04w18:3 Einstein vs. Asian Boys Posted April 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 18 number 3 (Einstein vs. Asian Boys) ——————————————————————— From Companion’s Lost Diary, a Portrait of Einstein in Old Age | Dennis Overbye http://tinyurl.com/ys8vy “Around Princeton she was known as Einstein’s last girlfriend. She cut his hair — shocking as it might be to imagine anyone tampering with that wispy cosmic aureole. They sailed together until the doctors took his boat away. They went to concerts together. He wrote her poems and letters bedecked with jokes and kisses. And he called her several times a week to chat about the day.” NOTE:NYT articles are usually only available for a week, so read this soon if you want to catch it before it gets archived, when it becomes for sale. A Dangerous Surplus of Sons? | David Glenn http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i34/34a01401.htm “In a new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer warn that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these ‘surplus males’ will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men’s aggressive energies.’In 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause,’ says Ms. Hudson, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 27 April 2004 @ 4:42 PM
04w18:2 Matthew Barney Part 2 Posted April 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 18 number 2 (Matthew Barney Part 2) Ok, so I know it is totally uncool to be into Matt Barney, and so I have a feeling that I might be lucky if you weren’t disgusted by the subject line and are actually reading this. Here’s the thing: I’m currently working on a new frontpage for Goodreads so that it will be accessible to a RSS newsreader, and the other night I really needed a post to help test out its development. Which means that my thoughts were partially on other things and I forgot one of the best articles of all, Onan the Magnificent, by Roger Hodge. There is no way that I couldn’t share this article with you, since it is one of the better ones I’ve ever read on Barney’s work, respectfully critical and at the same time able to remind one what is so silly about the Cremaster Cycle. So, in order to bring you Hodge’s article, I thought I should make it worth our while and bring you another serving of thoughts on Barney. Amoung the new selections is the first time I’ve included a link to an audio file. This is the net afterall, no need to for a goodread not to be a goodlisten. It’s a half hour long and Barney lives up to the speculation (posited in that damn National Post review that is for sale on their site and so I can’t direct you to it) that he can’t communicate. Lots of ums and dead air as he struggles for the words to answer the questions, but nevertheless worth a listen if you are interested. The link directs to a webpage, from which it is accessible (RealPlayer required). – Timothy ——————————————————————— Onan the Magnificent | Roger D. Hodge http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1798_300/60102146/print.jhtml “It is perhaps inevitable that the most heroic artist of our age should appear after the ‘death of the author,’ at a time when the word ‘genius’ has been all but erased, at a moment of unparalleled suspicion and resentment of the achievements of great men, when the very concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful have been rejected by most advanced critics. To be sure, appreciative reviewers have noticed that Barney represents a crystallization of the techniques, themes, and obsessions of the vanguard art of the last decade or so, and that he shares with his contemporaries a passionate interest in sexual politics, sexual identity, and gross primary sexual morphology. The 1990s, in the arts as in politics, were the decade of the genital, and Barney falls squarely within this strain of recent art. Appropriately, fame and fortune have followed, but Barney’s fame hitherto has been limited to mere celebrity. His work, however, demands not notoriety but awe. What even the artist’s most ardent admirers have failed to recognize is that Matthew Barney is the Michelangelo of genital art, the supreme master of the genre, whose work so transcends the run-of-the-mill video artist masturbating in his studio that he also may be said to bring his tradition to its unsurpassable realization.(1) ” Cremaster Master | Andy Spletzer http://www.thestranger.com/2003-07-10/art.html “I started exhibiting my work pretty quickly, right out of school. I had been making work that needed a context, a site. An interesting thing happened right as I was graduating [in 1989]: The stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn’t have normally been interested in it. I was continuing to make work that was site specific, but it was happening in galleries. I did that for a couple of years, and I started getting the itch to get back to very specific places in the world as the primary site for the work. This is what the Cremaster project grew out of.” Matthew Barney| Alan Murdock http://www.alanmurdock.com/apiculate/archives/000076.html “‘Yesterday at lunch I had a talk with a couple of fellow instructors about the work of Matthew Barney. One instructor couldn’t understand why he might be important to the art world. ‘Who decides? Is it some club on the East Coast that goes through and says who is going to be important? I mean, do you like his work?’ ‘He’s well connected,’ another instructor said. ‘But it’s like Duchamp – you don’t have to like it, it’s more about a visual exploration of philosophical concepts.'” The Leonard Lopate Show | Leonard Lopate/Matthew Barney http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/04242003 LL:”You must be very pleased when someone has important to the art world as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times calls you the most important American artist of his generation. Do you take all of that seriously? Doesn’t that put a lot of pressure on you? MB: Well I think that, luckily, that there are as many reviews that would say the opposite. LL: So you like the bad reviews? MB: I they’re important. I think they’re important for a dialogue to take place. That I wouldn’t want the bad ones to go away. ‘”(28:34/31:03) —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 27 April 2004 @ 4:41 PM
04w18:1 Matthew Barney Posted April 25th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 18 number 1 (Matthew Barney) Those of us on the list from Toronto will understand why this post is all about Matthew Barney and his Cremaster Cycle, since the AGO’s Jackman Hall has made the talk of the town all about the screenings, which began on Friday and continue next week. The decision to send out an issue on him was prompted by reading a review in yesterday’s National Post, which unfortunately is not included here because they have the article *for sale* on their website, which only makes me shake my head in disgust rather than reach for my wallet. Lucky for us, an even better review is available from Sarah Milroy at the Globe and Mail. There is another review, slightly irreverent in nature, that was written by yours truly two years ago for the Instant Coffee Saturday Edition, after seeing two of the films as part of that year’s Images Festival; and this marks the first time I’ve ever included some of my own thoughts in the Goodreads list. – Tim ——————————————————————— The art of the male mystique | Sarah Milroy http://tinyurl.com/yqna9 “When people look back at the work of the American artist Matthew Barney in 100 years time — and they will, Barney being one of the signal artists of our times — you have to wonder what they will make of it. His Cremaster Cycle is an epic series of five films, and it is nothing short of hallucinatory, a seven-hour-long immersion in one of the most dazzling imaginations any of us is likely to come up against any time soon. […] Barney places himself at the centre of this investigation; the films, made between 1994 and 2000, are self-portraiture on an epic scale…” Nurture boy | Katy Siegel http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/10_37/55015167/print.jhtml “It’s mildly annoying that so many reviews and articles about Matthew Barney’s work begin in a confessional mode, with a ritual throwing up of hands. (Aren’t critics supposed to use their expertise to help us engage difficult work?) But it’s also understandable. The ‘Cremaster’ series layers biology and history, multiplies and divides; like any thick, opaque text, it drives the critic either to wax vaguely lyrical or to perform iconographic contortions, numerology, advanced exegesis. But beneath all these spectacular particulars (and with work like this, you always run the risk of the artist rolling his eyeballs at your ‘insights’), the art revolves around a fundamental conflict. Matthew Barney is better than you – and he’s sorry. His studio feels like a high school woodshop, and he dresses down, not in the worker drag of the artist flaunting his machismo, but rather in the T-shirt-and-jeans camouflage of the seriously above-average guy. Writers often note, with varying degrees of suspicion, his aw-shucks reluctance to claim the public sphere, to play the part of the great artist in either the sullen or the glamorous mold. Barney is elaborately nice, despite the fact that he is much better looking than you, much more successful, a much better artist with a much more interesting life (inner as well as outer, apparently). At the same time, he obviously has a riotous urge to excel, to succeed, to play and act in the world. The clash of these contrary, impulses – reticence and self-assertion – is central to his work.” Cremaster 1 & 4 | Timothy Comeau http://www.instantcoffee.org/saturday/issue7/index.html#tenten (scroll down a bit) “I feel that Barney’s films benefit from their exclusivity, by the fact that we’ve all read about them, but not all had the chance to see them. Like the dream sequence in the Big Liebowski, they would become