randomosity

“Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.”

- Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain - life - 29 June 2009 - New Scientist

"I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of..."

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:50:26 -0400

“I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)”

- Sam Anderson reviewing Imperial @ Vollmann = Robert Caro raised by feral raccoons (and more!)

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is...

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:40:56 -0400

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

How To Get Snapped By The Sartorialist : Blog : Pedestrian.tv

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:21:35 -0400

How To Get Snapped By The Sartorialist : Blog : Pedestrian.tv

The Paris Review

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:46:29 -0400

The Paris Review