What’s in a Surname?. (via) “A new view of the United States based on the distribution of common last names shows centuries of history and echoes some of America’s great immigration sagas.” (Map: Mina Liu; Oliver Uberti, NGM Staff. Source: James Cheshire, Paul Longley, and Pablo Mateos, University College London.)
There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.
Fight Club. This was kind of boring. (Zodiac is by far the best of the three David Fincher films I’ve seen. Seven was worthwhile, but hasn’t aged well. I wonder where The Social Network will rank when I see it.)
I can walk to #4 and drive to #7 in like 8 minutes. We’ve also got the #12 retailer. I love Atlanta.
You should just sit down, there should be a bottomless thing of chips and really good salsa and then your meal starts. This whole thing about sitting down and ordering chips and salsa and paying $5.00 for it is insane.
As there is no appetite, sexual or otherwise, without excitement, the sane person has to be unusually mindful of all the ways she has of attacking, trivializing, ignoring, ironizing and generally spoiling her own excitement. So she will prize charm in herself and others because charm gives excitement a chance; and she will be suspicious of her own shyness–and more sympathetically suspicious of other people’s–because it too smugly keeps the excited self at bay.
A Cadger’s Map of a Begging District. Frontispiece to The Slang Dictionary; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and Fast Expression of High and Low Society. (via)
Spiritual experiences are easy to put into words, as long as you stick to cheesy, clichéd ones.
We recognize our sexual desire by the fact that once again–once again, after childhood–we feel our safety and our excitement are in conflict with each other. When we feel we are taking a risk, or are at risk, there is always an object of desire in the vicinity.
Flights of Fancy: How birds (and bird-watchers) compute the behavior of a flock on the wing – American Scientist. Image from the STARFLAG project, INFM-CNR. I am reminded of Kevin Huizenga’s starlings once again.
Since money always promises something other than itself–it is only, as we say, worth what it can buy–it seems to protect us, as promises do, from the fear of there being nothing and no one that we want.
Rope. This was pretty good, but not quite high enough suspense levels with all the dinnertime distractions. There are some great side characters, though. I like the novelty of having the movie run in real-time with one camera tracking around the room. It’s based on a play of the same name, which leads to a big downside for me: walking standing talking walking standing talking walking standing talking. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never gotten into theater that much. Only so many things you can do when you’re trapped in a room, and this is no Rear Window. My updated Hitchcock rankings:
James Stewart has a pretty good track record for me. I’ll need to see some more of his movies. And I think I’ve had my fill of Hitchcock for a while, unless there’s something really awesome I still haven’t seen…?
The authors of picture books are often relatively “agenda-less,” since most people don’t read the text, the selling point is the pictures, and the book is so expensive that the publisher doesn’t want to rule out the broadest possible audience.
Katja Grace gathers her opinions in one spot. I’m repeatedly surprised and delighted by how valuable I find some bloggers’ hunches, musings, and asides, e.g. Justin Wehr’s squibs, Ben Casnocha’s assorted musings, Colin Marshall’s heuristics.
You may read this and think: High maintenance! Picky! Temperamental! But I hope you’ll view it like this: Pastry is logical and consistent and wonderfully fun.
Baking for Beginners: An Introduction to Temperature – The Atlantic
The American. It seems that critics are a bit mixed, but I’m with Ebert: I loved this one. It got billed as a semi-action-thriller. Yeah, there’s some killin’, but this is really more of a slow-burning mood piece like Le Samouraï. Or, say, a Sergio Leone western – there’s even a scene with the Once Upon a Time in the West McBain massacre playing in the background. This is not (just) about assassins doing jobs, but about an existential crisis–I detect some parallels in In Bruges, and in film noir like Blast of Silence and my beloved Out of the Past. Except this is set in sunny Italy. Great photography, absolute minimal soundtrack.
Some obvious detractions are the heavy-handed dialogue with the priest and also the–yep–hooker with a heart of gold. But still. Master craftsmanship from Anton Corbijn. I’ll probably watch it again soon. Coincidentally, the only movie I watched twice last year was Clooney’s Michael Clayton. The guy’s got great taste.
Stavin’ Chain playing guitar and singing the ballad “Batson,” Lafayette, Louisiana. 1934. Photo by Alan Lomax. (via)
The less frequently we use something, the stronger the argument for valuing access over ownership.
This interview is packed with wonderful tidbits. James Hetfield on day jobs and the early tour routine:
We worked at day jobs. After that, we’d throw parties, take the furniture out of the house and smash the joint. We smashed dressing rooms just because you were supposed to. Then you’d get the bill and go, “Whoa! I didn’t know Pete Townshend paid for his lamp!” Come back off the tour and you hadn’t made any money. You bought furniture for a bunch of promoters.
Hetfield on growing up differently from Lars Ulrich:
I could afford maybe one record a week, and he would come back from the store with 20. He bought Styx and REO Speedwagon, bands he’d heard of in Denmark. I would go, “What the fuck? Why did you buy Styx?“
Kirk Hammett on Hetfield’s Nothing Else Matters:
All I could think of at the time was, James wrote a fucking love song to his girlfriend? That’s just weird.
Hetfield on alcohol abuse and parenthood:
You can’t be hung over when you got kids, man. “Dad, get the fuck off the couch!” Well, they don’t say that—yet.
Ulrich on Matt Damon:
PLAYBOY: Your wife, Skylar, used to date Matt Damon, and he made her the model for the female lead in Good Will Hunting. A few years ago, Matt described you as “a fucking rock star who’s got $80 million and his own jet—a bad rock star, too.”
ULRICH: He said that before we met. And he’s apologized about a hundred times. The first five times I saw him, he would spend 10 minutes apologizing profusely. He really is a sweetheart.
Ulrich on collecting art:
Hanging out backstage with Kid Rock is an amazing turn-on, no less so than sitting and staring at my Dubuffet for an hour with a fucking gin and tonic.
On the first tour through America, my spandex—I fucking hate saying, “my spandex”. It’s a pretty evil phrase.—They were wet from the night before, and I was drying them by the heater. A big hole melted right in the crotch. It was like, “They’re like pantyhose.” I just opted to keep my jeans on, and that was the best thing that ever happened.
Mark Larson 
