Caterina.net

After a painless and SARS-free flight (the flight attendants were all wearing face masks and latex gloves) we arrived in on the Isle of the Manhattoes, settled in and went out to Big Nick's with Lia for a Sumo Burger and then for a walk with Jarvis, who is like a cute and stubborn little old man, and does a sort of moonwalk backwards dance. Today, after drinking cups full of coffee from those thick ceramic mugs you only find in diners, it's midafternoon and I'm ready to start the day in classic Caterina fashion.

• Cassette Cover Design was very groovy.

• Some lovely scribbles from a fellow in Germany. His site is here.

• Nigeria Scammers are busted, and appear to be... Nigerian. Fancy that.

• Beautiful Lamps in geometric forms. I like the Prometheus.

• Package Design for The Pill, disk model and calendar model.

• Google's much rumored Social Networking Software is now out, called Orkut. Could we be more underwhelmed?

• Dos Pesos is now on Dogster, social networking software for dogs. It had to happen.

• A Hole in the Sky It's magical.

• Shuffle and deal. Unelected oil spiv, hmph!

• Graphic comparing the credits of Casablanca vs. The Return of the King. Via Signal vs. Noise.

• Chart of Ecstasy. Via the U.S. Government.

• Compostmodern, a conference on sustainability and design, looks great. And Shana's speaking there too.

• It's certainly not light reading for a crowded train carriage: this is a blasting display of wilful complexity, a strong-armed grapple from a heavy-hitter.

• Treat yourself well. Everyday. I missed this, somehow, last year. Proper use of Every Day. Via Invisible city.

• Shit and Civilization. Six weeks of scatalogical humor no doubt. And there is something so wrong about that toilet too. From Matt.

• And also from Matt, Frizzy Logic, my new favorite blog.

• Arlene Shechet at Dieu-Donne, a papermaking centre. Also Mary Judge

• Papier Mache Anatomical Models I especially like the embryos and the ovary.

• Jumping Sharks All kinds of animals here today.

• Oh life is wonderful. This link made me laugh/cry with happiness. From Peter.

• Bathtime.

• David Sheen's Mybrary, not unlike Mark Anderson's Booklend. They've put their personal libraries on loan.

• Put a heavenly being into a game to make a word for eternal.

• Strindberg and Helium. I was just reading a recipe of how to make absinthe yesterday. Via Estee.

• Graffiti Archaeology in San Francisco which tracks the evolution of different graffiti at certain spots over time, by Eric and Cassidy.

• BaaBaaTwinkleEFG and a bunch of other means to have Pointless Fun. There's a whole list of pointlessly fun games here from Bernie DeKoven.

• Tacca Chantrieri (Bat Plant, Devil Flower) a photo by Tomas.

• Mo Kin hasn't been linked to from here yet and, well, she's the 3-year-old Korean Xylophone Girl.

• Dreems on dirtdirt is one of the best Exquisite Corpses I've seen in a long time.

• Design Observer is a new weblog about design from the all-star line-up of Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Rick Poynor.

• Ban trans fats. Sadly, Oreo cookies are a major trans fat medium. As are most processed foods.

• Cipango a picture blog.

• Masonic Lodge Art (via Incoming Signals)

• The Toronto Skyline in a lovely time-lapse movie. I love it when the lights come on and then the sun sparks against the mirrored building.

• What are the odds of dying? At the moment, I'd say 100%. Good statistics.
• Was Hemingway known for being a really good dad or something? Why does everyone keep calling him Papa?
• Aldi sells art Art now available in German supermarkets. For cheap too!
• Stonehenge, 360 degree view. Is that grass enhanced? Or is it really that green?
• Ghost Study gallery. Some of these are obvious fakes, or of questionable interest but some are pretty credible.
• Gorilla Babysitter. Rich people leave children in gorilla cage when they go out, with a video of gorilla holding a child after he fell. I found this oddly charming.
• Digital Sundial I want one. Oo! Chrismas is coming! HINT. (Enough sunny days in Vancouver? Hmn.)
• Design Festa has some great stuff, which is pictured on greggman.com. Coolest are the pregnant torsos with the real rat embryo in it. Here's more by the same guy.
• Hourglass Nebula a beautifully shaped nebula with a very creepy eye in the middle. It looks like the eye of Sauron, really.
• Deseret, a Mormon alphabet, on Omniglot. All strange alphabets are beautiful.
• Dos Pesos by the fire. He loved Matt and Kay by the time they left. He's getting less and less territorial.
• No There Anywhere. A Canadian reporter wanders around in the American suburbs looking for something. Anything.
• Give me a world with more Rob Drimmies and fewer fuckwits.
• Modernism Timeline, concentrating on the work of architecture, designers and artisans. And Another one.
• The Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters, from Russia, where drinking season is in full swing. This one's a nice one.
• Don't meet your heroes, Part VI. Pushkin sounds like a real pig, but Eugene Onegin is, IMHO, absolutely sublime.
• Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band. Why not listen to a really dreadful midi file today?
• Charle Bukowski, marked for death. Oops. He's already dead. If you're over 22 years of age, you really shouldn't like the work of Charles Bukowski anymore. I don't mean you should stop telling people you like his work, I mean, literally, you shouldn't like it anymore. (via Xvarenah)
• Dos Pesos spends most of his time lying poolside and going to nightclubs with his sunglasses on, now that he's a famous magazine model.
• Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, is the subject of a new biography, though Joyce's grandson has demanded many omissions and occlusions.
• The Meatrix is a good reminder to eat more vegetables and avoid Tyson food products.
• New Langton Arts and SF Camerawork are both having auctions in San Francisco.
• A Remedios Varo painting for is sale at auction, a lovely one. These don't come up very often.
• The Scribbler just ate an hour. This one is from Nick.
• Judith Scott, a fiber artist with Down's Syndrome make some gorgeous work. "As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language...."
• Superstudio Exhibit at Pratt in Manhattan. It annoys me that I'm leaving 2 days before.
• Farnsworth House by Mies Van der Rohe, an architectural icon, is up for sale.
• The Galton Collection is full of cool stuff. Look at the Registrator, the box of eyes, the "Quincunx", the Family Composite Photgraph and so on. (Annoyingly, you can't link to the internal frame pages). (via Alamut).