trivial rather quickly if Barney exposed their ambiguous symbolism and made them available at Blockbuster. Movies with line-ups rule, cause at that point they’re an event. These two had quite a lineup, and participating in this must see aspect I found more enjoyable than the films, which were mediocre.” Article Date: May 2002 Master of ceremony | Daniel Birnbaum http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/1_41/91202137/print.jhtml “BAYREUTH CAN WAIT: Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER cycle is a Wagnerian vision for the new millennium. It started, in CREMASTER 4, 1994, with a tap-dancing freak–half glitzy performer, half goat–dressed in white. With great care, the soft hands of three monstrous muses attached prosthetic gadgets to his elegant shoes–not since the early Andy Warhol has an artist spent so much energy on footwear. And it’s not only shoes in the traditional sense that play a central role in Barney’s work, it’s strange devices attached to the feet, tools for ritualistic practices and occult communication. In CREMASTER 3, 2002 (the recently debuted, last-to-be-realized installment of the pentalogy), a woman with crystal legs is suddenly transformed into a catlike creature, possibly in heat; a lovely lady with blades on her feet dices a roomful of potatoes, for reasons that will remain forever obscure; an elderly enchantress secretly lifts ceremonial instruments with her toes. Surely one way to enter Barney’s work is through the rich world of fetishism.” matthew barney versus donkey kong | Wayne Bremser http://tinyurl.com/ct7l “Despite the popularity of the Cremaster films, only a small percentage of museumgoers have ever seen an art film. After twenty-five years of cultural relevance, video games still do not have a serious place in museums and galleries. Cremaster 3 is important not only because it has attracted a wider audience to an art film, but also because it is one of the first works of contemporary art to incorporate video game narrative. […]Both Barney’s Entered Apprentice and Mario climb structures modified from what architects have intended. In the Chrysler Building Barney ascends the elevator shaft, which exposes the building’s innards. In the rivets degree of Donkey Kong, Mario must climb around an exposed, unfinished structure, walking over rivets to remove them. The perfect disorder of the titled girders in the ramps degree of Donkey Kong, transformed by an enormous jumping ape, match the perfect order of the ramps in Guggenheim rotunda, created by the most famous American architect. A climbing rig allows Barney to scale the rotunda, bypassing the ramps.” Matthew Barney Needs Slaves | Gawker.com http://www.gawker.com/topic/matthew_barney_needs_slaves_014357.php “Wanna work for 20 hours a week — for no payment whatsoever — for Matthew Barney, one of the top-grossing artists in the world? On the plus side, you might have some good Bjork sightings — on the minus side, she might beat you down like that Thai reporter.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Sunday 25 April 2004 @ 2:28 PM
04w17:1 Architorture Posted April 19th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 17 number 1 (architorture) ——————————————————————— “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” | John Massengale http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2004/03/whos_afraid_of_.html “At the same time, the university announced a gift of an increasingly ubiquitous Gehry-designed building on the edge of the campus. Much of the money for Whitman College was donated by Meg Whitman, the young Chairman of eBay (a BoBo). While the Gehry building was donated by the octogenarian Princeton alumnus Peter Lewis, Gehry’s biggest patron. For ideological reasons, Whitman is more likely to appreciate Gehry’s design than Lewis is to like the new Gothic building. Gehry himself ungraciously and publicly criticized Whitman College, as did Robert Venturi, who has designed several important buildings at Princeton. I say ‘ungraciously’ not only because they are biting the hand that feeds them: why does Gehry feel that it is his role to lecture the students and tell them they must like what he likes? He went so far as saying that an institution of higher learning should not build a traditional building today. (How tolerant and pluralistic is that?)” Eyesore of the Month (Nov 2003) | James Howard Kunstler http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200311.html “Behold the new $30 million Ontario College of Art & Design classroom and studio building by British architect Will Alsop — a totemized retro-futuroid coffee table joined umbilically to its Soviet-style predecessor below. The message, apparently: art and design are nothing but fun fun fun. Nothing to get serious about. A playful spirit of induced hazard will keep students wondering when the checkered box might wobble free of its cute swizzle-stick legs and come crashing down on their heads. This exercise in hyper-entropic