2. Rediscovering Sleater-Kinney. Such a freaking great band. “Dig Me Out” is like aural caffeine, with a shot of pissed off.
3. Finally learning the lyrics to AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” the perfect metal song. This tune is so good, I think someone should do an album of covers in various styles: a country “Back in Black,” a power ballad “Back in Black,” a chanteuse-y “Back in Black,” a disco “Back in Black,” a rap “Back in Black.” I would love this.
4. Initiate, the recent (more or less) instrumental album by the guitarist Nels Cline (and his band “the Singers”), lately of Wilco. I suppose it’s mostly accurate to call the album “free jazz,” but much of it is close to the wide-open rock sound of Wilco, too.
The girls love to do mad-lib style stories that I start by writing a few incomplete sentences and they finish by filling in my blank spots. Julia’s tend to be almost reportorially matter of fact, but Vivi’s are often pretty Dada. A case in point:
Translation (with her additions in quotes):
One ‘morning,’ I went to ‘school,’ where I ‘played.’ I saw ‘Coffee Daddy’ there. They were very ‘gummy.’ I ‘just played’ them. After a while, I ‘got cold.’ It was ‘hot.’ The end.
I was really, really taken by “Prairie Cairn” sculpture at Grinnell’s natural reserve. It’s a gorgeous piece of art, for one thing, but it’s also perfectly suited to its setting – even though there’s nothing shaped quite like it in the reserve itself. Grinnell’s art gallery has a nice page on the sculpture, and Goldsworthy has a big write-up in Wikipedia. A couple more of my pictures of the cairn:
Vivi’s first picture of people in motion: the bent legs mean that we (from left: me, Julia, Shannon, Genevieve) are running. No word on why they have hooves.
Best reportage James Fallows, “Living With a Computer,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1982
This article from 28 years ago was meant as a kind of primer on acquiring – assembling, really – a personal computer avant la lettre, but serves now as an astonishing window into what we know now to have been the earliest dawn of the Internet revolution. Fallows is as amazingly right about many things as he is understandably wrong about some other things.
Best video
Sean Stiegemeier, “Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010”
Tursiops truncatus—a slate-gray, slick-skinned net thief, which coastal fishermen of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic sometimes called the “herring hog” in disgust—would, by the 1970s, leap in the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius, enjoying an improbable secular canonization as the superintelligent, ultrapeaceful, erotically uninhibited totem of the counterculture. And to this day, for many, the bottlenose—mainstay of aquatic ecotourism, beloved water-park performer, smiling incarnation of soulful holism—represents a cetacean version of our better selves.
Best Music Ametsub, “The Nothings of the North” – hypnotic electronic music that sounds like what would happen if Brad Mehldau got ahold of stray tracks from Radiohead’s Kid A sessions
God, but I love The Wire, the HBO series that aired from 2002 to 2008. I’m just over halfway through the series, and while I’ve enjoyed every episode, I enjoyed each season even more. The plotting, the characters, the dialogue – it’s great art, not least for its incredible realism. David Simon, Ed Burns, and the other writers deserve immense credit for creating such excellent work.
A show this layered with detail and nuance must have a few little glitches, though, right?I’m sure Baltimoreans would recognize many of them, while cops, lawyers, and criminals would recognize others. Me, I’m just a grantwriter, so I can only find a factual problem every now and then – and then only pretty nerdy ones.
Toward the end of season 3, for instance, the drug lord Stringer Bell, trying to legitimize himself, is told to seek federal grants for his expanding real-estate activities. The next day, he has the grant applications pretty much ready to go. As his political patron would say, “Haaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiillllllllll no!”
Then, at the beginning of season 4, an academic from a Baltimore university enlists a former cop to find 18-21 year old black men who could participate in the academic’s anti-crime project, which (we’re told) has a half-million dollar grant behind it. These subjects prove too hard to handle, though, so the academic adjusts on the fly and, later the same day, selects a new population, 12-14 year old kids. Again, no. Where’s the institutional review board approval he’d need to change his research project so drastically? Where are the approvals from his grants office and funder to do so?
