This book is not for the faint of heart, or for neophytes. If you are a practicing Southwestern archaeologist with hypertension problems, stop. Read something safe.
The warning that accompanies the The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest by Steve Lekson, an archaeologist from the University of Colorado, in which Dr. Lekson argues that "for centuries the Anasazi leaders, reckoning by the stars, aligned their principal settlements along this north-south axis — the 108th meridian of longitude," according to today's New York Times.
The New York Times also cites David Phillips, curator of archaeology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, on the controversial Chaco Meridian theory:
Steve is possibly the best writer in Southwest archaeology. Our academic writing has this inherent gift of taking something interesting and making it dull and boring. And Steve doesn’t have that problem. He thinks outside the box, and the rest of us comb through his ideas.
Having said all that, I personally think that the Chaco meridian is a crock.
The model starts by assuming that everyone cares about two dimensions on any policy issue: getting an outcome as close to what they want as possible, and getting credit for being essential in putting a deal together -- or preventing a deal.
The model estimates the way in which individual decision-makers trade off between credit and policy outcomes. Some are prepared to go down in a blaze of glory seeking the outcome they want, knowing they will lose. Others have their finger in the wind, trying to figure out what position is likely to win and then attach themselves to that position in the hope of getting credit for promoting the final agreement.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, explaining the computer model he's created, based on game theory, that can predict the outcomes of international conflicts. His interview with Sara Forrest appears in the 22 June issue of Computer World.
Torture is a felony, and is sometimes treated as a capital crime. The Convention Against Torture, which America ratified in 1994, requires a government to prosecute all acts of torture; failure to do so is considered a breach of international law.
I may have mentioned that I make mostly -- make that only -- fruit tarts. Never pies. Somewhere I got it into my head that pie crusts are impossibly difficult to make. Somehow I never found tart crusts difficult, but they're a little more sturdy than pie crusts, because they have to stand on their own.
I planned to take the old school route for this piecrust, which was my first, and after consulting with C on her renowned Crisco-crust I pulled out the Joy of Cooking to figure how to create a sweet enough filling from the perfectly ripe sour Michigan pie cherries that I picked up at the farmers' market yesterday.
And then I made of the mistake of checking Saveur to see what they had going on.
Their crust, based on one from The Pie and Pastry Bible which I've heard raves about elsewhere, calls for butter and cream cheese. And vinegar.
No Crisco.
This, as you can imagine, is suspect. Plus there's the issue of the tablespoon of whole cream that's called out as an ingredient but not incorporated anywhere else.
But I went for it, mostly because Saveur has never, not ever, let me down (outside of their website redesign which makes it impossible to find and share recipes but who knows: maybe that's their strategy?) (If it is it's a bad one).
After some three hours of crust making and cherry macerating the pie is now in the oven.
The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes [on June 25th], when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for.
It’s the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest in amateur radio. It’s possible, but only barely possible.
Nobel Prize winner and retired Princeton physics professor Joseph H. Taylor Jr. commenting in today's New York Times on the ability for amateur radio ham operators to bounce a signal off the moon.
Giant parabolic antenna radio telescopes have been assembled worldwide to facilitate a global moonbounce today in honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20.
Saw In the Heat of the Night, the 1967 Academy Award Winner for Best Motion Picture, for the first time tonight. Am embarrassed to admit that it took me this long, but somehow I managed to miss the memo that it may be one of the best movies ever made.
Pitch perfect every step of the way.
Each shot is so luscious in its composition that I couldn't bear to take my eyes off the screen. Each plot point is essential, of course, in the unraveling of the mystery, which the script unravels so brilliantly, but it's the performance of the actors that makes the movie unforgettable. The intensity of their engagement, the depth of their character portrayals. Sweet god in heaven why don't they make movies like this anymore?
If you've never seen it, see it soon. If you've already seen it, see it again.
And if you don't want to know anything about it before you watch it DON'T WATCH THE TRAILER.
Although I really must share with you that it's true what they say: They call him Mr. Tibbs.
