The classiest fam in Hollywood loves Mara's barrettes; this time Violet rocks them. Nice. Buy em here, and pass it on.
14 Aug 08 · filed under: san francisco, tip, visual · 
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File this one under: Holy crap. It has come to the attention of the tabloid-reading world that Jennifer Garner was seen wearing red barrettes! But, wait, there's more. A certain barrette-making friend of ours made them. By hand. In San Francisco.
This is from Just Jared, and I must say: If the blog really is just a guy named Jared writing about celebrities, my hat is off to him. He publishes some tidbit of celebrity gossip roughly every 5 seconds. That's dedication, homes. If you're interested in the barrettes, you can buy a pair for yourself at Little Something; if you're concerned that they'll make you look like Jennifer Garner, you can ask Mara for some guidance in the proper way to wear them.
I'm glad that the barrettes got the full paparazzi treatment. A couple of photos just wouldn't have been sufficient. Better get 17 and be safe. Check em all out.
(Congratulations, you big loser).
08 Aug 08 · filed under: san francisco, tip, visual · (2) ·
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I like to tell myself that I don't read stuff like this, but Esquire's got a pretty excellent list of "75 skills every man should master".
33. Hit a jump shot in pool. It's not something you use a lot, but when you hit a jump shot, it marks you as a player and briefly impresses women. Make the angle of your cue steeper, aim for the bottommost fraction of the ball, and drive the cue smoothly six inches past the contact point, making steady, downward contact with the felt. Illustration: Leif Parsons.
There are some good, less predictable skills: 5. Name a book that matters; 21. Argue with a European without getting xenophobic or insulting soccer; 52. Step into a job no one wants to do.
And then there are the predictable things:
Drinking-related stuff: 17. Make one drink, in large batches, very well; 24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope; 32. Describe a glass of wine in one sentence without using the terms nutty, fruity, oaky, finish, or kick.
Outdoors-related stuff: 14. Chop ...
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08 May 08 · filed under: reviews, tip · (0) ·
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It's not a word, but lots of people like to use it as if it were. Over the past few years, I've heard it more and more often, but today was the first day I've ever seen it in the mainstream media. Hmmm.
Is there something deficient about "influential" or "resonant?" What about affecting, authoritative, controlling, dominant, effective, efficacious, forcible, governing, guiding, important, impressive, inspiring, instrumental, leading, meaningful, momentous, moving, persuasive, potent, prominent, significant, strong, substantial, telling, touching, weighty, beating, booming, deep, electrifying, enhanced, full, intensified, loud, mellow, noisy, orotund, plangent, powerful, profound, pulsating, pulsing, resounding, reverberant, reverberating, rich, ringing, roaring, round, sonorant, sonorous, stentorian, strident, thrilling, throbbing, thundering, or thunderous?
19 Jan 08 · filed under: lit, tip · (0) ·
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Some great stuff on FFFFOUND, a social bookmarking service for images. It's in private beta, and I'll be curious how they maintain the current, continual high quality, as in images like this ...
Like this stuff by Andrei Robu.
Via kottke.
03 Oct 07 · filed under: photo, tip, visual, web · (0) ·
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I've spent a lot time combing through the archives of Paper Cuts, the blog of the New York Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner. It steers clear of smartypantsness, focusing on what one might call the lighter side of serious literature. In fact, most of the content is on the periphery of the strictly literary -- a music playlist assembled by Miranda July, a quick, fun interview with Judy Blume, a scan of Jack Kerouac's obituary ("his subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible"), a scan of an ad for Ralph Ginzburg's literary supernova Avant Garde that looks like the label on a Dr. Bronner's soap bottle.
Garner also has a podcast in which he interviews authors and reviewers from current and upcoming Book Reviews. Every once in a while, you'll suffer through some crap (e.g., Frank Rich gushing and giggling while furtively and unsuccessfully trying to hide the king-size man-crush he has on Don DeLillo). That said, most of the podcasts are informative and interesting.
The image at right is from a slide show ...
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06 Sep 07 · filed under: lit, tip · (0) ·
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My cozy bed between Herman Miller chairs at Dulles.
News flash: Air travel really sucks right now (Washington Post). A couple of weeks ago, I too was touched by this national nightmare. On a Friday evening, I planned to fly from Dulles to SFO, but got slapped with an SSSS on my boarding pass (expired driver's license) and a long security line and figured I would miss my flight. Good thing it was delayed. For three hours, initially. The gate agents reported that there was bad weather in New York, and this seemed reasonable to me because there were lots of people at the other gates who appeared to be pissed off and tired. Also, the storm was all over the hundreds of TVs that blast CNN at you. I got comfortable and watched an excellent movie (Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well) on my computer, fully believing what the gate agents were saying: The flight would not be canceled. They emphasized this: It would not be canceled.