avant garde faggotry is so cutting edge that it is already out of date. The only question: which of the two conjoined buildings is more cruelly ridiculous?” The Terrazzo Jungle | Malcolm Gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040315fa_fact1 “Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight – and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype. For a decade, he gave speeches about it and wrote books and met with one developer after another and waved his hands in the air excitedly, and over the past half century that archetype has been reproduced so faithfully on so many thousands of occasions that today virtually every suburban American goes shopping or wanders around or hangs out in a Southdale facsimile at least once or twice a month. Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall. ” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Monday 19 April 2004 @ 10:47 PM
04w16:1 Denis Young's 'About Painting' Special Edition Posted April 13th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 16 number 1 (Denis Young’s ‘About Painting’ Special Edition) I sent this out a couple of days ago, but anti-spam measure being what they are, I have reason to believe that some of you may not have gotten this one. So I’m sending it again to those who I feel may have been affected. If I am wrong in this, and you’ve gotten this twice, please let me know. – Timothy ——————————————————————— About Painting, The Old Paradigms: Are they still with us? | Denis Young http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/denisyoung/aboutpainting.html “So: are the old paradigms still with us? Obviously, some survived, somewhat transformed, throughout the modern period and some did not […]Their history may be seen as that of the rewriting of earlier achievements in new terms — terms which, once established, modified the template taken for granted in the production of paintings, the template of what was ‘given’. […]Once the implications of this were understood some 50 years later, it became possible for philosophers like Arthur Danto to declare the history of art to be over, and all the old paradigms thus made available, if only through a rear-view mirror in a Looking-Glass world ruled by irony. […] But the paradigm changes that were once called ‘progress’ can equally be seen as the creation of an expanding universe of texts, all ‘nuanced reruns’ from the past (there really isn’t an alternative to that): a view that still leaves viable the old formula ‘instruction and delight,’ that does not limit the scope of painters to raise our consciousness of some issue, private or public, with enough freshness, subtlety or éclat to hold our attention; nor limit intellectual enterprise, or forthright, hedonistic works — though there, of course, the painter, skating around obstacles of taste, between high art and kitsch, will find thin ice.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 13 April 2004 @ 7:47 PM
04w16:1 Denis Young's 'About Painting' Posted April 11th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 16 number 1 (Denis Young’s ‘About Painting’) ——————————————————————— About Painting, The Old Paradigms: Are they still with us? | Denis Young http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/denisyoung/aboutpainting.html “So: are the old paradigms still with us? Obviously, some survived, somewhat transformed, throughout the modern period and some did not […]Their history may be seen as that of the rewriting of earlier achievements in new terms — terms which, once established, modified the template taken for granted in the production of paintings, the template of what was ‘given’. […]Once the implications of this were understood some 50 years later, it became possible for philosophers like Arthur Danto to declare the history of art to be over, and all the old paradigms thus made available, if only through a rear-view mirror in a Looking-Glass world ruled by irony. […] But the paradigm changes that were once called ‘progress’ can equally be seen as the creation of an expanding universe of texts, all ‘nuanced reruns’ from the past (there really isn’t an alternative to that): a view that still leaves viable the old formula ‘instruction and delight,’ that does not limit the scope of painters to raise our consciousness of some issue, private or public, with enough freshness, subtlety or éclat to hold our attention; nor limit intellectual enterprise, or forthright, hedonistic works — though there, of course, the painter, skating around obstacles of taste, between high art and kitsch, will find thin ice.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 11 April 2004 @ 11:50 PM
