paul ford // f train [writing // BABL]

i first ran across paul ford last spring when i read his 'six-word reviews of 763 SXSW mp3s.' when he came back with 'six-word reviews of 1,302 SXSW mp3s' (click for loads of downloadables) this year, i backtracked to his blog, f train, to see what he's about. ford, a harper's editor and npr contributor, muses sporadically on laughs, literature, and life in new york, and there's really something to it. read steering wheel below.

I've been walking home--my bike is in the shop forever and the weather is nice. I listen to episodes of the Jack Benny program on my phone, waiting for Mary Livingstone to laugh. I'm up through 1946.

The traffic where I live is so bad that sometimes I am stuck in my minivan for forty minutes before I get to work. So I use the steering wheel as a kind of prayer wheel. Each notch reminds me of a prayer. I go from notch to notch saying prayers for my husband, for each of my children, my parents, my friends, and the students in my class.

I read something like that 19 years ago in Guideposts. I was sitting in my grandparents' living room on their black sofa. I think of it whenever my computer gives me the pinwheel, or when I am on the phone at work helping an old lady onto the website, explaining that email doesn't need stamps. At the top right of the screen, I asked, do you see a little box? And to the left of the box is the word “Username?” You put a special name into that box. We have to make that special name.

“I'm old,” she said.

Down through Soho. People walk into traffic while text-messaging. I also have on headphones. It's warm, crowded, and progress is slow. I see a girl in canary leggings and short bangs, backlit by a storefront. She is laughing at a joke made by a boy in a vest. No wonder people want to live here. Right then Mary Livingstone laughs in 1946. A man with his tongue out is trying to shake hands with everyone. On Bowery I pass the New Museum, which has a sign reading “HELL YES!” in great rainbow letters. Faces lit from below or on the side by cell-phone screens and media players. I am moving slow but light is absolutely everywhere.

changing new york, 1935-1938 [photography]

i wish i had time to run off at the mouth about this. alas. per the great vaults of the new york public library's digital gallery:

Photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) proposed Changing New York, her grand project to document New York City, to the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935. The FAP was a Depression-era government program for unemployed artists and workers...(more)

click the photos above to see a slideshow of some of this collection, and follow the slideshow through to loads of other collections that the nypl has made available via flickr.

LINK: related

will oldham [music]

will oldham is about as indie-huge as you can get. as it happens, the latest bonnie 'prince' billy album, beware, just dropped, and, accordingly, there is a glut of oldham lore in the news. loads of links below, all from the past week give or take. all are worth a look, but if you've only got a moment or just want to cut to the counter-intuitive chase, i recommend the independent article. i usually stay away from 'what's on your ipod' junk, but as you might expect, oldham's ipod is not quite like yours or mine, nor is his annotation. a sampling:

The Pipil Indians of El Salvador

"This next song is called 'El Barrenar'. The Smithsonian library has a website and you can order anything from the archives. Someone will then burn you a CD. I was going to El Salvador a year ago and I wanted to hear some music in the months leading up to my trip there. This is vocal, rustic and is in Spanish, when I was hoping it would be in an American-Indian dialect. It's probably from some time in the 1960s. The truth is I'm not all that happy with this purchase."

...

Timbaland

"We now come to 'Boardmeeting', one word, by Timbaland featuring Magoo from his 2007 record Shock Value. I have never listened to this song. I was on tour and I watched a Timbaland video with Nelly Furtado late one night on the hotel TV. I liked it and thought, OK, I must listen to the rest of the record. But I don't like the rest of the record, though I should at this point confess a weakness for Nelly Furtado records in general."

LINK: npr reviews beware
LINK: bonnie 'prince' billy live on soundcheck on wnyc (audio)
LINK: "the brilliant disguises of will oldham" - village voice
LINK: beware review on nytimes popcast (audio)
LINK: "will oldham lets his ipod do the talking" - the independent
DOWNLOAD // VIDEO: bonnie 'prince' billy - i am goodbye (via)

lmfao [music // video]

you can call this a guilty pleasure, but i see no reason to feel guilty about it.

LINK: if you've somehow not had enough...

madden mondays, season 3 [video // friends]

apologies for the million reasons keeping me from posting, but my dad's coming to taiwan, and i'm just real busy. might continue to be slow for a while.

madden mondays was a fixture back in the heyday of the riverhorse, when pabst was more cheap than cool. the above clip is the first in a 5 part docu by renato umali, my old film TA (and later roommate). you can follow the whole 30 some minutes through the links below. it'll take you right back when you see babyfaced menchal smoking and squinting while mauro puts angelo in a headlock hug. and if you don't know those guys, well, have a laugh at a ramshackle cast of too-old brats screaming unholies at one another over playstation wizardry. to be fair, there's some good commentary from the whole sick crew in various states of disrepair. watch out for my shitty nimbus of hair. from mke, with love.

2 // 3 // 4 // 5

chad moore [photography]

i know it's not that close to summer and none of us are 16 going on 19 anymore, but think balmy, sea salty thoughts, alright? i've been waiting to find something that merits a wavves link, and chad moore's (socal? scottsdale? florida?) neverending 19-year-old summer shots are it. shit, man, you were there. live the dream.

LINK: wavves - so bored [mp3]

tunde adebimpe // brandon kim [music // friends]

daniel's already got this over at btbn because he and brandon go way back, which is the essence of inside information, really. second-hand, third-hand, whatever, fact is brandon caught up with tunde adebimpe about the music and his role in rachel getting married and they let the discussion run to include the roles of music and other media in the current american(?)/societal rhetoric. read between the lines of me sounding like an asshole: they talk about race and politics. anyways, tunde handles it brilliantly:

Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting. I'm all for awkward, frank, sometimes painful conversations about things that give everyone a better perspective on who they are in the here and now, and how they want to proceed from there.

daniel also got the whisper on an mp3 of tunde's neil young cover from the film, so be sure to hit that btbn link.
LINK: taking a break with tunde adebimpe - b. kim for ifc
LINK // PHOTO CRED: gorilla vs. bear polaroids

new york times visuals [meta?]

*click for slideshow

this series of images uses the faceted searching abilities of the nytimes article search api to construct maps of the top organizations & people mentioned in articles for a given news year. connections between these entities are drawn, so that relationships can be found and followed. (more)

aislinn leggett // i am tourist [photography]

thank god you're never those people on vacation. and thank aislinn leggett for these gotcha!s you wish you coulda got. check her site. beware of travel and photo envy.

christian faur [art]

i was never any good at coloring. looking at christian faur's crayon pictures, maybe he wasn't either. while my old slaphappy method of splaying smiley faces on poorly proportioned two-dimensional dogs and people was garish and abstract in all its refrigerator magnet glory, like so many others my enthusiasm for the crayon ended on those sheaves of coarse brown paper. apparently, faur was bent on getting more out of his crayons. as such, his idea of retaining aesthetic while ditching traditional utility makes the crayon into a whole 'nother tool. in the pieces in faur's crayon series, the tips and slender columns of the crayons become 3D pixels, and the contours of the images change depth, shape, definition, and perception as the viewer changes vantage points. feels to me like these snapshots of life are meant to look familiar, and yet not quite. i find a lot of associative memory in the images: looking at someone through a screen, an old newspaper photo blown up out of scale, an infrared image, what life looks like with my glasses off, the millisecond after you look directly into a camera flash, a not yet developed polaroid. see what you want, the looking seems to be the important part.

ugh.

DOWNLOAD: lcd soundsystem - new york i love you but you're bringing me down [mp3]

neko case [music]

go to npr and stream the forthcoming neko case record, middle cyclone.

elizabeth weinberg [photography]

from her twitter profile:

* Name: elizabeth weinberg
* Location: brooklyn
* Web: http://www.elizabethweinberg.com/
* Bio: go outside!

DOWNLOAD: do your own thing

postcards [real mail]

DOWNLOAD: jens lekman - postcard to nina (live with narration) [mp3]
DOWNLOAD: the walkmen - postcards from tiny islands [mp3]

avett brothers [music]

aside from the fact that this avett brothers cover rolls so naturally that if you didn't know e street from sesame street you might think the boss had covered them, i was struck by no less than two memories of the best times ever by listening to this song. if you don't know him, dan dufek is this rangy urban cowboy-type i used to ramble around with. usually, after we were too pissed up to shoot any more pool, danny would sing impassioned versions of born to run in any mangy milwaukee tap with a speaker and a microphone. the boss always takes me back to those neon lights. and from way back, this song will forever remind me of these guys and county stadium. thanks to j bear for the heads up.
LINK: first time around

a russian poem (or two) [photography // writing]

Seaward

Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.
Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.

I threw my arms about those shoulders...

I threw my arms about those shoulders, glancing
at what emerged behind that back,
and saw a chair pushed slightly forward,
merging now with the lighted wall.
The lamp glared too bright to show
the shabby furniture to some advantage,
and that is why sofa of brown leather
shone a sort of yellow in a corner.
The table looked bare, the parquet glossy,
the stove quite dark, and in a dusty frame
a landscape did not stir. Only the sideboard
seemed to me to have some animation.
But a moth flitted round the room,
causing my arrested glance to shift;
and if at any time a ghost had lived here,
he now was gone, abandoning this house.

words: brodsky // pictures: sarfati

kowloon walled city [places]

tuesday is constant mania, so i'll leave the text to better-informed sources. i first became interested in kowloon walled city last fall when i had to make a visa run to hong kong. here's the quick noise on KWC:

kowloon walled city was the most densely populated place on earth before it was destroyed in 1993 and turned into a park. at its peak, the “city” had 50,000 inhabitants on 0.026 km² area of land (that, according to wikipedia, is equal to about 1,900,000 people per square kilometer). in contrast, manhattan has a population density of 25,849/km².

click the pics above to chase links. here are my photos from that hong kong run.

dark was the night [music]

i'm filing this one under 'you probably already know this, but hey what the heck?' dark was the night is a double cd/triple vinyl produced by aaron and bryce dressner of the national to benefit the red hot organization – an international charity dedicated to raising money and awareness for hiv and aids through popular culture. all 31 tracks are previously unreleased and it's chock full of bands you already love, so try out the three tracks in the player on the right, and then do the right thing and support the cause (available as mp3s via itunes and amazon).

