Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Art (Film): Drawing Restraint 9

From the film review: 'Drawing Restraint 9,' a Film Steeped in Ritual, With Whales and a Wedding, a great line -
Bjork, repeats a life-affirming motto in broken musical phrases: "From the moment of commitment, nature conspires to help you."

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Music: New CD - Yeah Yeah Yeahs


Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Show Your Bones - intense and insistent. Less raw and more listenable than their first release.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Music: New CDs - Hard-Fi


Hard-Fi: Stars of CCTV - I bought their EP and love the ska tinged post-punk. The full lenght is more varied. Been playing the Hard to Beat remix over and over.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Quote: Poems reverberate

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. -James Fenton, poet and professor (1949- )

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Zeitgeist: Foolish Chances With Words

A personal essay by Michael - Foolish Chances With Words. I enjoyed it especially because I still love the physical act of writing with a fountain pen on good paper.

If you're male, you probably acquired, when you reached the brink of adolescence, a machine that burned gasoline or shot bullets, and with it you risked your own life and endangered the lives of others. It took you far from home and gave you an early taste of adulthood's dark cracks. When I was 14, I acquired a typewriter. An aunt of mine, a high school teacher, had rescued it from her school's defunct typing classroom in Michigan, and in doing so she rescued me, too. With a manual Olympia typewriter as my companion for the next 10 years, I endangered myself and others and let it take me far from home so it could give me an early taste of adulthood's dark cracks...

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Books: Making a book

I read about Blurb in the NY Times a few weeks ago. Other options listed in the comments section of the Lifehacker blog. I am going to consider one of these to make Taxi Journal books for all the participants.

Technology / Design: Why is Usability Important

Some good articles and resources to make the case for usability from the UPA website:
Usability in the real world

Saturday, March 11, 2006


IMG_0615.JPG, originally uploaded by Shrez.

5th Street. Austin, TX. Sept. 2005

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Music: New CD - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness


I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - Fear is on our side
Athmospheric, melodic - this is my kind of music. I liked it the minute I put it in the CD player. Local Austin band.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Technology: Cool website tools

Found some cool tools for building websites on smarkets:
Ruby on Rails (Used by the 37Signals guys to build BaseCamp etc.)
Zeraweb
If I get some time, I am going to use Zeraweb to build a site.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Art: What Does Islam Look Like?

A good article from last week's NY Times about contemporary Islamic art - What Does Islam Look Like?
It mentions Karkhana and Shazia Sikander.
Excerpt:
The [Danish] cartoon issue isn't primarily an art story, any more than the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in India was an architecture story, or the censure of "The Satanic Verses" was a story about contemporary fiction. It's a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon.
As it happens, at the same time that intense partisan heat is being generated around the topic of popular images and Islam, we are getting a number of exhibitions of contemporary work to which the name "Islamic" is attached. Some shows approach the Islamic connection hesitantly; others embrace it. Together they tell us very different things about the reception of a cultural category called "Islam" in the West.