from The 39 Steps

"I got the wild style / always been a foul child"

"Boyle’s story lines are inventive, but his characters often feel implausible and feeble, drained of vitality by the surgeries necessary to fit them into procrustean plot contraptions." -- Wells Tower on T.C. Boyle

Honor Society Nominations Now Open

Order of the Golden Fleece: Nominees must possess exemplary character and include juniors, seniors and graduate students who have made a significant, lasting contribution to the University, and others who have made a significant contribution to undergraduate student life.

Order of the Grail-Valkyries: Recognizes students of outstanding character who have made significant contributions to our university's academic climate through excellence in scholarship, dynamic leadership, and innovative service.

Order of the Old Well: Recognizes students and faculty members of high character who have demonstrated outstanding humanitarian service and whose service has gone uncompensated and unrewarded.

Naming

She smiled for the first time and gently shook her head from side to side. "I believe that what you need is money. Does money have a name?"
I shook my head as she was doing. Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangability.

from Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

This is a...

"Table. Apple. Piece of wax. Finger. Table. Good morning Theaetetus."

adapted from Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Name That Song

"This is a story about a girl named Renee.
I don't discriminate.
Call me Evil.
I've never been tooken out."

Thoughts, or Artists (of the Bronze Age), or Founders of the State

"They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too different even to be hated."

Nietzsche, from The Genealogy of Morals
http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogy2.htm

from alain resnais' Muriel

Indifference

"Don't be afraid to show you care."

"And then I realized, all this time, I've been stuttering in the wrong language."

Dusty Fingers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusty_Fingers

Non Sequitur

"The more money we make, the more good we can do."

From: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?printable=true#ixzz0bx2VCH6c

neck face

via pblks

Fail Log: Cookie

Ever since I had my first Levain Bakery cookie in 2007, I've periodically been trying to replicate it. A quarter-pounder of a cookie, it is crispy crunchy on the outside, and richly soft and textured on the inside. In my quest, there was a point in 2008 when I would try to make 2-3 batches of big cookies per week. They were all failures. It is simply impossible for a cookie to stay that big and tall in a oven (they're almost an inch thick). The butter in cookies tends to push them out, or down, into silver dollar pancakes or tennis raquet heads, depending on the size. I tried everything in my attempt to copy their mojo, steam in the oven, baking soda changes, butter creaming techniques, virtually eggless doughs, bake time changes, you name it, I tried it. In failing over and over again, I think I understand cookies inside out now. But I always get mortified anew somehow. Recently, at the bakery I work for, I think I finally baked a pretty close cousin of the Levain mother cookie. We shall see.

Gil Scott Heron -- "Angel Dust"

Cultural Capital and Cultural Literacy

"Wonder Woman had some go-go boots!"

I feel that all the conversations we have today revolve around cultural literacy. I was at a party and all we talked about was TV, especially Mad Men. What is the point of displaying our cultural literacy? We have stopped living our own lives and now depend on the lives of fictitious characters to give our lives meaning. This is our secularized Protestant Revolution; Jesus is all around us, and always on TV, and often takes the humanly form of Don Draper.

In college, I had a friend, who any time the keywords "Halloween", "Wonder Woman", or "go-go boots" arose solely or in combination would immediately launch into a long description of a youthful Halloween costume she was very proud of. I had heard the story many times, and always found it frivolous and self-promoting. And now I find myself in many similar conversations. ____'s story of the go-go boots is like a haunting. This blog often delights in its cultural literacy, even if it aspires for something transcendent. I suppose this stops when one incarnates one's own piece of original culture, rather than bouncing around in the simulacrum.

via waxin & milkin

Zen

via yoyo

“To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness...He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

from http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2?printable=true

Mouthfeel

• Cohesiveness: Degree to which the sample deforms before rupturing when biting with molars.
• Density: Compactness of cross section of the sample after biting completely through with the molars.
• Viscosity: Force required to draw a liquid from a spoon over the tongue.
• Hardness: Force required to deform the product to given distance, i.e., force to compress between molars, bite through with incisors, compress between tongue and palate.
• Fracturability: Force with which the sample crumbles, cracks or shatters. Fracturability encompasses crumbliness, crispiness, crunchiness and brittleness.
• Gumminess: Energy required to disintegrate a semi-solid food to a state ready for swallowing.
• Heaviness: Weight of product perceived when first placed on tongue.
• Moisture absorption: Amount of saliva absorbed by product.
• Moisture release: Amount of wetness/juiciness released from sample.
• Dryness: Degree to which the sample feels dry in the mouth.
• Wetness: Amount of moisture perceived on product's surface.
• Mouthcoating: Type and degree of coating in the mouth after mastication (for example, fat/oil).
• Roughness: Degree of abrasiveness of product's surface perceived by the tongue.
• Slipperiness: Degree to which the product slides over the tongue.
• Graininess: Degree to which a sample contains small grainy particles.
• Smoothness: Absence of any particles, lumps, bumps, etc., in the product.
• Uniformity: Degree to which the sample is even throughout.
• Uniformity of Chew: Degree to which the chewing characteristics of the product are even throughout mastication.
• Uniformity of bite: Evenness of force through bite.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouthfeel

I recently went to a hip hop show paying tribute to producers DJ Premier & Pete Rock, who sat in opposing wicker chairs like hip hop royalty while artists played and sang their work. The closing song, and the one that got the most applause, was "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y)", a eulogy for a friend, Troy Dixon (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Reminisce_Over_You_(T.R.O.Y.)). The crowd was singing along, and this song, more than any other, encapsulated the night.

Pete Rock in a 2007 interview with Village Voice:

I had a friend of mine that passed away, and it was a shock to the community. I was kind of depressed when I made it. And to this day, I can't believe I made it through, the way I was feeling. I guess it was for my boy. When I found the record by Tom Scott, basically I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. It had such a beautiful bassline, and I started with that first. I found some other sounds and then heard some sax in there and used that. Next thing you know, I have a beautiful beat made. When I mixed the song down, I had Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School in the session with me, and we all just started crying."

The saxophone hook is infectious, and while not the "hardest" hip hop song ever created, T.R.O.Y. is a synonym for hip hop nostalgia. Fifteen years later, fans reminisce their own youth, their own upbringing (see lyrics: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/pete+rock+and+cl+smooth/they+reminisce+over+you_10204298.html). That was the thought I had, standing in the crowd, hands raised: "True school", or "old school" hip hop would always be a form of nostalgia because to feel it, you would have had to been touched in some odd way, the way Pete Rock was when he produced that beat. Not many experience the sensation, but those that do hold it with them through the transition to adulthood. The genesis of the transcendent hip hop moment inculcates repetitive listening behavior, like a two-bar saxophone hook or a classic verse. In that way, the generative hip hop moment is actually already and always a looking backwards, a repetition, a reminiscence.

B C

via drinkyourjuice