Bikes of San Francisco
Designed by Tor Weeks
Spot on.
Path puts a silly amount of trust in its avatars, especially given their tiny size. I never know who the shoes are.
Path is more tappy than typey. That’s fine, I suppose. It certainly makes for a clean flow.
Path is tappy and its content reads like the content of taps. “I am in a place,” you tap. “:)”, come the replies.
Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums. They are shaped like battleships and grain silos and crumpled souffles. There is much said about flow and fatigue and how one of these has been optimized and the other one reduced.
These museums are very exciting when they open. You show up and marvel along with all of the other fans of architecture. Maybe you return for one of those nights where they stay open late and there is a band and drinking. “A great space,” you think. Maybe one day you’ll be rich and rent out the atrium for a private party.
The art doesn’t get talked about so much at these museums. The museum itself is the “social object,” as it were.
Eventually the particulars around which the museum was designed fall out of fashion. A fresh crop of architects finds it to be too flashy, or too dull, or to have been guided by faulty principles. There is congestion where there should be flow. Certain rooms are simply exhausting. Maybe it is even an eyesore.
This is good for the museum. Now they can really fuck up the place. Fill a room with a thousand cubic feet of lead. Let Matthew Barney dangle from a rope and scribble some shit high on a wall where no one can see it. Or: just let their rooms be dull rooms filled with rousing art.
Path is a monument to Path. It is no place to scribble in. I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-25)
- Pavement (12)
- Hot Chip (11)
- Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers (11)
- Fleetwood Mac (10)
- Bon Iver (10)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Christmas is a time for family, so gather ‘round and let Björk tell you about the electrical wonders of the television.
Note the sports watches on both wrists, 2012 trend makers.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-18)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Truman Capote, New Orleans 1947
There’s something undeniably sexy about Capote’s expression in this photo, but it holds a pervasive, disturbing undertone. This is the same photo, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that is on the back of the edition of In Cold Blood I read the summer I lived in Mexico City.
On Avenida Mazatlan, between my apartment and the Chapultapec metro stop, there was a small used book store. It was ramshackle, cramped, and filled with the crisp smell of aging paper—as a good used bookstore should be. I first stepped in during a Quixotic attempt to find an English-language copy of Infinite Jest for Infinite Summer. Naturally, while living abroad, I sought to broaden my horizons by staying indoors reading a massive novel set in the city I’d just left.
Though I never found IJ, I did find a small cache of carefully-curated English-language books that were all darkly related to living in Mexico or Central America: Bel Canto, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Old Man and the Sea, In Cold Blood.
The experience of reading Capote’s account of the unprompted slaughter of a Kansas family, and the trial of their remorseless killers was haunting. More than that, it was confusing and unsettling to someone who generally believes that all people are compassionate. It demonstrated, in a way I hadn’t before understood, the human capacity for pure violence, which was, I guess, a fitting lesson for that time and place.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-11)
- Times New Viking (43)
- Yuck (36)
- Yo La Tengo (33)
- The Brian Jonestown Massacre (13)
- Animal Collective (12)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Death Ride: Tour of the CA Alps
This sounds like the best kind of bad idea.
“129 miles of super-scenic biking over 5 passes that include 15,000 feet of climbing”
Document: The Symbolism Survey
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?
McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.
His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.
The pages here feature a number of the surveys in facsimile: Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer. Each responder offers a unique take on the issue itself—symbolism in literature—as well as on handling a sixteen-year-old aspirant approaching writers as masters of their craft.
Kerouac
Ayn Rand
Ray Bradbury
(Source: misspants)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
