Night Vision

Tony Paiva produces richly colored, long exposure photographs lit by moonlight, flashlights and incidental lighting in the course of Urban Exploration. Now, he has a book of 115 of his best photos out. Here are some of the pictures in it:

The description from the Chronicle Books website:"A booming subculture is on the rise: dubbed Urban Exploration, it involves sneaking into abandoned or off-limits factories, aviation "boneyards," decommissioned bases, and other derelict features of the military/industrial landscape. Troy Paiva is a foremost photographer of the UrbEx (as it's known to its devotees) phenomenon, and his distinctive blend of atmospheric night photos and lighting effects are the visual hallmarks of a scene that has drawn the increasing attention of the media and the public—as seen in recent programs on both the Discovery Channel ("Urban Explorers") and MTV ("Fear"). Illuminated by histories of the sites documented, Night Vision reveals the remarkable discoveries of a new generation of explorers."

Now I'd like to see Michael Cook's photos made into a companion book. Different style of photos, also UE focused.

(via boingboing)

Confession

I covet my neighbor's abs.

Impeachable Offenses as Venn Diagram

Slate presents some of the most offensive crimes of the Bush Administration as an easy-to-read, colorful chart:

Sadly, the more these people seem to have done, the less likely their prosecution. Disbarrment for some of the lawyers is marginally more plausible.

Not Just 1st Amendment Badasses

The Society for Librarians who say Motherf***er.

People of Berlin

Berlin is getting big mind share this week, not only because of this:

Barack Obama in Berlin photo: Michael Gottschalk/AFP

But also because it's teetering between being the place where everything happens and a super-laid back backwater, between being the site for luxury condominium projects and a techno-minimalist haven. In this fascinating cluster of articles, music and the city are connected, perhaps interchangeable:

when - as seems largely to have happened in much of Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg - an entire chunk of a formerly working city becomes a playground for an international of 'creatives', something odd happens. One often got the sense in Berlin that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake: pure pleasure becomes boring after a while, as does the constant low-level tick-tock of a techno designed seemingly for little else than just rolling along.

As Mick Jagger observed, this week, there's really no establishment left to speak of. And without that, there's no tension driving the Bohemian circuits. What was a way to fight "the Man" has become an aesthetic choice, like choosing shag carpet. What do you do when nothing's shocking, even to you?

Randy Pausch passes.

The Cost of Empire

Jon Taplin puts together a pretty impressive case that we are in serious trouble on multiple fronts due to the global military infrastructure we've put in place since WWII. He has a track record of good insights into the economic news of the day. So, it's definitely worth taking a good, hard look at his analysis.

I've got more comments and analysis to put together in response to some of his points, which I will do in the coming days.

Robert Mapplethorpe, an Oral History

In the New York Observer, an oral history to accompany the new exhibition of Mapplethorpe's polaroids at the Whitney:

[O]ne gets the sense that the leap from Robert Mapplethorpe to “Robert Mapplethorpe” took hold in the summer of 1963, when the 16-year-old satyr was caught stealing gay pornography from a newsstand in Times Square. The aesthetics of gay male sexuality—and later, unflinching images of raw sex—would go on to color every period in his artistic career.

Mapplethorpe met Patti Smith in 1967. He was drinking the electric Kool-Aid. She was trudging through a terrible date. Their initial pairing was a symbiotic, if hasty solution that would define their relationship until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. They needed one another, always, but especially at the beginning of their bohemian squalor, when income was elusive, celebrity a dream.

His relationship with Smith is ambiguous, and the intimate details of their time together seem almost irrelevant. Smith, who was traveling while the interviews on the following pages were conducted, has said, “We were like two children playing together, like the brother and sister in Cocteau’s Enfant Terribles.”

It is particularly gratifying that Jesse Helms is dead, while Mapplethorpe's art lives on, and looks ready to do so for a great while to come.

The Future Is Now Vol. LXVII

Bruce is right. If a telomerase pill could be developed, then we'd all be living a good bit longer at the cellular level, although not necessarily at the level of the whole organism. Still, every bit helps.

Unfortunately, the article at the other end of the links seems to be a confirmation of what we already knew: cortisol and other stress-related hormones result in telomeric shortening, bringing closer the day when a particular cell can no longer divide.

Link Roundup

The NYT goes Sartorialist, and looks at sharp summer suits that are cool as cucumbers.

Dr. Who theme composer Delia Derbyshire's sonic experiments from the 60's rediscovered.

Shave your head, it's the only way.

Moving Pains 2

Lesson two from moving: no matter how much stuff you pack, the moving people will always find more. They did an exceptionally impressive job packing my overstuffed chair using a giant foll of clingfilm, a la Christo. Everything is now triple packed inside cardboard boxes, inside wooden crates, inside a giant warehouse alongside the Lost Ark of the Covenant.

Moving Pains

My gosh, I've got a lot of stuff. Now that I have to put it into storage for a bit, I'm more tempted to just pile it outside and burn it to save the trouble.

Meanwhile, after a week of radio silence, people are calling one on top of the other. Friends from Ohio are moving out here just as I'm moving back, and potential job opportunities are beginning to open up. How inconvenient. Meanwhile, I'm finding that you can never have enough boxes to contain even a moderately sized apartment full of crap.

Somethingsomething

The link between Design Observer and thirtysomething's Miles Drentell revealed.

Why Miles is the world's greatest villain.

Rules for Living

David Archer compares the advice for the good life from Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Roger Stone. Reads like a faceoff between Balthasar Gracian and Nicco Machievelli. NNT wins.

(via Kottke)

Baarle-Hertog

BLDGBLOG has the details on the highly convoluted enclaves of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau, in which part of Belgium is enclaved in the Netherlands and counter-enclaves of the Netherlands are embedded in Belgium. Some of the borders run through houses, businesses and hospitals.

