I miss mine too

Filofaxes, Mundis, days of dreaming, notes and tasks. My systems, my lists. It was the address book that pushed me over to the Palm - that and the heaviness of the little looseleaf planners themselves. But how I loved the visual record. I have years in my closet. Sad, sad, sad.



Magazine
The Demise of Datebooks
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: May 3, 2010
Shelving analog calendars for digital ones.

Not that I'm going to post all my work clippings here, but it is a convenient scrapebook and filing system of sorts for some favorites. Loved this

ELLE Film Critic Karen Durbin's Postcard From Austin:

I've done jury duty at lots of film festivals but I’ve never been to one as buoyant and exhilarating as SXSW.

(full blog)

Tiny Furniture in the NYT- just one of SXSW 2010 highlights

I don't keep this blog anymore, well, certainly not like I used to too. It was a little space for writing practice and personal musings. Now I'm in a job with a public component, and lots of eager eyes with their own agendas. But occasionally, it's still a worthy parking space. So I'm happy to note this here: Young Filmmaker's Search for Her Work is Rewarded, by David Carr.

It's a terrific piece, about a terrific film, by a wonderful new filmmaker, that on top of everything, exposes one of the best components of SXSW Film - the creative crossroads where filmmakers really do get to meet and mix it up with one another and return or even evolve elsewhere, that much the stronger.

From kottke.org on How Genetics Works

sizzling summer

Say Farewell to a Scorching Summer

I know the image is a bit hard to read...but not that it's not the top horizontal line that's 100 degrees, it's the next one down!!!

A unique and very lovely John Hughes interaction and memory

What a really lovely story! Read all the way through. (thx Rebfef for the tip)

HIlarious - Slate on Obama's first 100 days Facebook style

(continued)

Austin Kleon on John's Master Class with Tom Perrotta

original image/larger


Nice full circle. I first became aware of Austin Kleon through his cartoon notes of Tom Perrotta during his previous Austin visit during the 2007 Texas Book Festival. Nice for this reconnect all the way around.

Peggy and Steven, looking fine on Oscar night

Love seeing this photo with Peggy's newest piece on NPR "Who are you Wearing to the Oscars? Who Cares?" Steven's 4th Oscar nomination! I'll certainly be cheering him on.

Ah Austin K on John's Master Class again

More

wyatt's suggestion for super bowl sunday

I know this blog is crazy dormant. I just work all the time now, and haven't figured out how this blog fits in with that. But my son just sent me a hilarious email and this seemed the best place to mark it. He's funny in person, but he's really funny in email. A relevant fragment:

.... Superbowl is tomorrow though which is exciting. If you happened to be going to a superbowl party and wanted to get SXSW out of your mind, I suggest spending your time making this http://www.holytaco.com/ultimate-super-bowl-snack-stadium.

austin kleon's big move and the sweetness of perspective

Sadly I've been too busy to keep up as much as I like with Austin Kleon's blog and tumblelog but had a chance this weekend on the 7 hour drive to and back from Lubbock for that amazing UT/Texas Tech football game Friday night -- and came across this. What a lovely sentiment -- and so true..... Here's wishing them continued closeness and intriguing perspective along with larger pacing territory.


From austinkleon.com:


SKETCHBOOK

THE NEW HOUSE

Friday, October 31st, 2008

In the midst of the mortgage crisis, Meg and I went out and bought a house. We closed today, we move in this weekend. In the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve never lived in anything bigger than a one-bedroom apartment. Now we both have offices, a washer/dryer, a two-car garage…it’s very surreal.

When you live with someone in a tiny apartment, you’re always in close proximity. You never see that person more than 10 or 20 feet away, because there isn’t 10 or 20 feet to gain between you. You get used to seeing them from a particular distance.

Meg and I often meet each other for lunch on campus. When I see her from far away, walking towards me, often she looks like a different person—she looks like a stranger, or someone I just met. It’s like a visual refresh. (I wonder if this visual element isn’t part of the hidden magic of what self-help couples books tell you to do: meet for dinner, but take separate cars…)

I’m reminded of this passage from Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville:

Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind - the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time - or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time. [...] But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?

