Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Rob Sheffield’s review of KT Tunstall’s upcoming Drastic Fantastic is one of the best record reviews I’ve read in a magazine in a long time.
Not only does it tell a story totally separate from its review, but it gives you an exact sense of what you’ll be hearing on the album.
Sheffield released a memoir earlier this year, partially detailing his life with his late wife.
In case you haven’t caught on, I have lit a bit of a fire under myself on the topic of Year 8 of Crushing Krisis, and part of that flame had extended to reading other blogs.
Blogs don’t exist in a vacuum, but if you pretend that yours does then its reality will conform to your whim. That’s been one of my biggest problems – I have plenty of regular reads, but beyond Rabi, Amanda, Jett, and Alison I don’t make much of a point of regularly reading, commenting and – most importantly – linking to my favorite compatriots.
I’m trying to surmount the first two difficulties by using Google Reader to aggregate my favorite RSS feeds. The reader has a handy “starred” feature to let me highlight my favorite posts, which will hopefully lead to many bounties of links such as the one you’re about to experience.
Okay, so I lied a little – I read more than just those four blogs on a regular basis. Like every other blogger on the face of the internet, I regularly read Dooce, ostensibly so I can chat about it with Lindsay over lunch, but more and more often because I love how she weaves in her OCD with her toddler stories.
(ps: Linds, I know you’re reading. Check out this post about photocamp. Spin any gears in your brain?)
On that same topic (the one before the parens), Whoopee is one of my favorite blogs from NaBloPoMo, as is Flotsam, with the terrifically statistically improbable phrase, “our embryos are the most beautiful embryos that ever underwent meiosis.”
I’m also a long time reader of Acerbia, which tricked me into thinking it was telling the truth for the first time in a while. And, I’m a devotee of Things That Make You Go Hmm, though TDavid often blogs faster than I can read, offering an embarrassment of rich links.
My favorite Hmm-link of the week was a brief feature on Whateverlife, a flashy-as-hell free MySpace layout website run by Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old girl living in Detroit. Oh, did I mention it gets roughly 60 million page views a month? For more interesting background, check out “Girl Power,” an article from FastCompany.
Not only is Ashley amazing, she’s saving us all from having to dumb down our web design skills just to satiate the beast that is MySpace.
God bless her.
Mlarson is another terrific blog for useful and/or thought-inducing links … without never ending commentary of TDavid or, say, yours truly. My favorite of his this week was a link to a diagram illustrating the difference between generalist and specialist approaches to problem-solving. That’s via Communication Nation and how could I not like a blog named that?
Speaking of things you can’t help but like, did you ever read Suck? Back in it’s late-90s heyday it was an utter addiction of mine – a daily dose of irreverence from a snarky group of anonymous writers.
Whether you recall it or not eZine Keep Going featured an amazing article about what they rightfully deem the first great website.
(What I love the most about the article is that it’s a whopping 15,000+ words. I love a piece of journalism that you can really sink into.)
That link was gleaned from Karl @ Paradox1x, proprietor of Philly Future, who has been reading CK a long-ass time. We’re talking early Year 2. This week he made an absolutely essential post (partially) about the problem with Facebook which I later commented upon. Also good: the power of tagging is as a byproduct, not a feature.
Jumping back one topic, another weighty article you might enjoy is The New Economics of Pop Music (via Smokler‘s del.icio.us). Oh, also, while you’re enjoying thing please enjoy my two favorite photos of the week, via Ugly Green Chair and Dooce.
Finally, randomly, the top ten most amazing pictures taken by Hubble. Trivial note: every desktop I work on has a background from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which draw endless complements. At home it’s stars, dust, and nebula, at work it’s blue lagoon. So, clearly I am a nebula fan, but, really, there are so many good ones that it’s very hard to choose.
One Astronomy shot i glanced at while compiling that sentence wasan illustration of the relative size of Earth, which is coincidental, as I had pegged this Debbie Millman post on planetary proportions as a must-link because it’s the first time I’ve ever truly been impacted by such a visual representation (probably because it shows depth).
As a rule of thumb, that’s roughly a fifth of the amount of great reading I’ve been missing out on in the past year just because I didn’t have an RSS reader. Scary.
I am so very behind the times when I need Rolling Stone to tell me that a tune from PJ Harvey’s forthcoming piano-based record Under The Chalk has leaked onto the internet a month ago.
What the hell?
Luckily, the internet forgives and provides. Check out a rather transfixing YouTube performance of “When Under Ether” and/or stream the leaked track below, and then head to Philly-based mp3 blog Some Velvet Blog to check out the cover and tracklist of Chalk.
I really like it. I’m looking forward to the huge, inevitable number of Tori comparisons PJ’s record draws, as if she is suddenly professing to be a pianist; the entire point of her is that every album is completely different.
(Also discovered in my mad PJ hunt – The Yellow Stereo. Very good music writing, and taste.)
You don’t date a photographer for nearly five years without picking up something – a certain vernacular – but that something is entirely different when you finally have a camera of your own, and nearly unlimited space to store hundreds of indiscriminately snapped digital shots over the course of a day.
Two days into my spree of snapshots and I can’t decide if digital cameras accelerate a photographer’s novice phase or distend it. Sure, it helps to be able to bracket the same shot at every possible exposure and film speed to see the difference in action. Yet, it’s easy to slip into the habit of continuous clicking – shoot now, sort it out later.
I don’t know why I feel I have to master each little thing I lay my hands upon. Just when I was getting decent at theatre I started playing guitar, and I interrupted that to be the best at blogging, and in the middle at being the best at blogging I decided I needed to make a sporting try at singing. I just can’t pick something up with the goal of being mediocre.
Will I ever be as good a photographer as Elise? Will I ever be as good a songwriter as David Bowie? Both aspirations are irrelevant to the reality – the tools of producing pictures and songs and web essays have been democratized, and each tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
I have a new weapon in my arsenal. While I’m futzing with my Flickr account, here’s my favorites from my first forty-eight hours as a photographer.
Early on in NaBloPoMo I picked up Debbie Millman’s fascinating blog as a read, but i didn’t realize who she was. Debbie hosts a Voice America Business show called Design Matters, where this season she plans to talk to an utterly stunning list of communicators such as journalist and personal hero Malcolm Gladwell (on her 1/5/7 debut), NYT Mag Creative Director Janet Froelich, and authors Dave Eggers and Ze Frank. And, those are just the names i recognized instantly.
In her bio, Debbie is identified as “Managing Partner and President of the Design division at Sterling Group, one of the country’s leading brand identity firms.” With tongue hardly in cheek, a few days ago she examined the brand of Kate Moss.
Debbie has my dream job, and gets to talk to some of the most forward thinking people in the world in her side job as an internet broadcaster. Essentially, she is living my ideal life. I am in somewhat of a state of shock just thinking about it.