Sunday, February 21, 2010

Armory Show

Last Friday I joined the P. Club at a performance of Moving Theater's Armory Show. I was particularly looking forward to this one because I'd never been to the Park Avenue Armory before and was excited to see it (and it was worth the excitement).

Several days later I'm still having trouble thinking of the show as a cohesive whole. But I was certainly interested in all the constituent parts. I particularly liked the way they addressed history and militarism in a space rife with both.

Go here for the Performance Club post and discussion.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Notes on the Olympics

  1. My apartment has been about 82 degrees the past few days (with the windows open) which is making it a bit torturous to watch the Winter Olympics. All that snow! All that cool air!

  2. These Alexandre Bilodeau features make me teary. Also, let me just say that having a disabled brother--mine has Down syndrome--never inspired me to any sort of greatness nor instilled within me any particular motivation. Oops.

  3. Related: I love it when the entire crowd at an event sings O Canada. I also love O Canada.

  4. Things I hate about NBC: Their refusal to show anything live. Their insistence that I love figure skating. The fact that they spoil the results of events they have yet to show right on their homepage so that when you go to look up their stupid broadcast schedule said results are spoiled for you. They're showing ice dancing on the main channel rather than the Canada-USA hockey game which means those of us without cable (see: me) can't watch the hockey game. Their sappy features that take away from time they could spend showing the sports that the Olympics are theoretically about.

  5. Winter Olympics: Fewer black people than the Republican National Convention?

  6. From Amy comes the news that the IOC wants to make Ryan Miller remove certain things from his mask. Things like the tribute to his dead cousin. I don't think that's a PR war the IOC wins.

  7. A lot of winter sports look terrifying yet fun. Cross-country skiing just looks like it would make me throw up.

  8. Despite all my complaining I love, love, love the Winter Olympics.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

What I'm Reading, etc.

The nice thing about writing a blog pretty much entirely for one's own benefit is that you don't have to feel guilty when you step away for, say, a month and a half. I felt like I was so crabby all the time and I wasn't particularly enjoying writing about my own crankiness so I can't imagine it was in any way interesting to read about. But I've since managed to plant myself in a cheerier place. So I'm back, if not with anything particularly substantive. But here are a couple things I've read recently:

Google and the New Digital Future
The terms of the settlement will have a profound effect on the book industry for the foreseeable future. On the positive side, Google will make it possible for consumers to purchase access to millions of copyrighted books currently in print, and to read them on hand-held devices or computer screens, with payment going to authors and publishers as well as Google. Many millions more—books covered by copyright but out of print, at least seven million in all, including untold millions of "orphans" whose rightsholders have not been identified—will be available through subscriptions paid for by institutions such as universities. [...]The negative arguments stress the danger that monopolies tend to charge monopoly prices. Equally important, they warn that Google's dominance of access to books will reinforce its power over access to other kinds of information, raising concerns about privacy (Google may be able to aggregate data about your reading, e-mail, consumption, housing, travel, employment, and many other activities).

Adam Gopnik on J. D. Salinger

In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye. Of the three, only Catcher defines an entire region of human experience: it is—in French and Dutch as much as in English—the handbook of the adolescent heart.