February 2009
15 posts
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Phoenix "Anything You Ask and More"
Maybe you don’t get why people were excited about the new Phoenix song when it debuted earlier this week. Perhaps you’ve never really paid much attention to them, or you’ve dismissed their brand of classy, immaculate pop rock at some point in the past. This mini-mix is for you, and I hope that you dig it.
A great service — worth downloading and listening to this weekend. Thank you, Perpetua!
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This is an audio representation of the daily closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIJA) from February 25, 2008 through February 25, 2009. A year’s worth of stock trading is compressed to under thirty-three seconds. The values are mapped relative to this timeline, the highest corresponding to MIDI note G9 and the lowest to C-1. Each trading day is represented by a sixteenth note. Held notes represent a period of relative stasis over multiple days.
This post was published at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange today, February 26, 2009. If the Dow drops any lower today, the resulting value could not be represented within this scale.
It’s interesting to actually hear the market fluctuate up and down, making patterns within patterns, before it plunges to where we start again this morning.
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'Slumdog' no hit with Rushdie
I wish someone would give Salman Rushdie a regular spot to review movies.
Slumdog Millionaire - an Oscar contender Sunday night - may have been a hit with movie audiences. But not with Salman Rushdie.
“The movie piles impossibility on impossibility,” the famous novelist said in a lecture Sunday evening at Emory University.
He also nailed The Reader (“[a] leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability”) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (“It doesn’t finally have anything to say.”). (via The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci
It’s reassuring to know that procrastination means you’re a genius actually. (Chronicle of Higher Ed)If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.
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Cat Power, “Cross Bones Style”
Watching serious episodes of Sports Night was good prep for going on The Takeaway: the jargon’s slightly different, but in the control room, they really do say stuff like “30 seconds back.” That frenetic level of energy seems highly addictive. Thanks for having me on, John!
