"A medium is available....It is dumb, inarticulate, contains no magic. It is available and manageable and probably stunningly beautiful when managed by graceful people who are bent on acts of expression ....This newer medium is swift in nature. It demands a new kind of perception. It moves like light sparked into life as through a nervous prism. It is another paint, another dance, another music of sound. Another message meant to catch the quick vision of the inner eye."

--Brice Howard, Videospace, 1972
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David alerted me to the release of the latest Iain M. Banks Culture novel. Unfortunately not yet available stateside, though you can order it from Amazon UK.

"When using that middle initial M., Iain Banks writes grand space opera combining galactic scope with twisty, tricky probes into the darkest secrets of human and other minds. Look to Windward revisits the utopian but ruthless interstellar Culture introduced in Consider Phlebas, exploring the complex aftermath of a rare Culture mistake--humanitarian tinkering with an unjust civilization that accidentally led to massive civil war and billions dead."
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Rekjavik Rocks. "With claims to the word's highest per capita CD sales and book ownership (not to mention mobile phone use and alcohol consumption), Iceland is flourishing culturally, with new filmmakers, artists and musicians all intermingling in a capital with fewer people than Elizabeth, N.J."

You might ask yourself why Iceland would have so many smart creative people. Perhaps the government sponsors the art and culture? That there is an excellent educational system, and universal literacy? They don't have the kind of issues of scale that we have here, and issues of diversity.
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Saw White this weekend. The only one of the Kieslowski red white and blue trifecta I hadn't seen. A really unusual story about amour fou and impotence and life.
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Directors I have to look into: Maurice Pialat, Chris Marker, Bertrand Tavernier, Raúl Ruiz, Emir Kusturica, István Szabó and Kira Muratova.
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"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." - Gustave Flaubert
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Saw The Contender tonight. Excellent, thought-provoking political drama, with excellent performances by Jeff Bridges (as the President), Joan Allen and Gary Oldman. It reminded me of a BBC film called "A Very British Coup" about a bloodless battle to destroy a political enemy. Jim and Spencer and I sat and talked about it for several hours afterwards, about principles and pragmatism, about which fights you fight and which fights you don't, about Spencer's time serving on the War Crimes tribunal at the Hague and the battles fought there.

Jim also told me to look for this New York Times article about a former Vassar professor of ours, Don Foster, Renaissance scholar who has found a second career as a literary sleuth. He believes that Clement Moore did not in fact write The Night before Christmas but that he was a fraud. The actual author seems to be a Henry Livingston Jr. Foster also found a poem now attributed to Shakespeare, identified Joel Klein as the author of "Primary Colors" and consulted on the Unabomber and Jon Benet Ramsay cases. He believes that people's writing bears its own signature, and that an individual's mode of writing is as singular as a fingerprint. In his new book Author Unknown he also debunks the famous rumor that a Mendocino County bag lady named Wanda Tinasky was actually Thomas Pynchon, discovering in the process that "Wanda Tinasky" was in fact a little known beat poet and murderer.
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We stand corrected. The Interrobang is actually a punctuation mark proposed in 1962 that combines the question mark and the exclamation point. (via email from andy crewdson thank you!)
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A good article on Feed about Syvia Plath: The Long Prosaic Loaf of Daily Bread and another at The Village Voice. Moreover, an article about Henry Darger by Darcy Steinke.
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Judith tells me the following indispensible facts: "#" is an "octothorpe" and "!" is an "interrobang"!!

For Judith, since she so nicely ceded the copy of Illuminations that she found at the bookstore the other week:

Mein Flugel ist zum Schwaung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zuruck
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hatte wenig Gluck.
-- Gerhard Scholem, "Gruss vom Angelus"

My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.

