Long before my art lessons stopped around age sixteen, I knew I would never be a professional artist. Partly, this was just a milder incarnation of other children's realizations that they would never be, say, Major League Baseball players. But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill.
Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.
Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what's happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?
See also, Tom Bissell, on DFW:
In the autumn of 2005, an e-mail message with the unpromising subject header “Thought you’d like this!!!” landed in my in-box. The sender, a family friend, was an incurable forwarder of two-year-old John Kerry jokes, alerts for nonexistent computer viruses and poetry about strangers who turn out to be Jesus. This latest offering contained not the expected link to a YouTube video of yawning kittens but several dozen paragraphs of unsigned, chaotically formatted text. It bore this title: “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address — May 21, 2005.” Before I had reached the end of the first paragraph I believed I could identify the author. A quick search verified it: The commencement speaker for Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005 was, indeed, David Foster Wallace.
"I love taking things that exist in the world as given -- things that are mainstream, notions that people take for granted -- and making people re-think them."
Recently:
Contrary to the classical view, touch can shape what we see.
David Lynch:
So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?
From 2004:
A teenage boy posing as a banker duped an Ohio car dealership into delivering a $123,000 BMW to him at his high school, police said Thursday.
From 2006:
Some locals are furious about the ruse, worried that they might end up looking foolish on national television.
After the latest 3-D movie fad runs its course, perhaps we'll move on to tactile blockbusters.
When subjects watched a stationary stripe on a computer screen after a machine stroked their fingertips, the motion of the stroking created the illusion that the stripe was moving. The discovery demonstrates for the first time a two-way crosstalk between touch and vision, challenging long-held notions of how the brain organizes the senses.
The discovery means that, contrary to the classical view, touch can shape what we see.
Alan Kay:
If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?
From the archive:
The rich and powerful humiliate themselves by bowing down and stroking the coat of the false leader, i.e. by 'currying Fauvel'.
Social scientists have long sought to understand the cultural production system. Such research elucidates the importance of the social milieu to cultural industries. We capture aggregate patterns of the social milieu and the geographical form it takes. We use a unique data set, Getty Images, and geo-coded over 6000 events and 300,000 photographic images taken in Los Angeles and New York City, and conducted GIS and spatial statistics to analyze macro geographical patterns.
1) Social milieus have nonrandom spatial clustering. 2) These clustering tendencies may reinforce themselves. 3) Event enclaves demonstrate homogeneous spatial patterns across all cultural industries. 4) The recursive nature of place-branding may partially explain resulting cultural hubs. 5) The media also clusters.
These results have unintended consequences for our understanding of clustering more generally and place-branding. The use of Getty data provides a new spatial dimension through which to understand cultural industries and city geographic patterns.
Richard Florida:
Globalization is not flattening the world; in fact, place is increasingly relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. Where we live determines the jobs and careers we have access to, the people we meet, and the "mating markets" in which we participate. And everything we think we know about cities and their economic roles is up for grabs.
From Karen Abbott's "Sin in the Second City":
A young man walking up the stairs to a bordello encounters his father coming down the stairs. "Dad!" he says. "What're you doing here?"
"For two dollars," his father replies, "why bother your mother?"
Modern History is a series of collages assembled exclusively from screen grabs of Youtube videos.
See also:
One person called me “Jesus of YouTube.” I don’t think that’s right but it’s a good feeling.
From the archive:
Feedback is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.
Utility is not contingent on perfection of form. In fact, the lessons I’ve learned about crafting elegant experiences—from the creative brief to user interface design—involve abandoning the desire for perfection entirely.
Malcom Gladwell:
We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.
Douglas Bowman:
Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
A 1993 video by Neil Goldberg (b. 1953) of 73 gay men brushing their cats and saying, "She's a talker."
Update: Note that linked video has been removed from YouTube, but you can still find it here (nsfw web site). See also an interview with Neil Goldberg in which he talks about the film.
