Six minutes of tripped-out dot-com era bliss (Tumblr users, video doesn’t show up in the dashboard)

continue reading Levi’s, “They Go On” Linked Ads, 1997

I shouldn’t be enjoying Damages as much as I am—the often exposition and recap-heavy dialogue, the characters’ willingness to resort to murder, the quick payoffs from readily-comprehensible schemes that are supposed to be fiendishly clever.  Shot on video and edited with less elan, the show would be little better than a soap opera.  (Although: Wallace Shawn!  As a paraphilic jailed financier!)

What makes it work, I think, are the faces.  The soapy dialogue propels the show from one concerned face to another.   The close-ups are terrific, long enough for intentions to register in the silences.  Rose Byrne looking concerned, feigning innocence; Campbell Scott looking pursued; and above all Glenn Close.  Age, makeup or lighting have made her eyes stand out more than in her bunny boiling days, like turquoise.  And Martin Short’s mobile face makes him a supple villain.

Yes, I am entertained.  But does it satisfy?  I think I’d feel more filled by a show about nothing.

Soviet artifacts have the strangest quality of seeming to be ancient relics from a distant future.  To me the jaw-dropping thing here (in Google’s occasionally off Russian translation) isn’t even the gargantuanism (James Cameron with an unlimited budget and actual military?) but how different the Lun battlestar ekranoplan—and the thinking and design sensibility behind it—is from anything in the West outside of science fiction.

Lest one think only in Soviet Russia, according to the photographer the U.S. Air Force and NASA recently toured it.  Because pirates and the terrorists would never see this coming.

via xplanes: BoingBoing: Philip J. Hollenback

to watch out for spelling eros

• I’m in love with Josie Sigler’s poem in the current Pebble Lake Review (via E Wilcox)

• Leigh Stein read at the Montague Bookmill last week.  She’s a terrific poet and reader, and also blogs (and has upcoming New York-area readings).

• I have been reading The New Republic a lot recently.  It occasionally reminds me of the scene in Out Of Africa when Karen walks into the men-only section of the English Club, but it’s worth it for Jonathan Chait’s super-smart pieces about the health care fight.

•  Always such amazing free, legal music.  Favs of the moment:

Reading Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute this weekend, I was amused in light of recent discussions by her willingness to use exclamation points.  Some of them seem ironic and Internet-y (which I think she would appreciate—a medium military in origin, propagating OMGs and long cats), others as exuberant as Whitman.  She’s as exuberant about sentences as about people; she knows how to twist context and jumble us up along with her.  What is one to do, at last, with sentences packed this tightly semi non-sequiturs but marvel:

I wanted to stop and admire the long beach.  I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York.  There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges.  But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring.  I had decided to run.

Which she does, until she gets to her childhood neighborhood, where people trump her plan and she stays for a couple of weeks. 

continue reading Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute
Played 7 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Saint Etienne, “Spring”

Two weeks and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit difference…

- from Ellen Barry’s profile of Russian Booker Prize winner Yelena S. Chizhova:

Since [1996] she has written for six hours a day without weekends or vacations, producing five novels, three of them finalists for the Booker Prize. It is not surprising, given this, that she speaks about her work with moral urgency.

This afternoon I signed off a letter to a potential vendor, “I look forward to working with you.”  Now I can’t stop thinking about the last line of this bit of genius from the folks who’d go on to bring us Whose Line Is It Anyway?