Remembering
: John Ellis sends us to Leon Wieseltier's essay in The New Republic on remembering September 11 (you have to register to read). I agree with him in spots (and don't agree with his dissection of William Langewiesche's pieces on the aftermath at the World Trade Center). In any case, the piece is filled with good and smart and smartly written observations and I'll quite unfairly reduce it to its best soundbites:
A society that is notorious for its inability to remember is about to do nothing else. America eats the past...
...The yahrzeit is here, and the least lachrymose country on earth is devising its rituals of commemoration. The interesting question is whether the memory will have life outside the media....
...Most of us will be remembering an event that we never saw, which is precisely the character of collective memory: knowledge made so immediate that it feels like experience...
...It was a measure of the horror that the media were too weak to interfere with our consciousness of it. In American existence, this counts as an epiphany. For the managers of meaning, the anchors and the reporters and the commentators, were themselves too shocked to set to work...
...The American heart is the bouncer at the door of the American mind....
...The media is greedy for tears. I expect also that what will be commemorated on television will be the coverage of the catastrophe as much as the catastrophe itself. Many reporters have an unattractive tendency to believe that an event that they have covered is an event that has happened to them...
...They are tourists in history...
...There is nothing that anybody can say or show on television that will be as crushing as what one may oneself imagine about what it must have been like to perish at the World Trade Center a year ago. Imagination is television's mortal enemy; and mourning is, to a large extent, an activity of the imagination...
...What we will be commemorating on September 11, after all, is the beginning of a war...
...A shallow mourning is a hideous thing. Or so I reflected the other day, when I came upon the perfect mourner's accessory, a Judith Leiber bag that portrays, in black crystals on white crystals, the World Trade Center. For under $4,000 evidence may be given of a broken Manhattan heart. Otherwise the terrorists will have won.
More memories
: Rossi has survivor's guilt:
The thing is…the closer we get to September 11th 2002, the more I realize how far I really am, and how far perhaps many of us are from moving on. I’ve been quiet on the subject lately because, well shit..I’m just tired of dwelling on it. I want to get up and get on with things.
: By the way, I had the pleasure of meeting Rossi yesterday. We met almost a year ago here in this space called the blogosphere. I admired her writing; I felt what she felt after September 11; I said so; she said thanks. And yesterday, we had lunch and, for the first time in a long time, I talked about that day and so did she; we shared memories among many other things. This is a medium like no other ever. It is a place where you can not only read and write, you can meet people, even make friends.
YuckedCompany.com
: SatireWire.com shuts [via Shift]:
New Haven, Conn. (SatireWire.com) — Citing creative differences, SatireWire's founder and sole employee, Andrew Marlatt, announced that as of today, the site will no longer be updated.
Unlike everything else on the site, this is not a joke. Not even the "creative differences" part.
"I've been producing SatireWire by myself for 159 Internet years (2.67 Earth years), and in a staff meeting yesterday, I all agreed it's time for me to move on," said Marlatt. "While the decision was certainly difficult, the meeting was actually quite harmonious. I brought doughnuts."
: A
Slashdotter recommends Satirewire's tremendous
Interview with a Search Engine. Enjoy
More yucks
: Anil recommends containers.
Can you hear me?
: I've been wanting to make audio blog posts for sometime. Only problem is, I haven't thought of anything that works better in audio than in print. A nice rant and rave would work, but I'm too tired to r&r. I already recorded my 9.11 recollections but that was more than a post.
Anyway, Adam Curry is musing on the topic and he points to an audio comment posted to a weblog here.
Now I'm not so sure audio works.
Whoever this is sounds like a geek. I don't say that to dis the guy; it's just that if I were reading his words, I'd hear them in a different (read: more pleasant) voice.
Playing an audio file on my new machine always gets me into the fight between applications over who's going to play it. Internet Explorer: "It's mine!" RealAudio: "No, it's mine. I stole it already." Netscape: "Can I play?" Audio remains irritating.
Finally, there's the content: The guy starts talking about setting standards for recording audio posts and I zone out like I do when I hear Imus drone and I switch him off.
If Dennis Miller had a blog, it should be an audio blog. But for most of the rest of the world, text is just fine.
Good reviews
: The best review I've read recently, from Christopher Locke:
Do this. Buy the album. Remove annoying wrapper and anti-theft shit. Slot into car CD player. Position car at top of long ramp onto high-speed Autobahn-like highway just as sun is rising (and no cars around). Open all car windows and sun roof (if any). Punch up track 6 and crank to full volume. Gun it. Never come back.
