jinx the byte

Wilco - “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” They spent...

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:01:00 -0500

Wilco - “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

They spent the summer days applying for jobs and writing reviews, the nights drinking bourbon at the pub under a picture of James Joyce, listening to Wilco b-sides and trying to figure out their failed relationships. - portraitoftheartistasayoungman

billydalto: From here, either a periodic table or a board...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:45:09 -0500

billydalto:

From here, either a periodic table or a board game.

I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:51:28 -0500

I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully :

On Walter Benjamin’s Übersetzung Maschine (Translation Machine), formerly of Widener Library and now, ostensibly, belonging to Google.

I didn’t know what to make of this essay when I first read it many months ago: it couldn’t be real, but I so wanted it to be real. It burrowed deep in my consciousness, and as the visceral appeal of Walter Benjamin and lost objects faded in time, I kept returning to the ideas on mechanical reproduction, translation, and mechanical translation. The essay is beautifully written, and you should click on the link rather than dally anymore on Tumblr.

Hilobrow and Matthew Battle’s blog are always worth a read.

cakelin: bryanmckay: Beer float? This was good! I don’t think...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:21:00 -0500

cakelin:

bryanmckay:

Beer float?

This was good! I don’t think it would’ve been as palatable with any other type of beer, though. Even with this, there’s a moment at the beginning that just tastes… wrong. But immediately after it tastes chocolaty and rich and sweet but also a little bitter and complex. Really nice.

Young’s Double Chocolate Stout! I spent all summer searching for it in England to no avail. Even the Young’s pubs didn’t have it, how perverse. Where can this be found?

Update: Trader Joe’s - TJ, my man. Thanks bryanmckay!

On race: outside.in/inside.out

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:12:33 -0500

Dinner table. 6 people. Ethnically, two Indians, two Jews, a Pole, and me (Chinese), but we are all Americans.

It was a joke on in- and out-groups. “Well then you must be the outgroup” said one guy, pointing at me. What do you mean? I blinked, confused, at the white and brown faces around me. It look me a full second to realize that, indeed, I was the only “yellow” one.

I was stunned by how it long the realization took me. This moment in America, in college, was in stark contrast to my experiences in Europe this summer. “Where are you from?” they’d ask because it was so obvious I was a foreigner, from the way I scrutinized traffic signs to the way I carried my backpack. ”America,” I’d reply. (Or “the States,” “die USA,” or “les Etats-Unis.”) “No, but where are you actually from?”

At the Bristol bus terminal, an English lady sat down beside me and enthusiastically tried to convert me, in Chinese, to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Despite the fact that we both spoke English with a thousand times more fluency, she soldiered on in her broken Chinese. “I’ve lived in America for most of my life. I’m American,” I said, but I don’t think she believed me.

Europe hammered, nail by nail, a truth I never wanted to acknowledge. In Chinese school many years ago, my Chinese teacher — fed up with our laziness and general reluctance to learn our parent’s language— had said, “No matter what you do, Americans are going to look at you and see a Chinese person first.” I bristled at her comment. Then, and I admit even now, I prided myself on the ability to distinguish by sight an Asian and an Asian-American. That I find this distinction important is indicative of personal uneasiness.

In the artificially liberal and multicultural environment of my college, I have had very little opportunity to think critically about race. Yes there are panels and whatnot every week, but they never feel relevant or worth attending against the backdrop of general busyness. Only during my summers away — Chicago in 2008, Europe in 2009 — that matters of race have dominated my thinking.

I lived in Chicago during the height of Obama-mania, and my apartment was only blocks away from his house in Hyde Park. But it was in Chicago that my fuzzy liberal dreams of a post-racial American were hopelessly shattered.

I’m from Barcelona - “We’re from...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:04:04 -0500

I’m from Barcelona - “We’re from Barcelona”

It is impossible to listen to this song and not be cheered up. C’mon, bop along with me!

We’ll aim for the stars
We’ll aim for your heart when the night comes
And we’ll bring you love
You’ll be one of us when the night comes

"We are all afflicted at times with the cataracts of the quotidian, where routine clouds our ability..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:03:00 -0500

“We are all afflicted at times with the cataracts of the quotidian, where routine clouds our ability to notice what we once loved about the person we live with.”

