“Jim Jarmusch once told me, “Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good, it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good, it won’t be cheap.” Fast, cheap and good… pick two words to live by.”
Thinking of Allison Harvard…
One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible. The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich. A student pursuing a degree in the humanities can expect to run through 1,000 books before graduation day. A wealthy family in England in 1250 might have owned three books: a Bible, a collection of prayers, and a life of the saints—this modestly sized library nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. The painstaking craftsmanship of a pre-Gutenberg Bible was evidence of a society that could not afford to make room for an unlimited range of works but also welcomed restriction as the basis for proper engagement with a set of ideas. The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting. (via krislane)
Paul Winchell & Jerry Mahoney
In Stitches
Black magazine, issue 12
Thanks to Grant, Rachel, Barney and Hilary and all those lovely virtual folk who contributed to the article. (and Estelle again!)
“Any author who claims emotional distance from his or her work is lying or extremely un-self aware. If an idea is going to claim your attention and energies for the months or years it takes to write a book, that idea must be resonating with something deeply personal and unresolved in your life. Did I say “months or years”? In my case, the writing process consumes days or weeks…or hours, largely because my psyche is about one millimeter deep.”
Chuck Palahniuk
(interview via)
32 eyes
(via hrrrthrrr)
Marshall McLuhan
Noah Kalina
3D
Mark Zuckerberg.
(thanks matt b)
“What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”
Charles Baudelaire
Johnny Knoxville
François Gérard
Cupid and Psyche
1798
Musée du Louvre
(via catastrophy)
Cookie Monster explaining the finer points of museum etiquette.