Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman

Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman are nuts, but in very different ways. I have much respect for him for hooking up with a girl who seems to be like Courtney Love, except respected and prettier. And for her for hooking up with somebody who many rockers would surely see as very "establishment". But she was probably a fan of his writing.

Here's an article where they are being interviewed in a bubble bath and talking about her death-photo hobby.

And here's an article which includes Amanda giving an interesting speech about record labels. She mentions how, when her band Dresden Dolls signed up with a big label, there would be people in meetings who would talk about how maybe there was something about this Internet thing... and this was in 2003!




Gaiman says. “It’s the ultimate coffee table book for people who don’t have coffee table books. Or coffee tables.”


[the comic book] “Sandman,” Gaiman says, is sexually transmitted. “Guys who wanted their girlfriends to read comics would give them ‘Sandman.’ They’d break up, and the girl would take the ‘Sandman’s and infect the next guy. It grew on a vector.” According to Berger, it was the first modern comic to attract a large female readership. “Young women dressed in black and black eyeliner would walk into the comic store and pick up ‘Sandman’ and just walk out,” she said. “You look around a room where Neil is, and half of the fans are women, if not more.”

There are so many weird tidbits in the New Yorker article. (His odd gothic house... it must be exhausting.)
A few years ago, he was at a convention with Angelina Jolie, who played Grendel’s mother in the movie “Beowulf,” for which Gaiman co-wrote the screenplay. “When I try to explain that I attracted more attention than she did, people say, ‘Oh, ho, he’s being funny.’ I’m not.” [...]
Gaiman was scheduled to attend a “sushi party” one evening in the teen lounge, a duplex suite on a high floor of the convention hotel. On the door was a sign that read “Under 30, Over 12.” He climbed the stairs to a loft, where a dozen young people sat around a table beside a buffet of eel-and-avocado rolls and a thermos of miso soup. They cheered when they saw him.
“Do you lot have names?” he said brightly.
“Nooooooo!” they called, in unison.
“How many coats like that do you have?” a small girl with blue and green streaks in her hair asked.
“I’m pretty much always wearing something black or coaty or jackety,” Gaiman said. She beamed.

[...] The readings were videotaped, and Gaiman posted them to his blog. Every time the book dipped on the best-seller list, he tweeted a reminder to his followers that they could hear him read “The Graveyard Book” for free online, and, he says, sales of the print edition spiked.
-

Mo' money tawk

My personal money article has been updated.

A few years ago, TTL pointed me to Harry Browne, mentioned in that article. And today he mentioned Jim Rogers. I've only taken a quick look, but it looks interesting.

Valentines

[Thanks Carter]

I'm not sure I get exactly what the joke is here. Is that she is too-obviously a hooker, or is it more subtle? (If the former, I'd say that's prejudiced. I have friends who dress like that who are not hookers.)
Anyway, it reminds me of an old idea I've had on and off: to make cartoons, perhaps one-panel, for the web. This drawing is quite artful, which makes me interested. If I could combine art with funny, and perhaps sexy, then we might have something which could work.

Work-a-day world

[Thanks Jim]

A young family moved into a house, next to a vacant lot. One day, a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot. The young family's 4-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and spent much of each day observing the workers.

Eventually the construction crew, all of them "gems-in-the-rough," more or less, adopted her as a kind of project mascot. They chatted with her, let her sit with them while they had coffee and lunch breaks, and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important.

At the end of the first week, they even presented her with a pay envelope containing ten dollars. The little girl took this home to her mother who suggested that she take her ten dollars "pay" she'd received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.
When the girl and her mom got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own pay check at such a young age. The little girl proudly replied, "I worked last week with real builders building the new house next door to us."

"Oh my goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"

The little girl replied, "I will, if those assholes at Home Depot ever deliver the sheet rock."

Complete New Yorker (DVD)

Complete New Yorker (DVD).
(Also from Amazon (even cheaper).)

Being European, I'm not really familiar with The New Yorker. It seems to have a very vague definition, it's not clear what it's about. But it may be good.

