CollegeHumor.com fills the Turkey’s Nest with a bunch of balls for a web series. I’m sure a few drunken kickballers are lost somewhere in there…
shield your eyes
Will Gompertz explains why Louise Bourgeois’ autobiographical art shocked him into understanding what it must be like to be a woman (?)…
I was the victim of a brutal emotional mugging. It was a comprehensive assault on my sense of wellbeing, a bit like the tragic moment when you walk into work looking forward to the challenges of the week ahead, only to be told you have been sacked. The attack isn’t physical but your reaction is. I was shaking, on the verge of tears and genuinely frightened. I had gone into the exhibition expecting to see some big sculptures, but it was a group of small paintings that did the damage.
John Judis goes deep into heroism’s grip on the political subconscious in the New Republic.
The psychology of heroism, it turns out, is capable of exerting a powerful pull on American voters. It may help explain why McCain outlasted his better-financed foes in the Republican primaries—and why, in a year when the Democratic nominee should by all rights be crushing his Republican opponent, Obama hasn’t been able to put McCain away.
…
Hero worship as a whole is probably rooted in early feelings about one’s parents—a child’s first models of success and leadership—but admiration of death-defying heroes reaches more deeply into the psyche. It, too, is informed by early feelings about fathers and mothers, but it also derives implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, from our fear of death. Thoughts about death are not usually conscious, but they nevertheless play an important role in our reaction to people and events.
The Republican War on Words
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Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.
A reminder to see the Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton exhibit at the New Museum. She did those Kurt Cobain portraits after his suicide…
In most political speeches, the common refrain is “my fellow citizens”.
John McCain just referred to the country as “my fellow prisoners.”
“Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners and the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent.”
Late Update: For what it’s worth, my own hunch is that McCain’s just gotten so in the habit of peppering his speeches with gratuitous POW references that it’s hard to keep the two things separate.
This week I wrote about Sam Lessin and his company drop.io, a private file-sharing site.
“Look, if my entire life is going to be searchable and findable, I’m going to change how I live my life, or at least how I live it online,” said Mr. Lessin, a fit, bespectacled 25-year-old sitting in the coffee shop at the basement of Drop.io’s office (literary magazine n+1 is in the same building). He lives in Tribeca and commutes to Brooklyn, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge each day to his office on Jay Street. “I’m going to change the power of the Internet as a tool for communication.”
And Mr. Lessin plans to do just that with Drop.io. In a Web world increasingly deluged with public information, Mr. Lessin’s company endeavors to provide an alternative: simple, private spaces where individuals and businesses can share files—documents, pictures, music, love notes, whatever!—via the Web, but without fear of attracting millions of other eyes.
Launched in November 2007, Drop.io does not require users to submit their e-mail addresses, or to register in any way. The sharing spaces, called “drops,” are not searchable on Google or any other engine. They’re also not “networked” like Facebook or MySpace accounts. Users simply come up with a location name for their space (like drop.io/myspacehere), and “drop” in some files with a couple of clicks. They can protect the page with a password, and set how long they want the drop to exist (if you only want it to last for a day, Drop.io will automatically delete it after 24 hours).
In other words, Drop.io is the anti-network.
You’ve gotta love the Observer and this week’s cover story by Jason Horowitz.
Leonard Nimoy approves of Barack Obama’s emotional detachment and logical approach to campaigning.
“He is measured and stable,” said Mr. Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek, and who has supported Mr. Obama since they first met about a year and a half ago at a small Los Angeles fund-raiser. “It’s true that he has an intellect that works for him, he handles difficult problems with aplomb. Reliability and stability are very important assets in this race, in these particularly volatile times.”
Mr. Obama, as far as anybody knows, does not greet strangers with a cloven V salute, practice debilitating neck pinches, bleed green or have a constitutional incapacity to fib. But his methodical, unflappable style and otherworldly resistance to overt displays of emotion—not to mention his temperamental inability, or refusal, to connect on a visceral level with working-class voters—makes him, by contemporary candidate standards, downright alien.
That’s usually not a good thing. Yet, with less than a month until Election Day 2008, the Vulcan is winning.
Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand will bring his work back to the United States - to New York City for the first time in 2009. Aiming to inspire people to think globally about sustainable living, Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing unique views of our planet, seen from the sky, since 1994 - and has produced an exhibit of over 150 4-ft. by 6-ft. prints which will be on display in New York City at the World Financial Center Plaza and along the Battery Park City Esplanade from May 1, 2009 to June 28, 2009. When completed in New York City, the Earth From Above exhibit will also move on to California in 2010. Photographs and captions all courtesy of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. (38 photos total)
(Thanks, Puja)
I went to one of those punk houses in Crown Heights for a show this weekend. I took this picture in the bathroom and have been thinking about it since. I don’t know if I’d like New York if I lived in Manhattan. Most of what (and who) I love is in Brooklyn. I wonder if this is a true statement for most New York transplants…
P.S. Go see Black Ships, an awesome hardcore/punk band from Montreal who were great live. Good guys, too. They’re on tour now.