adj. Dreadful, loathsome.
indite (in-DYT) verb tr. To write or to compose.
sobriquet (SOO-bri-kay) noun, also soubriquet. A fancy nickname or a humorous name.
Tartarean (tahr-TAR-ee-uhn) adj. Hellish; internal.
Canossa (kuh-NOS-uh, Italian: kah-NOS-sah) noun. A place of humiliation or penance. Mostly used in the form "go to Canossa": to humble or humiliate oneself, to eat humble pie.
suppurate (SUHP-yuh-rayt) verb intr. To produce or secrete pus.
-vespa calendar girls (via coudal partners)
-sunset from space (from bifurcated rivets)
-erotic origami (via 6differentways)
-not making it in the music business
-tiny chocolate handbags
-even tinier TVs (also see my past entry: a doll's house)
-cigarette pack art (may have already posted this; can't remember)
-"the slick, generic in-flight-style info-graphics
1. make it hard to believe this is real
2. make the whole thing scarier" (via incuBLOGula)
. . . to land here:
barefeet and capri pants
sexy sauces or bedrooms
hilton sisters eats food
vaginal lips guillotine
airport travelers named everything from wet people to being eaten alive by insects
martin luther devil get into my anus
picture of a harpy fantasy erotica
the unpleasentness of life
nathalie chicha october 31
britney derrida
lucky strike cigarettes and semiotics
jonathan safran foer sucks
-What's your Value Package? It's the Hartman Value Profile, and it's "a standardized test, just eighteen questions long, that not only can tell you things about yourself that will haunt you for weeks, [but] can diagnose how good you are. . . and how evil." (quoted from This American Life on PBS, test and quote found on six different ways.)
-"Most people have heard of the Rorschach test (pronounced "raw-shock"), but few have ever seen a real Rorschach inkblot. The blots are kept secret. When you see an inkblot in a popular article on the test, it's a fake: it's an inkblot, but not one of the inkblots. There are only ten Rorschach inkblots." But now you can see the real, authentic blots, along with information on how the test is scored.
Pablo Picasso's Self-Portrait (1906), left, and Henri Matisse's Self-Portrait (1906)
In art, genius can be a hindrance. Not to popularity or success, but to empathy, and the rough edges that humanize. I mention this because the "Matisse Picasso" exhibit has come to MOMA, and "this is a tendentious, eye-educating, sometimes revelatory and usefully debatable event, whose parade of pairings and groupings of pictures by the two painters is a spectacle of institutional muscle only the Modern could manage."
My preference for Matisse may not say so much about my aesthetic taste as my (American? European? Romantic?) distrust of genius. Genius, as epitomized by Picasso, is prolific and flexible; challenge, not emotion, is the inspiration. I prefer to imagine art as an emotionally charged event, a document of personal engagement. An odd impression of genius: the genius is nothing more than his production, and his production is impersonal, mechanical. Where did this association of genius=robot come from? But there it is, deep and settled.
Often, I don't blog interesting links, but blog what links people are linking to. Today, instead, I'll delve into my massive, minutely organized "favorites" and pull out some un-timely links. This hour: articles.
Dangerous Muse: Caroline Blackwood
Admittedly, contemporaries often saw Caroline Blackwood as some sort of sorceress. Her father, the fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a changeling, according to his mother, who believed that fairies had stolen her real child at birth. Lord Dufferin grew up to marry Maureen Guinness, one of the three Golden Guinness Girls, each heir to a brewing fortune. ''The sisters are all witches,'' wrote John Huston, who stayed with one of them in Ireland on his way to shoot ''The African Queen,'' ''lovely ones to be sure, but witches nonetheless.'' They had pale gold hair, pale blue eyes and transparent skin. Huston believed they could change men into swine, and back again, without anybody realizing.
The consequences of having X.P. can be both startling and lethal. Exposure to even a few minutes of sunlight can cause agonizing blisters. Deadly skin cancers develop with frightening ease: X.P. sufferers are 1,000 times as likely to develop skin cancers as other people. Forced to shun the sun, these ''children of the moon'' live topsy-turvy lives utterly quarantined from what others take for granted: daylight.
This observation might suggest that the attainment of felicity requires one to be not merely alone but elevated, in which case the happiest of hermits were the stylites, so named because they perched on pillars in the wilderness (Greek: stylos, a pillar). The most celebrated of the stylites was Simeon, a fifth-century saint who lived for 36 years in a hut on top of a pillar 60 feet high, emerging from time to time to harangue the crowds and entertain them by performing up to a thousand consecutive genuflections, very likely still a record.
