January 2010
24 posts
Helplessness is
needing a cigarette
missing a friend
forgetting a name
1 tag
Secret Lives of Machines
The ten cherry pickers in a parking lot by the side of I-39 all had their arms raised high and it looked exactly like they were toasting each other with big glasses of beer.
"Something, Something, Something, Detroit: Lazy... →
This is a fun article about how photographers frame shots of Detroit landmarks to make them look more sad and abandoned.
For instance, one of the accompanying photos shows a reporter ostensibly “climbing a hillock for a better view of the grassy wastes surrounding Jane Cooper Elementary School. If you move the camera just a few inches to the left you’ll get a bustling, well-maintained...
1 tag
PODCAST!
(It’s about dim sum.)
WatchTeeters on the brink of self-parody, over-corrects, veers dizzyingly into… ? …
Maya Deren’s lost cooking show?
A Different Kind of Weekend →
My review of Vampire Weekend’s Contra is out on Wunderkammer.
This weekend, my desire for stimulants (double-shot lattes, brisk walks) was always followed by desire for sedatives (wine, bubble baths). It was as if my body ran out of the necessary neurochemicals to create mood swings and had to outsource.
Notable omission
pornsoda:
One simply cares about other people, or one does not. To care about other people disingenuously or tepidly or conditionally or with selfish intentions or only in the right mood or only in the right company is to care about other people not at all. This is not to say that one cannot learn or come to know how to care about other people. Rather, it is to say that caring about other...
When I change my status on gchat now, these two options present themselves:
“Let’s get dangerous”
“Let’s get professional”
It feels like a major life choice every time.
A phone that plays music on tinny little speakers was everyone’s favorite Christmas gift this year. Several of them blast out harsh rhythms in the library; I tell the students to shut them off, but then their cheapass earbuds are just as loud. The hiss of secondhand bass is inescapable.
It’s snowing hard. Out the window, I can see late students shuffling in from the bus stop, hunched like peasants in a Breugel painting. Usually silence in the library is a troubling symptom of emptiness, but today the snow makes it feel comfortable. It suggests the dampening of sound rather than its absence, as if this were the only place of refuge from a cacophony of demanding...
My favorite words from the first 141 pages of...
“war-cake”
“stirk”
“kittiwake”
“clasp-knife”
“homefield”
“glebe-land”
“palisander”
“glacier”
Chicago feels heavy and settled now, after the break. The city is encased in snow, a hard crust of it that I doubt will crack again before March. Quite different from the little eddies of flakes that danced on the runway at JFK yesterday. They made all objects look insubstantial, so much that during takeoff, you’d swear the ground was dissolving beneath you.
Got through the day on stale tortilla chips, a freezer-burned veggie burger, and the rest of that goddamned Ritter Sport. My life would be improved by a firmer commitment to buying groceries - in the heat of the moment, though, it always seems like there’s something better to do.
At the airport. Paid $18.57 for lunch at Cibo “Gourmet Market.” Damn you, irresistible imported European treats! Ritter Sport will be the death of me.