In 1986, I stepped into a residential street and mooned a car. It stopped instead of going around. We both held our positions for what seemed like forever. #supermoon
Shucks…
Found this in a 1917 issue of The American Jewish World.
“An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”
Eric Hoffer
“It’s the life you can’t escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer.”
Norman Mailer, in an interview with Steven Marcus
“Last night, with my lids pulled over me, I went on seeing as if I were an open window. Full of wind. I wasn’t lying in peaceful darkness, that darkness I desired, that peace I needed. My whole head was lit with noises, yet no Sunday park could have been more lonely: thoughts tossed away, left like litter to be blown away and lost. There were long avenues of footfall, leaf flutter lacking leaf or tree, barks unreturned to dogs.”
William Gass, knocking me on my ass in his novel, “The Tunnel”
Levitttown, PA
Couldn’t help but reblog this photo. I traveled to Iraq in the ’90s, when Iraqi Airways was grounded by economic sanctions. The Iraqi Airways office on Sadoon Street in downtown Baghdad had been converted to an “International Businessman’s Center.” There you could place international calls, exchange dollars for dinars or send a fax to wherever.
The men who dealt with currency exchanges and faxes (it was mostly women who sat at the phone desk, dialing for you and holding a stopwatch to time the call) were all out-of-work pilots. The receipts you got for whatever business you did there were Iraqi Airways catering slips.
I wonder if that place is still there on Saddon Street, and if it has been converted back to a place for booking flights out of Iraq. Anybody?
(Source: iraqiana)
I’ve been obsessed lately with how we make stories (and how we make them effective). I came across this nugget online in an article called The Marvels and Flaws of Intuitive Thinking by psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. Here’s what excited me about the bananas/vomit thing:
Let me propose what’s happened in your minds over the last few seconds as you were looking at this display of two words. Everything that I’m going to say is very well-defended in recent research, mostly in research over the last 10, 15 years. You saw those two words. People recoil from the word “vomit”. You actually move backward, and that has been measured. You make a face of disgust. It’s not very obvious, but there is a disgust face being made. You feel a bit bad. The disgust face makes you feel worse because we know that forcing, shaping people’s face into a particular expression changes the way they think and the way they feel. All of this happened. You are now prepared. Then something else happens. You have those two words that have nothing to do with each other, you made a story. There is now a connection between those two…
“It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.”
Edward R. Murrow
A peek at this morning’s recycling for all of you Lost fans.
Ian MacKaye: “You can’t stop music”
I just came upon a feature I wrote for Punk Planet in 2004. I was surveying independent labels as Apple was courting them for the iTunes catalog and the RIAA was just starting to sue people for downloading music they didn’t pay for.
Not surprisingly, my conversation with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye was a highlight. There are two stand out quotes. Here’s one:
“Everyone told me if I don’t go to the meeting with Apple I’m never going to get in there. You’ve got to understand something about me, I don’t think about the future and I don’t worry about it. All I think about is what will work today. That’s the way I’ve always been. So if in a year from now you call me and there is no Dischord because we didn’t get on board, that’s the way it goes. If you’re out because you didn’t get on board, then I don’t think I want to join all of those people who got on board. Why would anything be so black and white? What kind of craft is it that they’re on?”
And then, this true gem:
“You can’t stop music. Music is water. It’s in a river and it’s free. Anybody can go to that river and drink. And at some point, somebody came up with the idea of bottling the water. I don’t think it is an evil idea. It makes sense. There are times when I’m driving in my car and I’m thirsty and I want a sip of water. I’m not near the river so I have this bottled water. I appreciate the fact that water and music have been put in a conveyable format. Now the people who are bottling the water are trying to block access to the river. If they go down for it, good riddance — the river is open again and everyone can go!”
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