In Kurzweil's inventive hands, Alexander's neurosis takes odd forms, among them a fascination with hidden compartments in furniture and an obsession with puns and etymologies. But the strangest is that he records everything that happens to him in a small book attached by a rope to his waist. This ''girdle book'' is an alphabetized record of sounds, smells and events he has experienced; ''E,'' for instance (for Enclosure), is where his feelings go. ''Librarians often don't do feelings all that well,'' he notes.
interactive:
Storm Front | Reactive Object| Mycelium Model| Node Study | Pixie Particle System | Maeda Keyboard
just pretty:
Binary Network | Torrus Export | Seeds | Mandlebrot Trema Generator
—from levitated.net/daily (found at right side of my brain)
-Match the couples: it's like "memory" meets Love Connection. (via the presurfer)
-somebody's small thought re:religion
-a little upsetting. Forniphilia: the art of human furniture.
-disco squirrels, take me to an altered state
-the visual and tactile aspects of the written word
-Ladies of the Bedchamber: the role of the royal mistress
-geekchic.com (i'll explore it later)
-daze reader has some interesting sex links this week
-"Revolutionary molecules turn bland food bodacious"
-what celebrity parts surgeons are sculpting
-Can you tell ABBA and gothic poetry apart?
-phrenology links
instant kama sutra. click top-right to create your own positions.
Entries from David Markson's This is Not a Novel:
Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.
I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakesperare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Says Darwin's Autobiography.Thomas Hardy wrote a carefully sanitized third-person biography of himself and left it behind for his widow to pretend she was the author of.
Anthony Trollope wrote seven pages a day, seven days a week.
And would actually begin a new book if he came to the end of one before his day's quota had been met.Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires.
Augustus John's habit of patting every passing London youngster on the head:
In case it is one of mine.Only one person, his secretary, attended Liebnitz's funeral.
The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you.
Said Marcus Aurelius.
Encyclopedia of the Marvelous,the Monstrous, and the Grotesque.
Some entries:
Acephalous. 'Having no part of the body specially organized as a head' (OED).
Demonic. Grotesque as "the demonic made trivial". See Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose.
Imagination and pregnant women. See James Blondel's The Power of the Mother's Imagination over the Foetus (London 1729): "the mere longing for Muscles is sufficient to transubstantiate the true and original Head of the Child into a Shell-Fish". See also Pietro Pomponazzi, "If a pregnant woman greatly desires a chickpea, she will deliver a child bearing the image of a chickpea. That is how Ciciero's family got its name" (De naturalium effcetum admiradorum causis [Basel, 1556].
Marriage. "Deformed men, as a compensation for their handicap, will be favored for all positions where celibacy is a suitable qualification [...] Every boy who has some bodily defect will be excluded from the legitimate classes, and different classes of cripples will be constituted, in accordance with their degree of infirmity. (1) Those disabled will have a choice of marriage or the ecclesiastical state, secular or regular, as with the following class. (2) The lame without any other deformity will form a second class who can be given young girls as wives if they are otherwise vigorous and healthy. (3) The bandy-legged will qualify only for widows. (4) Congenital hunchbacks and deformed men will only obtain women past forty. (5) The deaf and one-eyed will have as wives only rejected girls who have not been chosen at the marriage festivals. (6) The blind will have the ugliest girls who have not been able to find husbands. Selection among the malformed will have as many divisions as among the robust. Priority will be given to those uniting the least deformity with the greatest merit; the rest will be ranked in accordance with the merit which offsets their deformities, until that subject is reached who has the least merit and the greatest defomity. Finally, it should be observed that those whose illness is communicable, such as the scrofulous, the scorbutic, the herpetic, the syphilitic, and so on, will not be able to marry,or will be permitted to marry only women past fifty, who might be willing to expose themselves to the disease. This will apply also to those attacked by epilepsy, consumption, and so on." From Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne's L'andrographe (1781), Articles 25 and 28.
Rectum. There are records of cases of birth from the rectum! See Gould and Pyle pp. 120-21.
Okay, sure, Britney's slutty and Christina's dirrrty. I don't really mind, except that their sexiness implies we're stupid.
What do I mean? Their images are blatantly sexy, but, at the same time, contain details that we're meant to respond to without registering, details that assume an invisible semiotics.
For example, take these two pics, one of Brit-Brit during her Super Bowl 2001 Pepsi commercial, and the other, Xtina, on her second album cover.