Update: Boingboing picks up the story.

The Dark Side

Jane Meyer lays out the history of the torture and civil liberties violations carried out by the current administration in her new book The Dark Side. NPR conducts an illuminating interview. Like Imperial Life in the Emerald City, this is a real life horror story in the fact that you wish that none of it were true, but can't turn away.

Dr. Horrible

Act I is up.

I'll Take Basketball, Too

"For those of you who don't know, I was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease a couple of weeks ago. Which sucks. Because I hate baseball. I'd really much rather have been diagnosed with a basketball disease. Maybe Wilt Chamberlain disease. That's the one where you have sex 20,000 times and then you die."

-- singer Carla Zilbersmith, updating fans at a concert,

as quoted by Gary Trudeau

Escape from Iran

Neal Stephenson

Returned to Uptown, my 1st Chicago neighborhood. Lawrence Ave at Broadway getting the gentrification treatment with a complete row of al fresco dining, but overall upscaling is uneven. Got panhandled whilst getting gas (cause people buying gas must have lotsa money these days). Watermelon martinis and dinner at Marigold with the Pilgrims, part of the Last Supper series. Food was fantastic but the service was terribly slow. Andrew a lot bigger and a little wilder. I think the Pilgrims are a little mad I'm leaving Chicago before they do.

Artemide

Hydro/Aqua light installation. Looks like those swarming radio controlled blimps, and like the Heathrow Cloud sculpture. Belongs in my next house.

(via grinding.be)

Happiness is Dancing

Matthew Harding's 2008 around the world video, with cast of thousands.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

FISA fight and other matters

Bob Herbert with more on the question, "What's he doing?"

Veto threats over oversight

Link Roundup

Zeppelins & dirigibles making a comeback due to rising oil prices or due to coolness factor? Unfortunately, they are also more vulnerable to turbulence than smaller, heavier-than-aircraft. Massaud's Manned Cloud concept looks to be the most exciting of the bunch, if also the least practical.

Another interview with Skullboy. A number of boingboing's commenters had a problem with the guy, who actually comes off as well grounded, if slightly inarticulate. It's the interviewers who are really creepy, seemingly egging him on to do more extreme body mods (removal of nose & ears, for example).

Daniel Ellsberg on the FISA fight.

Turning the Campaign Upside Down

No one I've talked to is going to change their vote because of Obama's failure on FISA, but plenty of people are plenty ticked off, because reversal of the Bush Administration's Constitutional violations are critical to creating change through this election. Obama's chosen to shed a lot of grassroots support in exchange for a classic top-down, centrist campaign.

Bob Ostertag discusses the current Obama vs. the netroots flap, and pretty much nails it right on the head.

I will vote for Obama of course. I will continue to urge everyone I know to vote for him. But my money and time, paltry though they may be, will likely get redirected to candidates who are willing to stand up for issues I care about. And because of the Internet, I know that there are a lot of other Obama supporters in the same boat; a lot of people considering cutting off their string of small donations to the campaign.

All of this is coming at a time in which Obama's schedule is filled with big-money fundraisers where people can buy face time with the man for $30k. Put all these things together, and one cannot help but wonder if there is a turning point, that from here on out the campaign is will be less of a grassroots affair. This is not the death knell of the campaign. Far from it. I think Obama can do very well against McCain with a traditional, top down, big money campaign. I think he will be sworn in as our next president in January. But it will be a different campaign than what it has`been until now. As one commenter to my blog so aptly said, "Senator Obama, you can tap my phone or my wallet, but not both."

I'm less optimistic than Bob is about his prospects going forward. Look how well that's done for his opponents so far if you want to see how well it'll work for him.

Some Days, Nobody Dies

Review of Tom McCarthy's The Remainder by Geoff Manaugh, in preparation for an upcoming interview.

Maxims for Writing

Felker's adages:
1. Never hold your best stuff.
2. Put something shocking at the top of the page.
3. Women are the best reporters.
4. Point of view is everything.
5. Personal is better.
6. Never hold your best stuff.

(via Choire)

How to Write a Movie:
1. Write a play instead

Are you sure you need to write a screenplay? Almost any movie takes years. I've just done a TV film for the BBC that has taken 20 years to go from idea to execution. If you've got a great story, it might be worth writing it as a play first, or a book. To get a movie into the world, someone needs to love it enough to spend millions of pounds on it - and years of their life. A play costs a few thousand and takes a couple of months. Plus it makes you a playwright, which is way upmarket from a screenwriter. And if it's successful, people will want to make the movie.

2. Do the title first

Seems obvious, but you'd be amazed. A great title can make a big difference. The musical Oklahoma, as it was initially called, famously flopped in the provinces, but became a massive hit after they added the exclamation mark. Orson Welles said Paper Moon was such a great title they wouldn't need to make the movie, just release the title. If you want a good title, you need it before you start, when you're pumped up with hope. If you look for it afterwards, you end up thinking like a headline-writer. If Victor Hugo had waited until he'd finished Notre-Dame de Paris, he would have ended up calling it I've Got a Hunch.

3. Read it to people
4. Forget the three-act structure
6. Don't write excuse notes
7. Avoid the German funk trap
8. Do a favourite bit
9. Cast it in your head
10. Learn to love rewrites
11. Don't wait for inspiration
12. Celebrate your invisibility
13. Read, read, read, read, read

Metropolis Restored

Ninety minutes of the premiere version of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis have been rediscovered in Argentina and are being reintegrated into a new edition. Even though some of the footage may be too badly scratched for complete restoration, experts are pleased because the film's full plot is comprehensible for the first time in seventy years.

