On the Ridiculousness of Wrathful Reaction to Swell Ideas
Topic: Arts
6:52 am EDT, Oct 20, 2008
My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh, I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.
A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all. -- Louis Kahn
I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.
Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.
Overhead, the sun is a wrathful god. It is made to ravage a dying land.
The boy stands in a dry gulch. He tilts his hat to the sting of the wind.
These men are patriots, says The Coach.
I reckon.
Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.
Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new.
It has been a historic few days. We have been reminded of a simpler time.
Mourners include those who are looking for answers to the pressing questions being asked in our country today.
They seem to be asking, What can we do about our country now?
Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone.
Indeed, charisma, intelligence, and ambition, tempered by a self-deprecating wit, are the particular hallmarks not so much of a great black politician as of any great one.
Anathem is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.
This time, Stephenson has given himself the broadest stage yet: a world of his own creation, including a new language. Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog. It's got elements of Dune, The Name of the Rose, and Michael Frayn's quantum-physics talkathon, Copenhagen. Befitting a novel written by a founding member of the History Book Club, its leitmotif is time—and its message couldn't be more timely.
See also:
For a while I was trying to impose a policy of having a harpoon-throwing character in every single one of my books. But it's difficult to maintain that kind of restraint.
And:
"I had the idea that there would be people who voluntarily stay inside those walls," said Stephenson, a fit 48-year-old who looks like he should carry a broadsword, "as a way of getting away from the distractions of everyday life, of doing something in a serious way that took a long time. And one of their jobs would be to care for the clock."
Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate.
For Coelho, digital is about relationships. The internet always is - and he is revelling in the new connections it gives him with his readers. He loves to meet them face-to-face. He mentioned on his blog that he'd like to invite a few readers to a party in a remote town in Spain and he was shocked that they were willing to fly in from as far away as Japan. Now he regularly invites readers to his parties.
From the archive:
Our reporter brought a 3 liter jug of "White Ace" cider back to the states, which is 7% alcohol per volume and only about $3.50 US for the whole 3 liter jug. When the test subject drank the whole bottle of "White Ace," in Las Vegas, the effects were severe. He got kicked out of 4 Queens casino for washing his hands in a urinal, then fell asleep for 3 hours and woke up soaked in his own urine. He woke up and got into a 6 year old's pirate costume, ran around slapping gamblers in the gut, got kicked out of The Imperial Palace, and became so obnoxious that his friends put him on a plane and sent him home early.
If scientists have been able to create glowing green hair by merging jellyfish DNA with that of the mice, would it be possible for a "Real Genius" such as nanochick to create Warez, the Glowing Pumpkin?
In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. This project won several international design awards.
From the archive:
Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. Beever's images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle.
These unbelievable photos are chalk drawings done by Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner. Both Julian and Kurt have different styles to create an amazing 3D illusion.
Scroll down slowly and stop at each new frame. Julian Beever is an English artist who’s famous for his art on the pavement of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium.
Most of his artwork it is impossible to tell whats real from what’s an illusion. Very cool stuff.
The word “capitalize” comes from “capital,” meaning “head,” and is associated with importance, material wealth, assets and advantages. We have capital cities and capital ideas. We give capital punishment and accrue political, social and financial capital. And then there is capitalism, which is linked to private ownership, markets and investments. These words shore up the towering single letter that signifies us as discrete beings and connote confidence, dominance and the ambition to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
Or not ...
“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”
Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness.
The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.
Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip.
Far away, so close:
"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."
If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.
To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
... What does a man need---really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all---in the material sense.
... Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?
From earlier today:
I honestly believe that for my startup(s), the personal edge I gain from swimming or surfing in the ocean every day in a small town in Florida is larger than any advantage I got by living in Atlanta.
WE LOVE COMIC SANS ... and we'll kill animals to prove it
Typography is not simply a frou-frou debate over aesthetics orchestrated by a hidden coterie of graphic-design nerds. You need only imagine a STOP sign that utilizes the heavy-metal typefaces favoured by bands Dokken or Krokus to realize that clear, clean and direct typography can save lives, or at the very least prevent drivers from prolonged bouts of confused squinting.
Because everything you read, every sign, book and logo, is in a font. Fonts are like the air: you don't notice them when they are fine, only when they are mucked up or obscure.
Virginia Postrel talks with Gary Hustwit — director of Helvetica — about filmmaking, creativity, and the expressive implications of one of the world's most popular typefaces
Stefanie Posavec's maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces. It’s not often that I am so thoroughly impressed by the depth of an artist’s work, but somehow, for me, these pieces do it all. I know, who would’ve thought I’d have stumbled upon such incredible work in the gallery across from our hotel in Sheffield! It just goes to show the world is full of surprises.
