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Swiss (by marchballad)
I’ve been day dreaming about going back to Europe a lot lately. Technically, I currently have the funds to go too, and it’s so hard to not just up and do it. But it’s my savings for a few months of rent/living expenses that I hoarded last semester knowing that working freelance after graduating wasn’t going to cut it and that finding a full-time job may take who knows how long. Maybe when the weather is better, a trip to The Cloisters will kill my yearning to take a breather from the city and see someplace calm and beautiful without actually having to leave.
“things can get a little strange out in california; all that lingering light plays tricks on life. pods of dolphins slip into sight; birds sing, unseen. the shackles are gilded and the cages palatial. yet the colors are lovely, and there’s always the promise of escape on the PCH…”
You’d think that cinemagraphs would get old after awhile, but nope - I love them every time.
meatpacking district.
Seriously considering adding a “Those Johnsons are so damn talented” tag on this. I think it would it get a lot of future use.
There’s a new resource for spring-break-bound overachievers as well as those who just want to take, say, their French to the next level. International-travel bookstore Idlewild unveiled a Brooklyn offshoot to its Flatiron headquarters last week (249 Warren St., nr. Court St., Cobble Hill; 718-403-9600), focusing exclusively on France, Spain, and Italy. In addition to more than 5,000 foreign-language novels, comics, and children’s books, the next-door storefront offers ten-week language classes ranging from beginner kids’ lessons to Crime Literature and Conversation. (via New York City Store Openings - Idlewild Makes Its Brooklyn Debut — New York Magazine)
BUT BOOKSTORES ARE CLOSING EVERYWHERE! WE’RE ALL PANICKING! No we’re not, hurray Idlewild!
Awesome news! And note to self: look into those language classes. Watching I Am Love last night reminded me how much I love - and miss being able to speak - Italian.
“The Rumpus is finally starting a print subscription. We’d like to say this was the plan all along, but we’ve actually never had a plan. It’s called Letters in the Mail. Almost every week you’ll receive a letter, in the mail. Letter writers will include Dave Eggers, Marc Maron, Stephen Elliott, Janet Fitch, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Cheryl Strayed, Wendy MacNaughton, Emily Gould, Tao Lin, and Jonathan Ames. Think of it as the letters you used to get from your creative friends, before this whole internet/email thing.”
For $5 a month, I’d say that’s a pretty sweet deal.
Google “Search Term site:username.tumblr.com” (or site:domain-where-your-tumblr-is-hosted.com). Example.
I’ve been doing this for awhile, but I get the idea from how often others on my dashboard complain about Tumblr’s non-functional search that a lot of people don’t know or use this workaround. It would be great if the in-site search ever worked, but in the meantime, the Google way is helpful for finding old stuff from your own archives as well as that one thing you know you saw that one time on someone else’s tumblr and are desperately trying to find again.
When I first moved to Brooklyn last January, I was overwhelmed by the number of literary events. Every night featured several worthwhile readings, and at least once a week something spectacular totally slipped past my radar.
I have come to depend upon the literary event calendars and previews at The Contextual Life, Book Stalker, and Slice Magazine, among others, but none seemed comprehensive enough for my needs.
A couple of months ago I decided to create a website dedicated to NYC literary events. Since my time is already filled with Largehearted Boy, writing, and reading, I knew I needed a co-conspirator, someone who loved readings as much as I did. Fortunately for me and the resulting site, Gabrielle Gantz, the blogger behind the culture site The Contextual Life and book publicist, shared my vision and gladly signed on.
Book Boroughing, our new project, launched today, and consists of a NYC literary events calendar, as well as a blog and podcast that will feature event recaps and interviews with authors, event coordinators, and people associated with the city’s literary scene. The site is a work in progress, and new readings are added continually.
Follow us on Twitter for a continuous stream of NYC literary event news.
This is wonderful! Reblogging for any NYC-based bibliophiles who might be following me.
I unearthed an old Xanga journal (remember Xanga, you guys?) the other day that I apparently used for exactly six entries in 2006, almost all of which were overly dramatic and highly embarrassing to even skim. Luckily I managed to guess the correct password so I could change the view settings to private. As I’ve written about before, I kind of prefer to just lock down these traces of past online lives when I rediscover them instead of deleting them entirely. While I don’t have any desire to re-read those things right now, I always think that I might want to sometime in the future.
I also explored my Google Dashboard with more than a cursory scroll through for the first time. Those of us who are at least a little web-savvy have an inkling of the vast amounts of data this corporation stores from our daily use of its products, but it’s still slightly unnerving to see it plainly laid out on your screen. In my case, a fraction of that data is a five-year-long record of my web history - anything I’ve Googled while logged into my account.
For quite awhile now, I’ve been leaving my Gmail inbox open as a pinned tab without thinking about how each and every search term is recorded because I am always logged in. My first recorded search: “green day pop rocks and coke lyrics” on March 26, 2006, at 9:07 pm. Yeah, I have no idea why I was looking that up; it’s not even one of their better songs! But it’s fascinating to me that all of this automatically stored data amounts to a personal archive of sorts. You can sift through it at your leisure and either remember or be completely baffled by where you were at a certain point in time by what you Googled.
Now, who wants to tell me what your first [recorded] search was? (Click, log in, scroll down, and click “oldest”).
Today in (stylish) BAMFs: Willem Dafoe walking in the Prada Men’s Fall/Winter 2012 show. Photo by Scott Schuman.
More (including Adrien Brody and Gary Oldman) at The Sartorialist.
I want need that shirt. Also acceptable: Texas Forever.
“This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Ar, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color.” (via Colossal)
Before photo of the installation, which is titled “The Obliteration Room”:
good:
We’ve always been a little confused about what actually happens at a caucus—and some of us are even from Iowa!
Check out our latest flowchart for an explanation of what’s going down. →
I would love to see clear and simple flowcharts like this for the rest of the electoral process as we move through it this year. I took a semester long class on the election in Fall 2008, and I still don’t fully understand how it all works.
I had a really lovely New Year’s Eve and a lazy New Year’s Day, unfortunately followed by a horrible bout of insomnia and post-grad anxiety last night. But this little guy made me smile, and I thought he might do the same for you.
Happy New Year! May your 2012 be as exciting and utterly satisfying as snarfing corn on the cob seems to be for Teddy.
That’s the ornamental ceiling inside Theater 1 at the Village East Cinema, which is possibly my favorite place to see a movie in the city. It opened in 1926 as a Yiddish theater and has been through several incarnations and a restoration since then. It now has several more screens on the lower level, but Theater 1 still has that majestic atmosphere you don’t often experience when you go to the movies anymore. Last night, S and I had a bit of an unexpected New York moment when we went to see a 10:30 showing of The Adventures of Tintin there and ended up having the entire place to ourselves.
