Louise Glück is the new U.S. poet laureate.
In honor of the occasion here’s a repost from over a year ago, one of my favorite Glück poems:
Fable
Then I looked down and saw
the world I was entering, that would be my home.
And I turned to my companion, and I said Where are we?
And he replied, Nirvana.
And I said again But the light will give us no peace.from The Seven Ages
[ via randomWalks ]
From “Bloggers Among Hardest Hit by Massive Blackout”:
A widespread electrical power outage affected some 20 million North Americans tonight, but none were so hard hit as writers of so-called weblogs, a kind of online journal.
With no electricity, many “bloggers” were forced to post their latest musings to the Internet by candlelight. Some resorted to using old-fashioned kerosene-fueled personal computers. Others wrote their thoughts out longhand on paper then ran through the streets reading them aloud to the passing crowds of stranded commuters.
[ via The People’s Republic of Seabrook ]
Kiri took photos of the blackout from her roof in Brooklyn, as well as this video (16mb, but worth it) panning 360 degrees in the darkness. The Statue of Liberty was lit up during the blackout!
[ via Uffish Thoughts ]
No one I saw during the blackout was really seriously complaining about the power outage, other than wondering when they’d get home or where their loved ones were. I guess everyone realized it could be much much worse (I mean, hello September 11) and so everyone who could get home last night made the most of it, there were lots of impromptu barbeques on roofs and street parties in New York. Lots of people caught in Manhattan figured out they wouldn’t get home before morning so they might as well party in bars or at a friend’s house. There were lots of people walking around with drinks in hand (and quite a few who were staggering or worse) when I finally went in at two a.m.
The weird thing for me was seeing how unprepared most people were to deal with an emergency, even people who’d been in Manhattan two years ago during the attacks. Most people didn’t have flashlights in their bags or even at home (our building’s stairwells and halls were pitchblack, so the doormen had to walk people without lights up and down the stairs—and there are twelve floors in my building), many didn’t even have candles or a bottle of water at home in case the water went out too, or even contingency plans for meeting up with loved ones in case the phone networks were down.
(Meanwhile back in Manila, as a result of the power shortages in the early 90s that had electricity going out for at least four hours every single day for about a year, everyone’s got stacks of candles and boxes of matches at home just in case (even though we’ve now got a power surplus), and all the malls and hotels have generators to power lights and refrigerators so food doesn’t spoil and lights and elevators still work. Yes, people actually go shopping even when the lights are dim and the mall’s airconditioning is off. No one gets to stay home from work or school even when the power goes out—I was in high school during the power shortages and as much as I hated chemistry, it was even less fun learning it in a dark room.)
From “David Byrne’s Alternate PowerPoint Universe”:
To view the medium creatively, he says, “You have to try to think like the guy in Redmond or Silicon Valley. You feel that your mind is suddenly molded by the thinking of some unknown programmer. It’s a collaboration, but it’s not reciprocal.”
Starting with parody, he adds, even incompetent imitations, is a legitimate first step. Eventually, if you persevere, the obsessive nature of the process yields unexpectedly beautiful results. For him, then, the challenge became “taking a form that’s purportedly logic and rational and making it poetic.”
Yet one suspects that there is another agenda behind his attempt to subvert the global uniformity of PowerPoint. “Corporate culture,” he says wistfully. “What if I could set it free?”
Amazon currently has E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) for $56 bucks, a whopping $24 off the cover price. Not bad for a book and DVD boxed set, especially not one by David Byrne. If you don’t have the cash or just don’t want to spend it, and you happen to live in New York, his “End of Reason” (a four-minute long Powerpoint presentation with new music by Byrne) will be at 4 Times Square from September 10-17.
The gallery LipajePuntin has lots of images of Byrne’s previous work, for those of you who haven’t seen much of it. Good stuff.
Lucky for me I’m a procrastinator or I’dve been trapped in the elevator right when the lights went out here in New York—instead I was standing in front of my microwave with a plateful of orange chicken and shrimp fried rice I was just going to put in and reheat for lunch.