Am Dienstag vergangener Woche reiste Paula Félix-Didier in geheimer Mission nach Berlin, um sich dort mit drei Filmgutachtern und mit Redakteuren des ZEIT-Magazins zu treffen. In Gepäck der Museumschefin aus Buenos Aires: eine Kopie einer Langfassung von Fritz Langs Metropolis, darin Szenen, die seit fast 80 Jahren als verschollen galten. Nachdem die drei Experten den Film begutachtet haben, sind sie sicher: Der Fund aus Buenos Aires ist ein echter Schatz, eine Weltsensation. Metropolis, der bedeutendste Stummfilm der deutschen Geschichte, darf seit diesem Tag als wiederentdeckt gelten.
Die Urfassung von Metropolis hatte Fritz Lang im Januar 1927 in Berlin präsentiert. Der Film spielt in der Zukunftsstadt Metropolis, sie wird von Joh Fredersen beherrscht, dessen Arbeiter unter der Erde leben. Sein Sohn verliebt sich in eine junge Frau aus der Arbeiterstadt – der Konflikt nimmt seinen Lauf. Es war der teuerste deutsche Film, den es bis dahin gegeben hatte.

-Zeit Magazin auf Deutsch
English translation here.

(via Coilhouse)

So, when the young people come up to me these days, they do so to tell me that I'm "sweet". Always have been, always will be. But what I want is to be appallingly, dangerously sexy. Like, you might see me and develop an uncontrollable urge to tear your clothes off and try to have sex with me sexy.

Scenes from a Parade

Seen:

• A young woman wearing a t-shirt that says: "Torture is barbecue"
  
• On Broadway a young man and woman playing catch with a sizeable dildo with a base shaped like a foot, such that I initially thought they were tossing a model of a human leg across the street in advance of the Pride parade. What can this mean?
  
• Ronnie Kroell, late of Make Me a Supermodel, who on close inspection and in natural lighting actually looks as though he were first airbrushed and then lit by professionals.
  
• Small clusters of fundamentalists, who look like they've all gone together to special stores to buy their clothes. They've also really gotten into those big Old Testament beards favored by the Afghans and the guys on the Luden's Cough Drop boxes. Pride parades without religious extremists are like Easter without malted milk balls: it would be more logical and straightforward, but would lack a certain traditional element that one remembers from childhood. There are, however, fewer each year.

"Have You Read All These Books?"

I honestly hadn't expected to get this question, especially since my library is in three parts at the moment: 1)in my childhood bedroom, on double stacked shelves, 2)in my parents garage in a set of stacked wine crates and 3)in my current apartment. The only response I could think of was "yes, except for that one there." (pointing randomly)

Umberto Eco apparently gets this question on a regular basis, what with having a 30,000 volume library as of 1994 (I wonder how much it's grown in the past 14 years).

[For] people who possess a fairly sizable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house can't help but notice it; actually, it takes up the whole place.), visitors enter and say, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books . . . but there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.

In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. "I haven't read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?" But this is a dangerous answer, because it invites the obvious follow-up: "And where do you put them after you've read them?" The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office," a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure.

-Umberto Eco, "How to Justify a Private Library" in A Passion for Books

as quoted here.

What Makes Oil?

Kevin Kelly wisely chooses not to bet against bacteria.

Which means that Vinod Khosla's startup company may not be blowing smoke about its new discovery.

House Porn 4

David Ling has a house with a bed cantilevered over a waterfall. I, for my part, would tumble to the pool below if I had such a thing, but I love the deep blue color of the wall with the peeling paint.




David Ling has a house with a bed cantilevered over a waterfall. I, for my part, would tumble to the pool below if I had such a thing, but I love the deep blue color of the wall with the peeling paint.


Video at Dwell.com

Note the interesting eyeglass collection.

The Seven Who Fled

One night in Mallorca, in November 1935, I had a wonderful dream. I stood in the middle of a desert and the mountains in the distance suddenly burst into flames, and then they hardened into a row of luminous pearls. I awoke in a fever of joy and stepped out on the veranda. The Bay of Alcudia was as black as the fur of a yak, and on the horizon seven fishing boats lay in the sea with their seven torches.
...
I haven't read this book for many long years but as I look back on it from what seems like an enormous distance, I see seven fishing boats with their torches floating on a sea which is black as the fur of a Tibetan yak.

--Frederic Prokosch, from the 1983 Introduction to The Seven Who Fled
(1937)

I'm reading this on the recommendation of Harlan Ellison in one of his interviews. Prokosch was apparently a hugely popular writer in the 1930's with at least two bestsellers, but is now almost completely forgotten. I'd certainly never heard of him before. The book is embedded with these sort of jewel-like decriptions of the landscape, coupled with set of characterizations that are pre-modern, in the sense that the characterizations we see in silent movies are pre-modern: where the heroine is beautiful and yet overly curvaceous, where the hero's long blond hair comes loose and hides his face when he runs awkwardly (to our eyes, guided by college athletics and ergonomic shoes). The people dislike each other for reasons that don't quite match up with their actions. Their character is described a little to closely by race or nationality. Distant lands are described in terms that are currently reserved for other planets. In short, certain things are described in a shorthand that can't be read any longer, while other things for which we, in 2008, don't need to say are spelled out explicitly. It is for that reason and in that spirit that the book should be read, and read slowly, as Michael Ondaatje's English Patient said of Kipling, because it was written slowly, by hand.

What had happened was this.

There had recently been, all over Sinkiang, considerable disturbances. General Ma's army had swept bloodthirstily through the desert; the Tungans were still waging a truculent guerilla warfare against the provincial government; the Soviet government in the north had sent down its agent to Urumchi and Kashgar to support the Governor's forces. The cities, the towns, the tent-sprinkled plains, all rustled with distrust and detestation.

One day the Amban at Kashgar, a timorous, sedentary man, had petulantly issued orders that all Europeans leave the city. Meaning by that, of course, all Europeans whose motives appeared to him uncertain or unfamiliar. The officials made inquiries; the soldiers behaved impudently; the Amban wearily explained that orders from the Governor at Urumchi had to be obeyed. The atmosphere in the city grew hostile, full of glances, full of suspicious little whispers.