"A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." -- Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
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Can't shake this leaden feeling. It occurs to me that perhaps I've been reading too much Walter Benjamin?
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More geneology curios from my father: "Yes, that's right. Your Great Grandfather Duncan I was the guy who was murdered by MacBeth. Malcolm III Canmore (his unofficial name was Thorfinn) was Duncan's son and avenged his father's murder on the battlefield. MacBeth had become king after the murder, and Malcolm became king after he beat him. "
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Tonight, dinner at Judith's where I was fortunate enough to sample the famous pumpkin soup with toasted pumpkin seeds and gruyere, just as she recommends. Delicious. Her apartment too is so warm and friendly and full of curious objects and wonderful books; things to look at and touch and lift and marvel over that she brought with her from Brooklyn. Being there, and eating and drinking a lovely pinot noir and talking and talking did much to cheer me.

I was depressed today, and feeling vaguely sad and hopeless, tired and achy, and so long after I should already have had lunch I left the office and stumbled into the Adobe bookstore, with no recollection of having decided to go there. I happened upon A Passionate Journey by Frans Mazereel, a novel in 165 woodcuts written in 1926. On impulse, I bought it, and Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. I sat in Ti Couz in the shadows of a sunny day, and "read" the Mazereel book, and it was absolutely the perfect thing. It is a book comprised completely of pictures, following a man who boards a train, falls in love, feeds the hungry, embarrasses himself, gets thrown out of a restaurant, saves a little girl, watches her die, falls in love, cooks dinner, makes speeches, climbs a tree, plays with children, swims in the ocean, mocks a priest, weeps despairingly, exults, hugs a horse, makes love, goes for a walk, prays in anguish, dances. I was profoundly moved by it, and at one point almost cried. Please read it.
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A curio from my father in today's email delivery:

"I thought you would be interested to know that I have traced your pedigree back 29 generations, in one line, to a guy named Soberton Leman, the father of Osbert "Fil" Leman. Soberton was your Great Grandfather with 26 greats, and was born about 1157. We know the name and approximate date of birth of everyone between him and you. For a while, in the 14th and 15th centuries, there were names like Saloman de Lyman (16 greats), Ebpilon de Lyman (17 greats) and Alisolan de Lyman (18 greats). Of course, you have to realize that Soberton Leman (no doubt a Norman type) was only one of 268,435,456 grandparents of yours back to that generation, but his blood does run in your veins."
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Gee I'm feeling great.
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The end of Xerox PARC? "...the nearly bankrupt Xerox (XRX) is reportedly considering selling off parts of itself, including the world-famous Xerox PARC research center in Palo Alto, Calif." Since I worked (very) briefly at the similar, now defunct Interval Research, this saddens me. Interval and Xerox PARC were places that produced a great deal of technology and media art: Xerox PARC had an Artists in Residence program.
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Finished reading The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell last night, brilliant comic novel of New York bohemia in the 50s. Started rereading The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, trying to figure out why I disliked Gravity's Rainbow, since I liked Lot 49 and Mason and Dixon so much. Haven't read Lot 49 for a looong time, barely remember it. Laughed at the name "Mucho Maas".
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Yahoo! Health October is Breast Cancer awareness month. If you go to http://health.yahoo.com/ and click on the pink ribbon, yahoo will donate $1.00 to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
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My kitchen is laughably small for an American kitchen. I am baking chocolate chip cookies, but am only able to bake 5 at a time. (Postscript) I'm hopeless at cooking. I like my cookies hard and crunchy not soft and chewy, so I reduced the absurd amount of butter the recipe called for. They came out the texture and consistency of drywall.
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Another Stichomancy exercise This time I just walked over to the bookshelf, and not looking, grabbed a book. This one is the Baudelaire: The Poems in Prose. And the paragraph I selected was just perfect, seeing as how I spent the prior hour considering what it would take to move to a house near Jouke, in Bourgogne. Here is the passage from the prose poem "N'mporte ou hors du monde" or "Anywhere out of the world":

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas, et cette question de demenagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon ame.

