A week in review, 2018-W49

Leave a reply

Wrote

Read

  • Rebecca Schuman, the Rollins paradox, ask a gen-xer (2018-11-08). Arguments over the "integrity" of punk rock — wherein something truly punk is supposed to be utterly devoid of ca$h money in homage to its progenitors’ limited means, when in reality punk was a protest cry from people with limited means, against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or whatever, for sticking them with those limited means in the first place—are generally made from the comfort of someone’s home by clothed and fed people who have enough fucking spare time to argue about something so ridiculous.
  • David Cain, The Simple Joy of "No Phones Allowed", Raptitude (2018-11-13). I imagine that in another decade or two we’ll look at 2010s-era device use something like we do now with cigarette smoking. I was born in 1980, and I remember smoking sections on planes, which is unthinkable today. I wonder if today’s kids will one day vaguely remember the brief, bizarre time when people didn’t think twice about lighting up a screen in the middle of a darkened concert hall.
  • Michael Engelhard, Moving Pictures from the Permafrost, Utne Reader (2018-12-09). Film is, quite literally, social memory, this award-winning auteur insists. “When we lose filmic record, we lose the memory that these things occurred.” Film also has an uncanny power to resurface, which allows reexamination and re-contextualization.
  • Karen Han, In Praise of Tom Waits, Character Actor, The Ringer (2018-11-20). There’s an ease to Waits’s work in Buster Scruggs that makes it seem like it might just be what straddles the line between the two mediums—or come closest to really defining what Waitsian might mean—as his growl pitches high, low, and all over the place in his search for gold.
  • Robert H. Waterman, Jr., Thomas J. Peters, and Julien R. Phillips, Structure Is Not Organization, Business Horizons 23:3 (1980-06). (pdf) (notes) In other words, the rules we use in order to get on with it in big organizations limit our ability to optimize anything.

Listened

  • Dave Eggers Reads Sam Shepard, The New Yorker: Fiction (2018-12-01). [32:45, Dave Eggers] This is what I think attracts a lot of people, and always has attracted people to this country, is just how much room there is, you know, the interstate highways, and you really can go drive off and never see anybody you've ever known again. And I love that as sort of a concept, and I also like the concept that maybe sometimes people are just going—not necessarily running away, but going because instead of going from something or running from something or going to something, I like the idea of allowing him or anybody to go without motive or without a reason.
  • The Thirty Years War, In Our Time (2018-12-06).
  • Spousal Birthday Gift Becomes $40,000 Card Game, Side Hustle School (2018-12-04).

Watched

gǒushísān狗十三 (Einstein and Einstein) (2013)

Photo

new shirt

Upcoming

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *