Category: uncategorized

~ Mark

Hacking the Used Car Purchase « carsabi.

Hack #3: Buy Luxury Later. If you’re broke like us but still really like performance and leather interiors, consider getting a luxury car that’s 5-6 years old. More luxury owners want newer models than older ones leading to a pretty steep depreciation for the first few years; the average new E320 loses about $12k per year no matter the mileage (112 datapoints). Compare this to the depreciation curve for a Camry: the car holds value like people *want* to drive it into the ground. Crazy! (1,523 datapoints).

~ Mark

thesyllabi:

(Image via Prospect Magazine)

The Joy of Tennis

With the Australian Open coming to a record-breaking, excessively long climax this weekend, what better to fill the tennis void than some great writing on the subject?

  • The correct way to begin a tour of tennis writing is with David Foster Wallace. In his 1996 essay for Esquire, he uses a profile of Michael Joyce as a cover for an obsessive and effortlessly insightful consideration of tennis. Quite likely the best tennis nonfiction written to date. He revisits tennis ten years later for the New York Times and lets his inner fanboy loose with an equally epic and insightful profile of Roger Federer.
  • Three years later, Cynthia Gorney gives us a fantastic, sprawling profile of Rafael Nadal.
  • Rounding out the profiles of today’s top tennis players is S.L. Price with a profile of Novak Djokovic and Sarah Corbett on Venus Williams.
  • For profiles of yesterday’s best, Julian Rubenstein’s award-winning profile of John McEnroe and Frank Deford’s 1978 profile of Jimmy Connors are required reading.
  • One of the great pleasures of tennis is the personalities and the rivalries, and as Gerald Marzorati pointed out last year, “rivalries in tennis are like no others in sports.” In recent years, we’ve seen the same three — four or five if you’re generous — players constantly jockeying for the top spots in the rankings, always climaxing in thrilling, suspenseful, and often record-breaking semi-final and final matches in the year’s tournaments. “To be a great tennis player is to need a rival.”
  • Although you wouldn’t call them rivals, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut found themselves locked in a seemingly neverending first round match-up at last year’s Wimbledon. Most tennis matches end long before the 11 hours this one took to end, usually because a player loses concentration, but neither Mahut or Isner blinked for 3 days of play, and Ed Caesar explains why in his GQ piece following the match.
  • In “The most beautful game,” Geoff Dyer considers the beauty of tennis. It’s not enough that the players are simply good at tennis — everything you see on Centre Court at Wimbledon can be “replicated by an average player in a park.” The draw for the viewing public, he thinks, is wrapped up in the mechanics of the game: the most effective way to play is gracefully, as best exempified by Federer’s memorable single-handed backhand.

Read these and then read John McPhee’s Levels of the Game (part II) [$], and you’ll have just about covered all of the best writing on tennis.

Amy Rebecca Klein: The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write About Lana Del Rey

~ Mark

When the world decided that Lana totally bombed on Saturday Night Life, we could see Lana telling us nothing other than what we already tell ourselves about women in music. We already assume that the feminine is inauthentic. So, I mean, why does everyone care so much if she has had plastic surgery, or if her management company created an image for her? What’s the big deal with being deceived? Some of our most respected musical icons (Bob Dylan, anyone?) used music to continually invent and re-invent possible selves.

See also Nitsuh Abebe:

Making pop music— more than almost any other art— sits right at the intersection between being yourself and finding something better than yourself to be. This, in the end, is what we’re looking for: Someone who can devise some fantastically compelling version of herself to act out, while still seeming as if she’s… being herself. Musicians are expected to write a great part and convincingly act the role at the same time. And even after that, we’re not really judging them on how compelling the identity they’re offering us is— we judge them based on which types of identities we personally need or aspire to at the moment. There is no identity politics quite as nuanced or complicated as people arguing about music.

Amy Rebecca Klein: The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write About Lana Del Rey

~ Mark

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch.

Brian Lam.
~ Mark

Are There Fundamental Laws of Cooking? | Wired.

They found that [the food pairing hypothesis] was true, at least when it came to Western cooking. North American and Western European cuisines, which share many of the same ingredients, both adhere to the food pairing hypothesis: Foods in the same recipe often have the same underlying molecular components. However, once we stray from these cuisines, the food pairing hypothesis breaks down. East Asian and Southern European recipes use ingredients that do not overlap in their flavor compounds, implying that these styles of cooking are in fact quantitatively distinct.

~ Mark

I’m almost annoyed when something I’ve been interested in becomes valuable. Then it becomes trouble. I have to take care of it.

William Gibson.
~ Mark

I was always somebody. I was famous at the Chevron. I’ve had some trials that would have made the average motherfucker jump out a window a long time ago, but if you wake up one morning and say, ‘I can’t do it no more,’ then it’s all over. That’s why I wake up every morning and say, let’s do this shit. Let’s get it.

Young Jeezy on staying optimistic. (via howtotalktogirlsatparties). And don’t forget:

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.

~ Mark

I have saved the world so many times in video games that lately I have felt a kind of resentful Republicanism creep into my game-playing mind: Can’t these fucking people take care of themselves?

Tom Bissell in Extra Lives, which you should read.

The Crowd

~ Mark

The Crowd. It took a while for the talkies to catch up with the camerawork in this 1928 film. Nicely done. And as I find with many silent films, it was much funnier than I expected. The work scenes anticipate Il Posto (one of my favorite movies) in some ways. Technically, it’s supposed to be one of the pinnacles of silent film. One early long zoom moment reminded me of Hitchcock’s famous zoom-in in Notorious, 20 years later. Themes include changing social mores in relationships, expectations about masculinity, the arrival of modernity, self-realization, practicality. Probably hard to find on DVD, I lucked out with a live screening and piano accompaniment. Looking forward to the rest of Emory Film Department’s spring 2012 series.

~ Mark

I think that part of my experience of growing up in the American South in the early ‘60’s was one of living in a place unevenly established in the present. You could look out one window and see the 20th century, then turn and look out another window and see the 19th.

William Gibson.

An interview with William Gibson | The Verge

~ Mark

I think it’s an expression of our old hunter-gatherer module. I think that’s the module that lights up for everybody on eBay, regardless of what they’re looking for. It’s the flea-market gene. It’s hunting a bargain, sometimes. But when I went through my “watch process,” at the end of it I realized it was about information, about trying to master a body of fairly esoteric knowledge, regardless of what it was about. For somebody else it could have been hockey statistics. It wasn’t really collecting; it was about getting the knowledge.

An interview with William Gibson | The Verge