Mad Men Meets Mark Z.

From the first season's episode "The Wheel," the video below is a scene from one Don Draper's most famous sales pitches on the show so far.  In the original episode, he's working on an ad campaign for the Kodak Carousel slide projector, but as the mashup makes clear, his pitch eerily applies to the principle behind Mark Zuckerberg's new "Timeline" for Facebook.

Many thanks to Jorie for sharing.

via Jezebel

Happy Birthday, Bruce

His wisest words ever spoken: "Give that big final good luck and goodbye to your all time top-five and just move on down the road."

Last Words of Literary Greats

Funny how their dying words tend to be representative of their oeuvre.  See the full collection here.

Missing from the list, though, is Virginia Woolf's: "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."

Henry David Thoreau

James Joyce

Leo Tolstoy

Mark Twain

W.C. Fields

J.M. Barrie

George Bernard Shaw

L. Frank Baum

Ernest Hemingway

Thomas Edison Makes a Movie

Isn't this beautiful?  She reminds me of Florence Welch.

According to Open Culture...

The world’s first hand-tinted motion picture was produced by Thomas Edison’s company, Edison Studios, in 1895, more than 115 years ago. The dancer, Annabelle Moore (1878-1961), was just a teenager when this film was released, and her dance caused both a sensation and a scandal. (Note the flashes of undergarment, all the way up to above the knee, about 29 seconds in.) The film is also worth comparing with a similar but much more delicately painted version done just five years later by the Lumiere brothers.

Project Runway: Where Are They Now?

Though I was rooting for Korto during Season 5, winner Leanne was pretty solid.  I haven't really seen or heard about her since the show (along with most of the other past contestants), so it was a pleasure to see this video featured on Etsy about Leanne's upcoming line for New York Fashion Week.

Leanne Marshall Takes on Fashion Week from Etsy on Vimeo.

Homage to Radiolab

I reference Radiolab way too much on here (see other related posts here), but today is a must-post.

First, congratulations to Jad Abumrad, recently named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow!  Here's a description of the Fellows Program from the MacArthur Foundation website:

The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

The announcement led me to this article by Ira Glass, host of the great--but not as great as Radiolab--radio show/podcast This American Life.  In the article, Glass breaks down every specific thing that is simply awe-inspiring about the show; it's tedious but extremely accurate. Here's a basic summary/outline:

Every Great Thing about Radiolab:

• The Aesthetics: "Simply put: it’s a show that’s out for fun. It’s no surprise that a much younger audience loves Radiolab. It’s no surprise that a huge part of its fan base is people who don’t consider themselves public radio listeners."
• The Banter: "Thus the utterly effortless chitchat that floats you so cheerfully from plot point to character moment to scientific explanation to the next plot point is actually worked over second by second and beat by beat, over the course of weeks."
• The Music: "Jad’s an Oberlin-trained composer so he’s always either writing the music to fit the stories on his show, the way a composer writes a film score, or he adapts other people’s music so well you can’t tell it wasn’t custom made. No other public radio show has this."
• The Editorial Sensibility: "Listening toRadiolab I have the unusual experience where nearly every story is something I’ve never heard of or thought about before, and the stories lead to ideas I’m utterly unfamiliar with. That’s a standard very few of us even aspire to, much less achieve."
• The Flow: "Radiolab also does a beautiful job figuring out a mix of stories that’ll move us from one idea to the next over the course of an hour. Lots of their episodes have a coherent argument to them, an argument that takes an hour and several stories to lay out."
• The Generational Gap: "Sometimes when I listen to the show, I feel like Jad has taken all the key elements of Robert’s 1980 sensibility – the humor, the insistence on entertaining, the surprising story choices, the amused intimate interviews and the chatty narration style – and retooled them for the digital age and a completely different generation. It’s Jad’s ear and astonishing production chops that define the sound of Radiolab, but the DNA of that sound comes from Robert."
• The Number of Episodes: "For my part, I find it comforting that this level of excellence is so labor intensive that they only can make ten full shows a year (plus, sure, 16 “shorts” that they distribute on the Internet). If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio. What would be the point of continuing? How could anyone compete with that?"

"Because Yelp Needs Cormac McCarthy"

Last week Laughing Squid featured a new blog called Yelping with Cormac that writes Yelp reviews in the style of author Cormac McCarthy.  I've only ever read The Road--which I dare to say falls on my Favorite Books Ever list--but even from that single novel, I am fairly certain in saying that his rhetoric is unique among contemporary writers.  The weight of his diction counterbalances the brevity of text itself; he is a skilled curator of words.