Brit-Brit wears red suspenders that emanate from her crotch, like a giant thong looped over her shoulders, or the head of an arrow pointing down. Xtina wears some kind of pubic hair mesh over the jeans' crotch, and a long string directs attention to — hey, that's where the penis enters! As explicit signs of availability, or sex appeal, these details are over-the-top funny. But they're not supposed to be funny; we're supposed to not notice them, say "Easy boy" and smile like Bob Dole.
Fatal Facts, illustrated
[found at incoming signals]
I've been browsing the web for new sites, putting off writing a new draft of ch. 2, and came across a rant at tremble.com about Landmark Forums.
Catharine, if you're reading this, add a comment. We shared a dorm room with a Landmark Forum groupie, and it was scary; I've blocked most of it out. The roommate, the first semester of our cohabitation, was somehwhat self-centered (1. eating my candy when I wasn't looking, 2. exclaiming, when my grandmother died, "I should call my Nana! I love talking to her. I'll do that right now.", and 3. after my boyfriend told me he didn't love me and I cried on her bed, singing into the phone, to her boyfriend, "I love you, you love me, we're a happy family."), and I hoped her involvement with this thing called Landmark Forums would teach self-censorship. Instead, it taught a belief in the self's "possibility." Everyone in her Landmark Forums group got to choose which "possibility" they wanted to actualize; some chose love, others better social skills; my roommate chose greatness. She called her mentor daily, and always began the conversation with, "I am my possibility, and my possibility is greatness." Over the course of that semester, she tried to recruit me and Catharine to the Forum, and, for the program, regularly interviewed us about her best qualities (I said, "You're very confident (You eat my candy, bitch).").
So, I do not endorse the Forum, especially the Forum for Young People (Ages 8-12) and the Wisdom Courses.
Some background: Landmark Forums, an example of LGAT (Large Group Awareness Training), bought its "technology" from est, founded by John Paul Rosenberg, aka Werner Erhard. According to skepdic.com,"…when Erhard set up est he considered making it a church, as Hubbard had done with dianetics and the Church of Scientology. But Erhard decided to incorporate as an educational firm for profit in a broad market."
Est's headlining idea was the "assumption of responsibility"; this site quotes a est trainer trying to convince his audience to assume responsibility for getting mugged, or a wife getting cancer:
""How the hell am I responsible for my wife's getting cancer?"
"You're responsible for creating the experience of your wife's manifesting behavior which you choose to call, by agreement with others, a disease called cancer."
More info:
negative reviews of the Forum
positive reviews of the Forum
Another article today about surgical tools left inside patients' bodies. What's my fascination? Aesthetically, there's the idea of imbedded collage. But more than that, these surgical left-overs encourage my understanding of the body: that our bodies are foreign to us, and our body's vulnerability is us.
From the article:
The researchers checked insurance records from about 800,000 operations in Massachusetts for 16 years ending in 2001. They counted 61 forgotten pieces of surgical equipment in 54 patients. From that, they calculated a national estimate of 1,500 cases yearly. A total of $3 million was paid out in the Massachusetts cases, mostly in settlements.
Previous postings on the subject:
-Botched, December 17
-It's What Inside That Counts, May 15
I try to avoid television; for a lonely person, it's addictive. But I let myself watch High School Reunion b/c I can pretend it's a short course in American anthropology. Here's what I've learned.
One. The media combines and recombines archetypes. Two points on this: We already have emotional associations with each archetype, and so media acts on our emotions and engages us. And, nowhere in our culture, is the explicit emplyment of archetypes so acceptable as it is when portraying high schoolers. Look at the WB's website for High School Reunion: each reunion-goer gets a catchy label: "The Popular Girl," "The Artist," "The Bully," "The Nerd," "The Jock," "The Loner."
Two. In talking about our own high school experiences, we're encouraged to appeal to these archetypes and their familiar narratives. Shows like High School Reunion encourage transference: projecting ourselves and others from our high school experience onto other portrayals of the high school experience.
Three. We want want want to know, what is popularity? In American capatalism, the idea of popularity encompasses more than just the in-group: it encompasses market demand. So, how does popularity function?
Four. Let's take the case of two classmates on the show, Natasha and Holly.
  |   |
|---|---|
| Natasha | Holly |
| "The Popular Girl" | "The Shy Girl" |
The guys on the show lust after Natasha and call her a beauty. Everyone ignores Holly, a playboy model and lawyer. Because attraction is social and competitive: the more people that like one girl, the more we're likely to like her. She's been deemed a suitable object of our desire. And obtaining her has social value.