04w15:2 Pico Iyer Posted April 6th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 15 number 2 (Pico Iyer) “I saw Pico Iyer in Pages today, ” I said. “So?” she said. “I thought you’d find that interesting,” I said. “I don’t see why I would,” she said. “I honestly don’t care.” “I think you’re just saying that,” I said. “My god, no! What is the big deal? It’s like at the Rodney Graham opening, everyone was oooing and aweing, ‘look, it’s Margaret Atwood…” “Margaret Atwood was at the Rodney Graham opening?” “Yeahss….” ——————————————————————— Leonard Cohen Unplugged | Pico Iyer http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/buzz.html “And so, as time passes, I really do begin to feel I am watching a complex man trying to come clear, a still jangled, sometimes angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm. As day passes into night and day again, he comes into focus, and out again, like the sun behind clouds, now blazing with a lucent high intensity, now more like the difficult brooder you might imagine from the records. ‘He’s a tiger,’ I remember a women in New York telling me, ‘a very complicated man. Complicated in a very grown-up way. I mean, he makes Dylan seem childish.’ The first time she met him, he congratulated her on a book she’d written. As their meal went on, he added, ‘Your writing is a lot more interesting than you are.’ ” The last refuge: on the promise of the New Canadian fiction | Pico Iyer http://tinyurl.com/38sy9 “The English Patient captured me, as it did many others, with a language at once precise and ornamental, and with love scenes that throw open the windows of the stuffy house of English letters to let in a new, exotic light. But what made the novel most resonant, as well as popular, was its meticulous and highly self-conscious attempt to chart a new kind of identity outside the categories of the Old World’s order. ‘We were German, English, Hungarian, African–all of us insignificant to them,’ says the title character, as he thinks back to an ‘oasis society’ before the war in which people from everywhere assembled to map the North African desert. ‘Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations.’ His closest associate among the explorers died, he recalls, because of nations. And as he reminisces about the tribal flow of post-national souls coming together in the desert, he–and we–cannot fail to notice that the people around him in the villa, too, are ‘international bastards,’ in his phrase, moving around one another, as the novel repeatedly puts it, like separate planets, ‘planetary strangers.’ ” | A response Pico Iyer’s Mongrel Soul | Dave Weich http://www.powells.com/authors/iyer.html “Dave: You do like Toronto a lot, though. It’s not perfect, but Toronto seems to represent the hope you have for how cities might develop.” Iyer: Yes, partly because the government is very self-consciously and earnestly trying to draft what is essentially a multicultural bill of rights. Canada, in general, and Toronto, in particular, is small enough and malleable enough to be shaped into a workable international community. The other reason why I was drawn to Toronto initially was that every few months I’d get a book through the mail, and it would be the most exciting and unprecedented book I’d run into. When I looked at the back, it seemed the author was always from Toronto. Michael Ondaatje is the obvious example. But Anne Michaels and so many others who are making this new Canadian literature – and Canadian literature is as resurgent as any, though it’s being made largely by people from Tanzania and India, Sri Lanka, The West Indies, and other places – many of these authors are imaginatively trying to construct new notions of a community beyond nations, as in The English Patient […] Toronto seems in certain small, practical ways, to be trying to fashion a new sense of order, how to make a peace between cultures, and its writers seem to sense that they’re living in the midst of something very exciting. Also, of course, Toronto is the birthplace of the Global Village – that’s where McLuhan wrote about it. […] Toronto provides a counterpoint, in my prejudiced opinion, to Los Angeles, for example, or Atlanta. ” Flying to the Global Village | What is The Message? – The McLuhan Program http://tinyurl.com/2l3g7 “But instead Toronto exemplifies that, of any physical space, airports represent a lack of placeness (and occasionally time) quite analogous to the electronically-induced global village conditions that we all now experience. The fusion of global cultures demonstrated in this collection of artists’ work from Spain, Germany, the U.S. and Canada exemplifies that, ‘the artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present,’ as McLuhan said. The future is the creation of a new global culture that is not necessarily tied specifically to geographical location, but rather linked to creating trans-cultural shared immediate experience. This is what the GTAA has accomplished. From the Times article, we learn that the customary ‘Welcome to Canada’ sign was removed from the arrivals gates so as not to interfere with the art. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 06 April 2004 @ 10:38 PM