It seems that I would feel better anywhere except where I actually am, and the idea of moving is one which I am constantly discussing with my soul.
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I am a fan of Herbert Muschamp's architecture criticism, and even more so after his latest piece, A Rare Opportunity for Real Architecture in New York. The article walks us through the architecture competition put on by The New York Times to choose an architect for their planned skyscraper on Eighth Avenue in the 40s. He quotes an erotic Auden poem, muses on the symbolism of the obelisk, and is particularly good on the criticism of Pelli and Foster. The winning entrant in the competition was Renzo Piano of whom Muschamp writes: "Piano uses terms like vibration, breathing and magic to describe what he calls the "immaterials" of architecture. It is with these qualities that the reality of his architecture resides." His criticism is oblique and idiosyncratic and wide-ranging: last week in his article on the recent obsession with design he trots out the word "ecotone". He seems curious and completely enamored of his subject. Not enough of that in the daily news.
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Henry Darger Another thing to covet: a new release of Henry Darger's Art and Selected Writings. Orphaned as a child, he grew up in what was then called a Home for the Feeble-Minded and the Lincoln Asylum in southern Illinois, but later ran away to Chicago where he lived the rest of his life as a janitor in local hospitals. Little is known of his life, but after his death, his landlord found a room full of papers and drawings, a 15,000 page illustrated novel called In the Realms of the Unreal about a group of young girls called the "Vivian girls". Darger created beautiful drawings by tracing coloring books and newspapers, some of which are online at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago.
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"There is no pleasure in telling a story as it actually happened." -- Jorge Luis Borges
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Encouraged by yesterday's successful Stichomancy, I try it again. This time the text is Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne:

Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man's head there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like -- A train of artillery? said my uncle Toby. -- A train of a fiddle stick! quoth my father, -- which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle. -- I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoak-jack. -- Then, brother Toby, I have nothing more to say to you upon the subject, said my father.

Have you ever tried to frown with your eyebrows and smile with your mouth? Lift your eyebrows in surprise, and otherwise frown? Open your eyes really wide and furrow your brow at the same time? This is what Evan and I do to entertain ourselves, and laugh.
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Handy-dandy pop-up Grid of Issues by Presidential Candidates.
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My first effort at Stichomancy reveals this passage from Blow-up and other stories by Julio Cortazar (p. 55):

"I know, I haven't mentioned anything other than the usual coincidences, very visible. For example, even that Luc looked like me is of no serious importance, even if you're sold on the revelation on the bus. What really counted was the sequence of events, and that's harder to explain because it involves the character, inexact recollections, the mythologies of childhood. At that time, I mean, when I was Luc's age, I went through a very bad time that started with an interminable sickness, then right in the middle of the convalescence broke my arm playing with some friends, and as soon as that was healed I fell in love with the sister of a buddy of mine at school, and God, it was painful, like you can't look at a girl's eyes and she's making fun of you. Luc fell sick also, and just as he was getting better they took him to the circus, and going down the bleacher seats he slipped and dislocated his ankle. Shortly after that his mother came on him accidentally one afternoon with a little blue handkerchief twisted up in his hands, standing at a window crying: it was a handkerchief she'd never seen before."

What an auspicious beginning to my Stichomancy efforts! A passage about parallel, rhyming lives, mirroring the mirroring of book to life!
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Caterina about town sighting. This one taken in the Haight at Sunday brunch.
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A PARTIAL LIST OF CASUALTIES My friend Amanda just sent me this really depressing list of art spaces and arts organizations that have fallen recently. It's deeply discouraging:

• Dancer's Group Studio on 22nd and Mission
• Dance Mission Theater at 24th and Mission
• Brady Street Dance Theater
• Downtown Rehearsal Space (2000 musicians comprising some 500 bands)
• Art Explosion
• Division Hi-Fi
• 25 small businesses and non-profits that lost their leases in the Bayview Bank Building on 22nd and Mission
• Housing Rights Committee
• San Francisco Cinémathèque
• Cine Accion
• Film Arts Foundation
• Frameline
• The Jewish Film Festival
• Nearly 60 small businesses and artists who have been displaced by the Bryant Square development project on Bryant and 20th
• The American Indian Contemporary Art Group and Gallery
• S.F. Camerworks
• Z Space Studio
• The Clarion Alley Mural Project
• Quonset Hut (photographer Jon Zax and other artists
• 20 artists at Stevenson Alley building
• Centro Social Obrero

