May 2012
2 posts
I wasn't going to say anything about the Whitney... →
I belong to the Whitney. I went to the biennial last week. What I found was an exhausted building holding objects exhibiting the exhaustion of the art world.
It’s not as if our culture does not create beautiful, thought provoking things. I pointedly did not write above of the exhaustion of Western Civilization, of which I am an unrepentant admirer, but of the art world.
As I live my...
April 2012
1 post
2 tags
“There have been several leaps forward, adding wholly new dimensions to our basic...”
– The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower - Hans Villarica - Health - The Atlantic
March 2012
7 posts
“At the service of their obstinately narrow, small ideas he has placed the...”
– Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea.
This year’s winner at the Played-Out Verbal Tic Awards: “Really? Really?!”
Overheard:
—I’m not much of a reader… Actually, I don’t like reading… At all.
Can I bring myself to get on the elevator with these guys?
5 tags
Brand gamification. I first encountered it several years ago as some neighbors argued about Ralph Lauren.
—Well, it was the best Ralph Lauren. Black label.
—No, there’s another one: purple. They only sell it at their best stores.
You know, the stores that the first speaker apparently didn’t go to, was unaware of, was too much of a brand n00b to be aware of.
I have a weakness for...
February 2012
2 posts
Free-range artisanality considered dangerous
If your “unique selling proposition,” if your strategy for saving your commodity product from oblivion, is intimately involved with imbuing your aforementioned commodity product with some conceptual or psychological or status-signalling benefit, you should take pause. You should take a long pause if that imbuation process—yes, I did, I think I did indeed just make that word up—yields a...
See a Pattern? Featured books at Three Lives & Co. →
January 2012
5 posts
1 tag
“One doesn’t know what ought to astonish the most: the tyrannical madness...”
– Vivant Denin (author of No Tomorrow), regarding the pyramids.
4 tags
WatchAnnual New Year’s Garbage Can Ball Drop at 700 on Flickr.
Use and abuse of reference in the arts
Everything is quotation, everything is a remix, nothing new can be said, and good artists copy where real artists steal. I plus or minus agree with these statements; I’m willing even to call them insights. But as insights, they’ve inevitably been mis-applied, mis-interpreted, and generally abused.
Assume that everything is simply a rehashing of things that have come before.[1] This...
December 2011
25 posts
A tool for using people
Kant asserted that morality demands that human beings, being rational creatures, be treated as ends in themselves and not as instrumental, as mere means to an end. Klout represents a complete repudiation of this principle, as Klout aspires to help organizations identify those who “drive action” and therefore should be targets—objects—of organizations’ efforts to achieve their...
The American mall and the grammar of space
There is a grammar to human spaces. I was driving home from Christmas
at my parents’ house, low on gas, and I noticed that I instinctively
knew where gas stations might be—and also where I knew that they
would not be. The grammar of spaces changes over time. For example,
take the American mall. For decades, one could with relatively high
confidence identify whether a given store might...
Thoughts on public education, schools
Teachers can, like doctors who image themselves the progency of
Hippocrates and historians the children of Herodotus, connect
themselves to a proud tradition that goes back to Plato and
Aristotle. (To have tutored the man who went on to rule the world:
there is something to put on your cv!)
But let’s remember that the important thing is teaching not the
existence of a distinct class of...
Benefits of driving to Stravinsky
I started playing Rite of Spring as I merged onto 95 South on my drive home. This piece of music so colors the driving experience that I believe that if it were required listening for all drivers at all times, automobile accident rates would plummet. Listening to Stravinsky while driving is akin to listening to Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score while showering: it is sure to make one more...
Further thoughts on the woman and the SUV
Consider the movie The Breakup. In it Jennifer Aniston is with Vince Vaugh, a slovenly waste of space who passes his time talking trash against fourteen year old video game opponents via XBox Live. The tragedy is not that Vince Vaughn is a waste of space, though he is.
It is that Jennifer Aniston does not have an SUV.
…
Consider the gift of an SUV from a suburban man to his female...