And so early one morning seven Europeans gathered at the il-smelling serai outside the poplar-lined walls of the old city and joined a small caravan that was starting eastward on a long journey toward Aqsu...

And what follows is the story of the disasters that befall them, singly or in pairs.

Friday night, walk over to Michael & Kirk's. The Californians are in from San Clemente, and we order pizza--$44 for two mediums seems awfully steep, no matter how many toppings are on them. Kirk makes us watch Kathy Griffin, so now I'm naturally addicted; previews of that real estate show with the OCD guy who worries about the temperature and exact composition of his Starbuck's mean I've got to watch that one too. Everybody tired from a late night the night before, or maybe tomorrow.

Saturday, do nothing around the house in anticipation of Ed the Fox News Outlet's party, except shave my beard into a pornstache. Ride out there with Eric & Liza and Mark the Shark. Eric shouts at people whose cars have broken down in the middle lane, thus stopping traffic for six miles. Trip out to Iowa takes two hours or more. We stop at the Oasis and I get a 64oz Diet Coke for $0.99. All the sizes are the same price. Weird. So I drink my lake of Coke slowly over the course of the evening and so cannot sleep on the two hour ride back. For some reason they've decided it would be an opportune time to shut Southbound 90 down to one lane for the evening, resulting in a 2AM return time. Ed & Gina produce a nutrition-free buffet on purpose; Gina regales us with stories about living in Alabama, where she was the only dinosaur-loving atheist in Church school. As a result, she ended up going to the swimming pool a lot that summer. Patrick gets the lead role in American Theater Company's production of Hedwig, and we all promise to go. He and Joshua wear coordinated red, white & blue vests for the evening. Joshua tells stories about working in the Rock & Roll show at Six Flags Louisville, where he got a taste of being famous for the twelve people who would show up on a regular basis with his name written on posters, bodyparts &c.

Today, I wake up too late for yoga again, and watch Lindsay Graham knock the stuffing out of Joe Biden on Meet the Press for no good reason. I notice a bunch of restaurants lately with "we don't think we have Salmonella-bearing tomatoes" disclaimers on the doors.

A Polaroid a Day

Jamie Livingston took a Polaroid a day every day from March 31st 1979 until the day he died. 6,697 of them. Mental Floss has the story.

Boom

Lunch at a neighborhood cafe. Cheesesteak that's a little too dry served by a waitstaff that's a couple of people short.

That night I head out to see a band called Mucco Pazza at the Stan Mansion on Kedzie with Ed, Gina, Mark the Shark and a bunch of Gina's friends. A lot of interesting fashion choices and incomplete haircuts in the room. The band is a punk marching band with gypsy swing and early 20th c. classical influences (references to Shostakovich and Bartok, cheerleaders who chant about number theory). About 30 people on stage, when they're not playing from within the audience or on a balcony at the back or trumpeting out of the proscenium arch. A lot of short people keep pushing in front of me, and tall guys push in behind. Very loud, very hot.

Markos goes after the AP

The nitwittery has seriously pissed off Mr. Kos. Go get em, tiger.

House Porn 3

I've always wondered who owns this amazingly decorated house on Cedar Street.

George Soros on the Bubbling Economy

George Soros holds forth in McLean's. He makes the extremely valid point that even a moderate contraction in the credit market could result in a large, sustained economic downturn, and that market fundamentalism hasn't done well by us lately (or ever).

Behind the housing bubble, there’s a super bubble which has been growing for the last 25 years. Every bubble has an element of reality and an element of fantasy, of misinterpretation. The reality has been a trend of ever-increasing use of credit, of credit expansion. The misconception is that markets tend toward equilibrium and can be left to their own devices, to take care of their excesses. In the boom phase, it’s very pleasant because you enjoy credit creation and, with that, comes wealth creation. In the bust phase, it’s very unpleasant because you have credit contraction, a reduction of leverage, a decline in the value of collateral, etc. and that involves wealth destruction.

Herr Doktor Professor Karl Popper also gets a guest reference, in a question on the interaction between freedom and empirical reality:

Q: You argue that freedom of thought doesn’t mitigate the misconception problem—that is, that an open society can’t produce a perfect market. Does it actually do the opposite?

A: It’s a somewhat different issue. I discovered a misconception in my own ideal of open society, which I kind of took over from Karl Popper. We all took it for granted that the purpose of critical thinking is to improve our understanding of reality. That’s the cognitive function. Then there’s this manipulative function, which is to change reality to meet your own desires, to influence people in a way that they’ll follow you. Politics is dominated by the manipulative function. You can’t take it for granted that critical thinking will give you a better understanding of reality. What you took for granted, you have to introduce as a requirement. I’m not abandoning open society at all; I’m just taking another step in what is necessary to bring about a well-functioning open society.

America, because of the adversarial, competitive nature of the political and economic system has really lost sight of the importance of understanding reality.

AP suing bloggers for linking

What nonsense, and what a waste of time and effort.

The Quotable Me

"I intend to lose weight until my chins are singular and my abs are plural."

Saturday I wandered around the Old Town Art Fair(s) with Kirk, Karen and Kate. Too much sun, rather than too hot, resulting in the necessity of an extended afternoon nap. Read Full Circle in one sitting while listening to Joni Mitchell, who sounds like California and always will.

Sunday, up at 5AM to hear the wind howling past for half an hour, followed by a short burst of rain and cooler weather. Fall asleep on the couch and miss yoga. Long phone call with Mom & Dad for Father's Day.

The Quotable Me

"The first child resembles the father, the second child resembles the mother, and the third child resembles me."

Writers Interview Roundup

William Gibson interviewed by io9.