October Sidelinks
• Dictionary of Units of Measure, which I found looking for the largest size bottle of wine: a Nebuchadnezzar.
• Lowbrow of Yesteryear. Some really great, really awful, and really neat pulp novel covers and movie posters.
• Circus Trees, living trees sculpted into bizarre forms starting in the 20s by a farmer named Axel Erlandson. They're now living at Bonfante Gardens. (this, and below, via Beverley Tang)
• Aerogel is a brand-new supersubstance, which I'd love to mess with. Pricy, I bet.
• Kunsthaus Graz looks lovely-weird. How long has this thing been open? (via archinect)
• Grass Church Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are filling a deconsecrated church with grass, grown from seed.
• The Shovel Chair is very elegant, and has a nice bum cradling protrusion.
• The Scariest Moments in Film History. Bravo for including Don't Look Now, that was great. The scariest non-scene was getting a glimpse of the gynecological tools in Dead Ringers.
• Don't tell Dos Pesos, but I'm thinking of trading him in for this baby hedgehog. Kyoot!!! (via lia)
• Human Sized Chess performance in Vancouver, near Western Front. When a player makes a move in the master game, the information will be transmitted to the appropriate piece via cellphone. The piece will then walk, bike, or skate the appropriate number of blocks.
• Sidereality has Nick Piombino as the featured poet this month. "Sidereality" is a great name too. Nick's personal blog is fait accompli.
• Most Important Artist of the early 21st Century? Stewart has posted some clips of his work. He works in the medium of Voice Mail. You also get to hear me eating an oreo cookie, amplified.
• The Cyborger tells me that "C.A.T.E.R.I.N.A.: Cybernetic Artificial Technician Engineered for Rational Infiltration and Nocturnal Assassination" is my Cyborg name. (via Langmaker)
• Meish.org's album cover challenge I failed miserably. And I like music! But then again, there was a Janet Jackson album in there, so who knows what that other stuff was.
• Three Simple Grooming Tips for the Average Guy. I'm totally behind Lane on this. Yes! And I'd add: buy clothes more than once every five years!
• Qwert schmarble. Some amusing Amazon garbage. Look quick, they'll take it down as soon as Stewart and Anil's reviews are submitted. Heh.
• Cabinets of Curiosities, representations of the actual rooms. My great grandfather collected the shells of Hawaiian trees snails, among other intriguing bits.
• Environmental Art Installation. This is just grand. It is for sale through Neiman Marcus! In their Christmas Catalog! Priceless.
• Have you seen Jeff Mangum?. The founder of Neutral Milk Hotel drops off the map and disappears. And why NOT be like Robert Wyatt?
• Dada & Avant-Garde Auction of the Hans Richter and Cimena Standish Lawder Collection. Also check out the Hollywood Memoribilia including Alfred Hitchcock's cigar box.
• The Swearsaurus enables you to swear in 123 languages, rendering the phrase "Excuse my French" all but obsolete.
• Sylvia Plath was a Cubist working in bright, happy colors. Hm. (this and many others via Greywyvern)
• Pinhole.nl, which are little worlds created by Bethany de Forest, about the size of a shoebox, and photographed with a pinhole camera.
• Acme Traditionals. Where you can shop for things that are not necessarily available and be amused.
• Chihuahua Calendar. Apparently the Japanese craze for chihuahuas is due to a commercial in which a man bought a tux for his chihuahua so he could attend his daughter's wedding.
• Eyeballs. 50 of them in their original sample box. If I had more money than sense, I'd buy it.
• Goth Interior Design. I just wish the pictures were bigger. (Login:caterinanet/caterinanet)
• Beyond Belief. I swallowed a nail. I ate rat. I drank human blood. I had the same dream as my sister once, detail for detail. I bought weed from my high school English teacher.

