Sasha Frere-Jones discusses how indie rock lost its soul.

A very cool article on how the National Parks Service is making more realistic maps. [via anil dash]

This Sarajevo Siege Map literally took my breath. Spectacular.

Photos of people and their breakfast. Some of them are just perfect. [via kottke]

An interview with Alex Ross:

I thought I had no choice but to write about the 20th century; it's such an extraordinary body of work that is relatively little known, especially in terms of your average educated person who can tell a Picasso from a Jackson Pollack and has read widely in contemporary literature and knows the great books of the 20th century, but will freeze up when you mention Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The thing is, they know the music, they know the sound of the music—they've been exposed to it in one form or another on film soundtracks, in concerts, or on CDs—but they don't necessarily know where this music came from, and how it all fits together, and how one composer affects another or reacts to another.

Seattle is an open and friendly place, but it's apparently hard to form genuine relationships. The so-called Seattle Freeze is "the flip side of Seattle Nice... The dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: Polite but distant."

Music visualization designs made from spiral spectrograms.

Albert Jay Nock, Anarchist's Progress:

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit — murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion, and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare.

A couple artists are selling paintings of things they want. The price of the painting is the same as the item itself. The Wii painting cost $270.92.

A timeline of things that have gone or will go extinct from 1950-2050. [via kottke]

A little slow getting to this one, but it was worth the wait. The Best American Comics 2006. There's a lot to cover in the collection, so I'll just highlight the authors and stories I enjoyed the most. Joel Priddy, "The Amazing Life of Onion Jack": a short bio of an aging superhero who really wanted to be a chef. I liked the clean stick figure styling in this one. Charming humor and great timing.

Lilli Carr?©, "Adventures of Paul Bunyan & His Ox, Babe": the classic folk hero, re-imagined. Paul is a sensitive, Proust-reading guy with real-world difficulties. His well-paced dialogue with Babe is reinforced by this really clear, powerful sense of setting.

Ben Katchor, "Goner Pillow Company": about pillows designed for sitting at windows. I like the basic concept here, briefly fantasizing about a world where people look out of windows instead of into our electronic boxes.

Jonathan Bennett, "Dance with the Ventures": early morning, a guy goes scavenging for old records in the trash. I love the dramatic inner dialogue. You can instantly relate to it.

John Porcellino, "Chemical Plant/ Another World": driving through a factory at night. I don't know how, but he captures a spooky night-time scene in panels that are really white-heavy.

David Heatley, "Portrait of My Dad": short vignettes about his father. I love the color and density of the pages. Here's the first page. Just an all-around beautiful chronicle of the relationship.

Jessica Abel, "Missing": an argument with a mirror, and an argument with a friend. The body language is wonderful in this excerpt from La Perdida.

Kurt Wolfgang, "Passing Before Life's Very Eyes": an old man dies, floats around, learns the truth. The dialogue borders on the preachy-casual, but the final panels are really satisfying.

Jesse Reklaw, "Thirteen Cats of My Childhood": a memoir of family and feline relationships. I had expected to hate this one, but I loved it. It was more text-heavy than many of the others, so you can really dig in to the story.

I really like this painting of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird by Viktor Vasnetsov. It's the carpet that really got my attention. You can see that it's floating and rippling in the air currents, but it still looks thick and heavy like a rug should. It looks like something you'd actually use on your floor. Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird are Russian folklore characters. I don't usually explore Russian art, but I found my way over there because lately I've been listening to Stravinsky's ballet, The Firebird.

Buckminster Fuller invented the Dymaxion map, which folds and unfolds the Earth in all kinds of ways, so you can arrange the map without any hemispherical hegemony. Here's a larger image of the Dymaxion map. It's kind of mind-bending. This version with Antartica and its ocean at the center is particularly cool.