Douglas Coupland's descriptions of Vancouver circa City of Glass are closest to my sense of the place. It's hemmed in and separated from the rest of the world by an ocean, a border, mountains. And then there's the unknown and incomprehensible north. Vancouver sits there, insulated to some extent, but picking up influences from across the ocean and across the border. The signals seem to be amplified by those symbolic barriers. Psychogeographically, I identify with greater Vancouver more than I do with the rest of Canada, which I have a fondness for and good feelings for. Vancouver's peculiar culture feels like home.

I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother's family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I'm happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I'm into hybrid vigor.

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

And Gore Vidal in the Independent on family, feuds and fame.

As a 10-year-old, Gore appeared in a Pathé newsreel, landing a light aircraft. How did that feel? "Great. I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936." He points to a dresser covered with small framed photographs. "There's a picture of my father."

"He looks like a film star."

"He was like a film star. He was the most famous college athlete in the history of the United States. A quarterback at West Point. He won a silver medal in the Olympic Games of 1924. In the 43 years that I knew him, we never quarrelled once, and we never agreed on anything."

His father's picture is towards the back of the display. Most prominently positioned is an image of a young woman with tousled hair, a mischievous grin, and great vitality: a tomboy with Katharine Hepburn cheekbones.

"Amelia Earhart," Vidal says.

"You can see courage in those eyes." "You can."

"Didn't she have a fling with your father?"

"She had more than that. I said to him, "Why didn't you marry her?' This was after she went down in the Pacific in 1936. They'd set up three airlines together." Even now, more than seven decades later, there is emotion in his voice. "He said: 'I have never really wanted to marry another boy.' And she was like a boy."

...He has recalled [his mother] telling him, for instance, that rage made her orgasmic ("I forgot to ask her if sex ever did") and remarking that she was born only "because my mother's douche bag broke". Nina also informed him how, on the way to their honeymoon, his father had told her: "'There's something very important I want you to know.' I was so excited. He's going to tell me he loves me. But he didn't. Instead, he said: 'I have three balls.'" According to Vidal, his father "was in all the medical books".

Sounding Rooms

The always great BLDG BLOG has a series of posts on hidden rooms, including this one, discussing Allen Fea's book. Nice set of comments as well. Apparently, the dream of finding new rooms in one's house is a common one, particularly among city dwellers. Likewise, the theosophists used to say that this was one of the first signs that you were doing some astral travel while lucid dreaming, and that the extra spaces were the result of the psychic space being a mirror of the physical or vice versa.

I used to have dreams about finding "extra" rooms behind the registers, and "extra" roads, usually dirt roads, lined by trees and elaborate, looming houses which appeared between existing hedgerows near my house.

This was probabaly touched off in part due to the fact that there was an entire extra row of lots that ran behind one of my friends' houses, one of which contained the single spookiest house in the neighborhood. Made of nasty, rotted-looking brown wood, abandoned and half ruined, surounded by burnt out grass and weeds. We could just see into the property whilst perched in a crabapple tree at the edge of my friend's back yard, with the partial obscurity offered by the branches adding to the uncanny feeling, as if we were stalking the house through the savannah. We used to take turns telling each other hair-raising stories about the place (axe murderers, Amityville-style demonic possession, crazed drug-fiend cultists and bloodthirsty ghosts made star appearances). The object was to make someone completely freak out and lose their nerve for staring at the place.

After a few years, someone knocked the thing down and landscaped it into a backyard garden with azaleas and a water feature, completely oblivious to the fact that they were planting their ground cover on top of a gateway to HELL!!!

I think every neighborhood should be furnished with a derelict building vibrating with the uncanny for the purpose of edification and atmospheric enhancement for the young people.

Dr. Chemex

I feel cheap and tawdry when I use links from boingboing or kottke, but sometimes they're too good to pass up, like this article from Gourmet Magazine on the inventor of the Chemex coffee maker.

“He loved to drink and he loved to eat,” says Roy Doty, a cartoonist who was a friend of the late inventor, “so going out for dinner with Dr. Schlumbohm was a horrifying experience.” Guests were treated to epic all-night food crawls in his huge Cadillac Coupe De Ville, which he pimped out with built-in shades and a solid-gold Chemex coffee maker bolted to the driver’s door. (When he traded in his car every two years, he removed the golden amulet and set it on the newer, larger model.) Like many German immigrants, Schlumbohm felt at home in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, once a stronghold of German restaurants and coffee shops. He drove his guests up into the 80s, handed anyone loitering near the area a ten-dollar bill to watch the car, and then marched in for his first course. Soon, they all piled back into the car and moved on to the next joint. “Eventually,” says Doty, “you’d be somewhere eating streusel with him and by that time it was two or three in the morning.” But three in the morning was nothing to Schlumbohm, who surrounded himself with fellow night owls and often made calls around that time to discuss his newest ideas.

When he did return home, it was, unsurprisingly, to a bachelor penthouse on 5th Avenue—a peeping Tom’s paradise overlooking Greenwich Village, with thousands of dollars worth of binoculars dangling from the windows, and ice buckets stocked with perpetually chilling German beers and wines at the front door for visitors. “He loved women, Dr. S., and women loved him,” says Doty.

The Puzzle Box Apartment

Eric Clough and a team of (sometimes unpaid) artists and artisans built a luxury apartment embedded with secrets:

[S]ome of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough,
whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter...

Photos Here

And also Here, in case the NYT loses its mind.

Habeas Corpus: Back from the Dead

Despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration, Habeas Corpus is back. The Guantanamo Bay terror suspects have constitutional rights, and should have their day in court. A Supreme Court ruling is the best way for this right to be affirmed--it confirms its place in the Constitution, which a repeal of the previous terror law would not have done. All in all, a good day for the American system of justice.



Still, as a 5-4 ruling, this points out the importance of getting some youthful liberal (or at least centrist) types on the Court. Subtext: Obama'd better win.