September Sidelinks
• Magic Shadow. More silly and fun Japanese inventiveness. (via email from Peter.)
• Talk like a pirate day is in full swing. Yarr!
• Lustre Online has some lovely accessories by Lisa Prentice, a local Vancouver designer. There are some beautiful necklaces there; I especially like the cinnabar temple necklace.
• Cost of the War in Iraq. At this moment, 73 billion dollars. You can also put a nifty counter on your weblog.
• Facetime pays off. A study confirms what I had suspected.
• Bush's behavior analyzed by Oliver James. "...staring at his vomit-spattered face in the mirror this dangerously self-destructive man fell to his knees and implored God to help him and became a teetotalling, fundamentalist Christian..."
• Prepare to smile on September 12. And commit to making 10 other people smile too, OK?
• Ferrofluid for sale, $21.95 for 70 mL. I know you, like me, have always wanted some.
• Interview with Douglas Coupland. "We went from being boring little Canada to a sexy country of sin overnight."
• Well, duh. Of course living in suburbia contributes to obesity. As well as hypertension, coronary disease, diabetes, asthma, anxiety and depression. Boy did I hate growing up in suburbia. (caterinanet/caterinanet)
• The ATypI Conference is coming to Vancouver Sept 25-28, at Emily Carr. Too expensive, damn.
• Typofonderie has a good typography weblog on their front page.
• A fireproof fabric from Belorussia and the gambler who got his hands on it.
• Catgee provide the worlds first personal DNA storage & profile request kits. "For the first time you can crack the genetic code and discover the secrets of your DNA."
• Schwarzenegger talks about orgies he attended in a 1977 interview with Oui magazine. Also about what drugs he uses and not being a "fag". What a reptile.
• Average age of women giving birth in BC is 29.6. Average age of women getting married in BC is 32.4. For grooms, 35.1.
• Look at this cool video by my friend Tomas. I love the way it spins around and then finds him again.

• Orange Cone, a new weblog by my friend Mike K, has been launched. Mike K wore an orange shirt and a brown tux to our wedding. Orange is king.
• Laura Miller reviews Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. Wow, she really hates it. I've always thought of Palahniuk as a sort of Elmore Leonard, inexplicably packaged in a "literary fiction" format.
• Gorgeous Pod is now open, according to Tony, wearables and covetables which are the work of Adrian Van Allen, creatrix extraordinaire.
• XIIIN Not sure exactly what this is, as it's all in Korean, but it's too cool for school. The message boards are animated too! (via Corey Senderov Jackson.)
• Google is nifty. Link from the equally nifty Stewart.
• The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher Alexander, anticipated for what? 10 years or something? is now out !!! It is the first of four volumes, and he has been working on it for 20 years.
• In-Take. Rena tells me that the print version of this zine is really nice.
• 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence. (Interconnected supplied this one.)
• Images from the History of Medicine from Art-Bin which has many other interesting articles
• A great collection of photos of cubists. Not what you're thinking. There's something delightful about these pictures of puzzle-solvers.
• Pinhole camera photography in Porto Alegre in Brasil. I'm inspired to make a pinhole camera.
• Power from human blood could lead to "human batteries". The most interesting science fiction use of this idea is in Dan Simmon's Hyperion.
• Dear Japanese people: Please stop exploring your sexuality. It really freaks us out. Love, American People.
• Odd Nerdrum show is currently up at the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco, for those of you interested in contemporary figurative painting, he's one of the best.
• TypePad Posts their Features and Prices and the features are great and the prices are fair. What I can't believe is that Ben Trott. He writes the code of ten men. I have no idea how he does it.
• Codex Seraphinianus is now available at Powell's for $550. Hell, I paid $200 for my copy in 1994 (at the Libreria Pegaso in Mexico City) and it's the silk-covered and fancily boxed Franco Maria Ricci version . So art-book fiends, I don't know. $550 is a lot.
• Have I moved to Hippie Nation?. Let's hope not. I'm allergic to tie-dye.
• I have a question.. If 43% of New Yorker readers are Women, and 44% are men, what are the other 13%?
• Is America Becoming Fascist? On Adbusters. Bookmarked to read later.
• A review of the drawing show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in the Glove & Mail.
• The Konundrum Engine Literary Review launches, with a piece by Stephen Dixon and an interview with T.C. Boyle.
• Roxy Music sort of on tour. I got all excited when I heard this, but 5 dates does not a "tour" make. And no Northwest dates either. Harrumph.
• The Gutenberg Bible. Impressive. From Andrew, via email.
• The pitiful status of women in Japanese business. "...it often seems that the Japanese would rather let their economy stagnate than send their women up the corporate ladder." (caterinanet/caterinanet)
• Wow, and there I am in NY in the rain. My great grandfather designed the mosaics in the New York City subways. Go Great-Grandpa!
• Boy am I glad I bailed on grad school. Academic poverty is an all-too-familiar lament, alas. Let's give it up for autodidacticism!
• Stewart is quoted in a NY Times article on IMs in lecture halls, which references a game Ludicorp is creating called "Neverending". Heh. (caterinanet/caterinanet)
• An interview with Esther Freud. I quite enjoyed the film made of her first novel, Hideous Kinky about two children whose hippie mother toted them around Morocco in the 60s.
• Wow, there I am in Evan's silhouette photo archive. That must be Greg and Anju's house, circa 2000.
• Queers at the Dance, a book and web site about being gay at your high school prom, with a place to add your own story.
• 174 Feral Chihuahuas whose fate is on the line. Several of the dominant dogs have already attacked and killed their kennelmates. (via Lia).
• Woz's Tracking Device sounds wonderful/scary. No more lost pets! Total 24-hour surveillance! (NYTimes: caterinanet/caterinanet)
• Inuktitut Cloud Names, Back River Dialect. (via Eleanor Rigby). And also How Many Ways Can You Spell Snow?. It is very hot today. Hot hot hot.
• Essential News Story The kind of news that makes me happy. Nine! Ranjit was the one who showed this to me. His friend said he wasn't very impressed with their color changing ability...
• Congratulations Jen for getting your bike back! Un vero milagro!
• Robert Smithson has a web site. Emily and I agree that the word "Jetty" is lovely.
• Celibate Matchmaking Service Many are religious, or waiting for marriage, but many "enjoy celibacy". I'm researching celibacy for a short story I'm writing.
• Looking for the Soul of Soho. As long as I've been alive Soho has been "over" so I never experienced it as an artist's paradise.
• The Leap into Language (NYTimes: caterinanet/ caterinanet) On the origins of language. Bookmarked to read later.
• The Three-Day Novel Writing Contest is approaching, and it's time to register. Looks like Blue Lake Books is involved this year.
• Victims of the War on Drugs Harvard PhD Candidate/Cop Peter Moskos has found his medium in the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers.
• A delightful list of the favorite etymologies of the chief editor of the OED: "curfew" meant "to cover the fire"
• Doctors can distribute marijuana in Canada, continuing the Netherland- ization trend of recent months.
• iChat AV is twice as fun as regular old chat. If you have a Mac, you must download the beta immediately.
• Remote Home a new home for the mobile society, existing simultaneously in London and Berlin.
• The Padawan's Guide to Padme Amidala Costumes. I'm not a Star Wars geek, but I sure loved the costumes worn by the completely forgettable Natalie Portman.
• The Philippines, a photographic trip by ronv.
• These earphones are definitely not for those squeamish wimpfolk who freak out when I actually use Q-tips to clean the inside of my ears.
• The End of Christiania? The free state in Copenhagen under threat of dissolution. (caterinanet/caterinanet)
• Return of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, the new icon of business success. Slow and steady is back in fashion. (NYTimes Login: caterinanet/caterinanet)
• The Whole Earth Catalog needs your help. They've put a bunch of the content online, but haven't been able print a copy.
• Illuminated Flemish Manuscripts with a lot of fancy zooming in and out technology (I'd rather they had one huge jpg). Gorgeous stuff though.

