Easy Rider — We blew it.
Friday, November 20
Thursday, November 19
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Oscar Peterson, Sandy’s Blues
My #3 most-played song, according to iTunes. This song never fails to improve my mood.
No more posts today, I’m packing for Boston!
“
When the Day grows too busie for these Gentlemen to enjoy any longer the Pleasures of their Deshabilé, with any manner of Confidence, they give place to Men who have Business or good Sense in their Faces, and come to the Coffee-house either to transact Affairs or enjoy Conversation. The Persons to whose Behaviour and Discourse I have most regard, are such as are between these two sorts of Men: Such as have not Spirits too Active to be happy and well pleased in a private Condition, nor Complexions too warm to make them neglect the Duties and Relations of Life. Of these sort of Men consist the worthier Part of Mankind; of these are all good Fathers, generous Brothers, sincere Friends, and faithful Subjects. Their Entertainments are derived rather from Reason than Imagination: Which is the Cause that there is no Impatience or Instability in their Speech or Action. You see in their Countenances they are at home, and in quiet Possession of the present Instant, as it passes, without desiring to quicken it by gratifying any Passion, or prosecuting any new Design. These are the Men formed for Society, and those little Communities which we express by the Word Neighbourhoods.
Steele, The Spectator #49
Excuse me while I bask in the warmth of this quote. I’ve had some of my happiest moments working in a little neighborhood bakery cafe, seeing and talking to the same folks every morning, moving through on their way to work, nothing but the latest news on Obama or Iraq or a certain Massachusetts state senator on their minds, and nothing expected but a frank exchange — besides, we all have work to do! I rarely feel comfortable in social situations but this was one exception, due perhaps to its publicness, which insures, oddly, a certain amount of privacy. As Jane Jacobs wrote, privacy is all important in a city:
A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from people around. This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted.
[…] In our family, for example, when a friend wants to use our place while we are away for a week end of everyone happens to be out during the day, or a vistor for whom we do not wish to wait up is spending the night, we tell such a friend that he can pick up the key at the delicatessen across the street. Joe Cornacchia, who keeps the delicatessen, usually has a dozen or so keys at a time for handing out like this. He has a special drawer for them.
My dream: to own a cafe that keeps the block’s keys.
I’m drinking my first coffee in four days. Good day! Now a quote:
‘Tis extolled for drying up the Crudities of the Stomack, and for expelling Fumes out of the Head. Excellent Berry! which can cleanse the English-man’s Stomak of Flegm, and expel Giddinesse out of his Head. Yet it is certain, that for the small space of an hour or thereabouts it hath expelled out of an English head and Stomack these infirmities. But after such a little interval, they return again. And the house being thus swept and cleansed, seven Devils enter it. For Physicians say, that Coffee causeth the Meagrim and other Giddinesses in the Head, &c. Of this dayly experiment may be made: For if you set Short-hand-writers to take down the Discourse of the Company, who prattle over Coffee, it will be evident on reading the Notes, that the talk is extravagant and exactly like that of the Academians of Bedlam, and such, as any others, would be asham’d of but themselves.
A few related questions come to mind. Why, at a time of breakneck technological and social revolution in news and newsrooms, do deans and presidents permit ossified philosophy departments to abdicate their responsibility to cover the world by not thinking about the media? How can it be that journalism and philosophy, the two humanistic intellectual activities that most boldly (and some think obnoxiously) vaunt their primary devotion to truth, are barely on speaking terms?
[…]
Unlike politics or art, journalism, as a sophisticated public practice in the West involving more than routine sharing of information, developed mainly in the 18th century, long after the core concerns of philosophy as a taught subject (chiefly cosmological, theological, and epistemological) shaped the curriculum. Unlike science, journalism long carried (and still does for many) the association of superficial intellectual goods. That made linkage with it unappealing to professional philosophers, whose egos and identities are deeply connected to an image of themselves as intellectually superior to other professionals. (Scientists and mathematicians, of course, tend to both scare and attract them.)
Add to this the historic insularity and inflexibility of philosophy—the field remains less diverse and intellectually adventurous than any of the other humanities—and the recipe for philosophical ignoring of journalism and new media was practically complete.
— We Need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’, The Chronicle Review
Philosophers v. journalists is today’s philosophers v. poets.
Tuesday, November 17
Zutphen Librije (via MR : jimforest)
The Library of St. Walburga’s Church in Zutphen is a unique public library, dating from 1564. The building and its furniture have been preserved almost completely in their original state, and much of the original collection is still in its original setting.
(See also jimforest’s whole set.)
OK, last one. This scene makes me laugh every time — it’s Judge Phelan’s expression at the end.
So you rob drug dealers. This is what you do.
Simon: Why make art? Why bother?
Rudy: Well, to keep busy. You’re awake and alive and you want to do something.
Simon: What is it that you do?
Rudy: Well, filmmaking, that’s probably what I’m best at. Filmmaking, I feel I have a little experience with — seeing something and getting it on film.
Basically I like pictures. For me it’s pictures. When I’m in a museum I see the pictures on a wall. Very often I don’t see the sculpture. Sculpture, I have to concentrate on just to see it.
I remember two-dimensional pictures much better.
Simon: Why is that?
Rudy: Well, they give you a picture of something. They’re not the thing itself.
Talking Pictures: The Photography of Rudy Burckhardt
The chess scene, quoted from the wonderful Wire piece floating around today. (Or yesterday. I’m a little behind on my dashboard.)
Sunday, November 15
Spiritualist Ludwig von Guldenstubbe had a no-nonsense approach to communicating with the dead — he left paper and pencil for them in Paris churches and cemeteries.
He got only a few scrawls at first, but apparently word spread through the underworld, and soon more illustrious correspondents turned up. In August 1856 von Guldenstubbe produced the signatures of the emperor Augustus and of Julius Caesar, collected at their statues in the Louvre:
Saturday, November 14
View of Boston from the banks of the Charles River, 1957 (via Nick DeWolf Photo Archive)
Wow! There’s a hill there.
This photo was taken last March, when the sunlight bounces and amplifies outside in the snow and streams into my parents’ big, open house in Maine, and things caught in the brilliant light glow such that I can take a photo like this, with the background dark.
SAD is supposedly caused by insufficient light during the winter; I can’t think of a better defense than living in this house, which I think of as being caught in a giant spotlight on a bright, snowy day. This is something I miss being away — it’s not nearly as bright in Boston.
Friday, November 13
Wiscasset, Maine, May 1958 (via Nick DeWolf Photo Archive)
The four-masted schooners Hesper and Luther Little were laid up at Wiscasset in 1932. Here they remained, rotting and becoming tourist attractions, until thier hulks had deteriorated into eyesores. In 1998 they were demolished.
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To paraphrase [Paul] Schrader, if you put Penn and Antonioni in bed together, put a gun to their heads and told them to fuck while Bresson watched through the keyhole, you got Taxi Driver.
The aforelinked ERRB.
I would love to know what this means.
Nick DeWolf photo archive
Much thanks to emysena for linking to this wonderful archive I didn’t know about! I’m in the mood for old photographs today.
