An audio slideshow about competing in the Barkley Marathon. Over the 22 years of the 100-mile race, only 7 have finished. It’s fondly called “the race that eats its young.” [via trails and tribulations]
Category: audio
“David Rakoff, who swore off TV in college, returns to it in dramatic fashion: he attempts to watch the same amount of television as the average American—29 hours in one week.“
Audio and video from the New York Public Library is now on iTunes.
You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, an online essay + soundtrack, “was born out of fraughtful observations of the state of our States and the repetitive, empty monotony of consumer culture and electronic music.” [via waxy]
Koyaanisqatsi
I watched Koyaanisqatsi this weekend. It’s got a lot of cool footage and overall it was worth watching. But part of the problem with the message (that we live a “crazy life,” a “life out of balance”) is that it’s so dependent on the soundtrack.
A lot of it made me think of those time-lapse videos I saw on kids TV when I was little. Seeing a factory in fast motion was cool, not cause for worry. I was glad I found this Koyaanisqatsi: Redux which matches a portion of the film to a goofy, upbeat soundtrack, and contrasts it with a more dramatic string arrangement in the middle (musical transitions are around the 2-minute and 4-minute marks). I like parts of Philip Glass‘ original soundtrack for the film, and I think it’s kind of spooky-cool how the soundtrack can direct your response to what you’re seeing. But it’s too much of an emotional shortcut.
There are a lot of excerpts from the film on YouTube, like the original trailer, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing in St. Louis, scenes from New York, and the famous closing scene that reprises the opening.
A recording of Tony Danza reading “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” a funny story from George Saunders‘ collection in Pastoralia. The book was quite good, but hearing a story like this makes it even better. [thanks, austin]
On NPR, a conversation about Holden Caulfield, protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. The literary remembrance has some interesting segues into how you read the book differently as you grow older, the beginnings of a teenage culture in the ’50s, and whether or not you can imagine Holden as an adult.
A short NPR story on the names on paper bags by Barbara Klein: “One of the names, ‘Alan Rumbo,’ intrigues her. She traces the bag back to its maker, and actually gets to talk to the line worker at the paper bag plant, Rumbo himself, who explains how the name on the millions of bags he makes propelled him to hero status with his kids.”
The letters of Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester
Emory University held a Flannery O’Connor celebration this week. The highlight was the first public exhibition of the nearly 300 letters between Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester, which had been under seal for the past 20 years. Brenda Bynum gave a dramatic reading of O’Connor’s letters. I was late for it, unfortunately, but what I saw was fantastic. In addition, lots of good material from her life is on display at Woodruff Library. Letters, notes, photographs, and things like her complaints about the cover chosen for A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I love it when schools do things well.
Bonus: Georgia Public Broadcasting had a show about O’Connor in August. And earlier this year NPR talked with Steve Enniss, the director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, about the O’Connor–Hester relationship.
BBC has a set of recordings of Ansel Adams talking about his work.
There is a ton of recordings from the 2007 Singularity Summit, featuring all the speakers and panels. [via justin, of course]
I was doing a little reading on William Carlos Williams and stumbled on the PennSound archives. They feature a page full of recordings from Williams’ poetry readings, as well as many other writers. I don’t claim to recognize more than a handful of the names, but they’ve got volume. At the very least, their manifesto is pretty great.
I would very much like to own a Monome 256. It looks like just the kind of wonderful toy I need* these days. They mentioned the beautiful woodwork was from Atlanta—I wonder if that’s Matt Soorikian‘s craftmanship?
*i.e., want
Something to listen to this weekend: This American Life, “Blame It on Art”. “The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure.”
Listen also: every other episode. I’m not sure how they keep the show so consistently good.
A photo collection of handmade, miniaturized synthesizers from yesteryear. Those are some incredibly detailed models.
Mises University is happening this week at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Tune in to the webcasts for some of the best economics learnin’ you’ll find anywhere.
I’m pretty much fascinated with the Whitney Music Box, which explores some of the ideas in John Whitney’s 1959 book Digital Harmony. I like the microtonal variation, and the sine wave harmonics are cool because harmonics are inherently cool. Jim Bumgardner wrote more about this project and some of the mathematics of the patterns in his blog.
Mark Larson 