Rimbaud (dead) Lautréamont (dead) Breton (gone to America) Marx Brothers (forbidden) English cigarettes (too expensive) American cigarettes (see English cigarettes) Jazz (no phonographs or recordings) Getting out of here (no papers, too expensive) Whiskey (too expensive) Picasso Cocteau
Text from a postcard from the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont to Paul Éluard written on 26 May 1942 from Nazi occupied Paris detailing what could and could no longer be had in the city under the occupation.
The ground floor exhibit features artifacts from artists and writers in France under the occupation -- the program from the first production of Anouilh's Antigone is here, as is a pseudonymous review of Sartre's Les Mouches. There are film posters and still shots of films made under the occupation including Marcel Carné's luminous Children of Paradise.
There are letters: one penned by later Marxist critic and then POW Louis Althusser who, en route to his concentration camp wrote of "the train that shakes my pen" before he enfolded his missive into an envelope addressed to his uncle and dropped it through the train's window onto the railroad tracks. It bore no stamp, only a request that it be delivered to his uncle's address in Paris. And it was.
There was another epistolary exchange between Marguerite Duras and her husband Robert Anthelme: his scribbled on a small spare scrap of paper that he has survived the camps; to which her letter replies "You're alive! You're alive!" and in which she writes of her fear that she might not have survived news of his death. Never mind that she had been sleeping with their mutual friend Dionys Mascolo since before the war; never mind that eventually she would throw the former over for the latter. Never mind. He was alive right then when worse was feared.
Photo: Robert Anthelme, Marguerite Duras and Dionys Mascolo
So downstairs there are writers surviving, collaborating and resisting Vichy France, and upstairs, in that lean hallway that runs alongside the Rose Reading Room there's Stonewall. 1967: The Year of Gay Liberation isn't afforded nearly the same real estate as the Vichy show, but like so many of the shows that hang in that hallway it's tightly curated to deliver a full body blow with minimal artifacts, and it's cast in a strong palette of groovy golds that put the yellowing sepias of the Paris show to shame.
Here too there were more print pieces: posters and zines; pamphlets, police reports, newspapers, and letters produced in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and the Lavender Menace response to Betty Friedan's lesbians-are-a-threat-to-feminism remarks. Ephemera, again. Small voices grasping in the swallowing din for a bullhorn to be heard by; a message in a bottle set upon the sea.
Here I am. Hear me.
I don't know if the NYPL planned these exhibits as complements. It's the first time I've seen such a strong echo between two simultaneously running exhibits in that space. The reverb was made stronger, perhaps, by the shouts coming now from Iran in the wake of the protests following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was impossible to not be keenly conscious of both the magnanimity and the fragility of the small human voice set against the force and will of a State that does not want to hear it.
The voices of the Green Revolution, as some have called it, are being amplified across the Web through retweets and vias and blog posts that trumpet the injustice and argue for the cause. These posts have and will most likely continue to play a potent and powerful role in spreading the word.
The social network Twitter acted as such an important conduit of information while events were unfolding in Iran that the U.S. State Department suggested that perhaps they should put off their scheduled maintenance and downtime in light of the fact that a revolution was underway. According to the New York Times:
This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.
Viewing the Vichy France and Stonewall exhibits at NYPL I was reminded that the government cannot always be trusted with preserving public freedom of expression, but I'm still alarmed that online there is no place that is truly public. We are having a public conversation across private enterprise channels.
The power and potency of the social graphs that folks are creating across social networks like Twitter and Flickr and Facebook and their blogs on Wordpress and Blogger ride on corporate dollars. That social networks afford individuals influence across the web and through their network neighborhoods is undeniable; the fact that corporations are bankrolling a dialogue that once upon a time unfolded in the public square or through businesses like newspapers where public interest was the core mission, is hardly being discussed.
I'm not ready to make an argument for government intervention in the online space, but it's a concern that has been gnawing on me since the SxSW conference in March where I heard over and over again folks speaking about using the Interweb as a communication tool for furthering human rights and self-expression -- but no one mentioned the fact that we're doing this on the back of big business.
Which brings us too to the question of the ephemera generated online during events like the Green Revolution: How will we recount the voices that spoke up when these events have passed and history has been written by the winners? Where will we display the green swathed avatars and the tweets that spread like a lightening strike in a dry tinder forest?