Princeton's pedestrians
I dislike commuting. I dislike even more driving inside urban areas. Urban environs are at their best human-scale, not automobile-scale. If I ruled Philadelphia with the velvet glove-covered iron fist that I dream of ruling the city with, I would close Arch, Market, Chestnut, and Walnut Streets to commuter traffic and reserve them exclusively for bicycles, taxis, buses, and delivery trucks. And...
Women and SUVs
Closing in on Princeton, I saw an impeccably-dressed woman in a large, black, recently laundered Land Rover.
Single women and SUVs. Let me get this category out of the way. Do single women own SUVs? Yes, actually, I know one. She’s into cycling and other outdoor activities. An SUV is useful to her. Utility is a fundamentally uninteresting topic in the context of women and SUVs. It’s...
Commuting
Driving up 206 North toward Princeton, I notice signs for NJ Transit, for bus stops. This is a fairly rural area: why are there bus stops? I look to the left, to the houses along the road: modest mansions, abodes of people who can afford automobiles.
Perhaps the absent-minded professors would rather take buses. Perhaps it is best for everyone that they take buses. And while I am no fan of buses,...
Aesthetics and morality revisited
Gresham Riley recoiled in horror—or perhaps with contempt—when I casually said to him that aesthetics and morality are the same thing—morality is the aesthetics of human action, and when he recoiled, I instinctively felt shame, guilt, and a sense of being in error.
But what was wrong about this statement? At the time—and even more so now—I believe that the analogy is a two way one, that...
“After [Beckett] the theater still exists, true, perhaps it is even evolving; but...”
– Milan Kundera, “The Painter’s Brutal Gesture: Francis Bacon,” Encounters.
“If I go into a butcher’ shop I always think it’s surprising that I...”
– Painter Francis Bacon, quoted by Milan Kundera in “The Painter’s Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon” collected in Encounter.
And having just witnessed, man’s inhumanity to (wo)man, I try in vain to find distraction in a book.
Greil Marcus on the Doors →
“… when there seems to be no possibility of communication, that nevertheless culture can take shape…”, “…a secret meeting in a public space…”
While reading Why Trilling Matters at the Khyber
It occurs to me that there is no easy way to over-share what I’m reading at any given moment, either using this new-fangled Path contraption or Foursquare, and the vast majority of the time I have a book under my hands as I over-share nearly every pointless detail of my pathetically pointless life. (Don’t worry, I’m not inordinately down on myself: I think your life is probably...
This particular present that we live in now, does it deny us a context for or a capability of or a means for understanding ourselves—individually and collectively—in a way that previous nows did not? Will the future provide a present in which people will be able to make sense of their lives, or is humanity henceforth doomed to travel in to real and imagined pasts and futures to tease out of them...
Whole Foods has aisles dedicated to “natural” products that do nothing for conditions that do not exist. What Whole Foods does not stock, apparently, are products for mundane problems, like moleskin, for the blister on my heel from my new pair of Dr Martens.
“[T]hey do not know the measure of their hopes; they do not guess that their...”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Vol de Nuit.
November 2011
25 posts
Surface area
Jane Jacobs identified block size as an important factor in determining an urban area’s vitality. Large blocks socially and economically isolate streets from each other and create zones of commercial blandness where the people from these discrete areas do come together. Small blocks, on the other hand, weave together those who work, live, and entertain themselves on adjacent streets.
...
To say I do not give a shit about football is an understatement. I have a meta-interest in it however, as something that betrays people’s stupidity and vile character. For example, has it occurred to anyone that having professional football teams attached to colleges and universities as cash-generating businesses creates the perfect opportunity for, I don’t know, offensive abuses of...
The on-hold experience
I have a sore throat. I am achy. However much I am not looking forward to swallowing enormous, reeking antibiotic capsules this morning was clearly time to make a doctor’s appointment.
I just got off a fourteen minute phone call with Jefferson Family Medicine, thirteen of those fourteen minutes having been spent on hold. Being on hold, even for a long time—I realize thirteen minutes is but...
