waste

Ain't gonna drag my feet no more

The cover by Richard Thompson of "Time Has Told Me", the Nick Drake song, that appears on RT, the new box set of mostly live stuff, is extremely odd, mostly because a little more than halfway through, it becomes a cover of a Hawaiian song of unknown identity, with a new, female singer who's squeaky of voice.  In fact now that I listen to it again, with prepared ears, it also begins, and remains, in a recognizably Hawaiian guitar mode—it's just easy to overlook that because of the whole english singing thing.

On a related note, Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa is not, at least not yet (65% of the way through!), a very interesting book.  It's just not scholarly enough, dammit!  And, slightly more seriously, there is no actual reflection on art in the book.  There are plenty of anecdotes about the artist who happened to meet his lifelong model or the guy who carved a cane that "turned out to be a fine work of folk art" (like, what, inadvertently?)—this is in the midst of a few pages on how gosh, it seems as though a lot of great art is made in extremely straitened situations, isn't that interesting, in the course of which he adverts to the quilts from Gee's Bend that got written about a few years ago, saying that they're "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has ever produced", which seems a little disingenuous, as if "modern art" were a strictly temporal designation—but very little discussion about what bearing any of these happenings might have on what we think of art, what role art has or ought have in anyone's life, what art is, whether "art" is a useful designation at all, etc, and what he actually does say tends to be a little anodyne.  There's a brief slightly interesting discussion involving Duchamp, but it's not exactly insightful, nor does it inform the rest of the book (thus far, of course, but I don't really expect this to change).

Plus, it seems to be written in a very popularizing style, which grates.  However, to its credit, it can be read without really needing to think about what one's reading, which is more than one can say for Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy.

The heeding that siezes upon

It's too bad that Cary Grant was never abducted from a formal event and then later found hewn limb from limb, but with each limb still impeccably clad, since that circumstance could have been announced with the headline "Debonair and Dismembered".

Stop player, joke #4

ART #18 TO COME

Product idea

Kashi should start marketing a cereal called "The Seven Last Grains of Christ".

• "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.": Buckwheat, in the shape of a question mark, illustrates ignorance (buckwheat is actually not a grain).
• "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?": Hard red winter wheat in the shape of a cross.  The color symbolizes Christ's suffering; winter is the time when Persephone abandons the earth (a little misplaced syncretism never hurt anyone).
• He said to his mother, "Woman, behold your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother!": This conceit is going nowhere.

O banner day

Not only did a bunch of nondescript glass bottles and synthetic corks come in the mail today, but also some nondescript sheets of plexiglass, cut to suitable sizes to frame two posters after being modified in the manner described here.  I even have photographic proof so you know I'm not lyin' (not that I would ever lie to you, baby).

I'm not even any longer sure that I really care about framing the second, Candidy poster, but now that I've got the plexiglass what else will I do with it?

Ha ha!

Hickory tree

I'm reading Stone Age Economics, because, well, because I thought it would be interesting, I guess, and it is—or at least, the marginalia that a previous borrower (for this, dear reader, is a library book) left in the book occasionally is.  I especially like the spiteful comments: things written in margins that don't clarify or argue with the text, or serve as reminders of what the noter was thinking, or refer to other parts of the same text or another, but are basically just fractious or jokey.  For instance, about halfway through the second essay Sahlins writes:

Enough said?  Nothing is more tiresome than an anthropology "among-the" book: among the Arunta this, among the Kariera that.  Nor is anything scientifically proven by the endless multiplication of examples—except that anthropology can be boring.

Our student informant has underlined "except" through "boring", put quotation marks around "can be", and written "is" in the margin.

Probably not a very good book

Based on the first 36 pages I do not recommend Special Topics in Calamity Physics, though I will be interested in seeing if "Jane Mansfield" makes it into the final edition or if that reference is just eliminated.