You couldn't identify anything anymore. The persistence of durable objects had been solidly defeated.
The poet Jean Follain describing Sant-Lô, Normandy, which was decimated by the allied bombing that accompanied D-Day.
"It's distracting; it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."
Ray Bradbury on the Internet in this morning's New York Times, which reports on his admirable defense of public libraries.
But, as someone who makes her living "in the air somewhere" (and is also a great lover of books) I'm left to wonder once again how the Internet became positioned in binary opposition to the paper artifact; how databases are assumed to be reasonable replacements for the hard tackle artifact of the book stack.
They are not.
Nor are digital books suitable replacements for IRL books. Doctorow got it right in *Content* -- the digital copy is for sampling, it's not any kind of equivalent for the real thing, but it's an essential and vital tool for reaching audiences and facilitating discovery.
Positioning digital as a rival and replacement to print digs a big huge cultural hole in which whole histories can be lost because of technological deprecation over time. We need to drop this alpha dog thinking and content ourselves with a world where each method of delivery plays its ever essential and always important role.
Posting by cameraphone from The Market at Larimer Square, Denver, stoked by espresso and a blueberry bran muffin the size of my head (to persist a theme). Apologies for any funky formatting.
Production Notes: Short film made with 4500+ still photographs. Shot with a Canon EOS 30D camera. Funded by the Seagate Creative Fund in 2008. Italian language with English subtitles.
Guys that talk about the ideal woman just don't like women. I don't want an ideal woman, I just like dames.
John Steinbeck in the July 1950 "All Male Issue" of Flair Magazine, when "handed a sketch pad and a snapshot of [a] plastic manikin" and asked by the editor "to draw his Ideal Woman in the same pose and give us his whys and wherefores."
I got my hands on this particular copy of Flair through eBay when I read that its editor, Fleur Cowles, passed away a couple of weeks ago. Flair counted W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Angus Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Ogden Nash and Clare Boothe Luce, Salvador Dalí, Saul Steinberg, Lucian Freud, Rufino Tamayo and Winston Churchill among its contributors.
At 50 cents a copy, Flair's standards and elaborate art direction managed to lose the publication money at a time when print was still going strong and most magazines sold for 20 cents. According to the New York Times:
Although there were just 12 issues of Flair, published from February 1950 to January 1951, the magazine caused a sensation and is still admired for its coverage of fashion, décor, travel, art, literature and other enthusiasms of Ms. Cowles’s. It was part of the Cowles publishing empire, which included newspapers in the Midwest and, most notably, Look magazine, of which Ms. Cowles had been an influential editor.
But Flair, incorporating cutouts, fold-outs, pop-ups, removable reproductions of artworks and a variety of paper stocks of different sizes and textures, was simply too expensive to produce, even though it sold for 50 cents a copy when Time and Life were selling for 20 cents.
When Flair ceased publication, Mr. Cowles, who had financed it, estimated that it had lost $2.5 million. Circulation, less than 100,000 for the first issue, eventually doubled, but advertising did not follow, and losses were running about 75 cents a copy.
Yesterday, during the deluge, Mr. Hoo climbed onto the roof. The goal was to clean the gutters, as it is every time the skies open wide and the thunder threatens.
I’ve trained myself not to worry and whine when the rain’s coming down and the ladder comes out and he pulls on his slicker. Instead I listen close for the thumps through the ceiling and the thick wet sloggy sounds that mean he’s liberated another pile of rotten leaves from the rain spout and flung them to the ground.
From each thud I extrapolate volume; with each thud I pray it's not sizeable enough to be him.
By late this afternoon those thudding piles of yesterday had burst out into a sudden chorus of forest on the path behind our house -- each seedling stretching for the sun, longing to be a tree.
Just discovered the work of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, friend of Tina Modotti (who was herself a student of Edward Weston) and colleague of Diego Rivera. Bravo taught at Chicago's Hull House and exhibited alongside Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans in New York. He was also the cameraman on Eisenstein's heretofore mentioned Que Viva Mexico.
I'm ashamed that I've never heard of him -- along with all the other astonishing talent from Central and South America that we generally ignore up North.
Shot this yesterday when we were out of cell range.
