Your Daily Awesome

When I launched Your Daily Awesome 16 months ago, I was between projects and looking for a creative outlet that incorporated the myriad cultural phenomena that constantly inspire me. YDA was the perfect vehicle for this, and to my great surprise and happiness, other people shared my enthusiasms: The earliest days of the blog drew a few dozen visitors daily. November alone has seen more than 90,000 hits, a level of popularity that excites and humbles me.

But all good things must end, and this is the final entry on YDA as we know it. I am a writer first and an artist second (or vice versa, it’s hard to keep track): Blogging is not my main gig, and for the past several months, I’ve been unable to devote myself to my real work so that I can noodle around on the internet every night, hunting for something appropriately awesome to blog. Those (substantial) daily chunks of time need to be applied to other projects that are more significant to me, creatively and professionally.

When I posted the clip from True Stories of David Byrne deadpanning his way through the history of Texas, I didn’t realize that it would be YDA’s last real post. But if pressed to choose a closing statement, I’d be hard-pressed to select something more appropriate to this blog’s sensibilities.

Infinite thank you’s to Your Daily Awesome’s readers, linkers, and the artists who inspired this blog. I promise to spend my time wisely.

Chas

Dear Louis,

You’re a very nice man and I do enjoy working with you. The fact that you own a donkey and a rooster makes me laugh. I don’t know many people who own a donkey and a rooster who don’t also live on a farm. You’re sincere and there is not a whit of vitriol in your body. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you mad. Often you share your lunch with me when you can’t finish it.

That’s why this is difficult for me.

Every time you come into my office I already know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me that you sent me an e-mail. And usually, just about the time you’re walking into my office, the boingy sound that I set up to alert me that I have received an e-mail is boinging. Or it boings right while you’re standing there. Then we say the same things: You say, “I just wanted to let you know I sent you an e-mail!” I say, “Yup, just got it.” And then you say, “Great, thanks! Just wanted to let you know!”

I know you’re a bit older and not technically inclined. I know you still use words like “facsimile” and “teleconference.” But here’s the thing with e-mail. When you send me one, I get it. That’s the whole point of it. Really. It’s why they invented it. So you can send me stuff electronically, and I can get it.

I want you to know I dream of killing your donkey.

Sincerely,
Jason

many more open letters

In 1958, Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office conducted several lengthy interviews with Keaton about his life and career. The interviews, which can be listened to or read here, provide a rare glimpse of a vanished era from one of the masters of slapstick. In doing so, they help give perspective and a sense of history to the entertainment we see today.

Before I was a year old, they quit medicine shows and started into the smallest of the small-time vaudeville, trying to work their way up. They had some very tough times. Of course, they had makeup on me and were walking me out just as soon as I could walk in front of an audience. By the time I was 4 years old, I was a regular member of the act, wearing grotesque clothes with a bald-headed wig and Irish beard on, and slap shows. It started when a manager in Wilmington, Delaware, said, “Keep him in the act and I’ll raise your salary $10 a week.” That’s what started me.

It wasn’t Sarah Bernhardt who said, “How can you do this to this poor boy?” when they were throwing me around madly. Everybody said that. From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week–that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can’t do acrobatics, can’t walk a wire, can’t juggle–a lot of those things–but there was nothing said in the law that you can’t kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we’d get called into court every other week, see.

Once they took me to the mayor of New York City, into his private office, with the city physicians here in New York, and they stripped me to examine me for broken bones and bruises. Finding none, the mayor gave me permission to work. The next time it happened, the following year, they sent me to Albany, to the governor of the state. Then in his office, same thing: state physicians examined me, and they gave me permission to work in New York state.

Massachusetts thought I was a midget.

Things Magazine has scanned this beautiful 1976 book about our effect on the environment, and reproduced it in its entirety. Very charming stuff.

