Dust-to-Digital: “Goodbye” to Obscurity – PURGE. Good interview with the Dust-to-Digital folks.
Neil Young was on Weekend Edition saying that Bob Dylan gave him a copy [of Goodbye, Babylon]. That actually freaked me out more than the Grammys. I almost fell on the floor.
The Virgin Suicides. I liked this one. Quite a debut. Themes include boys obsessing over girls on their way to womanhood, the fascination with death, the penumbra of loss that affects a community, etc. I like the tie-in with the dying elms, leaving mute, immovable stumps in the yards. And while I often cringe at moments when films use popular song, I thought the inclusions of Heart’s Magic Man and Crazy On You were inspired. If there’s any complaint, some parts were too overt. You don’t need a narrator intoning, “And so we started to learn about their lives, coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced” when that’s clearly suggested on the screen. Small quibble though. Worth watching. I wonder how the book compares.
The Great Gatsby – for NES. I fully support this. (via)
“Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members?”
The word refers to the “systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language” where “a word with a phonestheme in it has other material in it that is not itself a morpheme.”
For example, the English phonestheme “gl-” occurs in a large number of words relating to light or vision, like “glitter”, “glisten”, “glow”, “gleam”, “glare”, “glint”, and so on
I love this stuff. Here’s a list of English phonesthemes.
My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.
Certainly, I understood why students who had worked so hard and done so well would want to go to schools like Harvard and Princeton, but many places seem to be prestigious simply because student fads and crazes have made them hard to get into. Brazenly capitalizing on the whims and passions of teenagers seems a questionable practice for institutions dedicated, in part, to the well-being of young people.
Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor – Magazine – The Atlantic
Pablo Picasso with Brigitte Bardot in his studio in Vallauris during the 1956 International Cannes Film Festival. Photo by Jerome Brierre.
Self-control is really just the art of making the future bigger.
I think painters and sculptors react to music, more naively, in a sense, because their politics are a lot different from our politics. It’s very hard for one composer to listen to another composer without somehow bringing his own mind-set to the music he’s listening to. It’s not that it’s impossible. And that’s only natural, whereas someone in another art field is going to listen to it very naively, in a sense (you hope), and that’s a worthwhile, unbiased opinion. Ultimately, it’s a naive opinion that rules the roost.
“After practicing with his iPod—and feeling pretty good, actually—novice Christopher R. Graham discovers the extreme fear of conducting a professional orchestra.” (via)
When the Crescendo Is the Least of Your Worries by Christopher R. Graham – The Morning News
Getting a job decreases the amount of work it takes to live. That’s why jobs are good.
I Am Love. Not sold on this one. Just like the film deals with genteel restraint and animal passions, there’s a strange balance in the film making where some things are left unsaid, only hinted at–and some parts of the film are maddeningly overt or silly. Good enough to finish, but…
Thunderball opening titles with theme song by Johnny Cash. Woah. ( via)
Mark Larson 