We launched a new sixapart.com a couple of days ago, and I'm so proud to work with the team that built and implemented such a beautiful and useful site!
(Oh, and we also made some other exciting announcements, which as Mena says, bring back some memories of how we evolved.)
I'm sure it's old news by now, but I'm just getting around to reading this article on elevators in the New Yorker, and this, in particular, stood out to me:
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.
It's true: even though I know that the close button doesn't work, I still use it.
Michael Pollan poses a question that I'd assume a lot of people have about how to fight climate change on an individual basis--"Why bother?". For my part, I was (again) inspired by the thought of planting a garden:
But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction.
Now, to actually do it.
Out of laziness, I missed the Dirty Projectors show last week in San Francisco. I'm pretty disappointed, because I'm sure I missed an amazing show, and Rise Above--their most recent album--is one of my current favorites.
If you're not familiar with the concept of Rise Above, here's how I described it around eight months ago:
[it's] a reinterpretation of Black Flag's Damaged, made without listening to the original album, recorded on a four-track that Dave Longstreth picked up mid-inspiration at the local music shop (apparently), but with merely a 25-year-old memory of said album and its songs & lyrics ...
I love this because--yes, taking the story with a grain of salt--Rise Above is what Damaged sounds like inside of Dave Longstreth's head! This is how his twenty-five-year-old memory of the album has evolved, and that's pretty neat. Frankly, it sounds better than Black Flag ever did, to me, and probably a lot worse to people who grew up listening to Black Flag.
The best thing about Rise Above--and what makes it all work--is the sense of urgency in Longstreth's voice; "Police Story" may start with Getty Address-style strings, but then he wails:
This fucking city
is run by pigs!
They take away the rights
from all the kids.
As a reference point, Longsteth's take on punk sounds very much like early Scritti Politti: scratchy, nervous guitars combined with a mix of anxious yelps and R&B crooning.
And, perhaps despite itself, some moments of really intense beauty. The album closes with "Rise Above", one of the most conventionally pretty songs the Dirty Projectors have ever recorded, and a gorgeous end to a truly brilliant album.
Today, Mena and I were talking about this Michael Kinsley piece in a recent New Yorker, the premise of which being that longevity is essentially the last competition that you'll ever have, and that after arriving at sixty years old, it's totally up for grabs whether you'll die tomorrow or live until ninety. Fun!
Oh, and, I certainly wasn't aware of the state of surgery/repair w/r/t Parkinson's:
[The symptoms] got even milder after I had an operation, a couple of years ago, to implant wires in my brain and two pacemaker-type batteries in my chest ... During the operation, your head is screwed into a metal frame and the frame is screwed into the operating table. My surgery lasted nine hours, and for most of it I had to be awake, so that the doctors could test the connection, like asking somebody to go upstairs and see if the light in the bedroom comes back on while you fiddle with the circuit-breaker box in the basement.
It's the future! And it's pretty fascinating.
There's a fascinating profile of George Clooney in the latest New Yorker. I particularly enjoyed this description of Clooney's altercation with Fabio last year:
I asked Clooney about the Fabio incident last November, and he laughed, saying, "What do you want? Dinner at an Italian restaurant with Sarah and myself and my buddy Benny and his girlfriend Meilani, and there's a table sitting there full of four or five women and Fabio with his back to me, and it's one of those things where they just keep taking your picture." He went on, "This isn't new to me. I'm going to go to dinner tonight, and they'll do it, they'll position themselves. I know it, and I'm used to it. But it went on and it went on, and I gave them the finger"—a photograph of the gesture was published online—"and they kept doing it and Fabio was looking over his shoulder and laughing and smiling and shit. So finally I go, 'O.K., enough.' I go, 'Knock it off, enough.'" And, speaking across to Fabio's table, "'I thought you were a nice guy.'"
2008 started with a glut of indie pop, for me: Magnetic Fields, Raveonettes, Nicole Atkins, Vampire Weekend. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But, well, it all started to feel like I was in a bit of a rut.
Which is why I'm so happy that the last month or so has brought some real honest-to-goodness pop and R&B: Duffy's "Mercy" and Estelle's "American Boy"; new Usher, new Erykah Badu, new Lil Wayne; a rediscovery of Girls Aloud's "Can't Speak French"; and perhaps most unexpected, an incredible track from Mariah Carey!
It's a good year.
I love Rick Astley even more after reading his thoughts on Rickrolling in this LA Times interview.
“Listen, I just think it’s bizarre and funny. My main consideration is that my daughter doesn’t get embarrassed about it.”
The thing is, I actually really enjoy "Never Gonna Give You Up", and honestly, I'd rather watch its video than most of the things people link to on the web. So there.
The profile of David Chang in the latest New Yorker (not online, sadly) is brilliant & scary all at once--I wonder if Chang is as manically miserable as the profile makes him out to be? He's certainly an incredible chef; our meal at Ssäm Bar last year was one of the more memorable eating experiences I've had.
The article's filled with great quotes, but here's one of my favorites:
"I'm so sick and tired of how awesome it is to work at Google or fucking Apple or one of those tech companies," he says. "Why can't it be awesome to work for a food company? Why can't we create an environment where people are trying to push each other to do great things, and we're not trying to steal from anybody, we're trying to be good to our farmers and run an honorable business, if there is such a thing anymore?"
From Joel on Software: Martian Headsets:
If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.
This made my morning, and it's only one of many fantastic quotes.
