Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have. The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we get into the geographic discoveries of the Powell expedition, the explosion of Los Angeles and California farming during the Mulholland era, the massive federal projects of the Depression and World War decades, and the competition between two federal agencies that LOVE to build: the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Where great rivers ran we now have dams and reservoirs---around 75,000. Not to mention canals and levees and aqueducts. They're a mixed blessing at best. Aside from the environmental impact, the amount of political maneuvering, folly, thuggery, and outright deceit that has gone into some of these projects is just incredible. Very few of the projects would have been possible without Federal involvement (read: subsidized by Eastern tax dollars). I don't even consider myself "environmentalist" but still found it all pretty outrageous. Great book.

Maybe a bit of an alpha-male slant here.

• Ernest Hemingway
• Donald Rumsfeld "I like to use a chainsaw and cut wood and chop wood."
• Thomas Jefferson
• Winston Churchill
• Thomas Wolfe
• Vladimir Nabokov
• John Dos Passos
• John Adams
• Douglas MacArthur
• Virginia Woolf
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• Benjamin Franklin
• Napoleon Bonaparte
• William Gladstone

The seven deadly words of book reviewing. There are over 200 comments now that add to the list, most of them very good.

Probably a parallel here with the birth of Athena: [update: photo of a really awesome woodcut removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst]

From L'Idee by Frans Masereel.

Science confirms the runner's high, which used to be just folk wisdom. It's connected not only with better mood, but also with tolerance for pain.

Really enjoyed the Frontline feature Bush's War. Well worth a few hours.

An interview with Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, which I need to remember to buy:

Today there are great drawing tools in a lot of software packages, and many business people, bless their hearts, are getting better at using them. The problem is the pictures look perfect when they’re done. And by virtue of looking finished, they actually turn off people’s desire to constructively comment on them.

[via austin kleon]

As I continue the Frans Masereel Appreciation Week Festival, here's an animated film adaptation of L'Idee. Berthold Bartosch had Frans Masereel's help on the film for some of the two years he spent working on it. The end result is almost a half-hour long, and though it starts a bit slowly, there are some legitimately cool effects considering the crude tools available in 1930. A couple other bonus points: the movie was scored by Arthur Honegger (who's best known for Pacific 231), and the soundtrack features an ondes martenot---possibly the first-ever use of an electronic instrument in film.

According to that first link, Bright Lights After Dark, Masereel's work in Die Stadt (my brief review of Die Stadt) was also a big influence on Walter Ruttmann's hour-long silent film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Gro?üstadt. More about Die Sinfonie at Wikipedia and shorter clips available on YouTube.

Some behind-the-scenes video journalism from North Korea.

One of a few linocuts of Confederate & Union officers.

Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes both peaceful and violent. They are almost all dense with the detail and distractions that cities offer. You can see the full set of images from Die Stadt at Graphic Witness. These are some of the woodcuts that I particularly enjoyed... [update: images removed due to copyright complaint from from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity---good luck finding it]

If you look at this image in the original size, you can see the faces of the men walking about. With just a few cuts here and there, he managed to make them unique with mustaches, beards, long noses, weak chins. Most of them are in profile, which probably helps.

I like the perspective in this one, monstrous city receding but growing taller.

Different architecture for each walk-up. Sunlight filtering through the trees.

This one is probably my favorite overall. A slight curve in the edges gives this incredible softness to her skin and clothing. Really amazing.

There Will Be Vader made my morning today.

A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here's my favorite sequence from Die Sonne: [update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity---you'll have to trust me that it's worth your time]

Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. This is the first of four Masereel books that I recently picked up at the Emory library. I'm sure I'll enjoy the others over the next week or two.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, an article about the value of working with your hands and the increasing assembly-line nature of knowledge work:

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of worker---clerks---who replace the professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students ought to receive...

The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

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]

The Stylophone is a pocket-sized organ you play with a stylus. Here's a medley of Survivor, Final Countdown, and some other 80s hits. I love how the stylophonist leans back around the 45-second mark to kick out the full rock climax effect.

In the wake of our tornados last weekend, a fellow Atlantan has invented the tornado drinking game, which I'm assuming you could apply to your own regional weather concerns. "When you hear a TV reporter or anchor say 'war zone,' 'epicenter,' 'path of destruction' or 'ground zero'..."

Atlanta Ballet announced the 2008-2009 season [pdf], which is looking pretty damn good. If only they still had the orchestra. Dracula was pretty cool when I saw it a couple years ago. They do this great opening in pitch black, then the ghoulish red letters of the title project on the rippling stage curtains before they open on a dark, foggy, spiderwebby set. The dancing wasn't as exciting, but it's a cool spectacle. It's a Valentine's production this year.

I love the music for Swan Lake, which opens the season, and for The Firebird, which will be coupled with some kind of world premiere. Don Quixote is new to me as a ballet. Never heard the score.

I stumbled on these tabla lessons by Venkat last night and I am sorely tempted to buy a set. So cool.

I like this idea of ambient Skype, just keeping the line open.