1. Handtrucks and furniture dollies are God’s gift to man.
2. Moving at a leisurely pace is non-stressful, especially with a strong breeze.
3. Moving to a new apartment in Boston on Friday, August 31 is most likely infinitely more desirable than moving to a new apartment in Boston on Saturday, September 1.
4. My wife is a packing/cleaning genius.
5. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are still the best mid-move snack.
Advancement is a cultural condition in which an Advanced individual—i.e., a true genius—creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives to be bad. However, this is not because the work itself is flawed; this is because most consumers are not Advanced. Now, don’t assume this means that everything terrible is awesome, or vice versa; that contrarianism has no place in Advancement theory. The key to Advancement is that Advanced artists a) do not do what is expected of them but also b) do not do the opposite of what is expected of them. — Chuck Klosterman, Real Genius: An introduction to the highly advanced theory of Advancement
This is the best article/essay I’ve read on the internet in six months.
Do not be fooled by the first 40 seconds. This video is an amazing feat of human ingenuity, practice, timing, and awesomeness. It is harder, better, faster, and stronger.
Drummer Jojo Mayer pulls in styles like jazz and electronica’s drum and bass to create something technically-proficient and really fascinating. He describes it as an “endeavor in reverse engineering the textures and rhythms of the current stream of computer generated music into a live performed, improvisational format.” I just like watching him play.
Tip of the hat to Caleb for introducing me to Jojo.
[ba-cn] — noun
1. notifications, newsletters, updates, etc. that you sign up to receive via email
2. email you want, but not right now
3. email notifications that are somewhere between spam and personal email: Between Twitter, Flickr, and Virb, my inbox is full of bacn.
[Origin: 2007, coined via PodCamp Pittsburgh conversations]
I walked around with my camera waiting for things to happen - cliches, incidents - I leave it open. I am only partly conscious of what’s going on - there’s always more than what I expect, or less than what I hope. The instant where things occur is serendipity.
The main exhibit at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art right now is a massive collection of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photography. I was struck by his fantastic use of lighting in most of his work, especially the series of street photographs where “DiCorcia attached an elaborate system of strobe lights to construction scaffolding, and aimed them and his camera toward a fixed point on the the sidewalk [and] from 20 feet away, he operated the camera’s shutter and the lights, collecting images of passers-by.” The subjects are thus lit against a mostly black backdrop, which makes for fascinating portraits of daily street life.
Some conversation ensued while we were viewing the images about the laws governing the use of a person’s likeness in such photographs without their permission/knowledge. And oddly enough, one of DiCorcia’s subjects sued him for exactly that reason.
2005’s Nussenzweig v. DiCorcia pitted the photographer against retired diamond merchant Erno Nussenzweig with Nussenzweig claiming the photo violated his privacy rights under New York’s Civil Rights Law, which prohibits the use of a person’s likeness, without consent, “for advertising or for purposes of trade.”
Despite the fact that DiCorcia sold ten original edition prints of the photograph for $20,000-30,000 each, the court ruled in favor of DiCorcia and the gallery that initially showed the photographs, saying that the defendants’ uses of Nussenzweig’s likeness were not commercial - this was artistic expression (and therefor protected by the 1st Amendment.)
It’s interesting to me that the court is deciding/defining what constitutes “art.”
The fine print: many thanks to the ICA, Joseph, Mrs. Blankenship, and Wikipedia for helping me think through this.