Remembering
: John Ellis sends us to Leon Wieseltier's essay in The New Republic on remembering September 11 (you have to register to read). I agree with him in spots (and don't agree with his dissection of William Langewiesche's pieces on the aftermath at the World Trade Center). In any case, the piece is filled with good and smart and smartly written observations and I'll quite unfairly reduce it to its best soundbites:
A society that is notorious for its inability to remember is about to do nothing else. America eats the past...
...The yahrzeit is here, and the least lachrymose country on earth is devising its rituals of commemoration. The interesting question is whether the memory will have life outside the media....
...Most of us will be remembering an event that we never saw, which is precisely the character of collective memory: knowledge made so immediate that it feels like experience...
...It was a measure of the horror that the media were too weak to interfere with our consciousness of it. In American existence, this counts as an epiphany. For the managers of meaning, the anchors and the reporters and the commentators, were themselves too shocked to set to work...
...The American heart is the bouncer at the door of the American mind....
...The media is greedy for tears. I expect also that what will be commemorated on television will be the coverage of the catastrophe as much as the catastrophe itself. Many reporters have an unattractive tendency to believe that an event that they have covered is an event that has happened to them...
...They are tourists in history...
...There is nothing that anybody can say or show on television that will be as crushing as what one may oneself imagine about what it must have been like to perish at the World Trade Center a year ago. Imagination is television's mortal enemy; and mourning is, to a large extent, an activity of the imagination...
...What we will be commemorating on September 11, after all, is the beginning of a war...
...A shallow mourning is a hideous thing. Or so I reflected the other day, when I came upon the perfect mourner's accessory, a Judith Leiber bag that portrays, in black crystals on white crystals, the World Trade Center. For under $4,000 evidence may be given of a broken Manhattan heart. Otherwise the terrorists will have won.
More memories
: Rossi has survivor's guilt:
The thing is…the closer we get to September 11th 2002, the more I realize how far I really am, and how far perhaps many of us are from moving on. I’ve been quiet on the subject lately because, well shit..I’m just tired of dwelling on it. I want to get up and get on with things.
: By the way, I had the pleasure of meeting Rossi yesterday. We met almost a year ago here in this space called the blogosphere. I admired her writing; I felt what she felt after September 11; I said so; she said thanks. And yesterday, we had lunch and, for the first time in a long time, I talked about that day and so did she; we shared memories among many other things. This is a medium like no other ever. It is a place where you can not only read and write, you can meet people, even make friends.
YuckedCompany.com
: SatireWire.com shuts [via Shift]:
New Haven, Conn. (SatireWire.com) — Citing creative differences, SatireWire's founder and sole employee, Andrew Marlatt, announced that as of today, the site will no longer be updated.
Unlike everything else on the site, this is not a joke. Not even the "creative differences" part.
"I've been producing SatireWire by myself for 159 Internet years (2.67 Earth years), and in a staff meeting yesterday, I all agreed it's time for me to move on," said Marlatt. "While the decision was certainly difficult, the meeting was actually quite harmonious. I brought doughnuts."
: A
Slashdotter recommends Satirewire's tremendous
Interview with a Search Engine. Enjoy
More yucks
: Anil recommends containers.
Can you hear me?
: I've been wanting to make audio blog posts for sometime. Only problem is, I haven't thought of anything that works better in audio than in print. A nice rant and rave would work, but I'm too tired to r&r. I already recorded my 9.11 recollections but that was more than a post.
Anyway, Adam Curry is musing on the topic and he points to an audio comment posted to a weblog here.
Now I'm not so sure audio works.
Whoever this is sounds like a geek. I don't say that to dis the guy; it's just that if I were reading his words, I'd hear them in a different (read: more pleasant) voice.
Playing an audio file on my new machine always gets me into the fight between applications over who's going to play it. Internet Explorer: "It's mine!" RealAudio: "No, it's mine. I stole it already." Netscape: "Can I play?" Audio remains irritating.
Finally, there's the content: The guy starts talking about setting standards for recording audio posts and I zone out like I do when I hear Imus drone and I switch him off.
If Dennis Miller had a blog, it should be an audio blog. But for most of the rest of the world, text is just fine.
Good reviews
: The best review I've read recently, from Christopher Locke:
Do this. Buy the album. Remove annoying wrapper and anti-theft shit. Slot into car CD player. Position car at top of long ramp onto high-speed Autobahn-like highway just as sun is rising (and no cars around). Open all car windows and sun roof (if any). Punch up track 6 and crank to full volume. Gun it. Never come back.
...
