A ten-minute montage of great quotes from The Wire. Half of which are totally incomprehensible without subtitles. Shiiit…
They say Hell is full of good intentions, one of which is my intention of writing a weekly post aggregating the B-grade stuff I post to Facebook. There are simply too many better things to do. Anyway, here’s some stuff I shared lately:
Liam Neeson in the A-Team movie! I guess that’s what they call “Fuck-You money”. ¶
Isn’t Roxy Music’s More than This the most depressing song ever? I find ostensibly depressing music à la Portishead or Tindersticks somewhat funny. But a hint of sugar in a song kills me. ¶
Writing this the day ChromeOS is out there in the wild, I’m more convinced Nicholas Carr’s arguments in The Big Switch are right. Which means the future hurts. ¶
Geocities was shut down in late October, but never fear! Archiveteam is going to rescue your shit! ¶
Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer’s history of Hip-Hop. I mean, Chap-hop! ¶
Nick Cave’s cover of I Put a Spell on You. ¶
Hackety Hack seems like a wonderful tool for learning how to program Ruby. It’s a shame that, as it is, some of the listings in the tutorial are incorrect and cause errors, disrupting the whole idea. But it’s still interesting if you know how to get you way out of trouble. ¶
Pixel is the ultimate example of webcomic minimalism. Why won’t the author just do away with the ‘drawings’ and call it “short funny dialogues”? ¶
I don’t travel much. Reading this page felt exotic. ¶
The Times’ list of the 100 best films of the decade is… polemic. I can’t agree on anything. I would never even consider one of the first fifteen. ¶
“ As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it – or at least that has been the case for most of its history. What else can we expect from a framework in which the most pregnant moment in the story has for decades been the commercial break […] ? ”
David Simon on why he created The Wire (The Times Online) is a great, fifteen page read.
For the last few days I’ve been watching the series back-to-back again and I’m sure The Wire shows television can indeed be a medium for serious storytelling. There are fortunately many other examples of good television throughout its history, but perhaps not as often as it happens in cinema. But I have no doubt in my mind The Wire is surely among the five best pieces of moving image art I have ever seen, besting the best of movies. If you consider its five seasons as a 3000 page, five volume script, it’s perhaps the best piece of writing ever done for an audiovisual medium. Every piece matters as Lester says, and the way everything fits in the end is a thing of true beauty.
Parts of it are a bit thin (it’s history in a nutshell, duh!), but it is a good enough script for a class on the History of the Internet (which I now do - got myself another teaching gig, on the subject of Art and Multimedia Communication, yeah!). It just needs some meat - some general background about the history of computing, and interesting stuff like Douglas Engelbart’s demo, object-oriented programming and the GUI.
Musical discovery of the weekend: Merrill Garbus. You can watch and listen some more (excelent) songs at 4AD Sessions, which seems like a promising idea for promoting music.
By the way, did you know the ukelele which Merrill plays in some of the other songs in the session is actually a portuguese instrument called the cavaquinho, brought to Hawaii by 19th century emmigrants?
The Boston Globe’s incredible gallery of Martian landscapes, as photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
And also: CGR posted a wonderful picture of the Martian night sky, in which both the Earth and Jupiter (and its moons!) can be clearly seen.
“ While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society. ”
Adbusters calls the ‘hipster’ The Dead End of Western Civilization (via Drive-by Blogging).
I may not agree on this overly dramatic tone, as hipsterism must be seen as something aligned with the fact that in a way Art History stopped somewhere in the late 70s. So, in the same way postmodernism means there are no longer vanguardists fighting both the art market and the previous vanguards, youth subversion too became postmodern, ceasing to truly exist.
I don’t even think hipsters exist. There might just be too many obnoxious douchebags, overgrown tweens caught in a loop of consumerism, peer pressure and a fix for vacuous praise, for as long as their parents can support that. Most will hit head-on against a brick wall after college, when faced with poor salaries and a job economy much worse than the economy that gave their parents material progress and enough of a surplus to generate their hipster douchebag children in the first place. Others will be lucky and have enough money to continue being obnoxious douchebags for the rest of their lives.
Same as it ever was.
Webapp of the day: Unfortunate Cookie presents you with… misfortune cookies. The interesting thing about it is that it mines data off the Footnote.com historical document database, therefore backing its predictions with weird newspaper articles from the past.
David Hlynsky’s Communist-Era Store Windows depicts advertising (or the lack thereof) in East European countries in the late 1980s. This kind of cleanliness is now unseen, Mac stores being the exception (I knew there was something totalitarian about Apple!). But cynicism aside, what strikes me is not so much the difference between the then and the now, but how similar in fact the windowdressings depicted in the series are to my own memories of Portugal (a non-communist country) in the 80s. Perhaps it’s wrong to see these images set in a capitalism vs communism context. I see them in a rampant-capitalism vs whatever-else context. Advertising just wasn’t such a big part of the overall economy back then.
So it’s actually Fifty Things Restaurant Staffer Should Never Do. Oh man, where to start? Some advice seems directed at high-end restaurants I can’t afford to go to, but in a nutshell this lists tells us what we’ve always knew: portuguese restaurants are pretty crap. And so are the bars, and the coffeeshops. Some highlights:
2. Do not make a singleton feel bad.
8. Do not interrupt a conversation. For any reason.
17. Do not take an empty plate from one guest while others are still eating the same course.
18. Know before approaching a table who has ordered what. Do not ask, “Who’s having the shrimp?”
25. Make sure the glasses are clean.
33. Do not bang into chairs or tables when passing by.
Most restaurants I’ve been to, even the more expensive ones, easily break twenty of the fifty recommendations. (via Kottke)
Update (Nov.5): And here’s part two. So one hundred things it is.
Cory Doctorow has a new novel out called Makers, which you can, as usual, download for free from his website.
I have a colossal number of pages to read as part of my Master’s thesis investigations, but I’ll read this as soon as I feel I need a break from those readings.
“ 892: Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney strapped the head of a defeated foe to his leg, the tooth of which grazed against him as he rode his horse, causing the infection which killed him. ”
The Wikipedia’s List of unusual deaths, ranging from the funny and stupid to the appaling and gruesome. Some are all that. (via The Null Device)
