grant

Can’t pass this up. It may be hokey but HE IS IN SPACE....

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:48:24 -0400

Can’t pass this up. It may be hokey but HE IS IN SPACE.

IN SPACE.

This is exactly what we were hoping for when Bowie first wrote this song.

People would sing it IN SPACE.

Col Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut and Commander of the International Space Station, is preparing to return home to Earth. For the past six months he’s provided us all with truly awesome glimpses of our world and countless fascinating insights into what life is like in outer space, aboard the ISS. (What ever will we do without him?) But before he goes, Commander Hadfield has gifted us with a song. It gave us goosebumps and is pretty much one of the best things ever:

With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.

Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.

It’s a rainy Mother’s Day. Brunch is long over. I...

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:43:20 -0400

It’s a rainy Mother’s Day. Brunch is long over. I should be napping. But instead, I made a mix on @8tracks: “some kind of difference.”

None of these songs are particularly new, but they all make me want to take the first step toward new things.

"Unmistakably smelling of spar varnish, it is a common spice in Mexican cooking. Epazote (EP-ah-zoht)..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 17:41:54 -0400

“Unmistakably smelling of spar varnish, it is a common spice in Mexican cooking. Epazote (EP-ah-zoht) is from Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and means skunk sweat or skunk dirt. By now it should be rather clear that this plant has an odor issue. One does not need to cultivate Epazote in Florida, or buy it. Epazote grows quite happily nearly everywhere. I might have a different view of Epazote if I had tried it cooked sometime. But, I also don’t have internal worms and I really don’t want to find out if the line between Mexican spice and Mexican worm killer is thin. I will let a chef convince me in Some dish of his choosing.”

- Eat The Weeds is one of the best sources of wisdom ever.

Video: Vigilante Copy Editor

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:22:31 -0400

Video: Vigilante Copy Editor:

These are my people. The mysterious semi-colon insertion in the dead of night. The removal of surplus commas. The clarification of obtuse sentences.

A filmmaker searches for a mysterious vandal who has been correcting grammar on placards in the sculpture garden of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

"In the old series, the typical length of a Doctor Who story was four twenty-five minute episodes...."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:03:00 -0400

“

In the old series, the typical length of a Doctor Who story was four twenty-five minute episodes. This varied, of course — there were five two-episode stories, a lot of six-episode stories, a few three-parters towards the end, and the odd massive eight or thirteen parter, but in general the story length came to about ninety minutes, once you cut out theme music and cliffhanger recaps — so about the length of two post-2005 episodes.

That ninety minutes had a lot of work to do. Very roughly, each story had four ‘acts’ — a setup, in which the nature of the society the Doctor has landed in this week is shown (a necessity when you can go anywhere in space and time), the revelation of a threat to that society, an exploration of the consequences of that threat, and then a resolution of that threat.

”

- Mindless Ones pins down what’s been missing. Structure.

The Hobbit retold in charts. CHARTS.tobiassturt: The story of...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:10:09 -0400

The Hobbit retold in charts.

CHARTS.

tobiassturt:

The story of the Hobbit as told through charts - I was kind of curious to see whether I could make some of my ideas about telling fictional stories through data visualisation could work for adaptation and the release of the Hobbit movies (and the fact that its a short and quite straightforward book) seemed like a reasonable chance to experiment.

I’m not sure it has actually quite worked in this case, but it looks nice, at least.

asonlynasacan: 41 years tomorrow, these guys began their trek...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:07:38 -0400

asonlynasacan:

41 years tomorrow, these guys began their trek to the moon…

Shawdee Naimy, “Two-Headed Boy” (by Neutral Milk...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:31:00 -0400

Shawdee Naimy, “Two-Headed Boy” (by Neutral Milk Hotel)

Now here’s a thought. Was Ms. Naimy even born when this album came out? Was she old enough to speak?

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is really pretty strange - it sits there, on first listen, unquantifiable and a little unimpressive. It was never a hit. It never strikes quickly.

But one more listen and you start to realize (and the key part is it doesn’t matter who you are, this is how it goes) that the hook is in place. You are on the line.

When kids in the 80s covered the Beatles, it was no surprise. The songs were great, sure, but everyone had already heard the Beatles. The band, two decades after their songs had come out, still defined celebrity.

Neutral Milk Hotel is not famous, exactly. But it’s getting harder and harder to find people who haven’t heard of them. We’re all being reeled in.

In two more decades, a middle-aged Shawdee Naimy might well be looking at someone barely two decades old singing this same song and wondering that it was ever considered obscure or undiscovered.

Mariachi El Bronx, “Los Angeles, I’m Yours”...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:52:00 -0400

Mariachi El Bronx, “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” (by the Decemberists)
Yes. We live in world in which a drama club take on singer-songwriter yacht rock can be covered by a punk band who sing mariachi.
Love listening to the original, love thinking through this version.

Billy Bragg, “Between the Wars”. Not that I need an...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:31:15 -0400

Billy Bragg, “Between the Wars”. Not that I need an excuse to listen to this one again.

Thumbs up.

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:52:00 -0400

Thumbs up.

A song I wrote about all the girls I’d ever loved. Even...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:39:27 -0400

A song I wrote about all the girls I’d ever loved. Even the disembodied avatars of the nameless Most High.

Where gettin’ down is a pleasure… Thought to be Palm Beach,...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:03:57 -0400

Where gettin’ down is a pleasure…

Thought to be Palm Beach, ‘50-’60s

[from oldflorida]

Steve Martin and Edie Brickell shill their new album like...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:14:11 -0400

Steve Martin and Edie Brickell shill their new album like *pros*.

(Check out, also, the men’s clothes in this thing.)

This is me at work. I guess I’ve found my niche at last.

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:38:33 -0400

This is me at work.

I guess I’ve found my niche at last.

NME is collecting the wit and vitriol of Mark E Smith.

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:24:08 -0400

NME is collecting the wit and vitriol of Mark E Smith.

"The word “integrity” became like a sacrament. Hating dishonest things was our creed, and..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:35:26 -0500

“The word “integrity” became like a sacrament. Hating dishonest things was our creed, and since everything was a lie, hate was the only emotion we could express. No person or thing was so politically perfect that a flaw couldn’t be probed. The truth is, if there really was an Illuminati bent on controlling the world through a secret government, they couldn’t have done a better job of defanging the youth movement than by introducing the self-negating, life-consuming, ignorance-propagating, lethargy-celebrating, divisive and controlling, fashion-based ideology of punk rock into the mainstream. It was basically the crack epidemic of rock culture.”

- John Roderick is standing against punk rock.

"Many magazines have been funded by wealthy people who were willing to take moderate losses. (Thank..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:07:18 -0500

“Many magazines have been funded by wealthy people who were willing to take moderate losses. (Thank you to all of you.) Or Conde Nast could suck money out of its newspapers to feed into its glorious magazine operations. Nevermind that back at the newspapers they kept people working for nothing at podunk papers that also happened to make crazy bank with their classified ads. Any time I imagine the glamorous world of writing for The Atlantic or The New Yorker or Harper’s in 1968 or 1978, I remember that most journalists were going to homecoming football games and writing about the king and queen. Most journalists were humping around the local garden show and talking about trends in petunia horticulture. Most journalists were doing things that no one really wanted to do, but they did it anyway for money and for a shot at the show which almost never came. I respect the hell out of those journalists working at those local papers. They were doing the stuff that, at least within certain empires, that let the magazine editors have lunch at Balthazar’s (or insert actual appropriate New York lunch spot).”

- A perspective from Alexis Madrigal’s response to the “y’all ain’t payin’ yer freelancers nothin’” kerfluffle.

"Time is a great equalizer. We all only have 24 hours in a day, and how we choose to spend it is..."

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:46:25 -0500

“Time is a great equalizer. We all only have 24 hours in a day, and how we choose to spend it is largely dictated by the economic system we’re in. If we’re part of a hunter/gatherer society, anthropologists have observed that we spend about 20–30 hours a week in activities that could be classified as work and the rest of the time playing games, making music and hanging around the camp. In the feudal system during the European Middle Ages, the breakdown of hours worked as compared to hours spent doing other things was about the same. Now, in so-called advanced civilization, we are spending many more hours per week working for pay and fewer hours in recreational, social and spiritual pursuits. Why have we chosen these priorities in our society?”

- (Later in the same article.)

"At least twice in history, a form of money has existed where there was no incentive to accumulate it..."

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:24:14 -0500

“At least twice in history, a form of money has existed where there was no incentive to accumulate it as a store of value because it didn’t earn positive interest in bank accounts. Instead, it had the equivalent of a negative interest rate (known as demurrage)—the longer you held on to it, the more you would have to pay—similar to a parking fee on money. This gave people who were paid in this currency a strong incentive to spend it or to invest it—preferably in things that would continue to be valuable over the long term. The velocity of this type of money, in other words, was quite high. Since people didn’t hoard it, it also was not scarce—there is strong evidence that its existence fostered long periods of prosperity in Dynastic Egypt and during the Central Middle Ages (10th-13th centuries) in Europe.”

- Utne Reader on local currencies.