Stanley Fish - Think Again - New York Times Blog

“Even these days, when it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between a general-release motion picture and soft pornography, two of the most erotic moments one can find on film feature no nudity and bodies just touching.

Both are ‘50s movies. The first, the 1951 “A Place in the Sun,” pairs a ravishing 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift. In a scene where the two are dancing and declaring their love for each other, Taylor sets up a rendezvous. “I’ll pick you up outside the factory,” she tells Clift; and then she breathes into his ear: “You’ll be my pickup.” Moments later the emotional intensity is raised even higher when Clift exclaims, “If I could only tell you how much I love you. If I could only tell you all.” In response, she draws him closer and in a voice that could ignite fires implores him, “Tell mamma, tell mamma all.”

“Sexy” doesn’t even begin to describe it…”

NYT/ Freakonomics

“On a forum at the Chicago outpost of City-Data.com, a certain JohnDoe2008 asked suburbanites: ‘Why do you like suburbs over [the] city? Be honest please, I never understood it, still don’t. I might have serious problems, because I hate even looking at pictures of suburbs.’

Respondents cited backyards, quiet and cheap living, and congestion-free commutes — the very sort of suburban characteristics that have started to change due to higher gas prices, more single-person households, and even refugees.

What will the future hold for suburbs..?”

Washington Post

“Pandora is one of the nation’s most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has…”

Vint Cerf/ the guardian.co.uk/ the observer

“The internet is still very young. It was only November 1977 when a group of computer scientists successfully connected three networks around the world, including one at University College London. It took until 1989 for the internet to become commercially available and about another decade after that for it to achieve widespread household use in Europe and the United States. Only then did we emerge from what I think of as the ‘internet comma’ days, when its mention in the media was always followed by a comma and a short description…”

» Yanko Design

“Alarm clocks usually jolt us awake leading us to reach for the almighty snooze button. Silence is a conceptual alarm clock that allows you to program multiple alarms and wakes you without any sound. Each person wears a wireless rubber ring with an integrated vibration device that generates a tactile alarm. The snooze function is engaged by shaking your hand. However, each successive time you want to snooze, more movement is required, making sure you get to work on time…”

It’s perhaps pushing it to say that Byrne and Eno inadvertently changed the face of popular music with that album, but not much: whatever Steve Reich and Stockhausen got up to in the 60s, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ combination of jittery dub, Fela Kuti-influenced funk and borrowed voices sounds like the direct precursor to sampling as it has come to be known. So it’s hard to stop a certain weight of expectation hanging heavy over the duo’s first joint-effort in 27 years. Eno notes that their intentions in making Everything That Happens Will Happen Today were “quite different” - for one thing, it’s a collection of what Byrne described as “proper songs”, with Eno providing the music and Byrne the vocals and lyrics - but neither party has lost the capacity for the kind of unprecedented blue-sky thinking that fuelled their previous collaboration’s most groundbreaking aspects.

New York Times/ Art & Design

“‘On the back patio of an East Village apartment, Natasha Kouri sat on a bench surrounded by plastic bottles and bags. She picked up a bottle from the woman on her left, who chopped its bottom off at the Poland Spring label. Ms. Kouri wove a handful of bags through the opening and handed the work in progress to her right. A bearded man taped the bags to the bottle, fluffed the bags into petals and tossed the results into the growing pile of plastic petunias: 775 down, only 1,225 to go.

“We’re the art minions,” Ms. Kouri, 21, said with a smile last week. “What the directors tell us to do, we do.”

With reggae-trance music as a soundtrack, this six-person assembly line cut, stuffed, fluffed. In the building’s central courtyard another team…”

we make money not art

“REACTIVATE!! is a two-fold exhibition which runs until late August, at the Espai d’ Art Contemporani de Castelló, near Valencia in Spain. The first part, which i covered earlier this week (see REACTIVATE!! Part 1, Urban reanimations and the minimal intervention and Retired priests have all the fun) engages with recent architecture projects which makes the most of disused, outworn or inadequate urban spaces and buildings to create striking new edifices. On the cheap and with jaw-dropping results.  “

— Andy DeSoto

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the age of DISQUS, it was the age of Tumblr. Over the past two days, two highly-regarded and much-loved Internet services released updates: Top-notch global commenting system DISQUS and microblogging/aggregation tool Tumblr.

Unfortunately, in the world of incremental updates, all is not created equal, as these two very different releases have demonstrated….

In the early days, we’d go skiing together and Peter would have an idea every 30 seconds,” says the British entrepreneur Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group includes more than 200 companies. “We’d be sitting on the lift with me scribbling madly in my notebook, trying to get everything down. He’s worse than me.

New York Times

“A decent backyard magic show is often an exercise in deliberate chaos. Cards whipped through the air. Glasses crashing to the ground. Gasps, hand-waving, loud abracadabras. Something’s bound to catch fire, too, if the performer is ambitious enough — or needs cover.

“Back in the early days, I always had a little smoke and fire, not only for misdirection but to emphasize that something magic had just happened,” said The Great Raguzi, a magician based in Southern California who has performed professionally for more than 35 years, in venues around the world. “But as the magic and magician mature, you see that you don’t need the bigger props.”

Eye-grabbing distractions — to mask a palmed card or coin, say — are only the crudest ways to exploit brain processes that allow for more subtle manipulations, good magicians learn…”

NYT Blog/ Errol Morris - Zoom

“As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions about images.[1] Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?”

Wired 14.07

“The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry – from music to movies to TV – will never be the same. By Chris Anderson

On March 21, 2000, Jive Records released No Strings Attached, the much-anticipated second album from NSync. The album debuted strong. It sold 1.1 million copies its first day and 2.4 million in the first week, making it the fastest-selling album ever. It went on to top the charts for eight weeks, moving 10 million copies by the end of the year. The music industry had cracked the commercial code. With NSync, a pop-idol boy band fronted by the charismatic Justin Timberlake, Jive had perfected the elusive formula for making a hit. In retrospect it was so obvious: What worked for the Monkees could now be replicated on an industrial scale. It was all about looks and scripted personalities. The music itself, which was outsourced to a small army of professionals (there are 60 people credited with creating No Strings Attached), hardly mattered.

Labels were on a roll…”

The New Yorker

“In a 2005 piece in the Times, Jon Pareles called the British rock group Coldplay “the most insufferable band of the decade,” and he placed the blame on the band’s front man and singer, Chris Martin, whom he called a “passive-aggressive blowhard.” Earlier this year, in a study sponsored by the hotel chain Travelodge of the bedtime habits of 2,248 people in the U.K., Coldplay topped a poll of music choices that would help people fall asleep. Coldplay apparently relieves what Travelodge called the “pressures of modern living.” Martin may use the same metric to judge his band’s music. On coldplay.com, you can find a handwritten note, dated…”

New York Times/ Art & Design

“David Byrne is an installation artist, author, blogger, recording executive, photographer, film director and PowerPoint enthusiast. He’s even been known to dabble in music. But in certain New York neighborhoods he may be most visible as a bicycle rider, a lanky figure pedaling around the Lower East Side, or from Bay Ridge out to Coney Island in Brooklyn or up to the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

In recent years his interest in bicycles has expanded from riding them to thinking seriously about the role they play in urban life, as he has started making connections with politicians and international design consultants…”