Surprise visit tonight from my friend Jim (not the Mexico City Jim, but the Texan Jim.) He looked skinny and I told him so and he said that I told him that every time that I saw him. And I blamed myself for that. It shows a certain solipsism, a kind of jaded eye, a sort of reflex fashion of dealing with other people. Must. Be. Awake. Must be alive! Tired. Too tired to listen, and think, and be. Alive.
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Mitsu has a beautiful post today about an unusual experience he had in an elevator.
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Another weekend wrapup. Dinner at Ebisu with my friend Jim, a scholar and man-about-town, visiting from Mexico City and his friend John Lilly Jr., also a resident of Mexico, is in town on his way back from visiting his father, the famous John Lilly, Sr. in Maui. (John Lilly Sr. invented the isolation tank, and was the man Altered States was based on. More about him here.) Jim brought John in to show him how many books it was possible to fit in a very small apartment, and marvel over how much such an apartment costs. Over dinner, talk about light rail systems, Oliver Stone, the Huichol indians and obscure documentaries I don't remember the titles of. After dinner we took John, who is himself a documentary filmmaker, to Le Video where we rented Quo Vadis and The Mystery of Leaping Fish, which we've a date to watch tomorrow night. Jim and John talked about the need for a video library such as Le Video in Mexico City where there is nothing of the kind, and what it would take to build it, and how the Mexican government's film budget might be used to fund such a thing.
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Gasp! Hurrah! A new article goes up on Wench: Domesticity: a domestic feminist stays home. Holly Teichholz tells us why she's cleaning up her boyfriend's mess.
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My friend Jon and I have this little game where he sends me the punchline and I have to think up a joke to go with it. Today's punchline is: ...so the bear says, "That's what the elephant was trying to tell me!!!" I'm going to need some help with that one.
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A letter from Yale. "The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible. When I have pieced it together, I realise he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here – is a hoax." Articles such as this reassure me that my decision to skip out on grad school was the right one. So much crap and mindrot!
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I am supposed to be having lunch with Gloria Steinem (!) right now with a bunch of other people, but can't go. It's really damned frustrating.
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Aaagh. Today, home with fibromyalgia. A body full of aches. I just discovered last week that this was caused by my taking Lariam back in 1995 in Brazil for malaria. I never put the two together, and I don't know how I missed the connection, but my sister, who is a Margie Profet in the making, somehow came up with it. Has anyone out there taken Lariam? It also gave me chills and terror, nightmares and a lot of other frightening reactions. If anyone ever prescribes it to you don't take it, by any means. Everyone I know who has taken it has had these symptoms. Here'ssome information about Lariam. There are a dozen other anti-malarials -- take one of them instead!
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Tonight I had the pleasure of dinner with Judith at Ti Couz. After crepes and salad and cider and much conversation, we sauntered up to Adobe Books where I went a little crazy and bought an armload and a half of books, rationalizing the expenditure by remarking that I don't have any other vices since I quit smoking. I have to buy books.

Someone who I used to work for (no names here) was getting rid of all their graphic design and typography books -- their name was written on the front page of some of them. I got:

• Graphis Annual 1972-73
• Typographie by Otl Aicher
• Handbook of Type Designers by Ron Eason and Sarah Rookledge
• Modern Typography by Robin Kinross
• An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill
• Living by Design, Pentagram 1978

• Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
• The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell (at Judith's recommendation)
• Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (I didn't know he was Canadian.)

Happy Birthday Corey!
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"You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one -- well, at least one and a half."