Five. This brings me to my last point. We (the non-popular?) don't like believing popularity is so circular, that you're either in the loop (have people liking you, and getting more) or not (having none, getting none). High school stories are often revenge fantasies, in which new criteria is introduced for judging value. "The nerd," Ben R., is now handsome and rich, which is probably why he's been picked for the show. And Holly might have posed for Playboy as a way to overcome "The Shy Girl" label. We watch High School Reunion to see if outsiders can ever break into the loop, if they can assume new archetypes or redefine old ones (and if we can do the same).
For my own reference:
spatchcock (SPACH-kok) verb tr. 1. To insert or interpose something in a forced or awkward manner. 2. To split open a fowl for grilling.
fantod (FAN-tod) noun 1. A state of nervous anxiety, irritability, the willies, the fidgets. 2. A fit or emotional outburst.
noetic (no-ET-ik) adjective. Of or relating to the mind or intellect.
dysphemism (DIS-fuh-miz-em) noun. The substitution of a harsher, deprecating or offensive term in place of a relatively neutral term.
pathetic fallacy (puh-THET-ik FAL-uh-see) noun. The attribution of human traits to nature or inanimate objects.
holophrastic (hol-uh-FRAS-tik) adjective 1. Expressing a sentence in one word, for example, "Go." 2. Expressing complex ideas in a single word, as in some Eskimo languages. Also polysynthetic.
1. Which blogging tool should I use? I only have experience with Blogger and Movable Type. Blogger is easy; MT is hard (to install, not to use). Blogger has no features; MT can do anything (if you're not afraid to code). Click the link to compare most of the popular blogging tools.
2. Get a domain name, get web hosting. I recommend AM Hosting and domain tech. (Note: web hosting comes free with Blogger, but, like most free space on the web, has ugly banner ads.)
2. Learn some HTML. Go here for a lesson, here for a cheatsheet.
3. Design your blog. Or, copy and paste:
Using Blogger: Find designs here.
Using any blog tool: Find designs here.
If you're designing your blog yourself, learn basic design principles and keep the color codes handy. With MT, you'll want to learn some CSS.
4. Spruce up your weblog. With 3D animated GIFs, javascript, and fun codes. If you're running Mac OS X and iTunes, check out this nifty blog addition.
5. Final touches. Validate your HTML. Then submit your site to search engines and email friends and family. Ta-da!
This has to be some of the best writing on the web: The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum.
Start here, in the snapshots section. Or here, where she responds to readers' accusations. And then go back here.
Reading the site, I'm inspired to add my own snapshots, taken in the dank hipster hell of Brown's Modern Culture and Media Dept.:
—the wannabe hipster: a female who strives for hipster-asexuality, but whose narcissism undermines the front. Short butch haircut, tight jeans, sneakers, and a breast-bonding sleeveless vest. Archives her ex-boyfriends according to musical taste. Majors in critical theory, but unfortunately donates valley-speak to the cause. Rejected from the hipsters circle because she 1.has been spotted in flared jeans, 2. wears neutral makeup, 3. hits on them, effectively undermining their sense of male-transcendence.
—the rich hipster: lives with his rich hipster friends, with whom he collaborates on Nico-inspired electronica. At their weekend parties, they one by one take intimidated girls to their bedrooms and play the music (on their computers, not the stereo). While the girl's absentmindedly listening, struggling to say something good, the boy kisses the girl, and when she kisses back, pushes her away. "This isn't right. We don't know eachother yet." He returns to the computer and 'stumbles' onto a web photo album of his family cabin in Maine. "Things are , like, so real when you're there, I can't explain", and explains for fifty minutes. He sits in the computer chair, smoking Camel Lights, and the girl--not realizing she can look elsewhere without his noticing--squints at the photos from her perch on the bed.
•new spike jonze-directed bjork video
•elevator museum
•keith haring coloring book
•all about facial hair
•new fashion dont's
•presidential pets
•age simulation
•urban exploration on the web
Winona was my childhood hero. She touched on all of my obsessions. When I was only wearing black, I watched Beetlejuice, and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. When I was wanting to be a vampire, Winona played Barm Stoker's Dracula's love interest. When I realized my purest love was reserved for freaks, she played Edward Scissorhand's girlfriend. And Heathers taught me what true love was: having a boyfriend who wants to kill your classmates. Then: Mermaids and Little Women assured me my introversion could be a star-turn. Winona was my alter ego, my image made glamorous and paired with the best leading men.
