Beeker Northam
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Thrift store
While I was writing something else about charity shops I just remembered once going to a huge thrift store in San Francisco. I think on the way to the Mission one day and we stopped just for tourist reasons more than any kind of need. I’d never been surrounded by so much thrift. But it wasn’t thrift, that’s the thing, it was something else - thrift’s kind of the idea the stores sell, it’s what might be true of you as a buyer, but it’s not what the things are. The things were overwhelming. The experience was almost unbearable…the things were *full*, of meaning I couldn’t know but couldn’t help feeling. The whole place was like a weird kind of pregnant-with-the-past, and with questions and cut off stories and sentences…redirected possibility. Were these toys here because someone grew out of them or because something worse happened? Why did someone give their *whole* set of kitchen stuff? Even if there were no bad reasons for any of it, there were corners of lives and homes here almost intact, just in the wrong place. It was one of the most disturbing places I’ve ever been. And then I just checked my old photos, and I *had* photographed it, to remember to make some kind of note like this and then never looked at the photo again.
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How a word dies
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On Sabrina The Teenage Witch Not Getting Kickstarted
“…in truth, there’s only a very small sliver of time between someone joining Instagram to look at Rihanna’s bum and deleting Instagram because they’re tired of looking at Rihanna’s bum.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2013/may/16/sabrina-teenage-witch-rejected-kickstarter
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With his cherubic face and green helmet bearing the chemical symbol for plutonium, Pluto-kun fell out of favour after an appearance in an animated educational film in which a boy who downs a glass of plutonium, with no apparent ill-effects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/12/kumamon-japan-mascot-plutokun
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“There is no closure for an audience that is invested in characters.” -
I missed this but it’s making me very happy now. Via Joe Malia (indirectly).
Danny Brown - Grown Up (Scion AV)
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“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.” —I don’t buy this at all but yknow, bookmarking.
ACM Web Science talk, as written | Quinn Said (via new-aesthetic)
Via Bashford & Russell and lots of people.
(via bashford)
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“Margaret taught high school English before starting a family, and her love of language was apparent in the many Double-Crostics she completed (in ink).” -
“ But the real art of thinking clearly doesn’t involve adopting someone else’s view of rationality; it means ironing out the conflicts between your own values and daily behaviour.
If your life-philosophy involves not spending a moment on celebrity news, yet you fritter hours absorbing the misdeeds of Lindsay Lohan, you’ve got problems. If you believe material possessions are irrelevant, but cling to your coffee mugs, it’s time for a rethink. But it doesn’t follow that crockery-cherishing or Lohan-watching are mistaken per se. I’m tempted to call it the “clarity bias”: the assumption that those who don’t share your values aren’t just different, but are wandering, confused, in the fog.
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“4. For instance. It was 1968. Early summer evening, a Saturday. My mate and I were hitching home in the Essex countryside. We got a lift from a happy couple in a boaty car that smelled of leather and engine oil. We were 15, they were proper old, 20-ish. Relaxed and so very much in love. They treated us as equals, laughed at our jokes, we smoked their cigarettes. Walk Away Renee by the Four Tops came on the radio. We all sang along to the chorus. I felt a blissful certainty that life as an adult might genuinely be a laugh. The entire encounter lasted no more than 10 minutes. I have thought about that couple every day since. Every day, for 45 years. Imagine that. A Belisha Beacon of kindness pulsing through the murk of a whole life.”
