Submitted For Your Perusal

One of the more interesting statements made in Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica:

 “The classical modernist line on how aware a reader should be of a typeface is that they shouldn’t be aware of it at all. It should be this crystal goblet there to hold and display and organize the information. But I don’t think it’s really quite as simple as that. I think even if they’re not consciously aware of the typeface they’re reading, they’ll still be affected by it, in the same way an actor that’s miscast in a role will affect someone’s experience of a movie or play that they’re watching. They’ll still follow the plot, but be less convinced or affected. I think typography is similar to that. A designer choosing typefaces is essentially a casting director.” —Tobias Frere-Jones

1. “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike”

“This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated.”

2. “The Free Market: A False Idol After All?

“For more than a quarter-century, the dominant idea guiding economic policy in the United States and much of the globe has been that the market is unfailingly wise. So wise that the proper role for government is to steer clear and not mess with the gusher of wealth that will flow, trickling down to the every level of society, if only the market is left to do its magic…. But lately, a striking unease with market forces has entered the conversation.”

3. “36 Hours in Sarasota, Fla.”

“The Ringlings left behind more than just a circus. They amassed a large art collection, including a series of gargantuan paintings by Rubens that are displayed at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (5401 Bay Shore Road, 941-359-5700; www.ringling.org), on the 66-acre bayside estate where they wintered.”

4. “Hey, It’s Still Me in Here”

“Pity poor Ashley Tisdale. Riding high from her success as the scheming Sharpay in High School Musical 2, she seems to have come down with a minor case of Jennifer Grey syndrome. After having surgery to fix what she said was a deviated septum on Nov. 30, she emerged two weeks later with what looked to many casual observers like a brand-new nose. Celebrity magazines and blogs piled on, questioning her for tinkering with the trait that many people say made her special. Five-year-old fans said they no longer recognize her. She looks ‘plain,’ ‘average,’ even ‘Stepford,’ according to some of the online comments.”

5. “The Shrinking Market Is Changing the Face of Hip-Hop”

“If you’re looking for a two-word motto for hip-hop in 2007, you could do worse than that: ‘Keep grinding.’ This was the year when the gleaming hip-hop machine — the one that minted a long string of big-name stars, from Snoop Dogg to OutKast — finally broke down, leaving rappers no alternative but to work harder, and for fewer rewards.”

6. “Review of Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond”

“One day, Gustave Flaubert was out walking with his sister. Ferociously antibourgeois, Flaubert lived alone, unconsoled and unencumbered by marriage or family. His novels mocked and maligned the French middle class, ironizing it into oblivion. He was a great frequenter of brothels and had fornicated his way through Paris and Cairo. And yet here he was out for a stroll, suddenly stopping in his tracks before a small house surrounded by a white picket fence.
Skip to next paragraph

“In the yard, a solid middle-class father played with his typical middle-class children while wife and mother looked lovingly on. The enemy! Yet instead of holding his nose, Flaubert gestured toward the house and exclaimed, without irony: ‘Ils sont dans le vrai!’ (‘They are in the truth!’).”

7. “Review of Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine”

“They had faces then, along with glamour and impeccable grooming. The studios taught their stars how to walk, how to talk, how to dance, sing, fence and ride a horse without sliding off the saddle. They plucked their eyebrows, trimmed their waistlines, shaved their hairlines, kept their secrets and tried to protect this human capital at all costs.”

8. “The Hard Sell”

“What’s surprising is the degree to which we’ve all become sophisticates, engaging in our own Packard-like critiques of consumer culture without changing our habits. We know we buy irrationally; we just don’t care. We imagine that the ‘manipulators’ at J. Walter Thompson or BBDO play only on the fears and hopes of desperate consumers who aren’t as “conscious” as we are (in which case it’s hard not to admire the ingenuity of the advertisers), while we ourselves are smart enough to decide when to give in.”

From an article about idioms that appeared in today’s Seattle Times:

Ivory Tower: Meaning, “To live in intellectual seclusion and protected from the harsh realities of life.” The expression comes from Sainte-Beuve writing in 1837 about the turret room in which the Comte de Vigny, a French poet, dramatist, and novelist, worked.

“Supporting Cast Teaches Bryant to Appreciate Los Angeles”

“‘I’m very happy,’ Bryant said Saturday after the Lakers practiced at a Manhattan health club…. ‘I’m happy because we have a very close-knit group here. We’re like brothers. We all get along, so the chemistry is great.’”

“The Nike Air Force 1 Sneaker Turns 25 Years Old”

“Largely because of its popularity off the court, it has become the best-selling sneaker ever with more than 1,800 color combinations, many in limited editions that can cost thousands of dollars.”

“You Are What You Read”

“We’re not the first generation to invest reading with miraculous powers. But until radio and television dethroned the book, social reformers worried about too much reading, not too little. Advice about when and where not to read was once a medical specialty. In an 1806 diagnosis, a British doctor hypothesized that the ‘excess of stimulus’ produced by reading novels ‘affects the organs of the body and relaxes the tone of the nerves.’ Reading at the table interfered with your digestion, reading before lunch with your morals. Another expert, in 1867, warned that ‘to read when in bed … is to injure your eyes, your brain, your nervous system, your intellect.’ Cue to the other in-bed activity that makes you go blind. Like masturbation, reading was too pleasurable for its own good; like masturbation, it threatened to upstage real human contact (messy, tedious, disappointing) with virtual pleasures.”

“Remembrance of Things Unread”

“In the season of gift-giving, the ratio of books bought to books read tilts heavily toward the bought.”

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies

“A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of Barton Fink, with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.