I went to the window to check if it was just my building and saw Allan, who runs the super expensive vintage store across the street, standing outside telling everyone there’s no power, there’s no power. Lucky me again, living on the third floor it’s no big deal to hustle Jarvis down the stairs and out the front door. Our doorman Fred had his favorite little radio out and said he’d heard the lights were out all through the Eastern Seaboard and wouldn’t be on for quite a while, so I decided to hang out at the dog run until it got dark since it’s always cooler there than anywhere else in the neighborhood. Every two hundred feet or so on the way there I’d see this:
People crowded around cars with their radios on, listening for any news about the power. There were already people picnicking in the park, some of whom were from out of the neighborhood and looked like they were psyching themselves to maybe spend the night on benches if the subway system didn’t get working.
On my way home at 7:30 I found that most of the neighborhood restaurants and stores had either closed early (all the cafes), sold all their perishables on the cheap (Zabar’s moved their product to the sidewalk and were mobbed, Emack and Bolio’s were selling a scoop for a dollar), or had long lines snaking outside and down the block. Up till about 11 there were still crowds walking up the avenues trying to get uptown, and to Queens and the Bronx. All the bars on Amsterdam (and there are a lot of bars on Amsterdam) were open and packed with people, not just from the neighborhood but lots of people who’d been walking for hours and just given up on getting home that night.
One of my neighbors stayed in our lobby waiting for her boyfriend, who was working in Brooklyn when the power went out; he got here at 10:30, four and a half hours since they first talked, having walked all the way. He had photos of the crowds from Manhattan he struggled against crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the buses packed tighter than sardines he didn’t even bother thinking of lining up for that passed him as he made his way to the Upper West Side. Weird but I was even happier to see this guy that I’d never even met before get home to his girl last night than I was when the power came back on again this morning.
(I’ll update this post later on tonight. Power came back to the Upper West Side early this morning but Verizon DSL is still down, the wifi in my neighborhood is currently non-existent and so the only reason I can even get online now is that NYU’s finally got their slow-as-molasses dial-up working again.)
More on the blackout from other New Yorkers: Ranjit took tiny Sidekick photos of his walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge, Chris started the day craptastically but made her ordeal sound almost fun, Paul watched as Brooklyn slowly drunkened, Grant wrote his story in the dark, on his laptop’s batteries, Gina was caught at work and walked the Manhattan bridge home, Robert took photos all the way home to Williamsburg, Elayne reflected on the behaviour of New Yorkers in the crisis on her way home to the Bronx, Matt took lots of photos, Tien Mao saw a sign at a bar that said “BLACKOUT SPECIAL, Smoking Permitted, Fuck Bloomberg”, and Amy was stuck on the Q train. Gothamist was out of town (do I smell an alibi? Gothamist has been loving the photoblogs and flashmobs, after all) but picked out the best photos from the wires.
I was almost done with the second to the last paragraph of Ann Patchett’s essay “Friendship Envy” about “Sex and the City” and the complications of friendships when I put two and two together and realized the Lucy she mentions as having lost recently was Lucy Grealy, the author of Autobiography of a Face.
Patchett published a very moving profile of both Grealy and their friendship in New York Magazine three months ago, well worth a read but be sure you have a box of tissues around if you’re the crying type. (I read it in my neighborhood pearl tea joint in March and I think the only thing that kept me from tearing up was the thought of how absurd I’d look sniffling while sucking tapioca balls through a large straw.)
Update: Patchett’s memoir of her relationship with Grealy, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship was released in May 2004 and is available in hardcover, paperback, and on the Kindle, as well as in an audio edition.
Paola Vaccari from Novara, Italy is surely one of David Hasselhoff’s biggest fans, if not The biggest of all—her David Hasselhoff’s Page by Paola has been around for over five years. She even has an interview in her collection from when he was shooting a shitty movie called “Legacy” in the Philippines in 1998, which is where this great quote is from:
That’s what I am. I’m a showman. When you walk away from a Hasselhoff concert, you know you’ve had a good time. And that’s what’s important. There’s a lot of pure singers out there who are really boring. They have no connection with their audience. When I’m in my concerts I just – I tear up the place. Knock shit down. You have one life, you live it. Cyrano de Bergerac says, “I eat life.” It’s important, you know? They’ll say, “Why do you have so much energy?” I say, “Why not?”
