swi's Xanga

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 00:50:48 GMT

"Ulysses" has come to stand as the apogee of "elitist" literature.. really no less elitist novel in the English language.. by destroying plot — reducing it to a kind of geography — Joyce succeeds in reinventing time.. the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets...

good, brief, to-the-point James Joyce editorial in today's NYT:

Bloomsday, 1904

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Sun, 23 May 2004 16:52:07 GMT

NYT morrissey interview:

"I died two days ago"

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Sun, 23 May 2004 16:48:57 GMT

"The Family" was not a name that we used, you know. We didn't call ourselves anything but "us," "the girls," "the guys" ...

mary catherine garrison, who plays squeaky fromme in the sondheim musical "assassins" at studio 54, corresponded recently with her while squeaky does time at the carswell federal medical center in fort worth. 55 now, and eligible for parole since '85, she keeps waiving her right to a hearing.

squeaky's letters

Friday, March 26, 2004

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 23:39:24 GMT

- exiled 30 years from Yankee Stadium for writing Ball Four & slams A-Rod as "a quitter" -

good jim bouton interview in this week's sports express

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 00:51:59 GMT

NY Daily News gets the best headline award for the 9/11 hearings coverage:

Nobody knew nothin

Monday, March 22, 2004

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:56:39 GMT

"Among the 10 commandments of Dogme95: Shooting must be done on location; the sound must never be produced apart from the images; the camera must be handheld; the film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc.); optical work and filters are forbidden. For Mr. von Trier and the three Danish directors who joined him in signing the Dogme95 manifesto — Thomas Vinterberg, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring — the new movement would be a way to escape Hollywood genre films overflowing with technical manipulations and to return to the fundamental honesty of the moving image, much as it was in the 1895 films of the Lumière Brothers."

the official Dogme95 certificate of authenticity

the website

more lars von trier

Sunday, March 21, 2004

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 19:03:18 GMT

cruisin' that martian landscape with rover

Sunday, March 21, 2004

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 19:01:16 GMT

underwhelmed by the "world of awe"

did my homework today & checked out media wondergirl yael kanarek's super-hyped site after reading the NYT article. in fact, i'm writing this while waiting for her two-ton 4 mb "Portal: A net.dance" to download on my just average 56k modem which is typically just cruising along at a mach 24000 speed right now. this, after trudging through most of the rest of the stuff up there. i don't know, maybe i should have been born in a different time period or something, but the awe part for me was more of a (y)awe(n) than any kind of enlightening experience. ok, give her credit for the nice bryce-style ambient 3d scapes and an "e" for effort just trying to keep us entertained within her retro mac-kaleidoscope desktop look, the mood ring (no up-to-date plug-in for OSX), the video has its moments, and of course the goofy email thing.. kind of cute, yea, still - she ain't no matthew barney (speaking of which, how could wired magazine give their "rave" award to david byrne's powerpoint doodlings over the cremaster?). this is the type of overworked, pretentious art i consciously avoid these days and try to distance myself from as much as possible. main reason i usually pass on the whitney biennenials. so probably worth a look i guess, but does she really rate a major puff piece in the times, not to mention all the other international hoopla? hate to be such a hard-ass - it's a "fine arts" thing, y'know?

Friday, March 19, 2004

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 00:10:51 GMT

swedish inventor lars liljeryd toyed with ways of compressing and transforming audio for years...he came up with a way of radically shrinking the amount of information needed to store a song or speech in digital form:

the cnet lowdown

Monday, March 15, 2004

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 16:42:08 GMT

1,300-Pound Juiced Baseball

ALEXANDRIA, Ind.
For the past 27 years, Mike Carmichael has been painting a baseball that hangs in a shed behind his home. It now weighs 1,300 pounds, is more than 35 inches in diameter and has a 111-inch circumference due to more than 18,000 layers of paint.