Category: uncategorized

Martha Marcy May Marlene

~ Mark

Martha Marcy May Marlene. Wrenching. You just want to know, is she going to be okay? I’m not sure of other movies that deal with the dazed, overwhelmed confusion of self like this one. I also realized a while after movie started how refreshing it is to see a rural setting on film again. So many of our movies are urbanized, you don’t see a lot of love for those greens and browns. Elizabeth Olsen is impressive. John Hawkes, equally awesome (see: Winter’s Bone). This is absolutely worth seeing, but just know you probably won’t come out happy and refreshed.

~ Mark

Silva rerum – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Silva Rerum (diary) of Krassowscy family from Ziemia Drohicka in Podlasie, Poland.

In historical Poland [silva rerum] was written by members of the Polish nobility as a diary or memoir for the entire family, recording family traditions, among other matters; they were not intended for a wider audience of printing (although there were a few exceptions); some were also lent to friends of the family, who were allowed to add their comments to them. It was added to by many generations, and contained various information: diary-type entires on current events, memoirs, letters, political speeches, copies of legal documents, gossips, jokes and anecdotes, financial documents, economic information (price of grain, etc.), philosophical musings, poems, genealogical trees, advice (agricultural, medical, moral) for the descendants and others – the wealth of information in silva is staggering, they contain anything that their authors wished to record for future generations).

This blew my mind a little bit. A private book for multiple generations! Fascinating.

Hypomnema – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

~ Mark

…a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.

The context was Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, but it sounds like a good description of Tumblr, Twitter, and a number of wonderful things on the internet. I first came across hypomnemata (sleep + thread…) in The Present Alone is Our Happiness (recommended in Ryan Holiday’s super awesome reading list email archive).

Reading the Wikipedia entry, it made me realize what I often (mostly?) use this Tumblr for: to make notes to myself, shaping and re-shaping my perspective. Many of my favorite posts (tagged, e.g., work, opinions, empathy, arguments, happiness, death, travel, thinking, philosophy, stoicism, psychology) function as a sort of admonishment that I really do re-read every now and then. It’s an attempt to refresh and re-calibrate, internalize. This journaling/commonplacing thing isn’t new, but there’s something satisfying about knowing that one strand of the tradition goes back to an old Greek word. See also commentarii, commonplace, memoranda.

Hypomnema – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

~ Mark

When we say, “What do you do?” we really mean what do you learn? Because that’s what makes a person interesting – what they are learning. No one wants to answer the question what do you do if they have a job where they are not learning. That’s how you know it’s the learning that matters.

Penelope Trunk.
~ Mark

Never be ashamed of how you live or where you from.
You stack a mill’, ***s will see how far you come.

T.I. – Be Better Than Me. My favorite song on Trap Musik besides Look What I Got. Here’s T.I. on the proper ingredients for success:

Stay down, stay on your grind and yo digits’ll come.
Bottom line? You gotta shine, no matter what you become.
These streets is 40 percent of yo’ mind and 5 percent muscle,
10 struggle, 10 time, and 35 percent hustle.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

my mortifying month

~ Mark

agrammar:

There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.

~ Mark

The apparent practical success of capitalism is matched only by the failure of its public relations.

John Kay. (via)

WhoSampled.com

~ Mark

We’re building the ultimate
database of sampled music, remixes and cover songs. Dig deeper into music by discovering direct links among over 116,000 songs and 44,000 artists, from Hip-Hop and R&B via Electronic Music through to Rock, Pop, Funk, Soul, Jazz and beyond.

I wish I’d known about this site a long, long time ago.

WhoSampled.com

Interview with Andrew Potter: Travel and the Search for Authenticity – World Hum

~ Mark

I think we need to keep in mind that the backpackers you’re talking about, who go to new areas and beat new paths by living close to the people and close to the earth and so on, they are in a sense—and this isn’t my line, this is from an old book I came across—the shock troops of the mass tourism industry. They’re the ones who go into a place that has no infrastructure for tourism and basically create the market for other people to come in behind them. And that may or may not be a bad thing. But we need to be aware that that’s actually what’s going on.

Interview with Andrew Potter: Travel and the Search for Authenticity – World Hum