The Searchers – Each Time from Take Me for What I’m Worth. I love those big luscious jangly echoing guitars. Great cover of some wonderful songwriting. It’s a crime that this isn’t as well-known as Jackie DeShannon’s other hits like When You Walk in the Room or Put a Little Love in Your Heart.
The Fugitive. This has held up pretty well. The opening half-hour is A+, then holds a steady grade B through to the end. Caught it on TV and got my first exposure to Story Notes, to mixed results. “He was not actually missing an arm.”
The people who move to the suburbs aren’t nearly as stupid or careless or brainwashed as the urbanites seem to think. They know they’re going to get a lawn, a garage, and a backyard. They know they will be miles from a store or cafe, and that they’ll have to drive everywhere. Most people move to the suburbs with eyes wide open, fully aware of the tradeoffs they are making. They are not looking for some pastoral idyll, but for more privacy, space, quiet, and parking.
T.I. – Drug Related from The Leak.
Materialistic can’t substitute for your happiness.
Life’s about how you feel about you, and what you do.
When you wake up in the morning, in the mirror, you seeing who?
Making things is a better way to spend your time than staring at the wall contemplating what little time you’ve got left.
Last Notes: The wild, sublime music that composers write on their deathbeds. – Slate Magazine
It is ridiculous not to escape from one’s own vices, which is possible, while trying to escape the vices of others, which is impossible.
Getting up and going for a run everyday doesn’t need to be “justified” a few months later by competing to finish an arbitrary number of miles in a certain amount of time against a bunch of other unhappy losers. No, you run because keeping a healthy body and clear mind is part of your job as a human being. Because its a commitment you made to yourself that you’re obligated to keep no matter how tired, how busy or how burn out you feel. In other words, it’s practice—proof of your ability—in always having a little bit extra in you.
It seems fair to ask when a game’s expansiveness becomes an affable form of indentured servitude.
I don’t give a fuck if you’re doin’ petty shit or big shit. […] Get your motherfuckin’ money and make other people’s lives better.
Tent that looks like a sandwich, among numerous other designs. We’ve crossed a line somewhere.
All things are short-lived–this is their common lot–but you pursue likes and dislikes as if all was fixed for eternity. In a little while you too will close your eyes, and soon there will be others mourning the man who buries you.
Isn’t a private library simply a universal legacy pretending to be an individual one?
Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.
This is too cool. Imagine a daily blackout poem delivered to your LittlePrinter. Hmmm….
Three days ago, a friend politely listened to me lament the demise of fax machines and more generally, a sort of personal printing network. I wish we’d gotten to the point where someone could send an SMS picture to a fax back home, and I’d have a nice surprise waiting in the evening. Or an automated daily calendar, with maps and directions printed of where you need to drive that day. Or auto-printed journaling based on notes/pictures/voice memos you put into your phone that day. Or print up your own morning paper. We’re basically there. We have arrived. Oh, and I wonder how you could combine it with Twine…? Things are getting really interesting, folks!
The body, too, should stay firmly composed, and not fling itself about either in motion or at rest. Just as the mind displays qualities in the face, keeping it intelligent and attractive, something similar should be required of the whole body. But all this should be secured without making an obvious point of it.
My Pacific Crest Trail Moleskine Journals | The Hike Guy. Hiking journal porn. 850 pages from the PCT. What a treasure he’s made for himself.
There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.
See also Brian Eno on surrender.
Home Movies: “Tower Heist,” “Melancholia,” and the battle over video on demand – The New Yorker
Atlanta, Then and Now (1871 to 2011) – The Atlantic Cities. Awesome set of comparisons. Same spot, different day. This lot has been forlorn for a century:
Albert Ruger’s 1871 map of Atlanta is so good. See also his map of Chicago, 1868.
Richard Florida follows up on The Geography of Stuck that I tumbled a few days ago, talking about religion, poverty, human capital, diversity, health, and most interesting to me, the Big Five personality traits:
States with higher levels of agreeable, extroverted and neurotic personality types are much more likely to have a higher percentage of residents born in that state (with correlations of .46, .49 and .4 respectively). Conversely, the percentage of residents born in a state is negatively associated with openness-to-experience personality types (-.32).
I should add: considering all of the above, it seems statistically unlikely that I will remain in Atlanta.
No more roundabout discussion of what makes a good man. Be one!
Badlands. My second Malick. Like in Days of Heaven, which I really liked, we have another young female narrator, but this one, though older, seems more innocent and caught up in fairy tale language. Both of these characters are caught up in their own narrative, their own little world. Inspired by real people. Martin Sheen is really, really good here. Lots of eye candy and some great moments in the soundtrack. I’ve got to see The Thin Red Line soon.
Mark Larson 