July Sidelinks

• Cunt, the history. An exhaustive account of the etymological and cultural history of the word "cunt". (Though I always understood it to just be the regular name of the vagina in Middle English which was then turned into a vulgar term by the church, which imposed the latinate "vagina", "sexual intercourse", "penis" and "defecate" for cunt, fuck, prick and shit.)
• Five-Oh, on foot an op-ed piece by travel buddy, cop and Harvard PhD candidate Peter Moskos, on how cops on the street, rather than cops in cars, prevent crime.
• William Gibson on Steely Dan Do the people who program these supermarket background tapes have any idea what this song is actually about? And do they know where the name "Steely Dan" came from?
• Art created while the doors of perception were opened under the influence of psilosybin mushrooms. "The worlds inside the mind are just as read as the world outside".
• Victorian Visions of the FutureWalking on Water, Weather Control Machinery, Personal Flying Apparatuses, Summer Holidays at the North Pole.
• The Barbies that never were Hellraiser Barbie, Marge Simpson Barbie, Tattoo Artist Barbie, Catwoman Barbie.
• How to do marketing without appearing as if you're doing marketing. A revealing article about the bubble-up marketing for Pabst Blue Ribbon.
• Stinky vices for which I will gladly break the law. It's pathetic what passes for cheese in the U.S. - unpasteurized cheese is mostly legal in Canada!
• Les Amis Du Fromage is our favorite local cheese shop, full of delicious redolent mostly European cheese.
• Most Expensive Cities Not surprisingly, Tokyo is #1, but I had no idea Moscow was so expensive. New York is down at #10.
• When Men Clean House, It Pays off Big Time Not only do they end up with smarter, better adjusted children, their wives have sex with them more often.
• Lance Arthur at lancearthur.com. Ever funny, ever moving, lanceward ho!
• The Mystery of the Green Man, he's all over the greeny earth, peeking out at you from behind the foliage.