And as the "What" page of the blog says, "The real Cormac McCarthy is out there somewhere pulling a novel out of a horse skull."  Nicely put.

Anyway, Cormac-McCarthy-as-Yelp-Reviewer is quite entertaining for obvious reasons.  All are written by EDW Lynch.  Here's one of my favorites so far:


PAPALOTE MEXICAN GRILL

Mission - San Francisco, CA

Cormac M. | Author | A dusty home at the end of a road, NM

Two stars

The young cowboy lies in the afternoon sun, gut shot. The bitter tang of cordite and blood mingles in his mouth. In his hand, a pearl handled revolver, still warm. He lies propped against the lone cottonwood. A mile distant, dust trails mark a coming reckoning. Three riders, maybe more.

His eyes shift upward to a circling vulture, a sentinel of inevitability. The blood is almost black. He has another hour at most. The pain comes in waves, lingering like the burn of bad whiskey. One bullet left in the Colt.

Something as yet unheralded has died when a quesadilla comes on a spinach tortilla.

Update: Andy Warhol Gets Rowdy

Only a few days after posting the complaint letter from Andy Warhol's landlord, I watched this clip of video from Open Culture (big surprise) about Andy Warhol's artistic pursuits as the manager and producer for The Velvet Underground:

And speaking of The Velvet Underground, yesterday I also came upon a sad/funny/semi-shocking clip from an interview with Lou Reed:

 

Me Encanta la Argentina

Stumbled across this video from Open Culture today and was obliged to post.

It's been just over three years since I studied in Buenos Aires, yet now, as a city-dweller, I think about my time there more than ever.  I certainly owe my decision to move to Chicago to the five months I spent in BsAs, for I never would have been ready to live on my own in an urban environment had I not experienced that ciudad bárbara.

Anyway, the short below is a sweet tribute to Argentina's own Jorge Luis Borges.  The song, "De Usuahia a la Quiaca" by Gustavo Santaolalla, is from The Motorcycle Diaries (it also is the most frequently played song on my iTunes because I like to play it on repeat any time I write a paper).

Buenos Aires: Las Calles de Borges from Ian Ruschel on Vimeo.

Black Power and the Arts, Yesterday and Today

This summer I took an African Amerian Lit course, and I was particularly fascinated by the Black Arts Movement.  The movement, as the Norton puts it, aimed "to create works that would be--in the words of Maulana Karenga--'functional, collective, and committing.'  Hence, the Black Arts of the 1960s proposed to create politically engaged expression as a corollary to the new black spirit of the decade."

Amiri Baraka is one of the most recognized Black Arts writers, and his poem "Black Art" gets at the heart of the period, I think.  Here are a few excerpts:

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.  Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down.
...
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns.  Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.
...
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly.  Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world


We want a black poem.  And a 
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

Baraka's poem resonates with the same violent anger that propelled Black Power during the sixties and seventies.  Today marks the official release of Göran Olsson's documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975; you can read the NPR review here.  It looks pretty interesting--it's a take on the movement from Sweden, which apparently was pretty anti-US at the time.  Check out the trailer below:

Forms of Figure 5

I stumbled across a poem by William Carlos Williams the other day that reminded me of a Charles Demuth painting on a postcard Kathleen had once given me...when I looked up the painting, I discovered it was directly inspired by the poem (but you probably already knew that, Kathleen?)!

The Great Figure

"The Figure 5 in Gold" by Charles Demuth

by William Carlos Williams

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

Andy Warhol Gets Rowdy

About a month ago, Letters of Note, an awesome blog that scans fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos, posted a complaint letter that Andy Warhol received from his landlord after his parties were becoming a nuisance.  Here's a little background from the post:

One can only imagine the parties that occurred on the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street during the 60s, for this was Andy Warhol's Factory, the very studio in which his famous silkscreens were created on a daily basis; a veritable hot-spot that welcomed a steady stream of visitors that included, amongst many, many others, Jagger, Dylan, Capote, Ginsberg, Dali, Morrison, and Burroughs. From 1965 the Factory even had a house band of sorts, in the form of The Velvet Underground. No wonder the parties were so regular and legendary. It was the place to be.

With that in mind, it's hard not to sympathise with Warhol's landlord at the time...