After two more delays, at 2:30am, the gate agents delivered the obvious: The flight ...
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04 Sep 07 · filed under: flickr, tip · (0) ·
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A moment from a beautiful, riveting scene in Killer of Sheep. Photo: Milestone Films.
Killer of Sheep is director Charles Burnett's account of life in the LA neighborhood of Watts in the early 1970's. It began life as his senior thesis at UCLA film school and until recently it was never seen outside art houses and museums. Despite all of that, it was among the first 50 films to declared national treasures by the Library of Congress. I saw it earlier this week at the Castro, and it lived up the hype.
Burnett's account of his motivations in making the film seems like a good place to start unpacking the stuff that makes it so unique:
I wanted to tell a story about a man who was trying to hold on to some values that were constantly being eroded by other forces, by his plight in the community, and the quality of the job that he had. At the same time he wanted to do right by his family. I didn't want to impose my ...
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23 May 07 · filed under: cinema, inside art, tip, visual · (0) ·
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In 1978, Philip K Dick published an essay called "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." The title sort of says it all; it's about how to envision the world of a story in a way that lasts. He cuts right to chase, too, confronting the hard question that most writing how-to's like to gloss over: What is worth writing about? Where to start? How to make a statement that doesn't age badly?
... I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes ...
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13 Sep 06 · filed under: lit, tip · (2) ·
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I've been bugging out on Google calendars recently, and I found a really nifty one for this year's World Cup. Others: Bottom of the Hill shows (rock n roll!), Giants games (hey, batter), Dolores Park movie nights (bring: jacket, beer).
23 May 06 · filed under: tip · (0) ·
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So apparently Google and Earthlink are teaming up to provide free WiFi service to all of SF (via Gizmodo). While we're still a ways from knowing what this will actually mean -- mainly, will be accessible at 14th and Valencia, third floor apartment? -- it is intriguing to me that Google is involved. Unlike Earthlink, Google has never gouged me, or failed to provide service that I've paid for, or sold my name and home address to direct marketers.
So I guess you could say that I'm hopeful. Maybe someday soon I'll be able to work from Pac Bell (er, I mean, SBC ... er, I mean AT&T) Park, or Buena Vista Park, or the little redwood grove outside the Transamerica building.
Or from my roof. (See the photo).
06 Apr 06 · filed under: san francisco, tech, tip · (0) ·
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Here's my question: How did this become the "Dear God" album, considering at least half the songs on it are as good or better? Damn you, Sarah McLachlan. I hadn't listened to it since maybe 1995, when Ted and I played the shit out of it. We both loved the Beatles, and I had a fondness for the synthy 80's style. This album combines these qualities, and adds a little indie rock sensibility as well.
Now that the Cars and Hall & Oates have been on heavy hipster rotation for the past year or so, I'm surprised that XTC haven't seen some props, especially for this album. Compared to other XTC albums, the vocals are more blended with the rest of the sound, rather than held above it, which reduces the saccharine edge of later albums (Oranges & Lemons, for instance). Maybe XTC just doesn't have the kitschy cache of other 80's bands, who knows?
Incidentally, you can read more about the most well-known song on the album. Here's a fan of Sarah, explaining why it's okay to love Sarah even if she questions the existence of God: "I do not believe that you should rule ...
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09 Dec 05 · filed under: music, tip · (0) ·
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Most of my records, CDs and tapes sit idly in crates and on shelves, so here's what I'm going to do: Every so often, I'm going to dust one off and see what it sounds like. Dredge the archive, and take a good long listen to something I haven't heard in 2+ years.
Tonight, I begin the experiment with a randomly selected record: Sleater-Kinney's All Hands on the Bad One, which I'll admit I haven't listen to in three years. Maybe four.
Here's the thing about Sleater-Kinney and me. I'm probably one of the very few San Franciscans (of a certain age and neighborhood) who *likes* them but doesn't *love* them and sometimes wishes they would cool it with the too-often shrill vocals. But of course everyone knows they're politically-active feminists who play punk rock, so what's my problem?
Let's talk about Bad One. It's got great moments: the title track and "The Professional" are rockin and fun -- even after five years, they're a couple of the all-time great songs to listen to while riding a bike. The problem is that, ...
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08 Dec 05 · filed under: music, tip · (0) ·
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The Twin Cities are still full of good times, especially when the mercury plunges. A couple of weekends ago, I enjoyed the chill with my friends Fish, Katie and Becky (pictured, in front of the new wing at the Walker).
The highlights:
Vietnamese sandwiches at the Jasmine Deli on Nicollet. Their sandwiches are fabulous, especially the BBQ chicken.