June Sidelinks

• Blog of the week by Joshua Norton, Strip Mining for Whimsy
• Ontario court rules in favor of same sex marriage. Canada catching up with the Netherlands in its politics.
• Tiny Books on the New York Times. Use this newly created caterinanet login: caterinanet/caterinanet
• Photographer's Rights. A handy, downloadable guide that you can carry with you, should anyone challenge your right to take photographs. (Harrumph)
• Persuasion and Brainwashing Techniques, as practiced by your local preacher, military organization or meditation class. How to win converts and influence people.
• Erik Davis on The Matrix Reloaded. Behind one of those Salon superads unfortunately.
• Most Iraqi Treasures recovered after the wartime looting. Only 47 of the 8,000 items are still missing.
• Wow, there is a lot of room in here. Yeah.
• Mario Giacomelli, Italian. Photographs of surpassing beauty, and subtle humor.
• Well this just about sums it up. Gnashing my teeth over here. (link pilfered from sylloge)
• Death, philistinism, and the American Way. More proof of our national cowardice with respect to representation.
• James Tiptree, Jr., aka Alice Sheldon, and "The Women Men Don't See" by way of Language Hat.
• Self-referential Aptitude Test Take the test after you're finished reading this sentence.
• 80s Tarot Deck. Ferris Bueller as the Fool. Thomas Dolby as The Magician. Annie Lennox as the High Priestess.
• Games Qualify as Free Speech Appeals court overturns controversial district court ruling, and protects games under the First Amendment, which will help games to be seen as a mode of creative expression.
• Hiro Yamagata at the Wexner Center for the arts. Lasers, lights and mirrors.
• Grand Street, a magazine full of top-notch work by international artists and writers, is back, after a two-year hiatus.
• Medusa. There is an article by Mark Dery in the latest issue of Cabinet in the subject of severed heads, which refers to Medusa.
• Jan Svankmajer. How is it that after all these years of being on the internet, I've never done a search for "Jan Svankmajer"? Great site!
• Identity Project for the Principality of Sealand. Their official site.
• Man emerges from 20 years in hiding after the fall of Saddam Hussein, which he spent living between the walls of his parents' house.
• Oblique Strategies, those genius-triggering cards from Brian Eno, are available once again.
• A View from the Bridge, a profile of Don Delillo on The Guardian.

May Sidelinks

• 163 Chihuahua Pix and dozens of them are chihuahua puppies. Told you this sidebar was going to have lots of chihuahua links.
• Writers' block, an installation by Sheryl Oring.
• Exo-electric armor which delivers a hair-raising 80,000-volt electric shock is now ready for consumer use. How sci-fi!
• BC Facts, a web site about the BC government's decisions and how they affect health, the environment, and wildlife.
• His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz...
• Obligatory Occasional Chihuahua Link Yes, even more small dogs in outfits.
• Dinner Beast photographed and reluctantly consumed by Old Tasty.
• Beauty Check No surprises here. Beautiful people are thought to be better people.
• Kana, japanese G & L cutie, the official site.
• Fuck the bullshit it's time to throw down. "A page a day. Anything less is unacceptable you punk-ass bitch- motherfucker. Anything less is unacceptable."
• Dodge 2. Pixelation continues to fascinate, though its moment has surely passed.
• Amorphoscapes So does grimy-looking digital residue, whose moment passed in 1997.
• Handy 14-step Reference on How to Identify Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco

The venue for the Gel Conference yesterday was really awesome -- it was at the New York Historical Society, across from the National History museum. I like smaller conferences that are contained to one venue, where all the attendees see the same speakers and group attention is focused in one space. Congratulations to Mark for putting together an excellent roster of speakers, and attracting a really interesting crowd.

Two of my pieces will be in a show at Jen Bekman on Spring Street in New York, starting this Thursday: "Michelle" (February 2003, 8 x 8 Plexiglass, beads, paper, adhesive, bolts) and "Randy" (February 2003, 12 x 12, same materials)

Where:
6 spring street (between Elizabeth + Bowery)

When:
Opening Reception
Thursday May 8th
6pm -8pm
(show is up til June 14th)

Afterparty to follow:
Sweet + Vicious (directly across the street)

I won't be there , having returned to Vancouver late late last night, but please go see it. There are some lovely small works in this show (perfect for New York apartments!), and they will likely be affordable as the show is comprised mostly of emerging artists.