--Winston Churchill
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Calvino's Death an essay by Gore Vidal, has been published online by Random House on the occasion of the publication of The Essential Gore Vidal. Vidal is almost singlehandedly responsible for bringing Calvino to the attention of those of us here in the United States. And this essay is a fitting tribute to the master of wonder that was Calvino.
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Astrid writes to tell me that the Princeton Architectural Press has recently published a book on Walter Pichler one of my favorite architects and artists, though he is little known in this country. His book Prototypen has photographs of some of his work between the years of 1966-1969. Amazing, beautiful, unnerving work about architecture, technology and the self.
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SOMECOMIXS. Nice hand-drawn comics by Tracy White.
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A la verga? On the way home from work I heard a man greet his friends saying "A la verga!", which means, roughly, "Here's to penises!" They all responded with hearty "A la verga!"s and then seemed to fall into an embarrassed silence as I looked over at them in disbelief. Did I mishear this, or is this a common Latino greeting that no one's let me in on?
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From a biology book I got today from the thrift store down the street. What our relatives would look like if they were to shave their bodies and stand straight up. Disconcerting, isn't it?
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Another excellent typography blog, Lines & Splines by Andy Crewdson.
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copyrightdavis.com. Illogical and meaningless and wonderful art. Beautiful hand drawn illustrations. I'm a sucker for this loose pencil style. ( via glassdog)
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Geeked Text. I love it when designers like Heather use disenfranchised and detested typefaces like Brush Script, Dom Casual and Tekton. Eeeeew! Brush Script is the default typeface for American hair salon signage, manicure joints, chinese and french restaurants, laundromats and auto supply outfits. Once you start seeing it, you don't stop seeing it. I saw it driving all over France too. My original and unlaunched design of caterina.net used Brush Script, as well as some of the disenfrancised art that come free with software applications, as a kind of design joke. What I'd really love to see is a well-designed site that uses Hobo. Is it possible? I grew to loathe this typeface when I worked as a production artist on the original McDonald's site. Everything was in Hobo. I'm still working off the bad karma I accrued from that job, even after building two organic farm sites, using nice designer-acceptable fonts like, you know, Swiss or Garamond or Akzidenz Grotesk.

JJG adds that his co-worker once suggested that Hobo was created to test the visual acumen of designers. Those who choose to use Hobo fail the test.
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Shana and I had a marvellous time sitting around doing nothing at my apartment last night. Shana is marvellous. We ordered some Chinese food -- spinach and hoisin string beans and tofu -- and ended up with someone else's order of Amateur Chinese: sweet and sour pork in neon sauce, fried rice, mu-shu pork and pork chow mein. We pictured a couple of beefy guys sitting miserably in front of all our spinach while we sat miserably in front of all their pork. Then Evan showed up hungry and, unable to eat any of this, ended up having Grape Nuts for dinner.

Insomnia clearly runs in the family. Stayed up until six this morning, finishing up The Liars Club and a wonderful Buddhism book, Start Where You Are recommended by David Anderson. Time to update the books page; read some books on the plane to New York too: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and the Street of the Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.
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Double Tracking I love learning musical terminology, like "Big Muff" and "tones on tail" and "glissando". I like to say "bass cabinet" and "wah-wah" and "Mixolydian" because I believe that it increases my non-native kool kwotient without my having to undergo painful tattooing. JJG writes to lend some musical knowledge and its konkomitant kool:

The technique you describe is called "double-tracking", and it has a long and rich history in pop music. Cursory research on the Web indicates it started with Buddy Holly's "That'll Be The Day"; later it became a key component of Phil Spector's famed "Wall of Sound" production technique. Even when the vocalist isn't harmonizing, the interaction of subtle variations in the sound waves on each track creates the rich, deep sound you describe. Back in the days of mono, they needed every trick they could lay their hands on to create a fuller sound.

You mentioned Bob Mould's "Sunspots" not too long ago on your site. Mould is a big fan of double-tracking -- it's not so pronounced on Workbook, but it's really noticeable on all the Sugar records.