Section 3: Throw away yourself and build a new you

Before you go to ground, destroy as much of the old you as possible. You want to go beyond making yourself disappear: You want to make it seem as if you never existed. This means that you should do as much of the following as possible before and after you disappear:

•Destroy all photographs you have access to before you disappear. This includes family volumes of photographs that family members have. Your family members may or may not be supportive and hand over (to your opposition) all of their photographs of you depending upon your situation. Your family could be forced to support your opposition through threat of law or through physical violence. If you destroy all photographs of you, they can’t be shown around gas stations and quick food stops.

•Discard all your worldly possessions except cash. Most importantly destroy and discard all of your credit cards! The instant you use a credit card or an ATM bank card while on the run is the instant the authorities or private investigators know where you are. Before you run you should empty all bank accounts anyway. Gas debit cards can also be used to find you. Telephone calling cards can be used to find you. In fact, any magnetic card with your name or the name of someone you know can and will be used to find your general area. Destroy them all. If the FBI, DEA, BATF, CIA, or any number of other agencies are involved in searching for you, they can pinpoint your location within minutes of you using a magnetic card.

Don’t even think about hanging onto a credit card or other type of magnetic card for an emergency. You might think about maxing-out your cards then converting what you purchase to quick cash… but don’t take cards with you! What you don’t have can’t tempt you to give your location away. When you’re cold and hungry you will be tempted to use any cards you keep so destroy them before that happens.

•Purchase clothes you normally wouldn’t consider wearing and put them on in a place where you won’t be observed. Cut your old clothes into pieces and flush them down the toilet — you don’t want your old clothes to be found.

•Abandon your car. Don’t bother driving your car into a lake or an ocean. They can be seen from helicopters or, at minimum, fresh tracks left in the mud surrounding lakes can be spotted from the air easier than by people from the ground. Since you’re giving up an asset, make giving it up work for you.

Abandoning your car in a place where you feel confident it will be stripped and sold by thieves is a good idea yet you’re left with having to walk out of a probably dangerous neighborhood.

Leave the pink slip of the car in the glove box to make it easier for thieves to chop and sell your abandoned car. Leave a door unlocked so they don’t have to break a window. You want the car to be taken in mass rather than picked apart on the street where a cop will spot it so it’s best that you leave the key in the ignition while you’re at it. Before you walk away from your car, leave the engine running, in fact, so that a thief will feel more comfortable stealing it. You could make it look like you’re just running into a store to buy something quickly.

•Purchase another car. In America one can slap down $300.00 and buy a pile of junk with no questions asked and no identification needed. If the seller has the pink slip and a key, you buy it if it’s cheap and doesn’t have anything a cop might consider stopping you for a safety violation.

Make sure that the back license plate has a current registration and that the exhaust doesn’t visibly smoke. Make sure the turn indicators are working and that you have headlights. Make sure the windshield has no cracks. Broken or missing break lights are often used as an excuse by police officers to pull over suspicious cars so make sure that the break lights are working.

Don’t borrow a friend’s car. Don’t even think about borrowing a family member’s car. There are cameras situated along America’s highways and, while I don’t know their resolving capabilities, I think it’s likely that the make and model of cars streaming past them can be made. Even if they can’t resolve your car, a borrowed car is a known avenue of your escape so avoid it.

•Don’t fill up your newly-acquired car with any of your personal belongings. If you get stopped by a cop or a cop drives by you, you don’t want it to look like you’re packed up to the ceiling with all your worldly possessions. You need to discard everything you own and don’t let it show that you’re doing anything other than commuting to or from work. Even if the cop doesn’t stop you, if word gets around that you’ve gone missing, the cop is more likely to remember a stuffed car than all the countless cars simply commuting. They’ll match your profile against your description and may recall the general — if not the exact — type of car you may be driving. If you want to escape notice of the cops, you need to blend in.

Cops work off of profiles: They are trained to spot the unusual as well as how to spot individuals fitting a variety of profiles. Someone on the run fits several profiles. You want to “fall out of the net” and slip through the typical police profiles.

A cup of coffee on the dashboard in front of a guy or gal wearing work clothes arouses no suspicions. You’re on your way to work, not running from someone.

Don’t studiously avoid catching a cop’s eye, by the way. Lean back in your seat, left arm on the window sill, right hand on the steering wheel at the 6:00 O’Clock position. Take a sip of your coffee, water, or Diet Coke every now and then, and try to act like you’re a mindless commuter getting from point A to point B with the rest of the lemmings.