Sebastian in High Style

"It's better to live your life like an open book...sometimes it's open to the wrong page"

Friday, out to the MCA with Ed, Gina and Mark for the Jeff Koons exhibit and First Fridays. Then, off to Luxbar in the Viagra Triangle for some Urban Cougar observation, take some time to glue myself together, then off to Minibar where I run into Jarrod and Bryan on their last day before Google, rejoin the MCA crowd, and end up at Sidetrack

Saturday, too wiped out for Bluesfest. Recover, head out to Jason's B-day tour at Cocktail, then Minibar again. Am described as "really solid".

Erland Ellisunk

Speaking of the AV Club, they've got a new interview up with Harlan Ellison (the man the myth the legend). I love the fact that Harlan made a cameo in Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra has a Cold, and almost gets the shit beaten out of him.

Update: Part 2 now available

More on The Fall

The Onion AV Club has a lengthy interview with Tarsem on The Fall:

So I said that to the actors, the moment I met them on the set. I just said, "Here, I am your puppet. I will create the best atmosphere for you, and you tell me if anything is intrusive. You'll never get a situation like this, except when—" What [David] Fincher calls very lazy filmmaking, and I agree, is when you just put lights out there, go telephoto, shoot 10 cameras, throw it together—actors love that, 'cause they can be natural from far away. I had unfortunately chosen a style in which the camera was in your face. It was very Yasujiro Ozu, it was very static. I just said, "Nothing should move. Nothing should come and save me. If the situation's not working, I want to be screwed."


Unfortunately, the handheld, really gritty-shitty look is perceived as realism. In that style, I find that you can make a cupboard act. You shoot an ad and the actor is dreadful, so you just pick up the camera and shake it around, and then suddenly it looks like the actor can act. It separates boys from men, when people are sitting in the camera stand just observing. Instead, I picked a worst-case scenario by putting the camera up close.

On the other hand, I said "The moment we go on location, you will be my puppets."

There were a lot of unique talents on this movie. For one, Lee Pace delivers multiple performances simultaneously, including convincing cast and crew that he was actually a paralyzed actor playing a bedridden stuntman. He did this so effectively that he wasn't recognized when he walked around at the gym off set.

For another, Eiko Ishioka delivers amazing, operatic costumes for the fantasy seqences, as she did for The Cell. The costumes together with the sets and the props? art installations? by art director Ged Clarke to build the fantasy sequences of the film.

Thirdly, the lab that printed the film did an amazing job, producing Baraka-like levels of color saturation:

there's a guy called Lionel Kopp who used to run a lab in France that I absolutely adore. And he has a lot to do with this particular one. Because I went in with specific paintings, pigmented early color photographs from Russia, and blah blah and say "There's an aesthetic and a technique that has to get in here." If it was easy to do this kind of stuff, hey, everyone would hire relatives. It's not. And this guy really has an aesthetic that I absolutely adore and trust. So I was in Paris with him all the time. And when we had to set the look, I would just tell him stuff and he'd achieve it. It was difficult technically sometimes. But aesthetically, you know, I had a look in mind and had to achieve it.

The Same People

Anna Quindlen on the California Gay Marriage Decision: Love Won

(and soon it won't be a big deal, at all)

Lotsa Things Could Happen

Fafblog calls it: "By the time a the Democratic National Convention only one delegate still supports Hillary Clinton. His name? Jesus."

Chicago: City of the Year

According to Fast Company:

The real Chicago isn't so easy to keep up with. It's constantly reinventing itself. Jumpy. Agitated. Impatient. It's as if the place is trembling. Move aside. Don't linger. And if you're going to dawdle, get out of the way. But what any Chicagoan will also tell you is that the past is very much present. It doesn't go away. It shouldn't. In fact, that's Chicago's lure and its beauty: its ability to take what was and figure out what could be.

Chicago has given America social investing and the stories of Stuart Dybek and Aleksander Hemon. It has been greening itself since long before it became trendy, and it has been dancing, too -- this is the home of house music, Wilco, and Lupe Fiasco. Here, in the birthplace of the American skyscraper, Santiago Calatrava is redefining the form with his Spire, while at the Art Institute, Renzo Piano is building a $300 million addition. The economy is growing faster than New York's or L.A.'s. And one of Chicago's own, who arrived in the 1980s and, in the tradition of the great rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky, took a job community organizing, has made a shockingly viable run for president, despite everyone telling him he was too inexperienced. Early in his campaign, Barack Obama told supporters, "I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I'm tough. I'm from Chicago."

I agree, it's the energy of the place that really makes Chicago different. You come back afraid that you missed something while you were away.

The Road to Gambier

Off to my college reunion this weekend, driving a cherry red Mustang convertable in the first bloom of summer. Does life get any better?

James Madison's Pistols

This pair of pistols were a gift to President Madison, supposedly forged from iron from a fallen metorite at Campo del Cielo, and chased with Argentine silver. Results from a recent detailed analysis contradict this story on several important points.

(via Grinding)

Tarsem's The Fall

This is either going to be brilliant or an appalling disaster. Possibly both.



A story improvised by a five year old Romanian actress, based on photographs taken over a fourteen year period, featuring an actor who pretended to be a paraplegic throughout much of the film's production.

It will be many things. It will not, however, be mediocre.

Slideshow of related images: here.

Magic

Profile of industrial designer John Gaughan, one of the world's top manufacturers of effects for magicians, including some nice pictures of his collection of 18th and 19th century stage magic props.

House Porn 2

Alberto Manguel's 30,000 volume library, collected over six decades, gathered in a 15th century French country house.