Hm. If I were to put in my $0.02, I'd say, cute in the morning, handsome in the afternoon, sexy at night. But you know, I might need those pennies for bubblegum.
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Life is very very difficult. Very very very very very very very very. It's even more difficult when you decide to do difficult things.
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At the Pacific Film Archives: Pushed out for Profit films and videos by media collectives past and present that analyze the distribution of public and private space.
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Things to do one day department. Visit the Buñuel themed restaurant Viridiana in Madrid. Also: Visit Madrid. (via email from judith)
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I idolize Buñuel. Last night at dinner Daniela told us that when she was fifteen she was lucky enough to meet Luis Buñuel, the famous film director of Belle du Jour and Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie. She said that he lived in a very modest house, with no paintings on the walls, only a single small cross. He told her that people admire intelligence over kindness, but that kindness is a much rarer human quality. The kindest man that he'd ever met, he said, was Federico Garcia Lorca, and if Lorca had never written a single poem, he still would have been a great man.
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Here is the WSJ excerpt:

A Zoning Gambit

Opponents of Bigstep.com's expansion plans now are homing in on an arcane city ordinance that prevents any one company from occupying more than 6,000 square feet in a single building without a special permit to do so. But Mrs. Cort, the landlord, dismisses that argument. Three of the nonprofit groups who were former tenants occupied more than 6,000 square feet, she says, and 'nobody complained about them.'

"Mr. Beebe is awaiting a commission ruling on the matter, which could trigger a lengthy public-hearing process. 'I am deeply concerned it will turn into a referendum on our existence' he says. If City Hall ultimately rules against him, his company could have to move." (via email from faisal)

And back again! It's a very difficult thing, zeroing in on the truth. Jenbee writes, in response to Sasha Magee's response yesterday:

that ... reply to you about the 6k sq foot thing is misleading if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed.According to the (cover!) story today there were previously nonprofits in that very same bldg that occupied the same amount of space (or more) and the regulation didn't raise any ire. (or cause any evictions) I don't remember what the article said exactly, but it's worth checking out.

I don't have access to the WSJ online. Does anyone have a copy of this article?
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So Emily saw Matthew Modine again at Les Deux Gamins (see below) without Decaf...and said he doesn't look half as cute in shorts. :-)
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Sasha Magee of the Digital Worker's Alliance writes in response to my prior post on the issue of the Bayview Bank building in the Mission:

Thanks for pointing out the mistake on our web site. Should read "25 or so non-profits and small and community-serving businesses". Don't know whether that was a transfer-to-html mistake or simple mental sloppiness on my part to begin with. I'll talk to our web guy to get it fixed.

Note that a big issue with bigstep is that the building is not zoned for anyone to occupy more than 6,000 sq ft. They claim that they were not told about this by the Corts, who own the building (fine, but it seems like a pretty sensible business decision to actually wander over to the planning department and check the zoning of the huge building you are planning to rent), but have done everything they can to avoid having a hearing on a possible Conditional Use Permit (which would allow them to ignore the zoning, and which in the current climate they would almost certainly win). They have even gone so far as to hire the same lobbyist that jammed through Bryant Square to try to get them around the law.

One of the things we sometimes forget is that small businesses--not just nonprofits--are vital to the community, and allowing one company that serves the needs of the community at best tangentially to take the space of a dozen or two immigration lawyers, chiropractors, spanish-language media outlets and the like doesn't necessarily make peoples' lives any better, regardless of how many parks they clean up.

Break-Up Made Easier With Colorful Visual Aids
HUNTINGTON, WV--Stephanie Duquette's break-up with boyfriend Chris Straub was made easier Sunday with an array of colorful charts, graphs, and other visual aids from Copy Express, a Huntington-area copy shop. (via xblog)
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Oh, this is great. EX LIBRIS, a 1998 project by Michael Gibb. If you click on the spines, a little popup window comes up describing the book and its relation to Gibb's life. Not unlike Surplus Value Books by Rick Moody, or his short story "Bibliography" that appears in Ring of the Brightest Angels.
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Mariachis. Some suitor has hired a mariachi band to serenade someone up my street. Right now they are standing and singing beneath a lighted window, out of which a woman is leaning.