• On the way back from dinner at Cafe Leibowitz, we had to stop by Rice to Riches, a hyper-chic over-designed joint dolled up to look like the interior of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rice to Riches sells only...rice pudding. "Doesn't it look like.... vomit?" Emily whispered. We tasted some and decided the Emperor had no clothes; it was like eating flavored cottage cheese. "A testament to the power of design," Miles concluded.
• We went and had pudding anyway -- not rice, not hasty, not My-T-Fine, but the yumyum banana bread pudding a la mode at Blue Ribbon Bakery. It was warm out and people were happy and Miles really really likes dogs.
• Then we attended the Gel Conference on Friday, of which there would have been much to say, except it has already been well blogged.
• I had lunch with Nick, who is completely obsessed with blogging, at an outdoor cafe on 77th, and we talked and talked and there was so much to say, a conversation that will be continued at length.
• I went back to the conference in time for the afternoon session. After the conference we went to another place that looked like the interior of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, United Noodles on 12th St., where we argued about whether the new iTunes Music Store was going to save rock and roll or not (Jason said maybe, Anil said not. Jason wrote a whole piece on what is good about it, and also promised to sell me his old iPod as soon as he gets the new one. Rad!)
• We headed up to the South Bronx, one stop off the 1-2-3 and the 4-5-6, where Mitsu and Sue have been renovating a large and sunny loft in a neighborhood that had been less-than-safe only 5 years ago, but which is now very pleasant and unrushed, with residents sweeping their front yards and children playing in the streets. We went and had some delicious Mexican food. Looks like the next Williamsburg.
• Saw Golan, and wandered around Soho looking for a place to settle that was unhellish with Saturday shoppers. He told us about his latest work, which will be performed at Ars Electronica this year. He is going to be a prof at Carnegie-Mellon next year, which seems like an excellent gig. I was born in Pittsburgh; I like that town. "Steel City" I said, and Golan said I still have the accent. Drawr. Youse.
• Dinner with Jason and Meg and Lance at a little French place in the village, where we ate delicious things and planned a murder. Colonel Mustard. In the Pantry. With the Foie Gras.
• A lovely picnic in Central Park with Eric, Katrina and their two bambini, Jude and Phoebe. Tree climbing, rock-climbing, king-of-the-mountain, pouring rivulets of water down the rocks and choosing ice cream from the ice-cream vendor.
• Emily and I went to go see the Adolf Wolffi show at the American Folk Art Museum (next to the shut-down MOMA). If you're in New York you must go see this show. Here's the Google archive of Peter Scheldahl's article in the New Yorker about the artist.
• And more, even, but I am tired of typing now and there is much clutter in my brain.

There is an interview with Stewart in Mindjack about GNE, social software, and modding.

(At this moment the Mindjack server is down; it got Slashdotted and apparently Mindjack couldn't handle the traffic...)

There will be a live webcast of the events happening at the user_mode = emotion + intuition in art + design symposium happening at the Tate Modern in London this Friday and Saturday. Golan is appearing! I will make an effort to tune in.

Do people watch live webcasts with profit? I want them to work, because there are so many interesting things to see but I've generally found them to be a squinty, headachy experience, like watching an animated postage stamp through a heavily vaselined window.

I will likely die regretting only this: that I was unable to read every book, see every show, listen to every record, meet every person, admire every artwork, experience every experience and watch every movie that I wanted to in this tiny lit slot between two looming darknesses. But I've been making some headway this week with these delectable distractions:

• The Believer, a new periodical out of San Francisco, which I will be reviewing for Readymade (A magazine you should also delectate!) The first issue of The Believer contains articles by Heidi Julavits (its general editor), Jonatham Lethem, Ben Marcus and Anne Carson. It is beautifully designed and printed (if a bit McSweeney'sesque). I've already sent in my subscription form. It's going to be a monthly, fancy, fancy that!

• The Ganzfeld, an annual book of pictures and prose. Comics, drawings, doodles. Work by Rick Moody, Hairy Who, Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Nutt, Fred Tomaselli and so on. I've already drooled all over this copy, which I have also been sent to review for Readymade, the drooling being a not-too-subtle strategem to hang on to my review copy. Does Readymade's Shana Berger have excellent taste or what?

• Gyorgy Ligeti's Mechanical Music. Best known for composing the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, he has also written some delicious pieces for metronomes and barrel organs, and the delightful Nonsense Madrigals. There is one piece in particular on the Mechanical Music CD that Jocelyn Pook cribbed for the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. I was introduced to this music by my old friend and earcake connoisseur Forrest Norvell, who has a site full of super book and music reviews.

• Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau. After I read The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan and The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil, both about adolescent depravity, Demian suggested Les Enfants Terribles. It has a bit of the swoony homoerotic tenderness of Denton Welsh, but midway through the third paragraph I felt a pang of encroaching evil. I'm not finished with it yet, but when I am I'll give it a proper blurbing.

Eyeshot is having a Silent Reading in Central Park.:

Baby Squirrels.

Which stirred this memory to the surface of my brain-pond: my father has a funny way of deliberately mispronouncing certain words. In his idiolect, "squirrel" is pronounced "squiddle", "asparagus" is pronounced "aspergrass" and "blueberries" are "blubries". There's a whole lexicon. I'll have to compile it some day.

I also had a boyfriend in high school who unknowingly committed malapropisms such as "Look! That octopus is seizing the fish with its filigrees!". This usually happened when he was excited about something. I started writing them down. "Use this and you'll see a dramastic difference in your score!"

Surely you have some better ones. Tell, tell.

I absolutely love Frances McDormand, but the Laurel Canyon crew could have done a lot more work on tightening up the script before putting it out there. They also could have cast just about anyone else in the role of the son, who was played by Christian Bale, an actor with so little sex appeal you can hear the whooshing sound of desire leaving the theatre whenever he appears on the screen. The only other thing I'd seen him in was the ill-fated glam-rock flick Velvet Goldmine. As a girl who had a six-foot high poster of Marc Bolan on her wall throughout high school, there was no way I was *not* going to see it, but, damnit, no amount of Ewan McGregor screentime could offset the buzzkill of each Christian Bale appearance.