I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The Elements of Style is a handy little guide, sure. Brief, pithy. I suppose I've just heard it mentioned so many times that I was expecting a bit more. Honestly the best part of this particular edition of Elements was the illustrations by Maira Kalman. (Kalman has done a year-long illustrated story in the New York Times, which will soon be released in her book The Principles of Uncertainty.) Elements didn't earn a place on my shelf. It touches on some of the nuts and bolts of writing, and some of the philosophy, but none of the sections really feel complete. If you're looking for clinical advice on commas and grammar, you're probably better off with a dedicated grammar book or style guide. And if you're looking to seriously clean up your text, and to apply some thought and reason to your writing, for my money the better choice is something like Joseph Williams' Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace.

Alex Ross talks with Robert Siegel on NPR about 20th century music. Ross' new book, The Rest Is Noise, is coming in a few days---looking forward to 640 pages of music history goodness!

In a pretty thrilling essay on tragedy, comedy, and the modern novel, Julian Gough asks and answers: "What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" One of the best essays I've read this year---I had to try really hard not to go ahead and block quote the entire thing. [via austin]

In praise of Los Angeles.

Reader submissions for album covers for Radiohead's album, In Rainbows.

Tonight I heard photographer Alec Soth speak at the High Museum, a guest of this month's Atlanta Celebrates Photography events. It was incredibly cool. It was a walk through his career so far, his major projects and commissioned work, and what he's been learning. I took several pages of notes in the Moleskine... and now to decipher my handwriting and share a bit. I don't want to make a transcript, so I'm skipping around and weaving together some of the things he talked about. Take a look at his big projects: Portraits, Sleeping by the Mississippi ("the 3rd coast"), Niagara, Fashion Magazine, and Dog Days, Bogot?°.

Here are a few of my favorite photographs, matched with Soth's words that may or may not have been uttered around the time the slide was up:

• In Europe a lot of the Mississippi photographs are thought of as a critique of America. For him, it was about the excitement of travel and discovery. "For me, it's Huck Finn's raft."
• "I'm not good at photographing a contained thing."
• "I really aim to be empathetic."
• "Simple often makes a better picture."
• "You can't trust new passion."

Back in his high school days, Soth was a painter, but "wasn't comfortable in the studio." Too antsy, too fidgety. It was a Joel Sternfeld photo in particular that turned him to photography, one that showed the photographer's own car in the distance as just another part of the scenery. Like Sternfeld, Soth "wanted to be out in the world." He was painfully shy when he first got started ("I was shaking, sweating"), but yet he was drawn to portraiture. And the portraits aren't just snapshot candids---they often take some awkward negotiation with a stranger and time to fiddle with gear and set up the shot. So the photo is not only about the person but also about "the space between us." The irony is that Soth wanted to be out in the world, drawing on the passion and energy and intimacy, but a lot of his work touches on the desire for withdrawal and evasion and anger and disconnection and decline and violence. So there's this internal artistic tension.

Soth said, "One of the frustrating things when I show my pieces is people searching for little clues." So he started taking on specific project themes for his work, one of the first of these was the Mississippi project. In a way, the theme serves as another sort of evasive maneuver---it relieves some of the artistic pressure, the self-consciousness. "I don't always know what I'm doing at the beginning... it evolves over time."

Some interesting quotes on his craft, out of context:

• "For me, photography is not like storytelling... It's evocative, you make these connections... That's the poetic model: people respond in their own way."
• "A list gets you focused, and then it leads to something else."
• "Because I'm a stranger, I can ask a question and get an intimate response."
• "I'm trying to please myself... my audience is me."

And, lastly, Soth's three levels of artistic achievement:

1. Entertainment
2. Information
3. When the work causes the audience to reconsider their life

Scott Underwood and Merlin Mann talk about productivity stuff. I'm not really a huge fan of instant messaging in the workplace, so I enjoyed this brief exchange:

Scott: IM to me combines the worst aspects of the telephone and e-mail---

Merlin:---and being a teenager.