04w15:1 The East Coast with the Most Posted April 6th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 15 number 1 (the east coast with the most) ——————————————————————— Financial woes could close Atlantic arts mag | Phlis McGregor http://www.cbc.ca/arts/stories/artsatlmag20040405 “Atlantic Canada’s visual-arts community is watching anxiously, as a growing financial crisis surrounding Arts Atlantic magazine may jeopardize the future of the 27-year-old publication. […] The magazine, which relies on subscriptions, advertising and government grants to stay afloat, has suffered from a both a rising debt load and the elimination of some of its grants. The lack of revenue has forced the magazine to temporarily shut down production. These troubles are similar to those at many other Canadian magazines, said Gordon Laurin, chair of the magazine’s board. ” For $47.5-million, these Rooms should be full |Lisa Moore http://tinyurl.com/3gpu7 “Here’s the situation: We have a brand new $47.5-million facility in the heart of downtown St. John’s that would rival any arts centre in Canada. It is magnificently designed, offers gorgeous exhibition space, expert curatorial staff, state-of-the-art conservation laboratories and atmospherically controlled storage space. For more than a year, the staff of each of the three divisions of The Rooms have been working to create innovative arts and educational programming. They have been packing up the province’s substantial art collection, as well as museum artifacts and archival holdings for the big move to the new site. There was to be a gala opening this June. And now that everything is all packed up and ready to go, the opening of The Rooms has been cancelled for at least a year, as many as 30 staff members have been handed pink slips and more layoffs are scheduled for the near future.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 06 April 2004 @ 10:37 PM
04w14:3 Stanley Kubrick Posted April 3rd, 2004 by timothy. 1 Comment Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 14 number 3 (Stanley Kubrick) ——————————————————————— Citizen Kubrick | Jon Ronson http://tinyurl.com/2sqt9 “Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery […] There are boxes everywhere – shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive. […] Towards the end of my time at the Kubrick house, Tony mentions something seemingly inconsequential, but as soon as he says it I realise that the Rosebud I was after – the quintessence of Kubrick – has been staring me in the face from the very first day. From the beginning, I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn’t happy with the boxes that were on the market – their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off – so he set about designing a whole new type of box. He instructed a company of box manufacturers, G Ryder & Co, of Milton Keynes, to construct 400 of them to his specifications. ‘When one batch arrived,’ says Tony, ‘we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G Ryder & Co. The note said, ‘Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.” Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, ‘I suppose we were a bit fussy.’ But he doesn’t. Instead, he says, ‘As opposed to non-fussy customers who don’t care if they struggle all day to get the tops off.’ ” Thanks to Sarah Hollenberg for this article suggestion. —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Saturday 03 April 2004 @ 4:18 PM
04w14:1 Biological Bandwidth Posted April 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 14 number 2 (biological bandwidth) A bit of foolishness for the first of April. Gibson’s has the good fortune to be exactly a year old, while the other report I learned about earlier this week. – Tim ——————————————————————— While I rest up, a factoid | William Gibson http://tinyurl.com/2lxqg “Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems. (The following found, of course, on the Internet.) […] Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits * 2.00*10^ 8, which comes out to be 6.24*10 ^17 bits. That’s about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds , you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s . In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet ) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that”. Article Date: 1 April 2003 A New Israeli test confirms: PEI (Pigeon Enabled Internet) is FASTER then ADSL | RIM – Ami Ben-Bassat’s Blog http://www.notes.co.il/benbasat/5240.asp “A New Israeli test confirms: PEI (Pigeon Enabled Internet) is FASTER then ADSL […] Pigeons’ Data Transfer Rate: the bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was significantly larger that that available through commercially available ADSL broadband Internet connections: about 2.27 Mbps (Mega bit per second) as compared to 0.75 – 1.5 Mbps (see detailed calculations). Please note that all measured times are of an observer on the ground. If measured by the moving pigeon it self, times are a bit shorter, according to Einstein’s relativity theory.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 01 April 2004 @ 8:37 PM