But like Allisa Quart writes in the Sept./Oct. issue of Film Comment (quoted on Rick McGinnis' Movie Blog), "the past few years have shown that we overestimated her depth." Winona, whose favorite novel is "Catcher in the Rye," Winona, who wore drag king pinstripe suits in junior high, is no longer my Winona. The new, or perhaps always-was, Winona answers her door barefoot, red toenail polish on each toe (see W's interview w/ her); reveals that she's really a blonde; shoplifts $80 pairs of cashmere socks; and shows up to court in "twin sets and prim 30s stenographer outfits." She stars in Autumn in New York and Mr. Deeds. And so, my childhood hero is dead. 
I'm trying to find a passage, from either a journal or short story--can't remember which--about my junior year dorm room. I can't seem to find it, but to convince myself this isn't a huge waste of time, I'll use my readings to update my weblog.
So, excerpts from my journals:
4.11.01:
hysterical with self consciousness
that we understand our partners through past partners. idenitities melt into a pool of adults. I am no one special. My breasts, understood through other breasts, my sighs, other sighs, my hair, other hair.
I don’t hide life’s production. I put my lipstick on in front of the boys I date. They call that domesticity.
5.4.01
Sixteen in Paris, with a fan to sing me asleep
or nineteen in Berkeley, what I learned in Paris to keep me company at night.
What I expect from others is just more of myself.
Learning to bathe in myself, eat myself, smoke myself, and sleep under my own arm.
Learning to read myself, and breathe myself, and drink saliva on long walks.
Replacing television with hot feet or the pulse in my neck, and phone conversations with dirty socks and my compact mirror.
This is a new way of breathing, where my breath never escapes.
Slowly, I realize summer is a race of sitting still. How much endurance can concentration mimic?
7.9.01
And then my work: reading and writing. I’m full of ambitious plans. Drafting titles for a short story collection. Brainstorming thesis proposals. Matching short stories to appropriate literary journals. I sit down everyday and try to work on my short story, but the physical gets in the way: what is that headache? Why still exhausted? I can’t concentrate; I can’t get into this. I can fight myself, but I’m not producing good work in this state.
11.3.01
what it is to be somebody else. of course I’m not an I. I’m an accumulation of things. I feel no I, except in the worst moments of dissasociation, when all there is is the awareness of being dissassociated from the self: then, the mind’s activity is so limited, only one thing really, that an “I’ can come into existence; my “I’ is that one thing, that one awareness. But normally, too many things are happening for the simplicity of an “I.” But I sometimes long for it, the worst nostalgia. And I think I can find “I’ in breathing; my breaths start deep and then turn painfully shallow. That is me. My mother, I imagine her breaths move horizantally, out, slow, in, fast; and that is the essence of her drama, her critical sense of others, her life’s disquiet.
12.17.01
Sadness is the idea of eternal loneliness.
I’m thinking of the movie--with the tsunami and tea leoni. not armageddon, the other one. (deep impact.) tea and her father are on the beach, waiting to die, together, finally, after the parents’ divorce, drifting apart, etc., etc. Dying together: nice. But what if, when the wave hits, it snaps their hands apart, and crunches Tea Leoni’s spine, but, for two or three long seconds, she remains conscious, thinking: “Shit, this fucking hurts. This isn’t a good way to go.” And she thinks her thought is funny, but she has no one to share it with, and so, right as she dies, she comprehends true sadness.
1.11.02
The fight is between the present tense, activity, and the future tense, stasis.
Belonging to the future: crushes, shopping (books, clothes), bookmarking websites, making lists, applications, most daydreams, ambitions, goals. An image of myself that I don’t have to work to achieve.
Belonging to the present: I don’t know. I’d say cleaning, but cleaning is for the future self to live in, and when I clean, I think of others. I’ll stop there. I’m too tired to think right.
Another birthday almost over. Woo. Hoo. Ha. Ugh.
Let's look at binaries for a moment. Or, something like a binary, but binary is such a great word.
Birthdays exist in a, ahem, interprative framework. Right right? Cards, gifts, letters, meant to mean something—celebration, validation, blah blah blah. Ahem. I'm stoned. Anyway—I'm supposed to interpret them as such. But then, lack of cards, gifts, e-mails is unfortunately assigned the opposite interpretation. If it weren't, then the first (positive) interpretation of cards blah blah would fail to function.
That's what's wrong with birthdays. My theory for the day.
For those who wrote, called, sent their love—it meant a lot to me, and it made me happy, and this birthday wasn't so bad after all.
•The Great Archives Determine Your Vampire Name. My results:
The Great Archives determine you to have gone by the identity:
Lirit Arnauld
Known in some parts of the world as:
Minerva of Raven's Wings
The Great Archives Record:
A dark one, ancient, who flies free above all others.
