“Pick up just about any novel and you’ll find a throwaway reference to a dog, barking in the distance.” (via)
“Somewhere a Dog Barked” – By Rosecrans Baldwin – Slate Magazine
Links
A World Cup Mentality – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com
Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.
An exercise in empathy « Snarkmarket
An interesting mental experiment. “The core of the exercise, I think, is that you see yourself as just another person in the space—an opaque bag of bones—instead of as, you know, the movie camera. The privileged POV.”
“Target Anxiety: the Penalty Shootout Reconsidered” by Fredorrarci – Norman Einstein’s Magazine, Sports & Rocket Science Monthly
Nothing that matters comes without dread. It’s the dread of failure. One team will get to cheat death; thirty-one will meet with the end to end all ends. For that damned lot, their tournament will turn out to have been a series of attempts to delay the mortal coil shuffle for just one more round, like someone joining a gym, or praying furiously. The beautiful cruelty of the World Cup is that it is held every four years, and four years is a purgatory of a time to wait for reincarnation. Every game assumes an unreasonable importance, which is what makes it such fun.
Murder Kroger! – Conan O’Brien – TeamCoco.com
Team Coco visited Murder Kroger while in Atlanta.
See America First | The New York Review of Books
Speaking of bohemians, I like this bit from a 1970 review of Easy Rider and Alice’s Restaurant. (via I forget who)
The current generation of bohemians and radicals hasn’t decided whether to love or hate America. On a superficial level, the dominant theme has been hate—for the wealth and greed and racism and complacency, the destruction of the land, the bullshit rhetoric of democracy, and the average American’s rejection of aristocratic European standards of the good life in favor of a romance with mass-produced consumer goods. But love is there too, perhaps all the more influential for being largely unadmitted. There is the old left strain of love for the “real” America, the Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger America of workers-farmers-hoboes, the open road, this-land-is-your-land. And there is the newer pop strain, the consciousness—initiated by Andy Warhol and his cohorts, popularized by the Beatles and their cohorts, evangelized by Tom Wolfe, and made respectable in the bohemian ghettos by Bob Dylan and Ken Kesey—that there is something magical and vital as well as crass about America’s commodity culture, that the romance with consumer goods makes perfect sense if the consumer goods are motorcycles and stereo sets and far-out clothes and Spider Man comics and dope. How can anyone claim to hate America, deep down, and be a rock fan? Rock is America—the black experience, the white experience, technology, commercialism, rebellion, populism, the Hell’s Angels, the horror of old age—as seen by its urban adolescents.
On Bohemia | Music & the Entertainment Economy
Arguing that bohemias are temporary, neighborhood-centered, and artists don’t have much to do with it. (via).
The problem with restricting self-expressive action to artists is that being an artist requires talent. Bohemias solve this problem by democratizing the expressive life.
Urban Economics: Atlanta, the Rap and R&B Capital of the World | Music & the Entertainment Economy
Young, educated professionals and entrepreneurs in Atlanta and Nashville might be more likely to put their brains and energy into cultural industries over technology start-ups.
Urban Economics: Atlanta, the Rap and R&B Capital of the World | Music & the Entertainment Economy
Explaining Wagner’s Relevance To Soccer | The New Republic
A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance—this peak of ecstasy. During these moments, I no longer am my usual self, no longer human. I am connected to life. Call it bliss, call it ecstasy, call it what you will. In that moment, I not only see God, I am God. I am not only connected to life, I am connected to my TV!
Gulf of Mexico Spill: Expert Recommends Killing Oil-Soaked Birds
I was wondering about this… “Despite the short-term success in cleaning the birds and releasing them back into the wild, few, if any, have a chance of surviving.”
Gulf of Mexico Spill: Expert Recommends Killing Oil-Soaked Birds
Wehr in the World: Controlling your emotions
The important point is this: Evolution seems to have favored inaction over action. E.g., don’t get too close to those people — they might be dangerous! Don’t do that — they might laugh at me! Our limbic system — the emotional center responsible for an embarrassingly high percentage of our behavior — has yet to learn that in the industrial age with market economies and unprecedented levels of absolute wealth, people aren’t so dangerous.
Derek Powazek – Why Everything Sucks, Why That’s Awesome, and How It’s Changing Us
We were spared hearing The Beatles when they were new. There’s no record of Shakespeare’s embarrassing early attempts. No MP3s of Bach’s school choir. Maybe if we were more used to seeing people suck before they get good at something, we wouldn’t expect perfection from day one.
Just think about the millions of people on the internet, each in their own timeline of learning something new. Most people will never get to 2,500 hours. They’ll never not suck. It’s not personal, it’s just math.
So that’s why the vast majority of everything on the internet sucks. It’s because most of the people doing it, most of the time, just haven’t put in the hours yet. And most of them never will. So only a small percentage of all the people online will ever be vaguely good at whatever it is they’re doing.
But here’s the thing: I think this is beautiful. People are out there, trying new things, learning the hard way, and sharing their experience. That gives me hope.
(via) This reminds me of the idea for a museum of rough drafts.
Derek Powazek – Why Everything Sucks, Why That’s Awesome, and How It’s Changing Us
Detroit arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape — By Rebecca Solnit (Harper’s Magazine)
Then came the renaissance, but only for those cities reborn into more dematerialized economies. Vacant lots were filled in, old warehouses were turned into lofts or offices or replaced, downtowns became upscale chain outlets, janitors and cops became people who commuted in from downscale suburbs, and the children of that white flight came back to cities that were not exactly cities in the old sense. The new American cities trade in information, entertainment, tourism, software, finance. They are abstract. Even the souvenirs in these new economies often come from a sweatshop in China. The United States can be mapped as two zones now, a high-pressure zone of economic boom times and escalating real estate prices, and a low- pressure zone, where housing might be the only thing that’s easy to come by.
Detroit arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape — By Rebecca Solnit (Harper’s Magazine)
Where Good Ideas Come From
Steven Johnson’s new book. I’ve enjoyed all 4 (5?) of his that I’ve read.
The Living Dead
“David Foster Wallace speaks to us from beyond the grave in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—but should we be listening?”
Pitchfork: Why We Fight #4 – The Trouble With Maya
Dang, Nitsuh Abebe can write the shit out of a pop-culture essay. Every time.
The Obscure, the Forgotten, and the Unloved: 40 Critically Acclaimed But Little Seen Should-be Classics
A 2010 poll of committed cinephiles who hope to find, highlight, and promote films that have received a considerable amount of critical acclaim but have yet to find the audience that their evident quality deserves.
I’ve only seen Il Posto, but based on that alone, I’m inclined to trust these suggestions. With most things cultural, finding good filters is half the battle.
How To Make Cold Brew Coffee
It’s June in Texas, which means my wife just made me my first mason jar full of cold brew coffee.
Cold-brewed coffee is actually dirt simple to make at home….But you can also bang it out with a Mason jar and a sieve. You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you’re done. Except for the time it sits on the kitchen counter, the whole process takes about five minutes.
Bonus: recipe for New Orleans Cold Drip coffee.
This is also the season for cold-brew iced tea. Same method, folks. Just sayin’.
Salt & Fat: Burgers
Here’s a trick that will make you the star of the grill — put a dimple in the middle of your patty. Just press your thumb about a quarter of the way into the top of your burgers and reshape as necessary. This will keep your burgers from ending up like little UFOs as they cook.
Mark Larson 