Yeah! You tell ’em, Hasselhoff! Tell it like it is.
Paola’s site is important to me because it has my all-time favorite photo of David Hasselhoff, a snapshot of him on the beach in Hawaii with two young fans in 1983. I love it so because it shows how quickly and how perfectly he can slip into his cheese ball classic intense sex symbol pose. If that isn’t talent, I don’t know what is.
My favorite series of Hasselhoff photos would definitely have to be “The Swimmer”, an exquisite photo essay shot by Jeff Riedel for the New York Times Magazine in 2001 inspired by the classic 1968 Burt Lancaster movie which was based on this short story by John Cheever. Alas, the scans on his official site are craptacular, but you’ll still be able to see how gorgeous the photos are, almost Crewdson-esque in how they’re lushly stylized and tense. I wish he would wise up and get the rights to sell them as postcards; I would never send anything through snail mail but those postcards ever again.
Dear Mom,
Just in case you’re wondering whether the considerable chunk of change you’ve invested in my education is going somewhere good, my program‘s being called “The Harvard of Interactive”. The next time you come visit I’ll take you on our floor.
Lots of love,
Lia
On behalf of the American Cancer Society, Jarvis and I would like to thank the incredibly kind and exceedingly lovely people who sponsored us for Dogswalk Against Cancer on May 4th: Adriana, Andrew C., Andrew M. (a.k.a. Rory), Caterina Fake, Dan “Kiss My” Budiac, djacobs, George Kelly, Heather Champ, Heidi Gutierrez, Ranjit Bhatnagar, and Steven Green.
Because of their kindness we were able to raise a grand total of $450 to help fight cancer, so many thanks and much love to them, and all of you who sent us your best wishes and luck for the day. Photos from Dogswalk are here, for those of you who’d like to see them.
From remarks made by Bill Gates yesterday at the Newspaper Association of America Annual Convention:
During those early Internet years, there was the question of the boundary between content and technology. And how would the world of content be changed by the Internet, that essentially allowed anyone to be a publisher. Just have a PC and simple tools, and you can put information out on the Web for people to read.
That sort of bottom-up publishing capability has really exploded in a certain way. Blogging [lets you] decide if, essentially, your regular diary being there, being accessible to everyone, is a very important thing.
Wow. Bill Gates knows what blogs are. Presumably that means he’s read a few. I wonder which ones? He strikes me as the Boing Boing type, or maybe Geisha asobi.
[ via Anil Dash ]
Alia writes:
I just rediscovered that Yakult is the best in keeping your bowel movement regular. And when you want to induce movement, then drink it first thing in the morning. Hehe. But then you’ll end up going to the bathroom in the middle of the day, so be sure to have tissue and a tabo in your office.
There were also rumors that Yakult could help prevent SARS. Then the rumor was printed in a Hong Kong paper and everyone their started panic buying the stuff. The representative of Yakult was so shocked that he had to make a statement. He said that studies haven’t been made whether their product could actually prevent or cure SARS, but it’ll help keep you healthy and less prone to getting the virus.
Yeah! Go Lactobacillus casei Shirota strain!!!
I’ve been getting homesick this past month and pretty much everything I miss about Manila besides my boyfriend and my mom is edible—I miss sisig, I miss mangga’t bagoong, I miss Chicken Bacolod’s inasal, I miss Chickenjoy, I miss Royal Tru Orange, I miss my tita’s ensaimada, I miss Yakult.
When I was in the first grade I was only ever allowed to drink one bottle of Yakult a day because my yaya was afraid any more than that would cause my intestines to explode, or something like that. I’d never experienced bitter envy in my young life until the day I realized my classmate Louis had an entire twelve pack of Yakult in her lunch box every single day, which she would happily guzzle during recess.
The bitch.
