Of Time and the City is both a love song and a eulogy to Liverpool. It is also a response to memory, reflection and the experience of losing a sense of place as the skyline changes and time takes its toll.
"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog.
According to Mad Decent, the record label, Major Lazer is a Jamaican commando who fought in the “secret Zombie War of 1984” and lost both arms in combat.
Then the U.S. military equipped him (*) with experimental lasers that double as prosthetic limbs.
Shelby also coaxed Mullen to praise Alabama's very own littoral combat ships. "Could you tell us here the advantages that the Navy will gain once the service begins to utilize the LCS?" he asked.
"Okay," Mullen obliged. "I need the LCS at sea, deployed today. ... It offers unique characteristics in terms of speed and mobility and ..."
We are now, involuntarily and unceasingly, it often seems, assailed by a superabundance of electronic information, which can confuse and repel as much as it enlightens us. By contrast, when we pick up a book, we are making a deliberate choice that is limited to the contents between the cover, and we can see, feel, and smell what we are getting.
Wordnik: An ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them
Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they've found what they consider to be "enough" information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don't want to wait—if you're interested in a word, we're interested too!
Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.
Aleksandar Hemon's new stories have earned Starred Reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist:
... beautifully twists the language in this collection of eight powerful and disquieting stories.
Hemon arranges words like gems in a necklace.
Writing with steely control and an antic eye, Hemon has assembled another extraordinary work.
Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, and unquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers.
Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor.
I think envy is unavoidable. I think it's an absolutely essential emotion, and so rarely discussed. It's a basic emotion. All of us are unavoidably inadequate, because there's so much that we can't do and that we don't know.
It seems very important as an adult to have a good relationship to your own envy.
About the book, on sale next month in the US:
I wrote The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work to shine a spotlight on the working world. I wanted to write a book that would open our eyes to the beauty and occasional horror of the working world—and I did this by looking at 10 different industries, a deliberately eclectic range from accountancy to engineering, from biscuit manufacture to logistics.
The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy.
We are the heirs of two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human. Thus is born The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.
John Legend recently delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences.
Here's John Jackson on Legend's speech:
He argued for the academic conceptions of “truth” that he learned as an undergraduate, conceptions he considers a lot more rigorous and weighty than what gets passed off as truth in the contemporary public/politic sphere.
He challenged the students to hold fast to the methodological and epistemological lessons they learned in their Penn courses. He dared them to think internationally by putting their own relative luxuries in conversation with the material disadvantages of human beings in other parts of the world. He asked students to redefine “soul” as a framework for operationalizing more holistic engagements with our social world and more empirically verifiable/falsifiable truth-claims based upon such engagements.
Legend proffered soul as an apt scaffolding for the substantive stuff that truth should be made of. He thinks of soul and truth as directly related, even mutually constitutive.
As a soul-singer, people sometimes ask him to define soul. And according to Legend, it isn’t reducible to race or a conventional genre of popular music. Anyone can be soulful, he says in the speech, just as long as the person is “authentic,” “real and pure,” trying to find fleeting but fecund moments “when silence and sound come together” so profoundly and unpredictably that it might bring tears to one’s eyes. And those eyes will always see the world just a little bit differently as a result.
Super Slo-mo Surfer in the South Pacific, on BBC Two
Topic: Arts
8:20 am EDT, May 20, 2009
HD super slow motion video of big wave surfer Dylan Longbottom in a 12 foot monster barrel - the first shots of their kind ever recorded.
Sterling Hayden:
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.
Tim Winton:
The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.
Sanford Schwartz:
If Julian 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.
Jenny Diski:
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.