I wonder about this proximity of bodies. I wonder how we will grow in a bigger space, with an upstairs and downstairs. How our changing spatial relationships might alter our story…

Above is a sketch of the house, superimposed over a page from William Maxwell’s wonderful short novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Newspapers, the primal love along with radio and movies

We get the NYT delivered to our home here in Texas. $58/month. That's a lot, but we love it. But we're old school newspaper lovers. I probably started reading the Times when I was 12. It's what being a grown up was all about. And later, the career media I aspired to. I went another direction, but still love the New York Times. Though i don't quite read it everyday anymore, and haven't for awhile. I skim. But relish in the moments when we can sit together and the smart world comes to me to interact with. I love the online edition too - it's particularly great for easy sharing like I'm about to do here: But it's not the paper itself. You don't get the same easy happenstance. I hate to be an old codger mourning, but I love newspapers and magazines, and really don't want to see them disappear. I feel the same way about smart movies in movie theatres and radio programmed by real individuals in my community. But newspapers, primal.

The Media Equation

Mourning Old Media’s Decline

By DAVID CARR

Published: October 28, 2008

The news that Google settled two longstanding suits with book authors and publishers over its plans to digitize the world’s great libraries suggests that some level of détente could be reached between old media and new.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Employees of The Monitor looking through a prototype of a weekly newsmagazine that will supplement the Web site.

If true, it can’t come soon enough for the news business.

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

(continued)

Michael Barnes on Paul Woodruff's "The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched."

I really enjoyed this Michael Barnes Out and About column in the Statesman today about Paul Woodruff's book, “The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched,” which will be discussed at the Texas Book Festival on Sunday.

The Statesman page isn't linking properly, but I found this particularly interesting:

“People need theater,” Woodruff writes. “They need it the way they need each other — the way they need to gather, to talk things over, to have stories in common, to share friends and enemies. They need to watch, together, something human.”

Woodruff ranks theater alongside religion and language as essential distinguishing human characteristics. I’d add socializing to the list, for many of the same reasons.

Both kinds of watching and being watched, social and theatrical, start early in life. “We hardly take ourselves very seriously unless we can get others’ attention,” the slender, hesitant Woodruff says at rain-splashed Mozart’s Coffee Roasters on Lake Austin Boulevard. “The first thing we know as an infant, after finding a mother’s breast, is how to get her attention. And newborns are excellent at that.”

Yet the process doesn’t stop there.

“Learning how to give attention is a little harder,” he says. “We are naturally wired for getting it more than giving it.”

Late Bloomers. NYer piece by Malcolm Gladwell.

I love how John goes out of his way to share particular articles or pieces of information that he knows I'll like, and he knew I'd love this:

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Annals of Culture

Late Bloomers

Why do we equate genius with precocity?

by Malcolm Gladwell

Rodcorp's How We Work site

I know I haven't written anything original in ages - but I'm afraid that's probably the way it's going to be for awhile. In the meantime, this is a handy place to note other things of interest. Like tonight, from one of Ted Hope's blogs - this reference to "How We Work." Ted writes:

MetaFilter lead me to Rodcorp's How We Work site, and although it is not the kind of thing we usually point out here at TATT, but although it's not about specific work, it's about the process to get us there, and it's kind of glorious itself.

From J.G. Ballard, to the Coen Brothers, to Malcolm Gladwell, to Walter Benjamin, the site has catalogued the methods of what people do to create. Although it is definitely a white male centered list, it is fun place to browse through, and may very well lead to some new habits. They have posted a list here.

We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work.

It's a brilliant concept!

NYT on Gut instincts Suprising role in mathematics

This NYT article by Natalie Angier, "Gut Instinct's Surprising Role in Mathmematics" is kind of interesting to me - as I live in a family of natural math brains. They have the natural circuitry. I don't. (Although I did 100% on 12 passes of that dot quiz. Didn't have time to run the suggested 25.) I'm always fascinated the the natural inclination of our minds. Like I struggle so much with my memory these days yet there's still tons of information that I retain much better than those around me. It's just that I don't have control of what I'm remembering. My brain makes it's own priorities.

