"Fleur de Saison" by Emilie Simon

This song is too catchy for its own good.  Also, not speaking French, I don't understand the lyrics, but the techno-beat does not match up in my mind with "girl being taken over by plants."

RIP Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has died.

New York magazine has the best obit.

My personal favorite is probably "Split Images."  "Killshot" is good too.  Also good: everything else he ever wrote.

Nighthawks at the Flatiron

In celebration of Hopper Drawing, a life-size window installation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) is on view inside the landmark Flatiron Building's prow, one of the original architectural inspirations for the iconic painting.

From the Whitney Museum's tumblr, via Metafilter.

"Illuminatus!" and the Midgets in Pynchon's Shadow

After hearing a lot about the book and hating the idea of carrying around any book that manages to be two inches thick, I found, a few years ago, a paperback copy of "The Eye in the Pyramid," the first book in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" trilogy.  I first saw it in a friend's dorm room; I read about it when reading up on conspiracy fiction and counter-culture literature.  It has a reputation as a cult novel, a crazy libertarian magnum opus.

"The Great Inversion": Urban Planning and Learning to Let Go (and also a Lou Reed/David Bowie video)

So I enjoy, or at least I like the idea of myself, being someone who enjoys, learning new things, and so occasionally at a bookstore I'll go kill a few minutes looking through a shelf or even an aisle I don't regularly go down.  Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City" came in on the shelf side of that rather irrelevant little equation.
All I knew about urban planning was that it existed, that there was someone named Jane Jacobs, and that the older parts of European cities possess the kind of topographical geometry would drive Euclid himself to suicide.  Also, that the conventional model of urban sociology in the twentieth century involved poor people living in the heart of the city, and the richer folks moving the suburbs.  Ehrenhalt's thesis is that that process has been (wait for it) inverted, and that in many cases (although not all) the inner cities are gentrifying.

Whither Authorial Intent? "The Petting Zoo" by Jim Carroll

Not that authorial intent should have anything to do with it.  "The Petting Zoo" is an interesting book on several levels, least of which is the question of whether or not I would recommend it to someone else: I'm not loving it, but I could easily see why people would.  This is problematic for me.  The main character is fairly likeable, except that he's an artist who found success early in his life, which, as a frustrated creative type, I find envy-inducing, and with the envy comes contempt.  That's a personal hang-up; furthermore, Billy Wolfram, the protagonist, is overly serious, dismissive of rock music, self-involved, etc.  When a protagonist fills the book the way Billy does here, it's easy to assume that he is an author's stand-in, but here, despite no doubt having much in common with Jim Carroll, the main character is somewhat at odds with the world he lives in, as the narrator describes it.  Billy and the narrator are not one.  Whatever Billy's faults, I find myself suspecting that that was an authorial choice, not the non-decision of an obviously narcissistic creator.  Billy's limits--as an artist, as a person--make him real, and the distance between the narrator and Billy are key to making the book work.

 

"The Good, the Bad and the Queen" by The Good, the Bad and the Queen, from the album, The Good, the Bad and the Queen

One of Damon Albarn's things.

"The Affirmation" by Christopher Priest is pleasantly dissembling my brain

I am almost done reading Christopher Priest's novel, "The Affirmation," and I have a dilemma: as soon as I finish a book, my brain immediately moves on to whatever is next, allowing myself only an hour or two to properly process what came before.  In this case, I'm writing forty pages from the end, before I lose track of what happened and start staring at my "To-Read" pile.  So:

 "The Affirmation" is about a young British guy named Peter Sinclair whose life has gone to shit.  He's lost his girlfriend, his job, so on and so forth, and so he moves to the country and tries to a write an autobiography so that he can gain some understanding of where his life went wrong.  The problem is, because everything that he's trying to write about has so much baggage, he can only touch on the truth by camouflaging everything.  He gives his parents, his girlfriend, new names; London becomes Jethra.  A few chapters later, we're reading Peter Sinclair's memories of growing up in Jethra, where he has recently won a lottery allowing him to undergo a procedure that would allow him a kind of immortality: really, just an extensively increased lifespan.  The trouble is that the procedure induces amnesia, and so before the operation, Peter Sinclair has to write an autobiography so that he can revisit the details of his life.  However, Jethra's Peter Sinclair has already written an autobiography, except that to get at his own deeper truth, he had to change the names: his family's, his girlfriend's.  Jethra becomes London.

Bovine Folk Dancing

A friend was watching this on Youtube and I told him that cows actually do this in Kansas, it's just that normally they do it at night, a little more slowly, and that the video only went viral because someone finally filmed it during the daytime.

 
He did not believe me.