Somebody Hire This Guy
Chicago boy seeks new job. The whole thing makes for a great Wednesday morning read. (via BoingBoing)
Also a brilliant visualizer (is that a word?) of google news and it’s prioritization of articles.
Axis of Aevil has a nice collecion of links to humdrum technicolor postcards.
The Don Quixote Plunge
This weekend I picked up the newly designed Penguin Classics edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It’s going to be a commitment but hopefully within a few months I will have crushed this tomb and come out a better man for it. I love the newly retooled Penguin Classics editions. I wish I could have them all neatly lined up on a book shelf. Not that I can really critically discern the subtle differences, but the edition I bought is the John Rutherford translation and not the popular Edith Grossman translation.
So far I’ve spent more time thinking about the old arcade game Super Don Quix-ote (that I used to play at Chuck E. Cheese), than I have reading the book. I’ve also been tracing some of the design history of the early Penguin Classic book covers.
Moreover, I’ve been busy compiling a list of ‘music to read quixote by’, which begins with: Kevin Shileds, Bonobo, and The Merken Dream. Now I need to get to the task at hand and actually read the damn thing.
(Note: above image contains a beautiful photo of grass taken by my step-father Peter.)
Friday Morning in Paris
The cats and I are taking a self-styled Paris vacation this morning. We can’t actually go anywhere, and I have work to do but we’ll just pretend that we’re working from home in Paris. I will smoke my pipe and listen to Beethoven while pretending my Mac is an Underwood Standard Typewriter No. 5. The cats will remain perched in our parisian windowsill listening and watching the busy foot traffic on the city streets below. They will fall asleep there and dream of the rich milk and small slices of cheese that I will feed them for lunch. Later in the morning, when the sun pushes through the fog, I’ll go for a short walk to buy some spices and maybe some turnip greens. Do they eat turnip greens in Paris? Hmmm, well, since I’m making it up, and it is my vacation – they definitely have turnip greens! The best part of this vacation is all the beautifully imagined aesthetics without having to talk to any french people or be bothered by language barriers. Perfect.
Nice article in The New Yorker called Pepsi Degeneration. The article highlights camera obscura artist Vera Lutter and her pin-hole photos capturing eerily the dismantling of a Pepsi-Cola sign along the Queens river. More beautiful shots of hers can be seen at KultureFlash.
Brother Can You Spare 12 Bucks?
What a classic debate – libraries versus stadiums? It’s one for the centuries. This debate probably goes back to the beginning of mankind. Surely the Egyptians and the Romans squared off a time or two on this one. Caligula (a.k.a Little Boots), never met a coliseum proposal that he didn’t like. If he had gotten his way all the time, all librarians would have been sold into slavery and their codices and scrolls would have been ground up for cattle feed or reconstituted for chariot glue.
The top Minnesota politicians are riding their own chariots this spring. They’ve begun to parade around the streets in large numbers, blocking traffic wherever they go. They aren’t kidding around this season. They’ve come dressed in full gladiator armor. Their swords catch the morning light just so and cast a beam of pure light on mission statements that are shorter than attention spans. You can almost catch a glimpse of the Trojan Horse in their compassionate smiles and flirtatious winks given on the morning television news circuits.
These guys have learned a thing or two from their once and future king Norm Coleman. Everyone loves a stadium and more importantly everyone loves the guy that can deliver a new stadium. Delivering a stadium to the people of Minnesota pretty much gives you a political force field and free keys to a new and better chariot.
The premise that I’m not buying in this debate is that somehow new stadiums and new libraries are mutually exclusive. Our finite resources dictate that you can have one one but not the other. I love the Twins and want desperately to watch them playing outdoors in a new stadium on grass. I would also love to be able to keep going to my library on an almost daily basis. I’d love that library to be open more then 3.5 hours a day! But if the states going to frame the debate in this way and make me choose sides, then I’m going libraries all the way. If the New Romans of our state can’t find five million for our libraries in need then I’ll be damned if their going to spend hundreds of millions on building a new stadium.
Luckily, there are some folks that aren’t waiting for leaders to mislead. They’ve taken it upon themselves to do the hard math and have started passing around the public collection plate. Basically the libraries are suffering from a 4.4 Million dollar budget cut. Spread that over the population and it comes out to $12 bucks a citizen. That’s a steal in my book (checked out from the library of course). So if you love libraries, say hell yeah! Now say it again. Now go to The Friends of Minneapolis Public Library and give $12 bucks.