Just came off the James River between Urbanna and Irvington, Virginia, on the lovely 1930s-style raised deck motor cruiser Shadowfay. Captained by the inimitable BHOTW.
He was great in his genius; unhappy in his life; wretched in his death. But in his fame he is immortal.
From a memorial erected in Edgar Allen Poe's honor by a New York dramatist society because Poe's folks (whom he never really knew) were actors.
Posting by cameraphone from Richmond, VA where our excursion to the Poe Museum, coupled with our previous experience at the Writer's Museum in Dublin, has given Mr. Hoo all the evidence he needs to coax me *away* from museums dedicated to writers in the future.
Remember? This is the one where the dragon is slain. Where the princess stands with her hard-assed sword of not-taking-this-shit and slices through tumors like fruits that hang over-ready and ripe. Where the spell is broken when the cancer drops with a wet heavy thud and the cold stone creatures flush alive again.
This is the Brothers Grimm where long sleeps are followed by awakenings and good morning kisses and the kingdom restored. Where babies bounce the bed and shout GETUP GETUP because there's so much to *do* before this day is done but first let's make pancakes.
This is the story that doesn't end just yet read again and again like an incantation between covers that won't close warm forms cuddled close who can't bear knowing the night is here and fight with brave heavy lids and their last bit of strength to keep their Queen.
I was shocked when I got the report, because it said our No. 1 impact is milk production. Not burning fossil fuels for transportation or packaging, but milk production. We were floored.
Nancy Hirshberg, Stonyfield’s vice president for natural resources, commenting in this morning's New York Times on a report commissioned by her company in 1999 to assess their corporate impact on climate change.
The impact of the dairy industry on climate change results from the methane produced by cow belches.
Stonyfield and Danone (which owns a controlling interest in Stonyfield) have found that by restoring the cows to a diet that more closely mimics the sweet grasses they consume in the Spring, they're able to reduce their methane production to 18% among U.S. organic farms. In France, Danone has seen a 30% reduction when the diet was introduced across the larger commercial enterprise.
I'm not going to beat this "glad my guy won" horse into the ground, but this piece about Nancy Reagan's visit to the Obama White House touched me. I was reminded of an interview I saw with Ronald Reagan Jr. after his father's funeral in 2004 which he expressed anger at George W. Bush for abandoning his mother at the side of his father's casket, after Bush had escorted her up the steps to pay her respects at the state funeral.
I'm sure it wasn't malevolent, but it was wholly inconsiderate, and demonstrated a lack of compassion or awareness regarding the condition of others.
Nancy Reagan is nearly blind, Ron Jr. explained, and it was difficult for her to find her way back down the steps without assistance -- made more so by the public nature of the event.
Obama's gesture, as he graciously guided her through their meeting, was all consideration and kindness. Pure class.
The Beatles, really, made the music business. They took it from where it was, a small family business, and made it gigantic. The first time they came in, it was George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and they wandered in during the busiest time of the day. They were quite noticeable; they were wearing multicolored, beautiful clothing. I wanted to help them myself, but the store was jammed, but we pride ourselves on our musician customers.
I told them I had nobody to take care of them right away, but to feel free to try out whatever they wanted. They were great, they hung around for an hour or so, signed autographs, and purchased several thousand dollars worth of accessories. They got most of their instruments for promotion, but they wanted to try effects and they sure did buy a lot of stuff.
(...)
After that, the Beatles came in quite frequently, and when they did, all of them were perfect gentlemen, never asking to be served first. They would sit down quietly, they signed autographs. They were completely marvelous people. I loved the Beatles. They had tons of class.
Manny's Music was bought out by Sam Ash some ten years ago, which meant Sam Ash merchandising within the old Manny's innards. The New York Times ran a piece this morning about Manny's pending makeover: the old Manny's with its wall of fame will be mothballed and a Sam Ash interior will go up in its place.
I found the Goldrich book via The Virtual Wall of Fame, a site with the pure purpose of retaining some of the old Manny's vibe, albeit through a questionable information architecture.
Also from the book:
Les [Paul] is a genius. He did things with a guitar that no one else could do. He made effects that no one else could, and whatever he did he had a touch of gold; he was really good.
