July 1 2009
caro:
I Want You Back - Discovery
Quite possibly the zeitgeistiest song possible at this moment in time. A Jackson 5 cover by the hottest new hipster collab act (you know, the Ra Ra Riot dude and the Vampire Weekend guy), and autotune. Yes, that’s right.
(Found at Aural States via Hype Machine)
My new favorite food blog takes fast food and refashions it as haute cuisine. No extra ingredients, and most of the recipes are fairly straightforward. I’ll be having the Spicy Chicken Sushi (fancy Popeye’s Chicken) for lunch tomorrow.
June 30 2009
Broken Social Scene
Granted, the topic is morbid by nature, but this sounds fascinating.
“There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?”
June 26 2009
Good morning, lovely.
June 25 2009
TSA still takes swine flu VERY SERIOUSLY. No one has told them about squirrel flu, the new killer.
June 24 2009
Insane plane landings from Hong Kong’s former airport, set to enthusiastic horns.
I visited Hong Kong once, in 1987, a trip which peaked when I bought fake Air Jordans — a cockroach scurried out of one as I started to put my foot in to test the fit. I remember the landing, it was nerve-wracking.
June 23 2009
(via juliasegal)
June 22 2009
(via booktumbling)
I think this is actually a picture of my grandmother. Or rather, it’s a picture of a woman that looks so like my father’s mother that I am sending it to our English relatives for confirmation. It’s not the picture I recognize, but the woman. She, Edith — Nana, rather — was not known for cats, but she was known for reading. And smoking. And a sharp wit. I know her only through the things she was known for because I hardly knew her myself. We only met three times, the first two meetings happening so early in my life that I barely remember them, the third so brief it hardly left an impression. But I remember her well enough to know that this particular look — engaged, mouth just slightly open and ready to move towards an amused smile or skeptical, mischievous one based on the words before her — was the one she wore while reading.
Which is all just a roundabout way of getting to a subject that’s been on my mind lately: Father’s Day.
I was more keenly aware of the holiday this year than I think I’ve ever been. I’m not sure exactly why this was so, but I had more spam email, saw more bus and subway ads mentioning it, saw more online banner ads than I remember ever seeing before. It was not a holiday our family took seriously. It, along with my father’s birthday, was just quietly overlooked. This wasn’t out of cultural snobbery — my mother has fine taking us to McDonald’s; summer blockbusters were induldged — but a kind of morbid fear of self-celebration that I’ve come to identify as particularly British. In any case, it’s not a holiday that has much personal resonance for me, and no actual memories of celebrating it with my father adhere.
And yet this year something grated.
It may just be that going seven years without a father is beginning to wear, or that having a father who ended life a murderer is a fact that’s only beginning to take hold and it’s souring everything. Or just perhaps that the very notion of fatherhood — the mythic, semi-heroic aspect of it — seems to me at once false and kind of sad. Our culture yearns for certain things so much that we give ourselves away, and I find something in the insistence of Father’s Day that speaks to a desperation, a hole. I’m not talking about celebrating an actual father — perhaps your father, who is great and loved and worth celebrating — but the flat gloss given to a pitted landscape, and the assumptions that come along with that simplification. The assumptions and the gift baskets, really.