When I was rock climbing in Mexico City, I was told that when rocks are falling you cry out "Aguas!", (meaning "Waters") to warn the people beneath you. They said that it originated with mariachi bands hired for serenading: the mariachis, hired by a would-be lover, would stand beneath the balconing and sing love songs to the daughter, who would come to the window and swoon. Then her mother would come with buckets of household waste water which she'd pour down on the singers, who'd cry out "Aguas!" and scatter.
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Coming up: Maeda @ Media at C C A C's Institute. John Maeda will be talking from 6-7 p.m. November 17, 2000 at the Timken Lecture Hall. (I didn't link to the awful browser-crashing Flashturbatory web site at CCAC, but there is some info at his own site: Maeda Studio) Also, as I mentioned before, I am looking forward to the publication of the book.
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Are you a vengeful passive-aggressive anti-social paranoid? Card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe? Loompanics books are just the thing for you. Look at these book covers! And then there's articles on "Masturbational Insanity" ("..Sallow skin, lusterless eyes, flabby muscles, loose stools, cold and clammy hands, poor indigestion, heart palpitations, hollow chest, headaches, dizziness all mark the young man snared by vicious habit..."), advice on "How to Throw Profitable College House Parties" and the Jedi Mind Tricks of "Cognitive Ju-Jitsu".
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The other thing I love about this song is the minute, almost undetectable delay after the first guitar strum, which would appear in musical notation as a rit.... ritardando or something.

I am an obsessed maniac.
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I figured out what I love so much about that song. Kozelek is recorded singing the same song twice, and they're mixed together, one in each ear on my headphones, and though it's not harmonized, it sounds really rich and polyphonous. It has so much depth.

A friend of mine told me that the reason that Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa seemed so rich and lifelike was that Da Vinci painted a layer of varnish between each layer of paint so that it is, in fact, subtly three dimensional.
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My sister writes in her blog today about Margie Profet, an independent scholar working in evolutionary biology. She works outside the academic and scientific institutions and manages to come up with completely original ways of solving problems. Her story is a fascinating one: she has no graduate degrees, lived in Berkeley, worked at a coffee shop once a week, earning about $700 a month and did her research on her own. Here is a May 1994 interview with her, and an article from Scientific American.
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Attraction/Distraction . "On November 4, 2000, the Intel Corporation's Art and Design Research Council Committee and the Stanford Department of Art and Art History are hosting a symposium at Stanford entitled, Attraction/Distraction: Perceptual Conditions of Media Art. Speakers include Bill Viola, David Ross, Benjamin Weil, Victoria Vesna, Rebecca Allen, Red Burns, Alex Galloway and others. The symposium is free and open to the public, but space is limited."

Rebecca points out rightly that I've omitted the best part: sponsored in part by Krispy Kreme donuts.
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I've become a regular reader of Webtype.org -- Typography News
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Weekend Wrapup I went up to Sebastopol this weekend to one of the most beautiful houses I've had the pleasure to visit, Ann Hatch and Paul Disco's zen ranch. It was set in an orchard of Gravensteins next to a grove of redwoods. The rooms were large and airy, and had windows opening up into the courtyard where rocks had been placed in accordance with traditional japanese temple arrangements. Disco practises a kind of Buddhist architecture; the whole place was constructed by joinery -- no nails were used. He's building an enormous compound for Larry Ellison in Woodside, CA (here's a really revolting article about Woodside) . His partner, Ann Hatch, is the founder of the Capp St. Project and The Oxbow School in Napa, and so the place is full of art. Among the apple trees there's even an enormous sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard.
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