I could read this stuff all day

If these two essays bring you a fraction of the intrigue and happiness they brought me, your afternoon is about to get a whole lot better:

The Abyss: Music and Amnesia, by Oliver Sacks:

In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly. As his wife, Deborah, wrote in her 2005 memoir, Forever Today:

‘His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.’

In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.

Slights of Mind: The Science of Magic, by George Johnson

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

‘In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,’ he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. ‘If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.’

Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: ‘The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.’

Psychologist Robert Epstein certainly seems to think so, as evidenced by this interview in Psychology Today.

Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring “children” well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn’t an adult until age 26.

What are some likely consequences of extending one’s childhood?

Imagine what it would feel like—or think back to what it felt like—when your body and mind are telling you you’re an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you’re a child. This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed, with their distress carrying over into their families and contributing to our high divorce rate. It’s hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.

We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other “children.” In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong.

read the whole interview

“I’m Beginning to Think No One’s Coming to My Cinco de Mayo Party”

I mean, it’s September, so you’d figure at least the guests with kids would’ve shown up by now, because they have to get home early to set the babysitter free. What’s funny is that the fashionably late stragglers are probably going to be the first people here. And they thought they were being so cool!

Let me turn down the music. I checked out some mariachi stuff from the library to add some mexicano flavór. Now I’ve begun to suspect that four months of continuous mariachi music may have something to do with my insomnia and the mustachios I’ve been hallucinating.

One guy who has no excuse for not showing up is my neighbor Jim. He lives across the hall, has no family obligations, and just sits in his apartment getting stoned and holding staring contests with the light on his smoke detector. When I hear him walking down to the garbage room, I’ll grab a trash bag of my own and pretend to bump into him. He’ll say something like “Hey, man,” and I’ll casually respond in kind, waiting for him to acknowledge my serape. But nothing clicks. It’s true he never said yes on my Evite, but he never said no, either. He never even said maybe. In fact, no one replied at all. I feel like I wasted my time coming up with funny response headings (Yes=Sí, Maybe=Tal Vez, No=No).

Wait, did someone just knock? No, it’s just a guy outside working on his roof. Ever notice how you become hyperattuned to sound when you’re waiting for company? You think someone’s at the door, but it’s actually just a thunderstorm three states away or a stray cat’s heartbeat. The false alarms are annoying, but if I prop the door open anyone can just saunter in and crash mi loco fiesta—I mean, should mi loco fiesta come into existence…

read the whole piece
See also:
Today’s AA Speaker: Mr. Tom Waits (If Mr. Waits Is Actually Like the People He Writes Songs About)
Alligators Are the New Sharks, as Rebutted by a Shark
Having Just Completed a Three-Week Throw-Intensive Judo Course, I Strongly Advise You Not to Fuck With Me
Tom Skerritt’s Speech to the Cadets in Top Gun Is Probably Long Enough as It Is
more

I’ve always wanted to know what went on behind the editorial doors of “the world’s only reliable newspaper.” Now that the mag has folded, one writer talks about his time there.

Then one day I spotted an online ad from WWN seeking new “reporters.” I wrote back that I was thrilled at the opportunity, because who else would tell me that Hillary was dating a space alien? I further mentioned that the “mainstream” media always censored my best scoops like “Man Doesn’t Stop for a Red Light in 30 Years, and Never Has an Accident or Gets a Ticket.” The editors asked me to send in that story as a sample, and I was off and running.

Part of the fun of “reporting” for the WWN was constructing a scenario under which such a thing, though highly unlikely, could be remotely possible. In this case, I knew the driver couldn’t live in a big city where he’d be behind other cars that stopped for lights. So I placed him in a small town, so small that for years it didn’t even have traffic lights. When the town put them in, Earl (the driver), who was colorblind, sued, claiming the lights discriminated against colorblind people. He lost, but folks in the town agreed that since everyone knew Earl and his distinctive red truck, if he honked at an intersection he’d be granted the right of way. Ergo, he never had to stop, and broke no law. His one near-accident occurred because the other driver was deaf, and couldn’t hear him honk. Groused Earl, “They shouldn’t let deaf people drive. I could’ve been killed.” Plausible? Of course not. Would you place 1,000-1 odds that it didn’t happen? I wouldn’t.