Transcript follows. Image found in the stunning book, The Velvet Underground: New York Art.

Transcript

ELK REALTY, INC.
1107 BROADWAY
NEW YORK, N. Y. 10010
AREA CODE 212
WATKINS 4-3560

November 15, 1965

Mr. Andy Warhol
231 East 47 Street
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Warhol:

We have been advised that you have been giving parties in the fourth floor space occupied by you. We understand that they are generally large parties and are held after usual office hours. We have found that your guests have left debris and litter in the public areas which you have never bothered to clean. Further, we feel that a congregation of the number of people such as you have had may be contrary to various applicable governmental rules and regulations and also might present a serious problem with the Fire Department regulations.

Your lease, of course, does not permit such use and occupancy and you hereby directed not to have any such parties in this building.

Very truly yours,

ELK REALTY, INC., Agents

(Signed)

Alfred R. Goldstein
President

ARG:sd

Mad Men Mania

Self-initiated posters for AMC's Mad Men Season 5 by Radio.

2012 come quick!

Update: I Will Never Use GPS...

In response to my post "I Will Never Use GPS for Navigating the Road," I share with you an appropriate commercial:

Summer of '65

Before cable or the Internet turned us into the Big Brother of Hollywood stars, silent home videos captured the intimate lives of celebrities and were tucked away for safekeeping.  A collection of films from the summer of 1965, belonging originally to Roddy McDowall, has recently surfaced on YouTube, and the videos are simply amazing.  The 60s are my personal Golden Age, and these videos feed into my longing for the decade like woah.

Note: The Robert Redford video is for you, Alexa.

From Open Culture

To Read: House of Leaves

My friend Sarah shared with me recently an image collection of twenty curious literary tattoos, and one of the quotes particularly caught my eye:

"and this great blue world of ours / seems a house of leaves / moments before the wind"

Looked up the quote, found out it's from Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.  I've heard about the book before, and after reading more about Danielewski's experimental form, I want to find a copy ASAP.  Here's a brief description from Wikipedia:

"The format and structure of the novel is unconventional, with unusual page layout and style, making it ergodic literature. It contains copious footnotes, many of which contain footnotes themselves, and some of which reference books that do not exist. Some pages contain only a few words or lines of text, arranged in strange ways to mirror the events in the story, often creating both an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic effect. The novel is also distinctive for its multiple narrators, who interact with each other throughout the story in disorienting and elaborate ways."

"Separation" by W.S. Merwin

Separation

by W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.


W. S. Merwin, “Separation” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

Source: Poetry (January 1962).

It's Movie Season!

The Atlantic has compiled a great list of films hitting the festival circuit this fall, all of which are predicted to be possible Oscar contenders.  Awards aside, just about all of these films look fantastic based on their trailers.  I'm looking most forward to Martha Marcy May Marlene, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Artist.

Note: I couldn't find trailers for My Week with Marilyn, W.E., Albert Nobbs, or Rampart.

Time's a-Tickin'

So Jad and Robert have already taught me some mind-blowing facts about time in both the "Time" and "Memory and Forgetting" episodes (sorry for all the Radiolab-related posts lately); though parts of the conversation about time will forever remain impossible for me to comprehend, most of the facts below are quite intriguing.

To read more behind these ten statements about time, check out the explanations here. The points in italics are the ones whose explanations I find the most interesting (among those that I understand, that is).

Ten Things Everyone Should Know about Time
by Sean of Discover Magazine

1. Time exists.
2. The past and the future are equally real.
3. Everyone experiences time differently.
4. You live in the past.
5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think.
6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time.
7. Disorder increases as time passes.
8. Complexity comes and goes. 
9. Aging can be reversed.
10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats.

Baltimore Club Speaks to My Soul

This post is dedicated to my HWI partner Puccimama.

Thanks to DJ Solly, a fellow DePauw alum from the class of 2010, I was introduced to Baltimore club music my senior year.  I don't know what it is about this specific genre of house music, but every time I hear that Bmore beat, I can't help but move.  Today I've been updating my iTunes with some more dance music, so I figured I should just go ahead and share some of my favorite mixes here!

"California Dreaming" by The Mamas & The Papas (Solly Remix)

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by Daft Punk (Diplo Remix)

"You're a Jerk" by New Boyz (Diamond K Remix)

I, Robot

This is awesome.

I really need to listen to the "Talking to Machines" Radiolab episode now (apparently it features the Cleverbot).