The new and improved Walker. Twin Cities residents seem ambivalent -- some love it, others are underwhelmed -- but I was really impressed with the way that the new wing blends into the old, and the manner in which they space itself still seems intimate and surprising. Plus, it's open late on Friday nights; how great is that? The Walker's video installations have always been great, and I was really glad to catch a few moments of Jem Cohen's "Lost Book Found" and "Blood Orange Sky" as we walked through -- worth reading: A long, detailed interview with Jem Cohen by Rhys Graham. Also, an entire room dedicated to Sherrie Levine, a cabinet full of Fluxus stuff (still cool after all these ...
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30 Nov 05 · filed under: flickr, minneapolis, tip · (0) ·
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Mike Mills is a graphic designer, director of many excellent music videos (among them: "Kelly Watch the Stars," by Air, the one with the 70's-looking slow-motion ping-pong players), and all-around aesthetic bad-ass. Terry Gross interviewed him on Fresh Air a couple of weeks ago, and you can check out the archived version on the NPR website. It includes a funny anecdote about his experience as an apprentice for a well-known Scottish artist -- at the risk of giving away the ending, Mills didn't assist in the creation of the work as much as he created the work for the artist, who was too hungover to do it himself. Here's a really comprehensive collection of his video work, including "Kelly Watch the Stars."
Incidentally, when I was growing up, a different Mike Mills was the bassist for my favorite rock band c. 1985-88 -- REM. You can hear his thin, poignant harmonizing on Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, Dead Letter Office, and Document. (Don't bother with anything after Document; it's all downhill from there). Let's hear it for all Mike Millses!
29 Sep 05 · filed under: inside art, tip, visual · (0) ·
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Take one character each from column A and column B, place them in one of column C's settings, and voila! You have the makings of a New Yorker cartoon. Supposedly, this was the doing of a group of NYer cartoonists at a recent festival.
29 Sep 05 · filed under: lit, tip · (0) ·
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Law nerds around the country are providing interesting commentary of the Roberts confirmation. SCOTUSblog provides a blow-by-blow account of the posturing and intermittent questioning of the senators alongside interesting legal commentary, but it's a blog, so you have to scroll down to the bottom and read upwards if you want to read chronologically.
Balkinization, a blog that includes many quite interesting essays by Yale Law professor Jack Balkin, has an interesting discussion about why Democrats should not confirm Roberts. Balkin recently published an interesting piece in Slate about originalists and the concept of a living constitution: "Alive and Kicking: Why no one truly believes in a dead Constitution."
If you're willing to sift through the details -- and each memeber of the Senate Judiciary Committee tends go into excessive detail before getting to his/her question -- the NYT has raw transcripts: Day 1, Day 2.
13 Sep 05 · filed under: law & order, tip · (0) ·
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Has there been a more thankless task in modern literary history than editing Hunter S. Thompson? According to former Rolling Stone editor Robert Love, the magazine actually assigned junior editors the task of babysitting Thompson as he approached his deadline. (Okay, there are worse junior editing tasks than that; I've done them). In a recent in the Columbia Journalism Review article, Love discusses this and much more in his essay about editing the good doctor at Rolling Stone. Charming revelation: HST's bluster and bombast attained readability only after long, hard editorial oversight. The kind of oversight that involves tearing the thing apart and and reassembling it sentence by sentence:
So, a flurry of manuscript pages would arrive, buzzing with brilliant, but often disconnected passages, interspersed with what Hunter would himself call "gibberish" (on certain days) and previously rejected material, just to see if we were awake. "Stand back," the first line would inevitably say, announcing the arrival of twenty-three or twenty-five or forty pages to follow in the fax machine. Soon there were phone calls from Deborah Fuller or Shelby Sadler or Nicole Meyer or another of his stalwart assistants. We always spoke of "pages," as in "How many ...
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21 Jun 05 · filed under: lit, reviews, tip · (0) ·
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I've never met anyone who enjoyed an installment of the second Star Wars trilogy -- Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. Commonly cited aspects of its unpopularity (in no particular order): terrible dialogue, insufferable "love" scenes, new characters that would be merely uninteresting if they weren't offensive, and over-dependence on effects. [Read all of this and more in Anthony Lane's New Yorker review].
I submit for inclusion: No Han Solo! No roguish charmer! No swashbucking mercenary! Han is everything that the second trilogy's characters aren't: unpredictable, funny, charming; in short, INTERESTING. In the original trilogy, his unabashed egotism balances Luke's piety and Leia's bitchy coldness, making all three movies much less gag-inducing than they would have been otherwise.
Note to screenwriters: If you're going to write a story about the clash of good and evil, you need a character like Han to balance the saccharine aspects of the two. Luke and Leia are pure and uncomplicated; this renders them uninteresting unless they're contrasted with a character who actually displays human qualities. Han's irreverence and greed is offset by a devotion to his friends, and this meaty, real stuff -- plus sarcasm, fear, etc -- helps ...
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13 Jun 05 · filed under: reviews, tip · (0) ·
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