Archives

Too Much Is Not Enough

PowerBook 3400cMacintoshes in my apartment, right now: A 12-in. PowerBook G4, which is my principal machine, on which I do nearly all of my work. A 15-in. Titanium PowerBook G4, which I retired a year ago, but which I still use for miscellaneous tasks and as an impromptu file server. A Power Macintosh G4, aging but still remarkably serviceable and running Mac OS X Panther quite nicely — this is my girlfriend’s workhorse, but it too will soon retire as she makes plans to buy herself a PowerBook G4. And finally, tucked away someplace where my girlfriend can’t complain about it, an ancient PowerBook 3400c/180, a relic of the nineties with a busted motherboard that I’m toying with getting repaired just for the heck of it.

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Tape Worm

There’s not enough time in a month for me to watch twenty dollars’ worth of Netflix movies, so I can’t bring myself to subscribe to that service. Economically speaking, I still prefer the old school method of putting on my shoes and heading down to the local video shop when I happen to have a free evening that might be nicely consumed watching a movie. Two Boots Video is only about four blocks away, so I haven’t got much to complain about… except when there’s no DVD copies of the movies I want.

The past few times we’ve gone, my girlfriend and I have resigned ourselves to choices in — hold yourself — videotape format. These are older movies that the store clearly has little immediate intention of upgrading to DVD format. In some cases, like Eric Rohmer’s perversely mannered “Marquise of O,” I’m even a little surprised that someone bought them in VHS format to begin with. But in other cases, it’s a disappointment to me that the store is still resigned to providing them only on crappy videotape. I’m about three episodes into Ken Burns’ beautiful, nine-part “Baseball” documentary, and it’s a shame to watch it on such an inferior medium.

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Cure for the Common Cold

AirborneThere are few feelings of dread worse than that first indication of a sore throat in the middle of a steady barrage of intensive plans for your immediate future. The idea that the roll you’re on — all the tightly paced contingencies and deadlines you’ve scheduled over the next few weeks — can be interrupted by time resigned to bed, or at least complicated by the discomfort of sneezing and coughing, is a rude reminder of human fallibility. That’s how I felt on Wednesday afternoon, as my throat grew noticeably more and more constricted when I swallowed, and all the deadlines staring me down over the next week suddenly looked dicey.

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It’s What’s for Dinner

YummmAbout a year and a half ago I triumphantly kicked Coca-Cola, something I did to assuage my concerns about my own long-term health. Happily, my soda consumption is still relatively light — I’ll have one every few weeks, perhaps, but I no longer crave that particularly satisfying bite of a glass of cola. But as I get further along into my thirties, I realize that, as methods of arresting one’s incrementally declining health go, giving up soda is hardly a comprehensive plan for long life.

Right now, I’ve got it in my head that I need to kick beef, too. It’s always struck me that consuming red meat is something like trying to get a train wreck through one’s body; it’s spectacular and awful and a mess to clean up. I’m sure there are arguments in favor of beef consumption in moderation, but I’m not sure I buy them. What’s more, I’ve been haunted lately by the ethics of the entire slaughter process — how horrific it is to think about the thousands of cattle being led to their demise, and how much sheer force is required to take a cow down (forgive the crude terminology). I know there’s nothing egalitarian about poultry or pork production, either, but something about beef gives me shivers.

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Something to Blog About

One of my new rules for getting more things done in the incredibly limited time I have between waking and sleeping is: don’t sit there trying to come up with something to post about on your weblog if you have nothing to post about on your weblog. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past ten minutes, when I realized that, shit, I could be answering emails to people who have been very patiently waiting for replies. Or I could be making some of the little tweaks that constantly need to be made to this site. Or I could be watching another episode of Ken Burns’s “Baseball” documentary, which I’m enjoying immensely. Or I could be working on any of the several Web projects I’ve been scheming in my head for months.

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Word Processing for Fun and Profit

Design in FlightI spent a good chunk of time this weekend writing an article for Andy Arikawa’s Design in Flight magazine, an upstart PDF publication covering the wide world of design. I’m a big proponent of scrappy digital publishing endeavors like DiF, so it was a real privilege to have been asked to contribute. After considering a few overly ambitious article ideas, I settled on a simpler approach for my first contrubution. My article is a more thoughtful, better-researched take on a post I wrote last month about improving your interviewing technique, and it will be published in the magazine’s April 2005 issue. Eventually, I’ll make a copy of the article available online here at Subtraction.com, but for those of you who can’t wait, four-issue subscriptions are available for only US$10.

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The Nav that Almost Was

While cleaning out some files on my hard drive this evening, I came across a discarded navigation bar for the version 7.0 redesign of this site that I had nearly forgotten about altogether. It was one of the first gee-whiz improvements that I pulled off in prototyping the redesign — I should say “nearly pulled off,” actually. Ultimately, I tossed it out entirely from my plans for the site, considering it too cumbersome to update (it requires no fewer than six separate images to be manually generated each time the cover image is changed) and woefully inadequate in terms of manipulating CSS to conform to my intentions.

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Mr. Otis Regrets

OtisI went to art school at what’s now known as Otis College of Art & Design, a small institution with a head count, among all four undergraduate levels, totaling only around 800 people. It was probably a bit smaller than would have been ideal for a young kid trying to get through the madness that was Los Angeles in the early nineteen-nineties. I saw earthquakes, droughts, gang warfare and civil riots during my four years there, and by the time I left I was so embittered by the awfulness of that city and the intensity of my experience at that school that I tried to leave it all behind me and to think about my collegiate past as little as possible.

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Hidden Agendas in Writing and Design

David MilchThe New Yorker’s 14 Feb double-issue features a profile of David Milch, co-creator of “NYPD Blue” and the man responsible for the riveting, foul-mouthed and thoroughly excellent HBO series “Deadwood,” an intensely brutal Western set in a real South Dakota boom town in the late 19th century. As is the New Yorker’s wont, the article is unavailable online — or if it was at one time, I was, as always, too late in catching up on my issues to be inspired to go seek out the online version.

If you can find a copy in your therapist’s waiting room, you could do worse than read this article on Milch; I’m not much of a fan of the magazine’s pieces on entertainment personalities because they seem lightweight and shallow compared to some of the genuinely interesting stuff the magazine continues to turn out even in its old age, but this one happens to be about an interesting fellow. Or, at least, Milch has some interesting things to say about how he writes.

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Barbarians at The Gates

The GatesChristo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park installation “The Gates” is terrific. I saw the work this morning in clear February sunlight, and understood instantly why they chose to erect this spectacle in bright orange (or saffron, if you must): the long, winding sequence of gates makes for a brilliant, fire-like trail snaking through the leafless trees and gray paths of Frederick Law Olmstead’s naturalist vision in mid-winter. It’s not the kind of art that makes you reconsider much of anything, superficially, except perhaps for how feasible it is after all to have a crowd of thousands converge in the cold to enjoy something that does not involve alcohol, advertising, big media or a sports championship. Which is to say in terms of challenges of attendance, at least, it’s a triumph.

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