Another thing I did this week: Walking Without Rhythm 004 (and the SoundCloud version).
Pop Loser is an almost-daily blog of text, links, media and pithy commentary. It is written and collected by Tyler Hellard.
Megaupload has been shut down. Even crazier news is that Swizz Beats is the CEO of Megaupload, which no one really knew. It wasn’t even on his Wikipedia page until today.
Some things I’ve recently written for Fifty Mission Cap: Why I wish Eric Taylor (Friday Night Lights) was my coach, why I’m ready to get behind Mike Cammallari coming back to Calgary and why talking about sports makes us all raving lunatics.
The interior design sensibility of Mexican drug lords. [via]
These are the palaces of legend. In Mexican novels, and in movies, the houses of the illicitly rich and infamous are louche, luxurious affairs, with toilets made of gold, mounds of cocaine or cash lying around and furniture of thronelike proportions. In the public imagination, what might be called “narquitecture” or “narco style” is all gaudy excess — part “Real Housewives,” part “Scarface,” part conquistador.
I was raised in PEI, and I can tell you that there is a lot of truth in this video. And now I’m a bit homesick.
As the music critic Carl Wilson argues in “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste,” his book on Celine Dion, “In early 21st-century terms, for most people under 50, distinction boils down to cool.” And the Internet has rendered the competition for cool more transparent than ever. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we’re doing publicly, “like”-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.
[…]
To hell with style, then; the novelist now has to confront the larger problem of what the novel is even for — assuming it’s not just another cultural widget.
The newest tech blog we’re supposed to care about run by people who worked for tech blogs we stopped caring about: PandoDaily. Why is this a trend?
UPDATE: This! Blogger beef!
Tumblr of note: CanLit is Sexy.
The finest collection of CanLit pickup lines from the authors themselves. A misguided response to the end of McClelland & Stewart as an independent Canadian publishing house.
Sasha Frere-Jones interviews the guy who started Dangerous Minds. More interesting is that one of the DM contributors is Marc Campbell of “88 Lines About 44 Women” fame. It’s one of my wife’s favourite songs, which is why it’s on WWR #2. Also, we are prone to shouting around the house “Jackie was a rich punk rocker, silver spoon and a paper plate!” (This may seem odd, but we are also prone to yelling “Psycho killer. Qu’est-ce que c’est?” So, you know, it’s just a thing we do.)
Being a “guest blogger” at Boing Boing, though, was a big impetus in starting Dangerous Minds. I posted some ridiculous videos of Obama’s 2008 stump speeches played backwards, “exposing” supposed satanic messages. That night, Rachel Maddow ran a story about it, attributing it to Boing Boing, and the following morning, the Maddow clip was on Huffington Post. Tara and I were shocked to see how easily the news cycle could be influenced by an unshaven stoner in his pajamas who hadn’t left the house for a few days.
Something interesting I read on conservatism this weekend:
So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we’ve forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type.
Something interesting I read on capitalism this weekend:
At many companies, then, both public and private, the optimal course of action is a modest one — run the business so that it makes a reasonable profit, and can continue to operate indefinitely. If you chase after growth, you often end up in bankruptcy: that’s one reason why the oldest companies in the world are all family-run. Families, unlike public companies or private-equity shops, don’t need growth: they’re more interested in looking after their business over the very, very long run.
These things are unrelated, but I still felt like posting them together was somehow right.
Noam Chomsky’s problem with autocorrect:
When I use Orwell’s term ‘unpeople,’ it is changed to ‘unpeopled.’
Kind of makes your conversations-by-text-message look a bit pedestrian, no?
The Chinese food container as a uniquely American design.
In the 1970s, a graphic designer (whose name, sadly, has been lost to history) working at the company now known as Fold-Pak, put a pagoda on the side of the box and a stylized “Thank you” on top. Both were printed in red, a color symbolic of good fortune in China, where oyster pails are little known. And thus was forged the great paradox: “The structure has come to represent the idea of Eastern cuisine in Western society even though this packaging is not used for food containment in Chinese culture,” says Scott Chapps, designer of packaging for Help Remedies. Or, as David Federico, marketing manager for Fold-Pak, put it, “We don’t sell them in China.”
Jonathan Gourlay visits (and accurately describes) the land of non-readers.
After three weeks of non-reading, my brain felt a bit numb. I told myself that I was working so hard that I couldn’t engage with a book. I fell, instead, into a steady diet of Netlix, Hulu, Skyrim, and the NFL. Like an addict in the early stages of recovery, I felt a euphoric at being released from the bitter yoke of my addiction. As a non-reader I felt free to happily non-think all day. It was delicious. Almost animal. I craved red meat and raw sex and new episodes of Fringe.
Lou Reed and the estate of Andy Warhol are fighting over who owns the famous banana image created by Warhol for the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Namely, the band doesn’t think the estate should be able to license the image for $60 iPad covers. Also:
The band “expressly” noted the banana logo as its trademark in the booklet for a 5-CD box set released in 1995, and later licensed its use in a 2001 Absolut Vodka ad bearing the tag line “Absolut Underground,” in which the stem was stylized to look like a bottle top.
This whole story is an excellent metaphor for the world we currently live in and should probably make us all a little bit sad.
UPDATE: There’s more to the story, including that the image is technically in the public domain. Read here.
Trailer for Shut Up and Play the Hits, which is the LCD Soundsystem end-of-the-band-as-art-project documentary that’s apparently narrated by Chuck Klosterman (who it turns out might be the only writer I can identify by voice).
If you’ve got a spare three and a half hours, you can watch the fastest perfect game of Pac-Man ever played here. Though there are probably more productive things you could do with your time.
Tumblr of note: Clipart Covers. Famous album covers recreated using only clipart and Comic Sans. I’m not going to lie, it’s weird. But oddly compelling.
Trailer for Re:Generation Music Project. [Thanks, James.] Braggy fact: I once opened for Crystal Method. Back when I used to be (sort of) cool.
A short profile on Dr. Hank Chien, the current holder of the Donkey Kong world record (something he went after only after seeing The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which I suppose was bound to happen). I mostly found this little bit of insanity interesting:
At the bar, Mr. Leutz said he was inspired by Dr. Chien to go after one of the most enduring marks in gaming: a 1983 world record of 33,273,520 points on one quarter in Q*bert, which requires about 70 hours of continuous play. He recently logged 57 hours straight before collapsing, but for his next attempt, he wants Dr. Chien to surgically implant a catheter to reduce the need for bathroom breaks. They discussed other surgical procedures that might help hardcore gamers.
I have a serious love/hate thing with Q*bert that dates back nearly 30 years. Fucking Q*bert.
Austerity isn’t working in Europe. Just so you know.
Rarely do we get so stark an example of bad—arguably even perverse—economic thinking in action.
Want: Griffin Twenty audio amplifier for Airport Express. The Airport Express is one of my very favourite things. Maybe once we get the house renos over with, I can look at some audio upgrades.