Once I was “in,” I often described my job, without a hint of exaggeration, as “thinking of the stupidest shit possible.” I once pitched a story positing that the U.S. government had data confirming that the one commonality linking all mass killers, including the Columbine shooters, was that they never masturbated. Rather than issue this report, which would save lives but promote onanism, the government preferred to let occasional slaughters take place. My editor rejected it on the grounds that it was “too plausible.”

Farewell, Bat Boy

Every morning of every weekday for 12 years, Thomas Montgomery punched in at the Dynabrade factory in Clarence, a small town in upstate New York. He strapped on his goggles and stood at his machine until the late afternoon, churning out components for power tools. After work, he walked the family dog, Shadow, and took his two daughters to swim practice. He became such a regular presence at the local swim club that he was named its vice president. He tried to be a good father and a decent husband to his wife of 16 years, Cindy. There were a few things he enjoyed — poker night on Fridays with the guys, playing Texas Hold ‘Em on Pogo.com, and the Dynabrade euchre tournament, which he dominated for two years in a row. For the most part, though, life was uneventful.

Which may be why Montgomery looked at himself — a 45-year-old former marine with a reddish mustache, bulging gut, and disappearing hair — and decided to become someone else. That person, he wrote on Dynabrade stationery that he stored in his toolbox at work, would be an 18-year-old marine named Tommy. He would be a black belt in karate, with bullet scars on his left shoulder and right leg, thick red hair, and impressive dimensions (6′2″, 190 pounds, and a “9″ dick”). Emboldened by his new identity, Montgomery logged onto Pogo in the spring of 2005 and met TalHotBlondbig50 — a 17-year-old from West Virginia, whose name, he later learned, was Jessica.

He began instant-messaging “Jessi,” who later also went by the handle “peaches_06_17,” and the lies flowed easier with every press of the Return key. His mom had died of cancer when he was 12, he told her, and his father was a military man. At 17, Tommy had raped a cheerleader, and his life became so hopeless that he enlisted in the Marines. After a stint at boot camp in June to train as a sniper, he was headed to Iraq. Montgomery concocted elaborate ruses to maintain Tommy’s cover story, creating a second identity as Tommy’s dad, Tom Sr., who bore a striking resemblance to the real Montgomery. Tommy’s access to the Internet was supposedly limited because of his military duties, so Dad, as Jessi soon referred to him, began shuttling messages between the two lovers. He also told Jessi to send any mail and packages for Tommy to him, because he had contacts in Iraq and could get them to the young marine quickly.

Tommy’s tales of hard luck drew Jessi in. He was in need of comfort, and Jessi provided it, saying she was proud of him despite his mistakes. Tommy responded by telling her that she was “the best thing that ever happened to him.” As their intimacy grew, he sent her a picture of a young marine, claiming it was himself, and confided that he planned to commit suicide in Iraq; she made him promise to stay alive for her. They talked on the phone when they could. But if Jessi couldn’t reach Tommy, she sometimes IM’d Tom Sr. to talk about her lover. Jessi also emailed Tommy photos of herself, care of Tom Sr. She lived up to her screen handle, whether she was running her fingers through her flowing blond hair or wading in a pool in a yellow bikini or showing off her long tan legs in a denim miniskirt…