MMI VII [bikes]

it's coming(!). click for info.

adward [photography // bikes]

adward is a photography student in taipei. much of his work centers around documenting the genius and hijinks of the nabiis cycling crew, but in between he finds time for hazy landscapes and urban minutia. he took my photo once. click the photos.

john cowper powys // bookride [writing // books // BABL]

what a history of human excesses a second-hand book-shop is! as you 'browse' there– personally i can't abide that word, for to my mind book-lovers are more like hawks and vultures than sheep, but of course if its use encourages poor devils to glance through books that they have no hope of buying, long may the word remain!–you seem to grow aware what a miracle it was when second-hand book-shops were first invented. women prefer libraries, free or otherwise, but it too often happens that the books an ordinary man wants are on the 'forbidden shelves'. but there is no censorship in a second-hand book-shop. every good bookseller is a multiple-personality, containing all the extremes of human feeling. he is an ascetic hermit, he is an erotic immoralist, he is a papist, he is a quaker, he is a communist, he is an anarchist, he is a savage iconoclast, he is a passionate worshipper of idols. though books, as milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical and wicked spirits! in books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. [continue // part 2]

bookride is a blog dedicated to the noble pursuit of book collecting and all of the peculiar quirks thereof. not only do they offer thoughts and statistics on used and rare books, but they also often post various verbiage on books and book buying as a culture. the excerpt above is appropriated from an essay by "that gigantic mythopoeic literary volcano" john cowper powys.

tweed run // adam scott [photography // bikes]

adam scott's photography makes last month's tweed run in london look even more fetching. and you didn't think that possible. click for more.

smile

just a reminder.

made in thailand [music]

*disclaimer: appreciating that this blog is not a personal journal, and considering the difficulty i'm having trying to encompass the experiences i had on this trip, this will be my last post on anything vacation-related. if you're curious about the rest of the trip, by all means send me a message.

if you get to thailand any time in the fairly near future, keep an eye out for waifish grifters in nirvana and metallica t-shirts. you won't be long in looking. i can't say what, but something's got apathy and headbanging back in vogue in southeast asia. we first noticed the trend on our train ride from sungai kolok to hat yai - a few straggly teens in ragged 501s lounging at train stops and loitering on street corners - but the trend was true all the way to chiang mai. in koh phi phi we saw it get live.

the energy of koh phi phi, despite feeling at first ambiguous, is unmistakably omnipresent. the already small island feels all the more condensed because the majority of the livable area is a tiny isthmus that connects the mountains on either side. reflecting the necessary concentration, the streets teem with people at most hours and music, smells, and vacationers pour out of open store fronts in chaotic intervals. when evening descends on koh phi phi, the energy begins to coagulate, and it doesn't take long to realize that this is a place where growing-ups come for an E-induced latter day spring break. as the low pulses of house music begin to creep from the beach inland, bars begin filling with sunburned merrymakers swilling from buckets in which you mix your own fun. amid all this, i found myself drawn to the contrast of sounds and fluttering activity of one small alley where we found made in thailand - an all-thai four piece - ripping through a spot-on cover of ride the lightning. despite the reasonably early hour, the open-air bar, rolling stoned, was packed with an already-drunk, enthusiastically rowdy crowd rollicking in the revived youth of every nirvana and rage against the machine riff. made in thailand were mesmerizingly on point, and the crowd was fun galore. we stayed for the whole set.

angkor wat [places]

a foggy sense of trespassing accompanies investigation of the majesty and mystery of angkor wat's weathered beauty. the feeling i got standing on the sandblasted thresholds of so many long-abandoned miracles of human craft was something akin to equal parts A) being alone in a stranger's house, B) stepping into an exhibit at the museum of natural history, and C) being the first kid on the block to discover the rusted out oldsmobile in the creek down by the cemetery. after so many years of being told not to touch anything while being paraded around to appreciate history, art, and religion, it felt only natural to approach these ruins with a sense of apprehension. and despite being freely invited to poke our heads into so many nooks and crannies, it did feel somehow wrong that we should be traipsing in and out of these retired holies with such abandon. to that end, i found it both interesting and painfully frustrating to observe the ways in which people from different cultures approached and did or didn't revere the temples, but that's some cultural/anthro/socio blither to be had elsewhere. also on that tip, m put to words another feeling that had been puzzling me in those musty shadows: that despite all the visitors to angkor, it is rare that you don't feel mostly alone. with so many antechambers and interior rooms, there is always some marvel that you are allowed to find and appreciate - at least for a few seconds - without the shadow of some hawaiian-print-clad auteur looming.