In at least one instance, his absence saved the books:

I left my books behind when I set off for Europe in 1969, some time before the military dictatorship. I was 21 years old and wanted to see the world I had read about, the London of Dickens, the Paris of Marcel Aymé. My books, I thought, would faithfully wait in my parents’ house for me to come back one day. I could not have imagined that, had I stayed, like so many of my friends, I would have had to destroy my library for fear of the police, since in those terrible days one could be accused of subversion merely for being seen with a book that looked suspicious (someone I knew was arrested as a communist for carrying with him “The Red and the Black.”) Argentine plumbers found an unprecedented call for their services, since many readers tried to burn their books in their toilet bowls, causing the porcelain to crack.

House Porn

New York magazine's issue on home design includes a set of six amazingly constructed houses. The amazing part comes in part from the heavy DIY component, where palatial interiors have been constructed with glue guns, plywood and secondhand furniture.



Kohle Yohannon refurbished an 18 room Yonkers mansion "single-handedly", and now rents it out as a site for films.

(photos: Jason Schmidt)

I'm particularly fond of the Observatory Room, "like something out of Around the World in 80 Days" with walls covered in mica, copper and Moroccan rivets, and featuring church furniture and scientific apparatus.

Update: from an earlier interview with Kohle Yohannon

Mr. Yohannan is no less colorful. He tools around Yonkers on a Ducati motorcycle or in a secondhand Bentley. Born in San Francisco to parents of Iranian and French extraction, he grew up in a rambling Beaux-Arts house that his family had restored on a shoestring budget. "My dad was a mechanic, but my mom had really great taste," he said. "Our neighbors were doctors and lawyers who drove Mercedes, and we were the grease monkeys who fixed their cars."

At 16 he abandoned a fledgling career cleaning spark plugs for 25 cents apiece to become a fashion model, strutting his stuff down the catwalks of Barcelona and New York, where he also enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology and learned to make dresses. When he was 22 — during his sophomore year at Columbia University — he became the fourth husband of Mary McFadden, the fashion designer, who was 51; the relationship ended 22 months later in well-publicized recriminations. (In court papers, Mr. Yohannan described Ms. McFadden as an "older, selfish, willful" woman who demanded "rough sexual treatment" and "group sex sessions." She called him a "toy boy" and a "flake." He left the marriage with a settlement of $110,000 and the couple's pet cockatoo, Socrates Zinzar Big Bux.)

Karl Lagerfeld is Never Happy Anyway

More Steampunk

Once the media gets a hold on the Zeitgeist, articles like these pop up like fairy circles. From the Phoenix.

Soy Bomb

Whatever happened to Soy Bomb? He's running a salon in Brooklyn, creating imaginary betting tables & such.

"God is Coming, Msabu"

Low energy lightning surrounds the ash cloud from volcanic Mt. Chaiten. A large photo series by Carlos Gutierrez for UPI.

(via BLDG BLOG)

Steampunk

While sipping lychee tea at the eminently steampunk Pause coffeehouse

I read the raft of widely blogged articles on the steampunk aesthetic, including the New York Times article and Richard Morgan's original article on the subject. Of course, the subculture has been knocking around for a while now; the fact that the NYT is in on the game means that it's starting to go mainstream, or reach a tipping point, or be passe (or demode, as very steampunkish Karl Lagerfeld might say).

What's steampunk all about? Bespoke technology, the visual/tactile pleasure of brass fitted scientific instruments, waistcoats and petticoats and fitted leather, dandyism, being gothic without wearing black, zeppelins, anti-minimalism without rococo, and science fiction dialed back into history.

Grant Achatz's Miracle Tongue

Four stories on Alinea's Grant Achatz, his creations, his fight with cancer, and his recovery:

A Man of Taste

Slide Show: A Molecular Feast

Burned

From There to Alinea

NIN: the slip

Nine Inch Nails releases their latest album for free download under a share alike license. Ghosts I-IV made $1.6M, proving the value of direct release for established bands like NIN.

"(thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one's on me)"

Eccentric roundup

23 of New York's finest eccentrics. Some of whom appear to have been profiled in the New York Magazine article on people who wear a single color of clothes.

Luminous

The 99

Christopher Dickey on the use of comics to oppose the appeal of terror:

Scott Atran is an anthropologist who studies the kids who keep Al Qaeda and its spinoffs going. They're young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005 and hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006.

Atran has looked at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them. And he's reached an unconventional but, to me, convincing conclusion: what has inspired the "new wave" terrorists since 2001 is not so much the Qur'an as what Atran calls "jihadi cool." If you can discredit these kids' idols (most notably Osama bin Laden), give them new ones and reframe the way their families and friends see the United States and its allies, then you've got a good shot at killing the fad for terror and stopping the jihad altogether.

For Atran, a senior fellow at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, this is pretty much Public Diplomacy 101. But he's found that the battle of ideas is not just hard to win in the field, it's a very tough slog at home. In Washington last year he was briefing White House staffers on his findings when a young woman who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney said in the sternest tough-guy voice she could muster, "Don't these young people realize that the decisions they make are their responsibility, and that if they choose violence against us, we're going to bomb them?"

Atran was dumbfounded. "Bomb them?" he asked. "In Madrid? In London?"

So when Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration's warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called "The 99."

(via Cabinet of Wonders)

Link roundup

Sportsmanlike conduct:

Umpires confirmed that the only option available under the rules was to replace Tucholsky at first base with a pinch runner and have the hit recorded as a two-run single instead of a three-run home run. Any assistance from coaches or trainers while she was an active runner would result in an out. So without any choice, Knox prepared to make the substitution, taking both the run and the memory from Tucholsky.

"And right then," Knox said, "I heard, 'Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?'"

The voice belonged to Holtman, a four-year starter who owns just about every major offensive record there is to claim in Central Washington's record book. She also is staring down a pair of knee surgeries as soon as the season ends. Her knees ache after every game, but having already used a redshirt season earlier in her career, and ready to move on to graduate school and coaching at Central, she put the operations on hold so as to avoid missing any of her final season. Now, with her own
opportunity for a first postseason appearance very much hinging on the outcome
of the game -- her final game at home -- she stepped up to help a player she
knew only as an opponent for four years.