I am not sure if the narrator's claim that her father's succession of visiting professorships was secured by dint of his impressive scholarly reputation and desirability is meant to reflect naïveté or self-deception on the narrator's part, or is the result of genuine confusion on the part of the author.  I also question the wisdom of claiming on the jacket that the author has "the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt" when (obviously, not having read the book, I can't be very secure in this claim) it seems that what she really has is the basic plot of Donna Tartt.

Clean, degraded, recovering

What's fun is when you come home and discover that, while you were gone, your CPU fan stopped working.  (It turns out it's a good idea to make sure your case is actually closed, because otherwise massive quantities of dust can accumulate inside—who knew?).  So of course you go out, before even having unpacked, because your priorities are in order, to Fry's to buy a new one (and some air), and, after putting the heat sink on incorrectly (or possibly just with too little thermal paste), get told by the BIOS that the CPU is misreporting its speed, can you please set it to the right speed?  But of course you don't remember what the right speed is, so you try out a few times, always with the same result: after about a minute the computer shuts off, and has to be power cycled before you can turn it back on again.

Eventually you realize that it's still overheating, so you re-seat the heat sink, this time with more thermal hooha, and it works, but probably the CPU is running too slow now.  OH WELL AT LEAST IT'S RUNNING.  A few days later you might decide, for shits and giggles, to see if your RAID 1 array is in order and discover that one of the disks doesn't even claim to be there anymore, that's swell.  Is it just totally b0rked?  No, the connection to the motherboard was jogged loose while all the other shit was going down.  Guess the array will have to be rebuilt (86% complete!!!!)!

I hope that this post hasn't damaged my chances with the ladies

Secret garden

Idea: a box, made, possibly, of wood, with cleverly constructed holes for the entry and exit of air and water.  Outside, a switch; inside, soil, a seed, and a lightbulb or two.  Somewhere a battery or other source of power for the light.  The box would be nailed/screwed/welded/sealed shut when complete, preferably in such a way that in order to open it one would have to do serious damage.  As I see it there are two possibilities:

1. A large water hole over which the light in a reflective tube can be fit.  It is wide enough that one can see through it and the stalk of the plant can fit through it, but not so wide that the flower, when flowered (if there are flowers) can.  We know from Science that plants grow towards their light sources, so hopefully the stalk would grow more or less straight up and out through the water hole (at this point one would have to begin using a second light to illuminate the stalk-parts remaining in the box), resulting in a sort of ship-in-jar effect, since the top of the box couldn't have been put on after the stalk reached the necessary height.

2.  Many small water/air holes drilled in the top of the box, too small to look through.  To make watering practical the top of the box could be concave; simply pour on some water and it'll drip through the holes without spilling.  The lights are contained completely within the box itself (more than one, probably, so the plant grows somewhat evenly), and you basically can't tell at all whether or not your plants are growing, unless they're particularly aromatic.

I prefer the second! It fits well with my earlier idea for cabinetry/wooden furniture of various sorts in which all the visible wood is unfinished, rough, etc, but the parts that face inward or are joined to other pieces of wood are all ornately decorated, smooth, etc.

Update: If, in the latter version, the plant is aromatic, it could be the least efficient potpourri ever.  While the plant grows and flourishes, and for a bit after it's died and dried, the pleasant Duft wafts through the room; if it's too wet, or, uh, something, however, the stench of rotting plant matter.  It's a commentary on—or perhaps an intervention into—the way we purchase beauty at the cost of life! What's more, it occurred to me that one could combine the box and the furniture idea and just have a sealed-shut box with (possible) ornate, artful decoration or hatever inside—but maybe it's just as plain on the in side as on the out! See, it's, like, about how you can never be sure if the objet possibly d'art for which you've given out your hard-earned shekels is really the product of an Artist who was Inspired and which Speaks about Something, or is junk turned out by a charlatan who's temporarily duped the artworld. But either way, just owning one testifies to your incredible situation! Buy now!