I’ve never been prouder of Julia than when she showed me this excellent drawing of a ninja (standing next to a cave and a rope). Why is my girly-girl kindergartner drawing pictures of Japanese assassins? Because of Magic Tree House #5, of course. Or maybe because my own years-long fascination with ninjas (ca. ages 8-12) was somehow coded into my genes and passed on to her. Either way, it’s awesome.
After dinner, during the customary time of silliness, Genevieve started singing a song to Julia. Every line started, “I love you more than…” She ended various lines with about a bazillion different things, including the following:
purple
pink
pizza
cake
candy
Sabine (our cat, whom she loves)
Nonny (her grandma)
Boppy (her grandpa)
Daddy
Mama
anything
This song was followed up by an extended, heartfelt hug between the two sisters.
Best (worst) news story: Eileen Biernat, “Mary Stauffer stalked by former math student Ming Shiue” (City Pages [Minneapolis]) – the astounding true-crime story of a 1980 kidnapping case in the Twin Cities, now back in the news because the kidnapper – who was also a murderer and rapist – is up for parole.
Whenever Julia’s and Genevieve’s maternal grandparents visit, the girls delight in playing “restaurant” for Boppa, who always sleeps late and thus misses the big breakfast rush at seven. Playing restaurant – a.k.a. “waitress” – involves surveying the contents of the pantry and fridge, donning their adorable little kids’ aprons (and for Vivi, her hat), and most importantly writing up menus for Boppa to consult. Here are the menus they wrote on Saturday morning. (Vivi’s is first.) Next time they do this, I’m going to get them to put some prices on.
The writer William Gibson is the guy who invented the term “cyberspace” in his 1984 book Neuromancer and who, more recently, brilliantly summarized the postmodern condition by saying, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” After writing a lot of pretty good science fiction, he’s recently started writing novels set in a world that is “more or less the same one we live in now.”
These present-day books – Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) – deal with technology, art and music, post-9/11 security-statism, marketing, and a lot of other familiar stuff. His new novel, Zero History, is due out this fall, and Gibson is taking advantage of the lull before the book’s publication to answer readers’ questions on his blog. A lot of what he says is pretty damn good:
Artistic Influences
Influence is more like weather, when you’ve been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can’t say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it’s present.
Brands and Brand Names
It’s one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren’t really that many of those. It’s not about clothes, though, or branding; it’s about code, subtext.
Subject Matter
There isn’t anything that I think I know that would, in itself, warrant the writing of a novel.
The Writing Process
The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work.
Research
I don’t regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing.
How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet…
Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.
To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names.
B. Book Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell, a powerbroker in Henry VIII’s England. This novel has it all: an incredible (and historically-grounded, if not “true”) plot, fascinating characters, ridiculously good writing at every level from the sentence to the chapter, and the an ending that both closed the book and didn’t. Incredible stuff.
2. Things I Watched A. Movie The September Issue, the 2009 documentary about the production of Vogue‘s mammoth and influential September issue. I expected to like it okay, but I found it engrossing. Watching the magazine’s staff put together the magazine was interesting enough, but the politics at Vogue specifically and in fashion generally were gripping. Anna Wintour makes Thomas Cromwell look like a doofus.
C. Sports Video The first 15 seconds are literally jaw-dropping. (We could have ski flying right here in the Upper Midwest, if Copper Peak near Ironwood, Michigan, were refurbished.)
3. Things I Saw A. Stupidest Picture
“No Excetions,” in the “Teabonics” photoset on Flickr, a collection of misspelling or just dumb signs from Tea Party rallies.
B. Sports Picture
From Boston.com‘s “Big Picture” set on the 2010 Winter Paralympics:
“Haitao Du #5 of China competes in the men’s standing 20km free cross-country skiing race during Day 4 of the Winter Paralympics on March 15, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)”
Haitao Du #5 of China (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