One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning.

“When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”

Update from Choose Responsibility

I blogged about this group last June. I think their points are really interesting - and am excited to see the effort gaining ground.

Hello [CR] supporters, new and old,

As this amazing week draws to a close, we are glad to have a chance to check in, and to welcome over 700 new subscribers and volunteers to our ranks. This week has been a formative one for the drinking age debate and we hope to continue this positive momentum into the coming months.

In July, John McCardell began working with several college and university presidents on a statement calling for an informed and unimpeded debate on the 21 year-old drinking age. The statement became known as the Amethyst Initiative, so called because the purple stone was considered a symbol of moderation in ancient Greece. Over the next several weeks 104 college and university presidents signed onto the Initiative. Efforts were underway to expand the list when the Associated Press caught wind of our efforts.

Late Monday afternoon the Associated Press released a story about the Initiative. The resulting media firestorm was nothing short of astounding, and unlike anything we could have anticipated when we wrote to you on Monday evening to announce the Amethyst Initiative. The story was covered by all network and cable news channels, national and local radio, and in thousands of print stories and editorials. We have done our best to keep a running tally of some of the best coverage, which you can read here.

Here are some other highlights from the week:
• 24 additional presidents and chancellors added their names to the Amethyst Initiative
• Over 70,000 people visited the Amethyst Initiative website
• Over 8,000 people visited the Choose Responsibility website
• 1,200 email messages and a lively dialogue in the comments to our blog.

Needless to say, the resources in our small office are stretched thin. (Do you live in Vermont? If so, we are looking for temporary help this week and next in our Middlebury office. Reply to this newsletter if you would like to lend a hand). We need your help to keep the momentum going and to ensure that MADD and others do not succeed in stifling public debate. Two easy things you can do:

1. Write a letter to the editor in response to local coverage. See “Arguments Against 21” and materials in the [CR] Download Center for supportive facts and statistics. If your letter is published, please be sure to send us a copy!

2. Write to the president of your (or your children’s) alma mater, and to local colleges and universities who have not already signed on to the Amethyst Initiative to encourage them to join (see here for a fll list of presidents who have already signed on). Since the news broke on the issue before we had anticipated, many presidents are still actively discussing the issue and might benefit from your encouragement. If you do write, here are some points to emphasize:
• The Amethyst Initiative is a group of college and university presidents and chancellors who support open debate on the 21 year-old drinking age. They do not support a lower drinking age, or any particular policy outcome, but call on the public and our elected officials to consider the intended and unintended consequences of the law.
• The 21 year-old drinking age has contributed to a culture of dangerous, clandestine binge-drinking.
• Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among students.
• Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.

Thank you for your enthusiasm and commitment to this issue. We have made great strides this week and are happy to have you on our team.

Here’s to another busy week,

The [CR] Team
John, Mike and, Grace



Choose Responsibility
PO BOX 507 Middlebury, VT 05753 802.398.2024 info@chooseresponsibility.org

NYT article on Burning Man prep

Here I am again - always interested in Burning Man though I've never been. I mean, gosh, just look at the beauty of these flames....

From the NYT today:

Priming for Burning Man, Flames in Hand

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Fire dancers rehearse for the Burning Man festival. More Photos >

By APRIL DEMBOSKY

Published: August 13, 2008

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.

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

Slide Show

Art Bound for the Black Rock Desert

Related

Times Topics: Burning Man Festival

Enlarge This Image

David Goldman for The New York Times

Max Darby, right, and Stefan Pildes finish a sign for the Kostume Kult campsite. More Photos »

“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 built funhouse mirrors out of mylar, and Max Darby, a product designer and one of the masterminds behind this group artwork, put together vinyl street signs to be attached to an 18-foot-high, 60-foot-long mural that was still in pieces in the courtyard’s nooks.

“We had no money,” Ms. Darby, 41, explained, “so we’re basically making art from garbage.”

