JIMWich has a bunch of links to
treehouses. (That's not really a permanent link. I'm guessing that
this will be the permanent link after the end of this month.)
Software as (the real) digital art. This is along the lines of something I was trying to say at last weeks YAT meeting. But I really disagree with the quote from Jon Ippolito, curator of the Guggenheim Museum: "software art shouldn't be too functional, but should help viewers see the world in a new way via original code." Shouldn't be too functional? That's what I don't get about the art world.
I am glad to know people who have--or have tendencies towards--finer culinary habits than I do. It implies a possibility of improvement should I so desire. That I will not always seek the easiest, most cost effective route to hunger appeasement. But for now:
The redesigned Taco Bell at the corner of Broad and Tulane in New Orleans, Louisiana, which is across the street from the Courthouse/Parish prison is not a success, if success is measured by the number of customers drawn to it's interior, which was redesigned with high tables and stools throughout, an orientation clearly not preferred in the hood. The old design of perimeter booths, a short wall in the middle with tables on either side was better. The new design works out in the suburbs where I feel people are more titillated by new things but here in the inner city we want our booths back, and we don't feel at all advantaged by sitting in chairs the tallest of us can barely reach. I myself do the drive-through but have never been inside my newly redesigned neighborhood Taco Bell because there is rarely anyone else in there and, as a lone diner, I like a little company with my americanized mexican food, of which I recommend the steak soft tacos with lime sauce. And Pepsi is ok with that.
I saw Swordfish yesterday. I wish someone had warned me not to, which is what I'm doing now. Instead one might better listen to the Tom Waits song, Swordfishtrombones
The Dumaine campers are stirring, out of beds, couches, and off the floor, turning on computers, and possibly interrupting dial up connections which is my excuse for no more thoughtful reviewing other than this--I liked Moulin Rouge. A trite love story, with musical numbers based on tepid modern love songs, and some average digital enhancement. So given all that I'm not sure why I liked it so much except maybe for me it lived up to its duty of transporting me to a distant place of desirable surreality. Ok, not to mention I'm a girlyman sucker for trite love stories.
Decent article on the
Tolkien phenomenon from the Voice.
The importance of the material must be recognized. LOR drew the template for virtually every epic fantasy since. It may appeal to adolescents, but they represent the last, best, hope of the imagination, before the compromises of adulthood. Such compromises may be the subject of "grown-up" literature, but the unstoppable spring of Tolkienesque fantasy evidences a basic facet of our being. The template fits sci-fi futurism just as well as medievalism: the generality of a truly mythic chord being sounded. Tolkien does not fall into the typical cliches of pulp-fiction type fantasy. Violence, sex, and magic are central, but are consistently underplayed. His overwhelming nostalgia and melancholy are alien to Hollywood's understanding of the heroic epic. Scale is different than size, and this is where many followers have lost the way. The vastness of his tale is not so much a matter of length, as it is the implication of an entire world of untold tales, fleshed out by the extensive pseudo-scholarly appendices. This presentation of the material as some sort of discovered text links the work to things like Borges and Pynchon, and even Poe's early detective stories. It seems to be a gloss on a larger truth, which supersedes the author.
And the reader. Unlike the comic books, and other fantasy forms I've enjoyed over the years, Tolkien never fed my ego-fantasies, but served to weave me into something larger; a frame of reference in which the ego was but the focal point of loss. In this sense, his work is about as serious and adult as stories get. It triggers a nostalgic pain so acute that growing up becomes the escape. The sixties, the heyday of Tolkien-mania, has often been similarly critiqued, and I'd make a similar defense. I always think of Tolkien when I hear this song by the
Incredible String Band, exemplars of the Hobbit-swilling hippies of yore.
You Know What You Could Beby Mike Heron
Read your book and lose yourself
In another's thoughts.
He might tell you 'bout what is
Or even 'bout what is not.
And if he's kind and gentle too,
And he loves the world a lot,
His twilight words may melt the slush
Of what you have been taught.
You know what you could be.
Tell me my friend,
Why you worry all the time
What you should been.
Listen to the song of life.
Its rainbow's end won't hold you.
Its crimson shapes and purple sounds,
Softly will enfold you.
It gurgles through the timeless glade,
In quartertones of lightning.
No policy is up for sale,
In case the truth be frightening.
You know what you could be.
Tell me my friend,
Why you worry all the time
What you should be.
texas snakemanBibby, who lives southwest of Fort Worth in Wheatland, broke the record for crawling into a sleeping bag with rattlesnakes. He shared the sleeping bag with 109 rattlers, besting his old record by two.
"I'm ready to do what I do almost anytime," he boasted. "I'm like lunchmeat - I'm always ready."
Smarter Times: All the news that's fit to correct.
here's my librarian deed of the day
What did happen in Nepal?
Here's one story, but gossip Cindy Adams has
another.
Rockets Redglare, dead "In other lousy news for film buffs, Rockets Redglare, the downtown
fixture who turned up in flicks like Big and Basquiat, died last week as a
result of various ailments. Rockets had a fascinatingly dark life, which
spanned being born to a junkie mom, witnessing his mobster uncle pull
off a hit, and begging cash out of his famous friends. His triumph was
becoming a quirky star in his own right—one I'll sorely miss, and not
just because he never hit me up for money." - m.musto
86 year old woman survives two days underwaterShe was on the Today Show this morning, and talked about her hallucinations: "I'll never be able to see an elf again without thinking about them."