drat fink

picture perfect

"Image Gate is The New York Public Library's first full working version of its new digital image database. Image Gate provides free and open access to thousands of The New York Public Library's digitized images, taken from the Research Libraries' collections. At its inception, the Image Gate database contains approximately 80,000 images spanning a wide range of subjects. This number will grow as The Library digitizes more images; this phased rollout will end in 2004, when the site will include more than 600,000 images."

copyulation

"After an hour or so of scribbling in a notebook, Wearing showed us her idea. It was obviously shocking, but it also seemed to synthesise, in three short words, the point we were trying to make. This wasn't Wearing saying fuck Cilla or the Guardian saying fuck Cilla, but the voice of Mean TV passing judgment on a cuddly matriarch from another age of television. And Wearing's casual use of the F-word seemed to capture precisely the coarsening of TV culture that Stuart Jeffries would write about inside."

le carping

"America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. "

caught in the web

i had a dream about weblogging last night. wonder if my brain needs a few fresh inputs. went outside to put a pressed shirt in my van for some function i was to attend the next day and someone was shooting a movie on the street. thought it was low budget kidstuff but then i recognized a voice in the dark. the lighting was insufficient. they were literally shooting in the dark. my front door creaked open as i went to go inside and the guy behind the camera swung around to see where the noise was coming from. turns out it was kevin smith. he kind of glared at me for a moment and then turned back to what he was doing. and as i was going upstairs i thought about posting the encounter on my weblog. then i walked up one too many flights, and after retreating the key to my door didnt work. and while i was trying a bunch of different keys, my friend al who i havent seen in ten years shows up, smiley as usual. i was glad to see him but instead of embracing i hand him some boxes im holding and go back to work on the lock. i never do get in before waking up.

mini meme

blog hot or not

making a statement

the atlantic monthly's real state of the nation issue

salty dawgs

its gettin' salty in herre.

out to lunchin'

someone was murdered half a block from my apartment and i had to hear about it from my parents.

chalk lines

"Known as the "Sheetrock scandal" because tests determined that the substances were shredded Sheetrock, pool chalk or gypsum instead of cocaine and methamphetamines, the situation has been a major embarrassment to both the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas County district attorney's office."

"More than 80 cases have been thrown out against nearly 50 suspects, and the city faces an expected deluge of civil law suits for false imprisonment."

skid row houses

"The tenements and storefronts tucked along the border between the East Village and the Lower East Side will soon be in the shadows of four mammoth eight- to 14-story buildings. The historical Bowery skid row will get a major face-lift as the development of the long-planned Cooper Square Urban Renewal area finally commences in January. Earth movers are already poised at the first construction site, just below Houston Street, where developers Chrystie Venture Partners will start work after decades of halted planning and deliberation with the Cooper Square Committee."