Four hours a night, three nights a week, for the last three months, about 80 people have rotated through this basement apartment for craft sessions. None will see the final presentation of their work until it is assembled in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where the annual Burning Man art festival-rave-love-in takes place the week before Labor Day. About 48,000 people are expected to haul everything they need to survive — tents, water, fake-fur costumes — for this experiment in commerce-free, creatively wild community. Thousands of them will come from New York and set up camps with names like Smoochdome, Disorient and Rubber Chicken.

Ms. Darby and her craft workers are part of Kostume Kult, a camp known for giving away 2,000 pounds of sparkling, sequined, saucy costumes to attendees. This year the camp wanted to make a more artistic contribution as well, so members —friends, friends of friends, and others who found the group through its Web site, kostumekult.com, or through the event itself — came up with a New York interpretation of the festival’s 2008 American Dream theme.

“It’s a Coney Island theme,” Ms. Darby said, pointing to a sketch of the mural with roller coasters, balloons and skyscrapers. “The left is all candy floss, childlike colors. Then it turns into grimy Gotham City, all gray and dark.”

The mural will serve as a giant doorway to the camp, which they’ve dubbed KKoney Island. Visitors who wander through the middle of the boardwalk-downtown split will arrive in Central Park, a chill space with carpets, cushions and a canopy of plastic flowers. A critical element of the project, Ms. Darby said, was having everyone contribute to its creation.

(continued)

Finally, an American Teen review I can relate to

Finally, a smart, intelligent American Teen review I can relate to. Thanks to Marjorie Baumgarten at the Austin Chronicle.

American Teen

Year Released: 2008
Directed By: Nanette Burstein
(PG-13, 95 min.)

In our modern Information Age, it is no longer possible to believe in documentaries as conveyors of unfiltered, unvarnished truths. Everything is transmitted through the eyes of the beholders, from the lens of the filmmaker to the perceptions of the viewers. Burstein’s American Teen, however, causes us to become aware of the power the subjects have to control their ultimate image and message. We used to fret over the extent to which a filmmaker’s presence altered the very nature of that which was under observation. American Teen shows us that we really need to pay more attention to the ways in which the media-savvy of the subjects can shape the outcome of the observation. The teens of Warsaw, Ind., the town in which Burstein’s documentary is set, were born into the era of reality TV, in which a spot on The Real World or American Idol means a ticket to instant celebrity, and the confidences once shared in diaries and incessant phone chatter are now unveiled on Facebook and MySpace for all the world to consume. They may not have known it, but these kids were ready for their shot at fame long before Burstein entered their midst and wired them up with portable microphone packs. What her cameras capture shouldn’t be construed as truth but rather as scenarios that were cast in stone long before she came on the scene. The five high school seniors she chooses as her main subjects could have come straight from Central Casting – or The Breakfast Club: They are the princess, jock, rebel, heartthrob, and geek. It’s senior year, so the film gains some dramatic strength from the kids’ uncertainty about their futures, but apart from that, the film records the usual teenage obsessions with social insecurities, who’s dating whom, and the hierarchies of cool. From the outset, it’s necessary to ask if these students are a truly representative lot or whether they’re stereotypes that fit Burstein’s preconceptions. Burstein’s judgment also becomes an issue, as we watch the occasionally despicable behavior of the teens (as during the plastering of hate graffiti on an opponent’s window or the merciless mocking of a defenseless newcomer whose naked torso has been IM’d throughout the town), while her unyielding camera practically spurs further action with its rapt attention. The artsy rebel Hannah Bailey (who is now studying filmmaking in college) experiences a depression so intense that it precludes her being able to attend school, yet she gladly allows Burstein’s camera into her bedroom and inner thoughts. Burstein (who previously co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture and On the Ropes) ultimately tells us nothing about senior year in the heartland of America that we didn’t already know. However, the film’s revelations about our media-soaked society are revelatory. At times it’s almost like Lord of the Flies, with the camera serving as the flypaper dipped in the honey of the promised land of celebrity.

Marjorie Baumgarten [2008-08-08]