- James Wood, She’s Not Herself : The New Yorker

Steampunk'd

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0500

A steamy tidbit from Bruce Feiler’s “My Life as a Hand Model,” originally published in Gourmet and anthologized in Best Food Writing, 2004.

In the old days, photographers made steam by combining the vapors of ammonium and hydrochloric acid, but steam made that way doesn’t dissipate and it looks chemical. Later, they began hiding calcium smoke chips around the food. In recent years, they’ve tried dry ice, cappuccino makers, even theatrical foggers. Fernbach found that one surefire technique of getting steam from, say, a baked potato, is to stuff it with a moistened tampon. “The mixture of concentrated moisture and heated surroundings produces the most gorgeous steam,” he said.

The Rise of the Neuronovel | n+1

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:11:21 -0500

The Rise of the Neuronovel | n+1:

By comparison with most 19th-century novels, and even with most 20th-century modernist novels of the “stream of consciousness” school, the neuronovels have in them very little of society, of different classes, of individuals interacting, of development either alongside or against historical forces and expectations…It now seems we’ve gone beyond the loss of society and religion to the loss of the self, an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science. It’s not, of course, that morality, society, and selfhood no longer exist, but they are now the property of specialists writing in the idioms of their disciplines. So the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.

Neuronovels — Enduring Love, Saturday, Motherless Brooklyn, Atmospheric Disturbances, The Echo Maker to name a few -- have been in vogue of late. Marco Roth’s article raises provocative points, which have been tackled, in some form, by two people I admire very much, Jonah Lehrer and Joanne McNeil.

One point I keep wrestling with is Roth’s assertion that novelists, by writing about characters with a neurological disease, are somehow ceding ground to science — admitting that science can explain human nature better than writers. Or that science will always get there first. Perhaps I’m just a fuzzy Two Cultures person, but I don’t see the binary competition— isn’t this art meeting science on its own terms? Rather than ceding, it is illuminating science (which isn’t really any closer to understanding the human condition). The neuronovels strike me as longer, fictional accounts of Oliver Sack’s essays, which are written with great warmth and humanity. While I wouldn’t go the length to say that Ian McEwan is “warm” writer, these neuronovels are not a cold litany of scientific facts either. Science can tell us symptoms, but it does not tell us how to understand or deal with them. By illuminating what happens when our brains don’t work, the novels unpack the nuances of our conscious processing and the miraculous coincidence that so often, our brains actually do work. Bringing to life an obscure medical textbook entry gives greater returns, rather than diminishing ones.

Passion Pit | “To Kingdom Come” Somewhere between...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:03:18 -0500

Passion Pit | “To Kingdom Come”

Somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous: bubbly pastel cartoons and goofy mustachios. The band members play Victorian scientists.

Bonus, bonus, bonus: reciprocal transformation. Chairlift remixes Passion Pit’s “To Kingdom Come,” and Passion Pit remixes Chairlift’s “Bruises”

The Pains of Being Impure at
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:03:00 -0500

I’m not sure how and why but the conversation Friday night veered strangely often toward pornography. Although I was too giddy with sugar and carbonation to remember properly, a few nuggets did lodge in my brain. Brain splatter:

1. “Big Red Son” - David Foster Wallace’s essay on the porn industry

I sneaked this essay once in the Coop, but regrettably, didn’t buy the book. There is one detail from the essay that especially stands out: fluffers. In DFW’s own words,

Fluff (v) is unfilmed oral activity designed to induce, maintain or enhance a woodman’s wood (and high-end porn films used to employ what were actually called fluff girls, who were usually B-Girls in waiting).

Fluff girls are a literal manifestation of what is true in any industry: entry-level jobs are analogous to sucking dick.

2. Alt porn

I threw it out there, then it boomeranged back to me, and I wasn’t able to answer the question “What is alt porn?” Knowing that I had encountered an article about this somewhere online, I searched through Tumblr dashboard, Google Reader, and my browsing history to no avail. Even after I apprehensively but it through a Google search, I still didn’t get it. The problem is, I suppose, taking the word “alternative” as a catch-all to everything that is not mainstream. Thoughts?