In any case, it's an interesting comment on pricing: I've seen 80-page ebooks sold for $49. And here you can get fifty years of publishing, 4,000 issues, on eight DVDs, for twenty dollars!! Holy crap. A whole summer's reading (at least) for twenny bucks, dang.
(If it were me, I'd have priced this at $49, but that's another matter.)

(It's even Mac compatible. You can't say that about the Doonesbury DVD which came with a collection years ago. I wrote about it to Trudeau, and he said he's lost the battle about that with the publisher, despite him having eight Macs in the house and being the author.)

I imagine it's only pure scans of the pages, as graphic files (JPG for example), not converted to actual text PDFs, because that's a very big job. And so I hope the resolution of the images is high enough for them to be easily readable.
(You can get the collection on a hard drive too, a good idea, although it's much more expensive at $179.)

Oh, has anybody tried this? Do you know if it will work if you copy it to disk (it may not, due to copyright protection)? My MacBook Air would be the logical way to read this, but it does not have an internal DVD drive.

Update: typically, it seems copyright fears once again cripple a good product. An Amazon reader writes: "I've been a New Yorker fan for a while (I usually read my parents' old copies when they're done) so I thought it would be interesting to own the set for myself. I understand that the Complete New Yorker is available on an external hard drive, and this might be a good option, but I purchased the 8 DVD package, and found it to be pretty hopeless in its design and execution. For starters, the DVDs do not use a standard reader (like Adobe, say) and come with one of their own. The installation process is unwieldy and ridiculous, and the reader itself is riddled with bugs (I haven't yet been able to access any of the content). In addition to this, under the terms and conditions, the user must agree to a spyware-like program, giving permission for web browsing information to be logged, and personal information sold on to third parties. The Complete New Yorker is a good idea, for sure, but this set is pathetic."

I can believe it. Every time I have acquired something with a proprietary reader/viewer app, it has always stunk on ice. It's very difficult, it seems, to make good software like that.
While it has positive reviews for the content, many complain about the software:
"Others have complained about the search feature, which honestly I might have done without for my purposes. But that I am unable even to read the magazine in a lot of cases because of inept software development is a huge disappointment.
And let's not forget that the program uses spyware to collect personal information and share it with third parties.
Wow. What a terrible product. I implore you not to buy."

What a pity!
Anyway, I'm now finding evidence that the original price was much higher. Perhaps the twenty dollars is a special dumping price because it got all those bad reviews? Or even that they are preparing a new and hopefully better edition? (I'm sure it's too much to ask for that it will be simple PDF pages or such. Oh, the fears about copyright.)

John McPhee

Here's an interesting addition to the discussion about what is art.

There are some insightful comments under it, as is common on tOP, for example Janne's and Ctein's, both of which point to the change of the perciever's way of looking, and its influence on the experience of aesthetics.

And also Damon who says:
"I do take issue, though, with equating "art" and "successful art." It really does seem needlessly elitist to me to put down unsuccessful art as being something other than what it was intended as. But what is it then? If Van Gogh's early work isn't art, what is it? Craft? Likely not accomplished enough to qualify as craft. No, sorry, it's art. You may not like it; it may not work for you as art. It may work better as a wrapper of fish and liner of birdcages, but it's still art."

Exactly!
And David says:
"Lots of people hate cubism in general. Does this make all cubist art suddenly 'not art'?"

Just so. The problem is that there should be a pretty objective definition to aid communication about art, and the quality of experience is totally subjective. How many people have to agree that it's art for it to be art? How do we decide who is right? Is it a matter of education? Or innate sensibility?

Testing, testing...

[Thanks Charles]

Karen Bjornson unretouched (updated)

[Thanks tOP]

Karen Bjornson, Portrait by (c)Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
article, pictures.
I think these photos and women are gorgeous. And it's great to get some high-profile exhibition, fashion-related, which shies away from the super-hyper-anti-reality mind-set of the glossy magazine world.

