Archives for August 2009
The Bullitt chase scene on Google Maps. Also a Risky Business map “detailing Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay’s exploits in a gold Porsche 928.”
As a teen, did you jump start cars, deal hash, runaway from home, threaten to kill yourself when your boyfriend took another girl to the prom? Good news! You might be brilliant now! “The brains of teens who behave dangerously are more like adult brains than are those of their more cautious peers.” (via.)
No longer too early to call it, I think Significant Objects is the best new blog this year. So I was thrilled when Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker asked me to contribute. Here’s my essay about an object. From the most recent project update: “Aggregate cost of objects, sold so far: $50.25 Aggregate sales, post-Significance: $1,092.16″
Naked Lunch turns 50 on Friday. “It’s a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift’s Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect,” William S. Burroughs told Jaguar Magazine in 1996, full interview reprinted on Stop Smiling Love this quote too: “I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.” (If you’re in Chicago, celebrate the novel’s birthday by paling around with terrorists and the actor who played Burroughs in Cronenberg’s film.)
PSFK takes a look at Savannah College of Art and Design’s “Working Class Studio”(among the recent grads: Linda McNeil, my sister.) SCAD sets a budget for developing products by students in the program and sells them at stores around the country.
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention: “I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season…. I imagine an attention tax that aspiring cultural producers must pay. A barrier to entry. If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice.” (via.)
When I visited post-Katrina New Orleans a couple years ago, my friend/tourguide laughed when I asked if various construction projects around town were due to the hurricane. He told me there were plenty of scaffolding and yellow cones before the storm, and afterward, well, some of the builders found themselves eligible for various government grants and assistance. Here’s Thomas Morton in Vice seeing something similar in Detroit ruin photography (via.) “The city’s second-most-overused blight shot is of the mile-long ruins of the Packard Auto Plant in East Detroit. ‘This is the visiting reporters’ favorite thing to see,’ [photographer] James [Griffioen] said. ‘The people all come here to shoot the story of the auto industry and they love this shot because they can be like, ‘See that? That’s where they made the cars,’ and then forget to add the footnote that the plant’s been closed since 1956.’”
My proposed SXSWi panel with Richard Nash: The Novel in 2050. Research shows reading a book for as little as six minutes may cut stress levels in half. But have Twitter-length attention spans decreased demand for novels? What is the future of the “non-networked” book? This panel will debate the relevance of novels in a networked world. (Blip.tv clip of Nash’s talk at 140 characters conference mentioning book groups — 12:25 — and — 14:00 — how painting didnt get killed by film. More here in his recent Publisher Weekly article on “the future of [some] publishing.”) Our friends at Snarkmarket want to take you to 2020, and have a cool sounding panel focusing more on the actual gadgetry of reading. Great discussion on their blog. I’m also super excited about Erin Donovan’s panel for SXSW film: “Animating Reality: The New Frontier for Documentary”. If you aren’t listening to her weekly podcast Steady Diet of Film, I don’t know what your ears are doing.
There’s an entire museum devoted to counterfeit objects — Musee de la Contrefacon (The Museum of Counterfeiting) founded in 1951.
From WSJ: “As long the economy stays grim, bankruptcy filings will become increasingly common – which may diminish the stigma that accompanies bankruptcy. It is, in a sense, surprising that so many Americans should still feel ashamed of bankruptcy when those in a far more comfortable situation feel no such chagrin. Corporate bankruptcies are an accepted part of doing business from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Executives who collect $30 million from a bank in the years before it collapses are not expected to give it back.”
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