Read the whole story here
via Coudal

…Being the Decider for a Best American anthology is part honor
and part service, with ‘service’ here not as in ‘public service’ but rather as
in ‘service industry.’ That is, in return for some pay and intangible assets, I
am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities
down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about
this kind of Decidering is interesting in all kinds of different ways; but the
general point is that professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that
we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-
increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art
and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof
expands at roughly the rate of Moore’s Law.
The immediate point, on the other hand, is obvious. Unless you
are both a shut-in and independently wealthy, there is no way you can sit
there and read all the contents of all the 2006 issues of all the hundreds of
U.S. periodicals that publish literary nonfiction. So you subcontract this job —
not to me directly, but to a publishing company whom you trust (for whatever
reasons) to then subsubcontract the job to someone whom they trust (or
more like believe you’ll trust [for whatever reasons]) not to be insane or
capricious or overtly ‘biased’ in his Decidering.
‘Biased’ is, of course, the really front-loaded term here, the one
that I expect Houghton Mifflin winces at and would prefer not to see uttered in
the editor’s intro even in the most reassuring context, since the rhetoric of
such reassurances can be self-nullifying (as in, say, running a classified
ad for oneself as a babysitter and putting ‘don’t worry — not a pedophile!’ at
the bottom of the ad)…

Read the full essay here
via Crazymonk

I’m really kicking myself for missing Alan Weisman reading from his new book, The World Without Us, here in Portland a few weeks ago. The book is a scientific exploration of “how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence.” (I.e., what would happen if humans were to suddenly vanish. Here’s a hint: nature gets to work pretty quickly.) But even if you’re like me and haven’t actually read the book yet, there’s a whole cottage industry of World Without Us supplementary materials to nibble on that will help you sound like you know what you’re talking about when the book comes up. The book’s website has some incredible material, including a fantastic animation of what would happen to our homes in an unattended world over the course of centuries, and you can get caught up with the book’s main points on NPR.

It’s a year and a half old at this point, but Maggie Jones’ “Shutting Themselves In” is one of my favorite articles of all time. Reporting on hikikomori—Japanese teen boys who don’t leave their rooms for six months or longer—the article sounded like a Murakami story come to life. Jones goes deep into the motivating psychological factors and spends time, however improbably, with many of these boys, and reports on their unusual rehab programs, which start with a knock on the door from an attractive teen girl.

One Friday afternoon not long ago, Yoshimi Kawakami waited at a doorstep near Kyoto, expecting to be stood up. It has happened in the snow in Tokyo and in the heat of Kyoto summer afternoons. She has waited for two hours or more, fueled by the hope that - this time - someone will answer.

It is part of being a “rental sister,” as the outreach counselors are known at New Start. Rental sisters are often a hikikomori’s first point of contact and his route back to the outside world. (There are a few rental brothers, too, but “women are softer, and hikikomori respond better to them,” one counselor told me.)

The relationship usually begins after a parent telephones New Start and arranges for consultations and routine visits from a rental sister, which costs about $8,000 a year. The rental sister then writes a letter to the hikikomori, introducing herself and the program. “I never read it; I threw it away,” said Y.S., the 28-year-old with the shy smile I’d met at New Start’s potluck. When Kawakami arrived at his house in Chiba, near Tokyo, for the first time, Y.S. opened his bedroom door long enough to tell her, “Please, go home.”

It was a typical first meeting. “We’ll just talk through the door,” Kumi Hashizume, a counselor at New Start, said. “And tell them our interests and hobbies. Very rarely do we get any words back. And if they do speak, it’s very stressed.” Months can go by before a hikikomori opens his door and more months before he ventures out with a rental sister to the park or to the movies. The goal is that eventually he will enroll in New Start and live in the program’s dorms and participate in its job-training programs, at a day-care center, a coffee shop, a restaurant.

Filmmaker Errol Morris recently completed his second blog post devoted to the relationship of truth and photography. Entitled “Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up,” he deconstructs a fascinating story that happened within the pages of the New York Times last year. The paper ran a profile of Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man under the cloak in the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph. The only problem was, that’s not who he was at all.

Morris is currently working on a film about those Abu Ghraib photos and the power they wield, so he’s in a unique spot to pen this essay, which I found very stimulating.

(Shalal Qaissi is unfortunately nicknamed “Clawman,” and is referred to as such throughout the article.)

one crucial aspect of the controversy – to my mind, the most crucial aspect – remained overlooked. Namely, the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them.

