“A sense of humor is the lure that keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality.”
Tag: 11.20.11
A Visit To John Waters’s Lovely Baltimore Home
“Bookshelves line the walls but they are not enough. The coffee table, desk and side tables are heaped with books, as is the replica electric chair in the hall. They range from Taschen art tomes such as The Big Butt Book to Jean Genet paperbacks and a Hungarian translation of Tennessee Williams with a pulp fiction cover.”
Arianna Huffington, New-Media-Mogul-Meets-Hugging-Guru
“For Huffington, who, on the one hand, serves as a glittery Earth Mother and, on the other, is the world’s best bullshit artist, with stagehands and pulleys at work in conversation (although, oddly, she remains intensely enjoyable to be around), AOL is in some respects a ‘magical land’.”
Marina Abramovic: From Art-World Provocateur To Crossover Media Star
“Hardly anything Ms. Abramovic says offhand is publishable in this newspaper, any more than are photographs from the performances she has presented over the decades, during which, often naked, she has cut or burned or whipped herself, or put herself in situations the plausible outcomes of which included death.”
Israeli Women Get Naked To Support Nude Egyptian Blogger
“Dozens of Israeli women stripped off their clothes Saturday in a show of solidarity with the 20-year-old Egyptian blogger who caused a stir in the Arab world last week when she posted a naked photo of herself in protest against the limits on free expression in her country.”
The Letters After They Died – What Family Letters Reveal About Artists
“Full of emotion, expressions of remorse and grief, the letters are highly charged glimpses of the impact of artists from James Whistler to Jackson Pollock at the very moment of transition from life. They are key to understanding how their legacy would be formed.”
Copyright Hijackers “Stealing” YouTube Videos En Masse
“It’s not clear how much money the scammers are stealing from YouTube videomakers. But if you judge by the volume of complaints about the hijacking on Google’s forums, it’s likely Netcom and others are doing pretty well making money for nothing.”
Sorry, Talent Really Does Matter
“It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.”
E-books For Themselves, But Paper For The Kids
“As the adult book world turns digital at a faster rate than publishers expected, sales of e-books for titles aimed at children under 8 have barely budged. They represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books.”
That Symbolic Pardon Of The Turkey Parallels A Terrible Reality
“In the current American context, the turkey pardon is a distasteful parody of the strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners.”