Bill Murray versus RZA
From the incredible mind of Jim Jarmusch comes Coffee & Cigarettes, a movie about life’s two essential nutrients. Among all the great names associated with the film, I am esspecially looking forward to the scenes with Bill Murray and the Wu Tang’s RZA. That’s a screen pairing that’s way overdue.
It Was a Robins Egg
The sun is trying to warm this place and I try in vain to encourage it with ill-fated sun dances and late night prayers. The wind is strong and defies my attempts to bring spring out from its long hibernation. A fine wood bird feeder was bought to liven up the aviary that has begun celebrating with abandon in the back yard. It’s a Wild Kingdom competition between the ground squirrels and my flock of northern cardinals, house finches, and chickadees. The squirrels are winning out on the feeder right now. Their intimidation tactics and basic playground bulling have secured their position nicely. The cats are in heaven. They watch intensely the battle being fought, hoping for a chance to get in on the action and prove their superiority. I’m certain that both the squirrels and the birds thank me for holding the kittens at bay. Quite often, while staring out the window, the cats get worked up into a mad ecstasy; delirium takes over there little brains and they run around the house chasing nothing but air and imaginary ghosts. It’s fun to watch them tear their claws into dreamed up opponents with outbursts surfaced from lunacy. Good times.
I’ve become slowly addicted to the seasonal treat known as the ‘Robins Egg’. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically a malted milk ball that’s been dressed up for a spring fashion show. Speckles are the new black! Delicious in any color. A beautiful treat to have sitting in a nice bowl when dignitaries and guests arrive at your home. Martha is going away for awhile so it’s important that we all chip in and keep her spirit alive in our hearts and in our kitchens. The Robins Egg is my contribution.
A Sudden Rush of Boohbah to the Head
There are secret messages everywhere. I spent years on the farm trying to emulate Neil Pert beats on all the Rush albums. I even went so far as to read up on my Ayn Rand to properly understand the heavy messages the band was trying to get across. Little did I know that these blazing rock pioneers were just trying to decipher the codices of Samuel Morse. Fantastically, Rush’s rock opus ‘XYZ’ is an exact rhythm attack of the Morse Code letters XYZ. Damn! All this time we were playing records backwards trying to find the devil, while the real messages went unnoticed. This just opens the door to further musical speculation!
Are there any current bands carrying the torch for musical message mysteries? Certainly, the new Squarepusher record looks like a contender. The album ‘Ultavisitor’ strikes me as being loaded with hidden math-rock telegrams. It could take years to get to the bottom of this one. The album should have come with a decoder ring. I made the mistake of listening to the record while reading Chuck Palahniuk’s new short story Guts. I wouldn’t recommend this combination of media to anyone.
As a youth, I just wasn’t equipped with the proper education to handle these mysteries. The biggest brain-twister of my early childhood education came from the guy on the Electric Company who had toilet paper for ears and eyes. That one left me scratching my pre-cynical dome for quite a while. Todays kids are getting what they need. I believe this only after catching a glimpse of the PBS show Boohbah. Have you seen this thing; micro pod-creatures that run around in an ambient rainbow colored world who make farting noises and dance hypnotically to chilled out techno beats? That shit is crazy. But good. I look forward to a world run by the children who grow up on this stuff. They would have decoded that Rush song in a nano-second. Perhaps these kids will only speak in code when they get older. A whole new language based on farting noises. Should be interesting.
Lustron: House of the Future
There was a great documentary on PBS a few weeks ago called Lustron: The House America’s Been Waiting For. The Lustron home was supposed to be the ideal home of the future in the wake of a post-WWII housing shortage. The bright idea of engineer Carl Strandlund, the homes were to be all metal with a baked-on porcelain finish. The idea was to build a prefabricated maintenance free home that could be cleaned by simply hosing the thing down with a gardening hose. Demand for the homes skyrocketed, but a series of bad loans and poor management led the company to go bankrupt before they could blanket the world in baked porcelain. Only a few thousand homes were built. They are spread out all over America. It just so happens that in my neighborhood, on the 5000 block of Nicollet Avenue, there stand seven of these relics all lined up in a nice row. Only a few of them (like the one pictured above) maintain their original old school metal tile facade. Others have tried to hide and compromise their Lustron with stucco and bad limestone brick work. Mike Dust has a nice photo collection of all the Lustron homes on Nicollet. He’s also got a good collection of Lustron links.
