The first among elegances is idleness.
Les Miserables
Fata morgana
Fata Morgana is a type of mirage that occurs when a layer of cold air bends light downwards, creating a superior-image effect and making it look as though what is below one’s line of sight is actually above it. The name is derived from the superstition that Morgan Le Fey created illusionary castles at sea with which to seduce sailors. More information here and here. (The images above are extremely inaccurate)
Olivia Tremor Control – “Holiday Surprise”
Dusk At Cubist Castle
Despite their sound being more ether-soaked psychedelia on this record than the sharp, more abstract Black Foliage, OTC were plenty ambitious with this album. With multiple multiple-part tracks and an entire optional “background” track on a separate CD, this was straight up concept work. But with solid songwriting and an sound that changes so often you can’t help but pay attention, you can take the concept or leave it and it’s still a great record.
Leaving TechCrunch
(this is a personal announcement, please ignore if we are unacquainted)
In 2007, I was talking with a friend of mine who had recently been hired to write about gadgets and such part-time. It was for a site I hadn’t heard of, CrunchGear, and as there were many such sites at the time, I didn’t think much about it. But I had been doing music reviews on my old blog, Robosexual, for about two years, and thought maybe I could get a little pickup work doing something I was becoming familiar with: writing.
Move forward a year or so, and lo, there I was, quitting my real-life steady job at the beginning of a recession on a bet that my new blogging gig might pan out. Luckily, it did, and for about four years now I’ve been an actual full-time writer at TechCrunch, putting words one after another to form sentences and paragraphs. I’ve written and written, through hard times both in the world and at the site. CrunchGear is gone, as are most of the people who were working at the company when I started.
I’ll be gone too shortly: I’m moving over to MSNBC to write for the blog network there. If you want to know the totality of my reason for moving, it is this: I feel like it. TechCrunch has been great, and it’s recovering from a rough year to become better than ever. I’m not leaving because of any petty industry drama or rarefied principle. This is just an interesting opportunity to shake up my world a little bit and I’m ready to take it. I’ll still be contributing at TechCrunch, so I won’t disappear altogether.
I would like to thank my current employers at whatever company employs me – TechCruch, the Huffington Post Media Group, Aol, AOL, America Online, or whatever you please. Thanks also to my colleagues at TechCrunch today – I’m happy to have been able to work with all of you, and I hope to see you again soon. And a special thank you and congratulations to the original and extended CrunchGear team which formed my first online working group. All of you know who you are, all of you are doing well, and I sincerely hope to work or at least pretend to work with all of you again.
That’s all. The last few years have been interesting, valuable, and important to me. I have made friends for life and developed skills that may support me for a lifetime.
Autechre – “krYlon”
Oversteps
At first, I thought claims Autechre had gone melodic on this album were overstated. Then this and the final track cashed that check but good. It’s their most beautiful and accessible work since LP5’s “Rae,” combining some of that album’s glitch-outs with harmonies as much Frost as they are Tri Repetae. And the 10-minute closer, “Yuop,” channels (if you can believe it) Stars of the Lid more than anything, all zen bowls, strings, and eerie majesty. Oversteps does have the usual Autechre weirdness, but parts are powerful and the last two tracks are simply stunning.
Ruins of the Tower of Babel
If it is the grandeur of the revolution to gaze steadily upon the dazzling ideal, and to fly to it through the lightning, with blood and fire in its talons, it is the beauty of progress to be without a stain; and there is between them the difference which separates the angel with the wings of a swan, from the angle with the wings of an eagle.
Les Miserables
Amazing panorama and time-lapse of Hitchcock’s Rear Window courtyard (more)
Loscil – “Zephyr”
Plume
This hypnotizing album is Loscil’s third, far more rich than the muted Submers or the barely-there Triple Point. It’s full of tracks like this, repetitive but enveloping, and deceptively full of detail at every tone level. Beauty, but hovering on the border of threatening depths. (insound)
Letter from Kurt Vonnegut to one who would burn his books
Letter from Kurt Vonnegut to one who would burn his books
November 16, 1973
Dear Mr. McCarthy:
I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.
Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.
He was twice witty, first with his own wit, then with the wit which was attributed to him.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Black Forest/Black Sea – “Sevastopol”
Black Forest/Black Sea
An album of freaky chamber folk, before the band went a bit more digital. The cello/guitar combo makes it sound like an Espers backing track, but the off-kilter melody and confidently atonal background noise set it apart. An unpredictable band, for good and ill.
“Old books? The devil take them!” Goby said.
“Fresh every day must be my books and bread.”
Nature herself approves the Goby rule
And gives us every moment a fresh fool.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
I just received a beautiful old edition of Les Misérables I’d ordered and, upon opening it, found a wonderfully well-preserved four-leaf clover at the title page – and another inside the second volume. The edition is from a little after 1890, but there’s no way of telling how old the clovers are; they’re quite brittle, though, so it’s clear they aren’t a recent addition. A very pleasant surprise that makes this already excellent copy even more precious. (larger images)
Death on a Pale Horse, J.M.W. Turner (1830)
Why Finish Books?
Tim Parks in the NYRB suggests that finishing a book may not be necessary to the aesthetic experience. I don’t agree with this line of thinking, that the concept of the art in question lies entirely with the reader or viewer. If a piece of art (i.e. a book or painting) is conceived as a whole and executed as a whole, then finishing it is necessary to understanding and appreciating that piece of art.
If you are not enjoying a book, feel free to put it down. I have many times. But I don’t pretend that I have formed a complete and valid judgment. I forfeit that when I fail to comprehend the work as a whole.
As for whether endings are “necessary” when you have enjoyed a book, it depends on how necessary the author intended it to be, not on whether (as the author was rightly, in my opinion, angered by) the reader felt they were “done.” It’s a bit like knocking the wings off a statue because you think it looks better that way. What you think looks better isn’t the point. The statue was created that way because that’s the way the creator conceived it.
Personally, I think it is critical to read every word as the author intended. Otherwise you are appointing yourself as editor over their artistic imagination. You are in charge of your own time and enjoyment, but not the structure and content of their work.
For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how far distant Perseus and Cassiopea from us, how deep the sea, etc.? We are neither wiser, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it. What is astrology but vain elections, predictions? all magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery? physic, but intricate rules and prescriptions? philology, but vain criticisms? logic, needless sophisms? metaphysics themselves, but intricate subtleties and fruitless abstractions? alchemy, but a bundle of errors? To what end are such great tomes? why do we spend so many years in their studies? Much better to know nothing at all, as those barbarous Indians are wholly ignorant, than, as some of us, to be so sore vexed about unprofitable toys: stultus labor est ineptiatrum [it is foolish to labor at trifles], to build a house without pins, make a rope of sand, to what end? cui bono?
Anatomy of Melancholy
Shadow guide for Doric column and arcade (Canon of the five orders of architecture, Vignola, 1562)