(Man, what a woman!)

I should be clear: what I personally object to about over-photoshopping is not the "message it sends to women", it is a bit broader: the disconnection from reality. The implied lack of ability to see beauty not just in women, but in anything, unless it has been retouched to within an inch of its digital life, every little tiny perceived flaw removed.

TTL said:

I agree, Karen Bjornson looks so charismatic and beautiful here.

Thank you for this. I have tattooed the URL of your blog on my arm, under the anchor.

---

In fact, Karen Bjornson ('Björnson'? I wonder) reminds me of a woman of about the same age and beauty, I met in the neighborhood once, asking me for directions. Afterwards I kicked myself for having been too stunned to think of giving her a compliment.

True Stories, a film

True Stories, a film by David Byrne.
Just a quick mention, wonderful, quirky movie, very funny too. Oh, and some great music, performed by others than Talking Heads, but sometimes better. For example Dream Operator which I couldn't find anywhere in this version, so I recorded it from the DVD. Of course you have to see it in the film to get the ironic juxtapositions and the wild fashion show going on while she sings, but anyway I love her voice.

... Damn, I can't believe somebody put it on youboob three years ago! Is it really over three years ago I did this?



BTW, normally the whitebread "Nancy Reagan" conservative housewife with the big hair doesn't do it for me, but this one is hot!

Oh, and here is the Talking Heads version:

Why Is It (Not) Art?

Why Is It (Not) Art?, article.
Ctein touches on a subject with which I've conflicted with many readers before: what makes something art or not.
If you recall, I claim that if something is clearly and sincerely intended as art, it is art by definition, and saying that it is not art is a value judgment and not a category judgment. It might be great art or lousy art of insignificant art, but my viewpoint is that categories are important in thinking and communicating about things, and using categories-redefinitions as invalidation is confusing and unnecessary.

I think the argument hinges on the widespread perception/belief that calling something Art is implying that it's valuable, and this is what people might want to knock down in specific cases. I say that calling it art does not imply that it's good or bad, just what it is, as opposed to, say, food or a house or a car or a cloud or an insect.

It's similar to the pornography discussion recently. I think it would clarify communication if people would stick to the category definition (text or pictures intended as sexual stimulant) rather than the value definition (worthless smut).

I'll admit though that the whole discussion is confused (as Ctein touches on) by the actual definition of "art" being very much up in the air. Many people feel that it perforce has to involve some display of skill, while others, like Marcel Duchamp, feel that just declaring a urinal to be art makes it art, that it's the intention which counts.

On tOP, John Camp wrote:
"Duchamp's 'Fountain' and some of his other 'readymades' were jokes. In fact, Duchamp's most salient personal characteristic, present throughout his career, was his sense of humor. He had nothing but disdain for people who took some of his pronouncements seriously. He was, at times, an artist, but most often used his art to ridicule the foolishness of his day. Arrant nonsense was just as prevalent then as it is now.

Well, that makes sense. A lot of sense. However I still feel we should not out-of-hand dismiss the Intention theory of art. There are lots of grey areas. For example, take an old wall with patches of different kinds of bricks, remnants of old posters, etc. Most people will just walk past it. But a perceptive person can walk past and get an aesthetic experience from it. If he's a snapshooter, he may transfer that experience to another person, but it's unlikely. But if he's an artist, he could do it, and it's art. Even if it's seemingly just a straight record of the wall.
Or he could tear the wall down and re-erect it in a gallery. Is that art? Would it be art if he had built a new wall in the gallery, but it looked exactly like the old wall?

Interface flaw

Amazon UK has changed their home page to a slightly different popup menu displaying departments. It's different visually, I'm not sure how it's different technically, maybe it's flash instead of HTML. But what it means for me in practice is that instead of reaching the Search field in two hits of the tab key, I now have to slog through the whole menu, or reach for my mouse. As the kids say these days: FAIL! (The olders say "it's broken".)

Before:

After:

Ebook price war

The ebook pricing wars are heating up.