Here is how I believe the error occurred. 1) Clawman claimed to be the man under the hood in the iconic photograph. This led to journalistic interest in him – no iconic photograph: little or no journalistic interest; 2) that same photograph was taken as partial proof of Clawman’s claim; and 3) lastly, that “proof” was further cemented in the minds of Times readers with a new photograph. The photo of a man holding a photo of the man in the iconic photo created an associative link much stronger than mere words might have. We see the man who purports to be the Hooded Man in a photograph, holding the Hooded Man photograph.

Years ago I became enamored with the writings of Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher and ex-fighter pilot who died at the age of 43 while flying his own plane to a lecture engagement at Cornell. Hanson, among others, pioneered the idea that observations in science are not independent of theory but are, on the contrary, quite dependent on it. In his book, “Patterns of Discovery,” published in 1958, he coined the term “theory-laden” and wrote: “there is more to seeing than meets the eye.” I would like to make an even stronger claim: Believing is seeing.

The New York Times had two articles that really caught my interest over the past weekend:

How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist? by Peter Guralnick

Just how committed he was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue — and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic — in an interview for the black weekly Jet.

Anyone who knew him, he told reporter Louie Robinson, would immediately recognize that he could never have uttered those words. Amid testimonials from black people who did know him, he described his attendance as a teenager at the church of celebrated black gospel composer, the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, whose songs had been recorded by Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward and whose stand on civil rights was well known in the community. (Elvis’s version of “Peace in the Valley,” said Dr. Brewster later, was “one of the best gospel recordings I’ve ever heard.”)

Two Outlaws, Blasting Holes in the Screen by A.O. Scott

As J. Hoberman notes in “The Dream Life,” his revisionist history of the ’60s and its movies, “ ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ popularized the attitude Tom Wolfe would derisively call ‘Radical Chic.’ ” Its hero and heroine exist in a state of vague solidarity with the poor and destitute — the banks they rob are the real enemies of the people, and they are admired by hard-luck farmers and sharecroppers — but they themselves are much too glamorous to pass as members of the oppressed masses.

They are not fighting injustice so much as they are having fun, enjoying the prerogatives of outlaw fame. They exist in a kind of anarchic utopia where the pursuit of kicks is imagined to be inherently political. In this universe the usual ethical justifications of violent action are stripped away, but the aura of righteousness somehow remains.

The most recent research into phantom limbs, conducted by the American neurologist V. S. Ramachandran and popularized in his book Phantoms in the Brain, shows that the phenomenon may be connected to a sort of “artificial man” in the human brain. There is, on the brain’s surface, a map of the body in the awkward shape of a man. The map is known as “the Penfield homunculus.” In the homunculus, the hand and thumb are next to the face. When Ramachandran experimented with a phantom hand patient by lightly rubbing his cheek, the patient confirmed that he felt the rubbing in his missing hand. In other words, in cases of phantom limbs, the brain receives messages in a neighboring area, though that area is not, on the external human body, adjacent. Other patients confirmed this theory. For example, two people reported sensations in their phantom foot when they had sex, and were astonished to discover an explanation for this: in the brain, on the Penfield map, the genitals and the feet are next to each other. “I never suspected,” Ramachandran wryly concludes, “that I would begin seeking an explanation for phantom limbs and end up explaining foot fetishes as well.”

read Gaby Wood’s fascinating article here

Just yesterday I was thinking to myself that I wanted to know more about spam (the internet variety). I get a few hundred junk comments on this site’s spam filter everyday, and while most of them are either about sluts or Paxil, some have a distinctly literary quality to them. It made me wonder about the humans behind spam, and I thought that I should research the phenomenon. Within 24 hours, I ran across this article in the new issue of the New Yorker about “the losing war on junk email.” It doesn’t have quite the humanist edge that this astounding story did (about a intelligent but monumentally gullbile Massachusetts psychotherapist who fell pray again and again to those Nigerian email scammers who want you to wire them money), but it’s a pretty eye-opening story about the tricky world of smoked ham.

