Or is it the other way round?
Richard Thompson is the Eddie Campbell of pop music.
Futurama Battlestar.
How could you not share something like this?
(Oh, there’s more.)
What do Philip K. Dick, priestly ephebophilia, Knopf, and Gay Talese’s 50 pairs of hand-lasted shoes have in common?
They’re John Crowley’s suggested interests for Thomas Disch’s brand-new LiveJournal.
Later than eleven, trying to make the earth into a heaven.
Ran Prieur falls down six times. You can get up seven, if you like.
A brief descent into gearheadery.
I am a Mac baby, because the Spouse is a graphic design professional, and the gearhead of the family, so I usually run her handmedown machines, and graphic design professionals roll with Macs, and also Windows sucks. —Anyway, Boot Camp, about which I have little to say myself except I can now run jobstuff like Summation on my personal machine should I so choose, so yay, but I did want to share this delightful little joke which rather succinctly demonstrates why Steve Gilliard is, well, wrong:
What’s the difference between OS X and Vista?
Microsoft employees are excited about OS X...
Jupiter dropping elsewhere.
Ned Jingo says some things—about creating music, and consuming it—that are not inapposite.
Grandson of the Beast.
On the one hand, April fish. On the other, God damn but the resemblance is eerie, now you point it out.
It’s not just the size of a walnut.
So I’m browsing the latest New York Review of Books and the ad for Manliness can’t help but catch my eye. “Why do men need to feel important? It’s their manliness. But is manliness obsolete? Is it even a virtue?” —How disappointing to discover the author’s rather limited notion of manliness, when the questions are so patently leading. It is, I suppose, cute enough to picture him patiently reinventing a crude wheel, all the while imagining he’s taking the discourse to grounds that aren’t already worn thin by the traffic. Strength is for the weak, Professor, and would you please stop sullying my family’s good name?
Terrence Malick has released two films in the time since you released your last one.
Metropolitan has gotten the Criterion treatment, so Josh Horowitz asks Whit Stillman what he’s been up to. Lately. (Thanks, Anita.)
The net treats censorship as yadda yadda badda-bing.
I was wondering why I was suddenly inundated with searches for “without a trace teen orgy.” —Out of curiosity, you think the American Family Association will also be fined? After all, they’re still hosting a clip of said “teen orgy,” shorn of any mitigating narrative context, and they used it rather prominently in a lurid fund-raising appeal...
It figures that my current favorite song in all the world—
—would also have my current favorite video:
Jens Lekman; “You are the Light (By Which I Travel Into This and That).” (MP3 available here.) (Yes, this would at one point have been a deltiolographic post. I’m working on it.)
Value-added blogging.
Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.
Ariel Schrag is a staff writer for The L Word? (—Hat tip to Sara, who looked just as befuddled.)
What the world needs now—
A couple-three years ago, cruising the net, I found a page with some instrumental MP3s; stabs at what would have been the next Babe the Blue Ox album, in another, better world. There was a note from Tim I think about time passing, and families being raised, and walls stubbornly unfallen even after they’d circled them seven times and seven times again, blowing that horn, and what that felt like; too content to be called resignation, I think. (Boy, turning her back: “I stopped needing to save the world. Saving is what misers do.”) Rose was in law school, or Hanna maybe; time passing. —They were spare and crunchy and beautiful, those MP3s, or the three or four I downloaded; when I went back to get more, and drop some cash in the PayPal slot, the site 404ed, its links all rotted away. Then I lost the songs in a harddrive crash.
Which makes this the saddest and most hopeful thing I’ve read all week, but I’m a fan:
The last time I saw Rose, Hanna, and Tim perform—in 1999 or 2000?—they seemed dispirited, mixing brilliant unreleased songs with fragments that crumbled under their hands, that didn’t end but stopped, just like this.
“Babe may be in a deep deep sleep,” Hanna told me via email in 2005, “but we are all alive and well and in touch with each other too.” She added: “We are the future of rock and roll.”
You were, you are, you will be again. It’s terribly selfish of me to ask, but please: come back. The world still needs to be saved.
Teleautograph.
Over at Making Light, debcha reminds us all to check out Collision Detection more often. Here’s a bit on how Margaret Atwood is, well, not getting out of the house as much as she used to, thanks to a long-distance waldo. Which includes the following:
First of all, this confirms my growing sense that Atwood is among the biggest secret geeks on the planet. After all, she’s basically a sci-fi author masquerading as a writer of “serious” adult nonfiction. Her “what if” novels are so superb—and so manifestly superior to her other books—that I sometimes wish she’d just give up writing about the usual maundering-around-the-kitchen-moaning-about-your-children/divorce/boring-ass-upper-middle-class-life crap that comprises 99% of all of today’s dinosaur literary fiction, and just throw it down old-skool in sci-fi and fantasy, and crank out a bunch of 4,000-page novels with, y’know, dragons and instellar spacecraft and shit on the covers. I would so pay for that.
Ninety-nine per cent? —Anyway, exuberantly presented point taken.