Saluting Generation X:

[Jeff] Gordinier, an editor at Details magazine, makes a convincing case that despite finding themselves ground between the two huge demographic boulders of the boomers and the boomers' kids, as well as being on the wrong side of nearly every economic trend, the wary, self-effacing members of Gen X have at least as much to be proud of as those bumptious generations for whom boastfulness comes more easily."

The Freedom of Movement

" I'm happy to see that the parkour generation is ever growing and my father would be proud of you. He lit the fire within me to illuminate my own path. Now you are the founders for what will follow. Be free and no matter what you do with parkour, do it well. Goodbye and good training to all of you."

-David Belle

" Je suis heureux de voir que la generation du parkour grandit toujours et mon pere serait fier de vous aussi. Il a allume mon flambeau pour eclairer ma route. Maintenant c'est vous les batisseurs pour la suite. Soyez libres et peu importe ce que vous ferez du parkour, mais faites le bien. Aurevoir et bon entrainement a tous!"

-David Belle

Omnipotent Pyrotechnics

Listen to one of the most memorable monologues from NYPD Blue. Commentary by the writer.

I will now commence my 4 years 7 months of silence.

You are the River

Interview with Ken Wilber on interiority and non-dual consciousness in Salon:

This raises a fundamental question about the whole mind-brain problem. Virtually all neuroscientists say the mind is nothing more than a 3-pound mass of firing neurons and electrochemical surges in the brain. Why do you think this view is wrong?
It reduces everything. And you can make no distinctions of value. There's no such thing as love is better than hate, or a moral impulse is better than an immoral impulse. All those value distinctions are erased.

But is that scientific view wrong?

At this point, you enter the philosophy of science, and the argument is endless. Is there nothing but physical stuff in the universe? Or is there some sort of interiority? We're not talking about ghosts and goblins and souls and all that kind of stuff. Just: Is there interiority? Is there an inside to the universe? And if there is interiority, then that is where consciousness resides.

You can't see it, but it's real. This is the claim that phenomenology makes. For example, you and I are attempting to reach mutual understanding right now. And we say, aha, I understand what you're saying. But you can't point to that understanding. Where does it exist? But if you take a phenomenology of our interior states, then you look at them as being real in themselves. And that's where values lie and meaning lies. If you try to reduce those to matter, you not only lose all those distinctions, but you can't even make the claim that some are right and some are wrong.

Monocle

Design autopsy on Monocle's first year as a multimedia effort.

I have a very different opinion of Monocle's first year; one that is closer to Adam Greenfield's. In short, what I wanted was the second coming of Wallpaper*, redone as a smarter, more in-depth Economist. Instead, Monocle ended up being a boring magazine, lacking the "essential" character it claimed to seek and giving poor value for the subscription price.

Curta

a la Pattern Recognition, from the Wired Most-Wanted Rare Tech Submissions

Link Roundup: Religion

Benedict and Young Catholics:

"Honestly, I think a lot of people are more excited to see Kelly Clarkson," admits 16 year-old Stephanie LaGumina, who will attend the rally along with 100 of her female classmates from The Ursuline School in New Rochelle, N.Y. In a group interview with four of them earlier this week, they spoke of a strong desire for Benedict to speak directly to young people but also a deep disconnect that many in their generation feel with the church, particularly with this pope. "It's important for him to see how the faith relates to us, and I'm not sure that he does," said 17-year-old Gianna Caiola. "We're the future of the faith, and if you lose us now, there will be nothing left." Added LaGumina, "I know a lot of guys who have said they would be more interested in going to seminary if John Paul was still pope."

I Want to Be Left Behind. Fundamentalists have websites that allow them to leave their Earthly possessions to non-Raptured friends, should the End Times begin anytime soon.

Cognitive Surplus: Here Comes Everybody

This is the truth: you can do a lot with the time you spend watching television. 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year, according to Clay Shirky. A shedload of World of Warcraft.

Several years ago, I wrote a novel with my spare time spent not watching television. People asked me "where did you find the time?" C'mon, people, it takes maybe an hour a day, tops, to write 1,000 words a day. If you can do that every day, you have the 1st draft of a 100-200,000 word novel in 3-6 months. It may well be crap, but you've got it laid down like a brick wall. Then, you just have to spend the rest of the year, an hour or so a day Photoshopping it to your liking.

Or, you can write articles about Pluto with your free time:

[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

Update: aaaaand the video


(via boingboing)

City in the Fog

"Yeah, and 20 gigs more than the white"

From Radosh.net:

Bruce Sterling in Potsdam

The Viridian Cyberpunk Pope-Emperor Doktor Professor Bruce Sterling lays down some design rap.


Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo

Karl Lagerfeld Watch

Ten Things Karl Lagerfeld Can Do Without, including:

• Meat
• Children
• Fat People
• People Who Touch Him
• Boring Things
• Traveling
• The 90's
• Diane von Furstenburg

These things are "boring" and/or "demode". That is all.

Hedging

N+1 interviews an anonymous hedge fund manager about the subprime meltdown. It's clear within 5 minutes of reading this article that this guy is competent, because he's willing to say what he doesn't know, because he's willing to go against consensus opinion because it's the consensus and is therefore fully realized news, and because he ditched the TVs set to CNBC.

He also makes a number of good points about why Bear Stearns sold out (Treasury probably strong armed the execs) and discusses the importance of speedy shake-outs of bad assets in avoiding a repeat of the Japanese zombie bank situation.

Previous interview with the same person.

Watched 8 hours of Petraeus testimony. Nothing will change in Iraq until this administration is replaced, and then everything will move quickly.

Made Vietnamese beef stew for dinner. Watched part of Casino Royale with Mark.