Though I haven't seen American Psycho, I bet he'd make a suitably repellent serial killer.

Woot! A little piece I wrote for The Fray is now online, My Superpower, the germ of which was planted here at caterina.net. It is accompanied by some wonderful illustrations by Chris Bishop, Superpower trading cards! It's good to be back in the zine after so many years; I had a piece in the Fray's very first incarnation, when it launched back in 1996.

Derek is an old friend from back in the web's olden dayes. We both worked in the same building, he for Hotwired, and me for Organic, and we bonded over our excitement about new technologies like animated gifs, cute girls on motorcycles and the resentment we felt toward burrito preparers who didn't drain the black beans adequately before putting them in the tortilla.

He told me he was starting up a new webzine, The Fray, and could he use this thing I'd made for a Levi's proposal at work. We were trying to pitch a customer-content driven zine to Levi's, and the art kids at Organic, as I recall, were each assigned a classification in the teen taxonomy: jock, stoner, raver, prom queen. I got goth, and quickly wrote a poem about death, and illustrated it with Ernst Haeckel's superb and spooky engravings. Derek convinced me to put it up in his new webzine, where it continues to embarrass me as a terrible example of "poetry" written for my job. Hello? Gak?

But now it is part of the Fray's early days, and as such is archived there. The Fray has gone on to become a web phenomenon, with an enormous reader base, the Fray Cafe at SXSW, and an annual Fray Day celebrated with storytelling all over the country. I'm glad to be back in The Fray.

I first read about Öyvind Fahlström, an artist born in Brazil of Norwegian parentage, in the first issue of Cabinet Magazine His notes for a language called "Whammo" illustrated the cover.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon what appears to be his official web site, where the opera that he wrote for radio using "birdo" can be found, Birds in Sweden. I was surprised to learn that not only did he invent languages, but also made installations, paintings, drawings, prints, poetry, films, plays and happenings.

I was quite taken with the continuous drawing Opera, the word-collage in The Planetarium and the comic-book tempera of Sitting..., but I didn't realize until I saw this drawing that I'd seen his work so many times before, hanging in Danish modern living rooms. He died young, of cancer.

Dos Pesos went to the Animal Hospital last night, with a fever and a bad infection on his bottom, poor little thing. He was whimpering in pain. They gave him an analgesic and put him on antibiotics, and we've been giving him hot compresses and baths. We didn't get back until 4 AM, so I'm just beat. Dos isn't himself, but he's sleeping a lot, which will make him better.

It's a problem with his anal glands. I didn't know there were such a thing, but apparently his other chihuahua friend, Siesta, has a problem with them, as does Tigger. Maybe it's a breed thing?

FRUiTS, the magazine isn't FRUiTS, the book. I have a copy of FRUiTS #70, which I got at our local Japanese media source store, Sophia's, with the understanding that current street fashion in Japan was more outré than what you'd typically find here, as it has been in the past, but alas, no. It seems as if, like us, Japan going through a fairly drab period in terms of street fashion these days, which is also reflected in my own wardrobe. I trotted out my green velvet greatcoat and my white patent leather boots the other day, just to make sure I still had it going on. And I spotted an amazing outfit on Robson the other day, a big knitted tower of a hat over some hot pink locks, big moon boots with pom-poms under a pleated mini. It was like the old days, like what you'd expect to find in....FRUiTS.

Compromise is antithetical to love? Peterme notes that Meg believes that "...the key to any successful relationship is compromise." (she's going to see The Matrix Reloaded and in exhange, she'll have a date to see Sea Biscuit later this summer. And while I agree in principle, I'm not sure I'd invest two hours in Vin Diesel to get two hours of Tarkovsky in return. And I do go alone to the movies to see Japanese claymation documentaries on Jacques Lacan all the time, mostly because I want to continue having a relationship... But I digress.) Peterme is not convinced that compromise is the key to good relationships at all, and complains thusly:

and then goes on to quote an article that he found online, Is Relationship really about compromise? and concludes:

Reminds me of this: a recently divorced man told my friend Scott, "The secret to a successful marriage is self-righteousness."

I'm tempted to start one of those sidebar links-without-commentary things (like Anil and Jason), for stray links which otherwise get lost. In any event, some web sites I've visited lately:

• Marathon Man: a profile of Haruki Murakami
• Hilary Putnam's Brains in a Vat
• Slavoj Zizek in The New Yorker
• The Cultural Meaning of Suicide
• Werner Herzog Interviews Harmony Korine

It didn't bother me much when The New York Times, also known as The Grey Lady, went color, and I felt no nostalgia for the old grey-and-green when they announced the new colored money, but today I felt a pang of loss when I realized that, not only are they issuing scores of the poetry of Bob Dylan, but that most of the new music published by Schirmer's no longer looks like this. I think I am so attached to those old manila and green scores because of the many tears I cried onto the cover of Scales and Chords in all the Major and Minor Keys, which I found recently, grubby and weep-stained, tucked in the piano bench of my sister's Steinway.