“It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)

“But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.”

“True Religion Outlet Jeans”

“There was a time when outlet centers were associated with the grubby matter of liquidating unsold merchandise to unglamorous bargain hunters in a low-rent building in the middle of nowhere. Clearly this image has evolved, and many apparel makers even manufacture products specifically for their outlet channels.”

“Stopping at 10 Just Seems Wrong”

“Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list.”

“A List, to Start the Conversation”

“Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood,’ which I will write about in detail when it opens on Wednesday, and David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac,’ which I wrote about when it was released in March, together constitute my 1 through 10.”

“Of Radiohead and ‘Rehab,’ ‘1234’ and Calle 13”

Top Songs: M.I.A. “Paper Planes” (XL); SHAKIRA “Hay Amores” (New Line); JONI MITCHELL “Hana” (Hear Music); KANYE WEST “Stronger” (Roc-A-Fella); NEIL YOUNG “No Hidden Path” (Reprise).

Few Big Albums, but Small Ones Sounded Just Fine

Top Songs: RIHANNA “Umbrella” (Def Jam); R. KELLY FEATURING T.I. AND T-PAIN “I’m a Flirt (Remix)” (Jive/Zomba); MARTINA MCBRIDE “Anyway” (RCA/Sony BMG Nashville); SOULJA BOY TELLEM “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” (ColliPark/Interscope); LINDA SUNDBLAD “Lose You” (Monza/Bonnier Amigo).

“People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon.” —Mark Edmundson

New York Magazine did a piece on the best quotes of 2007. This one jumped out at me as being especially ridiculous:

“I’m the Ali of today. I’m the Marvin Gaye of today. I’m the Bob Marley of today. I’m the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. And a lot of people are starting to realize that now.” —R. Kelly

Food for thought courtesy of Jorn Barger:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)
2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.
3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.
4. Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it’s not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.
5. You can always improve on the author’s own page title, when describing a link. (At least make sure your description is full enough that readers will recognize any pages they’ve already visited, without having to visit them again.)
6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)
7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”
8. Warn about “gotchas” — weird formatting, multipage stories, extra-long files, etc. Don’t camouflage the main link among unneeded (or poorly labeled) auxiliary links.
9. Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.
10. Re-post your favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time.

What’s really scary is that I own a similar jacket.

(Via Dlisted.)

1. “Never Mind What’s in Them, Bags Are the Fashion”

“Once a flimsy afterthought in American retailing — used to lug a purchase home from the store, then tossed into the trash — the lowly, free store bag is undergoing a luxurious makeover.”

2. “Reinventing a Life Beyond Football”

“Having slipped quietly from football, Arrington now has the unfinished business of the rest of his life. ‘I want to do so well in other things that it’s like a trivia question,’ Arrington said. “Did you know LaVar Arrington played football?” That’s the kind of road I’m on.’”

3. “Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft”

“The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.”

4. “Remember the Milkman? In Some Places, He’s Back”

“Home milk delivery from local dairies and creameries was a mainstay for many families in the 1950s and ’60s. But as it became easier and cheaper to buy milk at the grocery store, and as processes were developed to extend milk’s shelf life, the milkman began to fade into the past.”

5. “Hannah Montana Tickets on Sale! Oops, They’re Gone”

“Some ticket brokers are so certain of their ability to get hold of desirable tickets that they confidently advertise tickets on these exchanges even before tickets go on sale to the public. How do they do it? An intriguing explanation is that brokers use specialized software to make multiple online purchases of tickets, circumventing the four-ticket-per-customer limit that the rest of us must abide by.”

6. “Gone Wild and Gone All Wrong”

“Mr. Francis, who sees himself as a Larry Flynt figure, argues this is all payback for defying the power structure in Bay County with his First Amendment lawsuit. Mr. Sullivan, the former mayor, denied this, but said Mr. Francis’s ‘cavalier attitude’ and ‘obvious disdain’ for authority have not helped him. ‘If he’s looking for his worst enemy, he’ll find it in the mirror,’ he said.”

7. “In Seattle, a Fugue for Orchestra and Rancor”

“At least 15 current or former members of the Seattle Symphony have signed sworn declarations on behalf of that member, Peter Kaman, many of them creating an image of Mr. Schwarz as a vindictive, harsh taskmaster who has undermined morale. Even given the strong feelings players in many orchestras have historically had about their conductors, the degree of public criticism is stunning.”

8. “That Fresh Feeling”

“Even now, Ashenburg reports, 40 percent of Frenchmen and 25 percent of Frenchwomen do not change their underwear daily.”

9. “The Godless Delusion”

“A word repeated in Taylor’s book is ‘disenchantment,’ derived from Max Weber, who saw Enlightenment reason turning into modern rationalization as intelligence is used not to get to the bottom of things but to organize life from the top down, through structures of hierarchy, specialization, regulation and control. Taylor agrees that this ‘disenchantment of the world’ leaves us with a universe that is dull, routine, flat, driven by rules rather than thoughts, a process that culminates in bureaucracy run by ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart’ — what Weber called the ‘iron cage’ of modern life.

“The Weberian outlook is bleak, and Taylor puts it aside to find a far more hopeful vision in the sociology of Emile Durkheim. In contrast to Weber, Durkheim saw the forms of society as containing not impersonal functions but deeply implanted sacred practices, and he saw religion rooted in the roles and rules of modern social systems resisting the chill of alienation. Whatever intellectuals may think, people value religion as providing a framework of meaning, a realm of unifying symbols and a sense of belonging.”

Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jason Schwartzman, Forest Whitaker.