Art
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On promise lost
I was digging around for links toward a post on Brian Knappenberger‘s crowdsourced Aaron Swartz documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy, when I learned that Malik Bendjelloul, the documentary filmmaker who won an Oscar last year for Searching for Sugar Man, was also dead — like Aaron, a suicide. I would guess that readers of this blog are more familiar with Continue reading
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Spying on your ass
Quantified toilets. Seems to be a project out of @CHI2014, going on now in Toronto. Continue reading
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Ash tray snowbank
Spent some time this morning wondering whether the butts in the melting snow by the A Train station at Dyckman Street migrated there from elsewhere, or if the former snowbank served as an ashtray for smoking passengers. Either way, it’s an impressive collection. Continue reading
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Getting into my header
Since I’ve been maturing while my blog header has not, I’ve been thinking that soon is a good time to change it. The old headshot, or art-from-a-headshot, dates from the last Millennium, when I still wore granny glasses and had hair. And it never looked much like me in the first place. This was it: Continue reading
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Into the dark
The power will be out for a while. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright night-work lights illuminating whatever went wrong with the day’s power pole replacement job. The notices they left Continue reading
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Something beyond perfection
I last visited Barcelona more than twenty years ago. Back then the Sagrada Família was already impressive, but also incomplete. All that stood were the nativity façade and some small number (four? eight?) of the Sagrada’s eventual eighteen towers. I recall nothing of the interior, perhaps because there was none. In many ways, in fact, Continue reading
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The Holy Mountain of Montserrat
To an window-sitter accustomed to flying over the American West, Catalonia from altitude looks like Utah. On the northern horizon the Pyrenees, like the Uintahs, run east-west above a dry landscape of settled alluvium, much of it reddish as the San Rafael desert. While the shapes of the ancient towns below are clearly old world in Continue reading
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Seeing Deeply
Cities aren’t simple, especially mature ones. They are deep and complicated places that require equally deep attention to appreciate fully. That’s what I get from Stephen Lewis‘ insights about the particulars of present and past urban scenes and characters in Sofia, New York, Istanbul and other cities he knows well. His latest post, titled The Women’s Continue reading
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Grace Apgar, 1912-2013
Aunt Grace — my father’s younger sister — died yesterday at her home in Maine. She was 101 years old, and in good health until just a couple days ago. Last month, in fact, she flew to San Diego to visit one of her granddaughters. Grace often said she wanted to live to 108, like Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to Continue reading
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Hart Island: a movie we need, about zombies as heroes
As Halloween approaches (and death itself, for all of us, eventually), I find myself thinking, Do zombies always have to be bad? And, What if zombies were good? And, Hey, maybe good zombies are what we call ‘angels’. Then I find myself wondering where one would recruit armies of zombie angels (let’s call them “zangels”), besides your basic Continue reading
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Now see these
40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World. In Twisted Sifter. My fave: That’s from Deadspin. Continue reading
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The Gospel According to ZZ Top
In mass this morning only two words the priest said during the homily stuck in my mind: it’s alright. Because they called ZZ Top to mind. Specifically, the song Legs. It begins, She’s got legs. She knows how to use them. Then the boys sing a bunch of other stuff over this repetitive throbbing riff that sounds like it’s Continue reading
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Hot Death from Above
Driving from New York to Boston today, I heard “Summer ‘Heat Tourists’ Sweat With Smiles In Death Valley” — a four-minute feature on NPR, aired on the 100th anniversary of the hottest temperature ever recorded outdoors on Earth, which happened in Death Valley: 134° Fahrenheit, which is around 57° Celsius. The report says Death Valley Continue reading
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Outlining vs. Formatting
Dave makes a profound distinction in his post this morning titled Outliners and Word Processors. For the first time I not only grok what I already knew about outlining, but why it’s so much better as a way to write than word processing ever was. The distinction is a bit hard to see because Word Continue reading
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Journalism is outlining
[Updated 1 December to add the addendum below. If you’re new to this post, start here. If you’ve read it already, start down there.] In Journalism as service: Lessons from Sandy, Jeff Jarvis says, “After Sandy, what journalists provided was mostly articles when what I wanted was specifics that those articles only summarized. Don’t give Continue reading
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Flying into New York at night
The conditions were what pilots call “severe clear” from Charlotte to New York on Thursday night. I made sure (paying $44 to USAirways) that I had a window seat on the left side, and had a perfect view through an imperfect window of nearly every city and town from Charlotte to New York. Rolling by Continue reading
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Why we have Silicon Valley
My son remembers what I say better than I do. One example is this: I uttered it in some context while wheezing my way up a slope somewhere in the Great Blue Hill Reservation. Except it wasn’t there. Also I didn’t say that. Exactly. Or alone. He tells me it came up while we were Continue reading