The world of design has sustained some terrible losses. The new British Petroleum logo is no improvement, nor is the new UPS swoosh/shield combo, and just think of what $60 Million could buy. It bought the Bank of America this. To see very clearly how bad your average 1990s brand redesign was, watch the evolution of the Rockwell Collins logotype. Canon has fared pretty well over time, as has Bic; the best ones haven't changed much since their inception; also see Alfa Romeo and General Electric.

The thing that is so fascinating about the photographs of Andreas Gursky is his ability to simultaneously present monumentality and minutiae, as in the following images:

• 99 Cent
• Times Square
• Singapore Stock Exchange
• Library

Looking at them at the Pompidou a couple years ago, I found my brain flipping back and forth between the terrible enormity of the environments -- the 99 Cent Store, or stock exchange or library -- and the terrible insignificance of each small thing within those environments. Each photograph perfectly depicts the horror of these vacuums, and reels with horror vacui. The cold calculation of capitalism is everywhere, a regular air-conditioned nightmare, which promises to provide for us, offering up its wire mother's breast. The plenitude represents the choice-that-is-no-choice that capitalism offers us. They are astonishing photographs. Few artists have affected me as profoundly as Gursky.

Just as Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali are often conjectured to be twins separated at birth, so, I believe, are Andreas Gursky and...Walt Whitman.

I know it sounds ludicrous, but bear with me here.

If you look at the work of these two men, you find the same interplay of the monumental and minute. In Whitman's poetry you find the great unity and oneness of, variously, Self, Nature, America, the Crowd, the Army, Democracy, People (and so on) juxtaposed with those endless lists of what comprises them (from one poem, bodies, souls, Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations, Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminalmilk, All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth, All the governments, judges, gods, follow'd persons of the earth.) He does this magnification and miniturization in every single poem. Here's one, taken almost at random, from the web:

How similar and how different is the work of these two artists! Gursky takes on the made world, Whitman the found world. Whitman sees the world in terms of nature and relationships with every speck included in his totalizing love, every least thing contributing to the grandeur of Man, Self, Humanity. Gursky sees the totalitarianism of the world we have built, and how it diminishes man, self, humanity. Instead of the instinctive recoil we feel from the objects in the 99 Cent store, knowing the thin fulfillment of every brand of canday bar, every last leaf of grass in Whitman's work provides the means by which self-realization and spirit are achieved, "as parts of itself, and justifications of itself."

Such clear micro/macroscopic seeing, such beauty and truth.

Yesterday, Ray of the Bellona Times listed the "members of his tribe" who are: "wimp, weirdo, faggot, loser, milquetoast, hennetaster". Hennetaster?

I looked this up, and it appears to be a Dutch word, defined thusly on this wonderful page of Dutch proverbs:

But during my search I found this abstract to a paper by Martha Peacock, about the "Battle for the Trousers" during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands, and (another great word, pantoffelhelden) which seems to indicate less of a skirt-chaser than an uxorious man:

UPDATE: Ray has posted his own explanation of the derivation of hennetaster on Bellona Times. Thanks Ray!

Stewart has been recording his spam pseudo-words, but since I get so little spam, I only have one example: temptetisque subsymbolic, sent by a Wilbert Mccombie.

It seems to be a simple script halving words and recombining them.

Here I will put a note to myself to remember to look into these thought disorders. I read a wonderful long sample of the evocative "word salad" of a schizophrenic in college. I wish I still had the book.

In this amazing photograph of the Kurd and Iranian poet Abas Amini we see his eyes, mouth and ears sewn shut, in a very graphic depiction of seeing, hearing and speaking no evil.

Which, badly translated by me, says:

There are more picture and commentary at Ananova.

Dean and Gail need your help. Dean may seem like an old curmudgeon, but he's really a big old softie, generous with the wine, cheese and scintillating conversation, and charmingly self-effacing. And Gail! Well, you already know how brilliant she is. She is a woman of tremendous kindness and courage, with a wry sense of humor, and two lovely sweet children. When we were visiting them last year in Pompignan, they were such generous and gracious hosts -- allowing us to stay long after our welcome had clearly been overstayed, and toting us around the countryside so we wouldn't miss any of the sights. I feel for them losing their lovely stone house. And they're not the sort of South-of-Francers that are passing their time down at the craps tables in Monaco either, so if you've been a fan of Textism or Open Brackets, please consider donating something to their cause.

Looking for drawings by Denton Welch, I happened upon an online exhibit of the work of John Biggers. You have to page through the site a bit to get to the images, but Biggers is like an American Diego Rivera, or cousin to Thomas Hart Benton.

Slavoj Zizek welcomes the prospect of biogenetic intervention in the London Review of Books, Bring me my Philips Mental Jacket. If you could take a pill instead of spending 12 years getting your high school diploma, you would, wouldn't you? Or would you, by doing so, lose your dignity and freedom as a human being?

Another wide-ranging Zizek essay encompassing Habermas, Dennett, Viagra, "steered rats" and the new Philips phone and music-playing jacket, a "quasi-organic prosthesis." (There are more Zizek essays on the LRB site: "You May" on the postmodern superego, Attempts to escape the Logic of Capitalism, and Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?)