Archives for June 2008
Caterina Fake has fantastic taste in literature: Arthur Schnitzler, Elfriede Jelinek, Stefan Zweig. I found her blog googling a book and enjoyed her concise reviews, (All The Pretty Horses — “Reading it was akin to seeing your cult band sell out, putting out Top 40 when previously they’d written only complex hieroglyphics whose meaning could be teased out only by those willing to climb the mountain and take the vows,” Alfred Jarry –”Turgid, overwritten and solipsistic.”) It wasn’t until a few years later I realized (what was once) her day job. Glad she’ll have more time now for the “hugely ambitious novel.”
“‘Is this your first time in Detroit?’ Mary inquired. ‘You’re going to love it! It’s just like Paris.’” - Washington Post travels to the “Most Miserable City in America” and declares it “beguilingly authentic — gritty and romantic.” (via.)
Wired profiles Trevor Paglen, a photographer who snapped 189 secret spy satellites. “Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan — a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 — to predict where a given ‘black satellite’ will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.” Other subjects he’s captured: “various military sites in the Nevada deserts, ‘torture taxis’ (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs”
Brion Gyson, who invented and later taught William Burroughs the cut-up technique, also gave Alice B. Toklas the recipe for her now famous brownies.
The Church of Scotland’s new moderator maintains the “Mod’s Blog.” The Times shares with us some of his bon mots, “Came up with idea for a new device — the iPray. No idea yet what it would do.” The piece is written by Allan Brown, who has another funny article about how sushi and shopping malls are incompatible, at least in Glasgow.
More from Tom Moody: “If you hate Matthew Barney–and who doesn’t?–you might enjoy these stills from Creamistress 6: The Centered Polenta.”
The Celebrity Atheist List reads like a roster of The Tomorrow Museum’s favorite people: J.G. Ballard, Bjork, Ingmar Bergman, Vic Chesnutt, David Cronenberg, Warren Ellis, Brian Eno, Stephen Fry, Rachel Griffiths, Diane Keaton, Mike Leigh, Stanislaw Lem, Cillian Murphy, Gary Numan, Bruce Sterling, and Angelina Jolie too! The page on Heather MacDonald is especially interesting, as she is a conservative. I adored her book The Burden of Bad Ideas, and many of her City Journal columns…ermm, well, right up until she started writing about why we don’t need civil liberties anymore. (via Technoccult, who adds, “And of course, one could write such a list for every major religion. My point here is that spirituality is not required for creativity and inspiration.”)
“Do you know who Marcel Duchamp is? Do you know who Roland Barthes is? Do either of them have any bearing on art practice?” From Tom Moody’s quiz “What Kind of Net Artist Are You?”
The mind delights at the design possibilities and pteromerhanophobia sufferers need not fear the prospect of “metallic glass” used as aircraft wings. UK researchers have new insights about glass properties — that it’s a “‘jammed’ state of matter that moves very slowly.” This will mean further developments in “metallic glass” — attempts to make metal get harder with stress –no more dents — and also easier to mold, as it will soften rather than turn to liquid when heated.
New Scientist interviews Jan Chipchase, whose travels around the globe as a design researcher for Nokia have lead to many stunning insights as to how foreign countries use mobile technology. “The common denominator between cultures, regardless of age, gender or context is: keys, money and, if you own one, a mobile phone,” he says, “[It] boils down to survival. Keys provide access to warmth and shelter, money is a very versatile tool that can buy food, transport and so on. A mobile phone, people soon realise, is a great tool for recovering from emergency situations, especially if the first two fail.” He gives an fascinating example of Ugandians using their prepaid mobile cards as a money transfer system, “They would buy prepaid credit in the city, ring up a phone kiosk operator in a village, read out the number associated with that credit so that the kiosk operator could top up their own phone, then ask that the credit be passed on to someone in the village - say, their sister - in cash.”
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