Tag: MWE

This week has been blissfully busy, so as life often goes, I spent far less time on the internet this week than usual. Some of these items will be from my secret stash of meh-fu.
1. Dimetri Martin’s 224 word palindrome.
2. Kitty, the transsexual Sicilian mobster.
This is Kitty. What you may not know is that Kitty was once Ugo Gabriele. Or that Kitty was a mafia ‘capo’ or godfather who masterminded a drug dealing and prostitution racket in Naples for the Scissionisti clan of the Camorra.
3. Audio illusions:

Listen to this with stereo headphones.
4. Michel Gondry’s favorite music videos.
All of these are worth checking out, but two of my favorites are:


*now that I write this, I can’t remember if those two are on the list, but it doesn’t really matter, both are super good.
5. Zadie Smith
For those of us who have not overdosed on Barack Obama, here‘s a really interesting article from Zadie Smith on Barack Obama’s voice.

For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not well served by that dull publishing-house title Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance with its suggestion of a simple linear inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and fulfilled. Dreams from My Father would have been a fine title for John McCain’s book Faith of My Fathers, which concerns exactly this kind of linear masculine inheritance, in his case from soldier to soldier. For Obama’s book, though, it’s wrong, lopsided. He corrects its misperception early on, in the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents’ relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. “Even as that spell was broken,” he writes, “and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”

To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It’s more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? ” The Man from Dream City.” When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see. ” Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” said Cary Grant. ” Even I want to be Cary Grant.” It’s not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.

Sorry for the infrequent posting. I kind of fell off the wagon this last week in many respects, but at least this came with the benefit of completely killing my blog traffic! Thanks to anyone who keeps reading after the great post desert of ’09. Anyway, here’s what I found on the internet.
1. High School.
For politicians:

and celebrities:

2. The single most emo and simultaneously proto-yuppie website evar!
From their description:

This is a blog developed by two friends who thought they had it all. Yet, when alone, with the lights turned off, when everything was quiet- both felt a void.
These two friends wondered: “Is this it?” Both saw a world of conflict, of deteriorating personal relationships, and of youth lost in the rat race, in jobs they hated, sticking it out to buy ever fancier possessions.
Neither is an expert, but drawing from personal experience and research, both writers share their insight, and blog about the conflict and turmoil that they see as they go about their everyday lives; this in an attempt to create greater self-awareness and hopefully a little bit more joy in the world.
To conclude, a statement from the founders Harvard England & Taz Barron:
“We should all be so lucky as to recapture the joy and happiness we had as children, to once again find our smiles…“

3. F**ck My Life

Speaks for itself:

Today, I was volunteering at a nursing home and I was calling bingo numbers. And one woman stood up and started making noises, I asusmed she had won and I started clapping. She then fell on the floor and died of a heart attack. I essentially applauded her death. FML

4. The Midwest is messed up.

This week, and weekend was actually super meh. Some of these links may be older, from my secret stash of meh. Last night, I made the mistake of forgoing a concert by the Geri Allen Quartet in favor of sushi and Coraline, both completely full. Like, the entire city of Portland was sold out. I ended up watching an anthology of Christian scare films from the ’60s. There was a pretty brutal one on “trainables,” mentally handicapped people who have enough mental reasoning to teach sex ed to. Anyway, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for:
1. The Abstainance Clown!
This Abs-clown recieved $50,000 from the Bush administration for teaching abstainance education. I know that not everybody follows up on links, but this one is worth watching. Entertaining in every respect.
2. Caleb Burnhans
Except for, like, the particulars, I really want to be this man.

EARLY this summer Caleb Burhans cleared his performance calendar for the first time since 2001, when he graduated from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and moved to New York City. He wasn’t taking a vacation, exactly. Lincoln Center and Alarm Will Sound, a new-music orchestra in which he plays violin, had commissioned him to write a work to be performed in March as part of the reopening festivities at Alice Tully Hall, and Mr. Burhans resolved to do nothing but compose.

Well, sort of. He set aside his weekly bread-and-butter job, singing as a countertenor in the Trinity Choir on Sunday mornings, and turned down pickup orchestra gigs.

But at the Bang on a Can Marathon in June, he played his “No,” for violin and electronics, and performed with Alarm Will Sound and another new-music group, Signal. He also performed with Signal at the Ojai Music Festival in California. And in a three-day stretch in August, in New York, he sang with two chamber choirs (also conducting one of them), played and sang in a pop theater piece and gave a concert with itsnotyouitsme, his ambient rock duo.

And when his Sept. 1 deadline arrived, the industrious Mr. Burhans not only had completed his work for Lincoln Center, “oh ye of little faith … (do you know where your children are?),” but had started two more pieces as well.

3. Hallelujah
As people who know me personally know, I love Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” This is a piece about the song by a British journalist, and is one of the better pieces of pop criticism that I have ever read. You should too.
Like I said, “meh.”