A spammer’s job is to confound the filters. The spellings “V1agra” or “Vi-agr@” mean nothing to a machine, but almost any human reader gets the point. In 2002, the programmer Paul Graham wrote an essay called “A Plan for Spam,” which became an intellectual manifesto for the thousands of researchers trying to find a way to clean up the Internet. “I think it’s possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it,” he wrote. “The Achilles’ heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. There is no way they can get around that.”

Graham compared every character—dashes, apostrophes, numbers, symbols—in thousands of genuine e-mails with those in thousands of pieces of spam. He was able to train his software to use the context of a message to guess how likely it was that an e-mail containing certain words in relation to each other was spam. The words “republic” and “madam” seem innocent enough, but when they appear together in an e-mail they are often from a Nigerian huckster who has addressed his e-mail “Dear Sir or Madam.” Mail like that is invariably spam.

As filters become more sophisticated, spam becomes more elusive. There are millions of ways to write a word using punctuation, numbers, and other symbols. One mathematically minded blogger who looked into it found that there are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra. “If I thought that I could keep up current rates of spam filtering, I would consider this problem solved,” Graham wrote. “But it doesn’t mean much to be able to filter out most present-day spam, because spam evolves.” Indeed, most anti-spam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing other than create a more resistant strain of bugs.

via Metafilter

Call me a product of the ’90s, but the sort of inspiration that I got from both of these creative masterpieces is the exact reason that I started this blog.

The same way the previous half-generation felt that Blue Velvet redefined cinematic and aesthetic experience by bringing an uncanny psychological menace to suburbia; so too did Lost Highway have a similar impact on me: it helped me to realize that art posed questions rather than provide answers. It posed metaphysical queries; had Patricia Arquette nude; introduced be to Robert Loggia; provided one of my favorite soundtracks of all time; and managed to chill the piss out of me by entering through my brain and gut simultaneously.

Similarly, the next year when David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was published, it was as if the rules of creative nonfiction had been re-written. DFW was blisteringly smart and funny at the same time, and his essay, David Lynch Keeps His Head, was like having the coolest guy you knew break down your favorite movie with crazy insight as well as on-the-set reportage.

2. WHAT DAVID LYNCH IS REALLY LIKE

I HAVE NO IDEA. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. You should probably know this up front. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed, because when he’s actually shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true, e.g.:

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. This is on 8 January in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take to run down the base camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first (and generally representative) sight of Lynch is from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public*, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.

TRIVIA TIDBIT:
What movie people on location sets call the trailer that houses the bathrooms: “the Honeywagon.”

*(though I never did see anybody else relieving themselves on the set – again, Lynch really was exponentially busier than everybody else.)

So, is there, like, a backroom where you change for work, or do you walk around like that?

Would it be possible for me to see that room?

I used to have very long hair.

And an earring.

In fact, Trent Reznor and I went to Hebrew school together.

You know who that is, right?

And, oh, my daughter is my niece. No, not my niece. She’s an orphan I adopted to indoctrinate into the ways of the vampire.

Can you tell by the way I’m checking out this skull-and-crossbones key chain that I’m secretly dangerous?

I knew I shouldn’t have worn my Dockers today.

Pee on me.

from the incomparable McSweeney’s
lots more Wayne Gladstone here

“This essay was written by an 8th grader in Pittsburgh in the spring of 2004. The assignment was to pick an enangered species, and explain why it’s important to save it. The typos and formatting are preserved from the original.”

I shouldn’t do shit. I don’t care about them they all could die and it won’t affect my life. I know a lot about them but I don’t need to think about them. They’re just a waste of time koalas are stupid they don’t help me with shit so why should I help them. If they all die there will be more room for the panthers and all the other hard animals. Koalas are weak a pit will get rid of their whole fucking family. That’s why I don’t like koalas.

Koalas have sharp claws but they are weak. They all small and fat and they be climing trees. I hope a storm just come while theyjust chilling up in the tree thinking they is hard and they’re will all just fall off. They just break they neck and shit. When they fall they claws are going to fall off and they going to be crying like some little bitches.

Koalas aren’t hard they some little bitches. They start climbing up the tree soon as they see a deer from like 50feet away…

read the whole essay here