Perhaps the best answer would have been the most obvious one: you know it when you see it.

3. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

This band only got a passing mention, but “Young Adult Friction” is such an awesome song in the delicious double entendre way.

An organic chemistry student, pre- and post- exam. Also a...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:30:35 -0400

An organic chemistry student, pre- and post- exam. Also a perfect representation of how I felt yesterday. (Am I too nerdy for you?)

"Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is..."

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:02:04 -0400

“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.”

- Adam Kirsch on Ayn Rand (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)

Natalie Angier’s latest article entered into a very...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:03:00 -0400

Natalie Angier’s latest article entered into a very timely discussion on dopamine neurons in my neurobiology class. When you’re pages deep into Nature papers about monkeys staring at computer screens to get 0.3 ml rewards of juice, it’s easy to get bogged down in details and forgot the essential question — why does dopamine matter?

Classically, dopamine has been associated with pleasure and reward, but recent research suggests that dopamine neuron firing is more closely related to drive and motivation. Is this a real difference, or as one student asked, is this just a matter of semantics? Quipped another, ” Just look at half the kids at Harvard — they’re driven but far from happy.”

(Agreed.)

Desirable Qualities

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:02:09 -0400

Confidence, not to be confused with arrogance
Humility, not to be confused with insecurity

Future Comestible Experiments

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0400

ostrich egg omelet
boot of butterbeer
self-cultured kombucha
a whole pig’s head
eggplant desserts

Kafka/Charlie Brown from R Sikoryak’s Masterpiece...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:14:21 -0400

Kafka/Charlie Brown from R Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics

The description for R Sikoryak’s panel at the Boston Book Festival sounded insufferable (“The authors here have imagined some of the quirkiest characters we’ve seen.” - emphasis added), but the panel we wanted to go to had overflowed and Brigham’s was no longer giving out free ice cream. So off we went to seek “Something Completely Different.”

Happy accident! Among the things irresistible to me are highbrow-lowbrow mash-ups. (Or are comics now highbrow?) Like all great mash-ups, the combinations at first make no sense and then make perfect sense.

Ghost in the Machine

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Now that we live in a world where machines can predict movie preferences with 10% more accuracy, I await the day when my computer can pinpoint best friend candidates. Soul mate matches would be welcome too. Until then, Facebook’s suggestions are wildly and laughably off.

In an effort to boost wall posts, Facebook has been suggesting I “reconnect” with certain friends. The same handful of people keep popping up; one of them is a girl who committed suicide last year.

It was her birthday recently, so I had looked at her profile prompted by Facebook. There was a long list of birthday wishes, and I wondered if anyone had reflexively posted a birthday note, not knowing that she was no longer with us. Her wall aside, the rest of her profile is frozen in time, as if she had simply decided to stop using Facebook.

How do you feel the loss of someone with whom most of your interactions were digital? It’s unreal.

Update: Oh boy, there’s already Time magazine article on this. Is the realization that none of our experiences are unique comforting or crippling?

Tipping Point

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:03:01 -0400

Being a bad tipper is not the same thing as being stingy. Let me put it this way: if a guy pulled out a coupon to pay for dinner, I would be personally offended, but if he did not tip well, I would be morally affronted. Tipping well is not a matter of social graces but of being considerate to other people.

On my birthday freshman year of college, I went out for hotpot with a group of new friends. It was less than a month into the school year: friendships were only nascent, and we were all still sizing each other up. The service was poor and slow, not unexpected at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place where the waitresses speak neither Mandarin or English. One of the hot pots leaked, and some of the raw meat slices were stained blue with dye (the kind used to stamp meat). At the end of the evening, one member of our party insisted that we do not leave any tip. I reasoned we should leave at least 10%. But he enumerated and parsed in the voice used by ibankers (a tone still novel to me at the time), and I could not argue over him.

The waitress chased us out of the restaurant and told us to never come back again. A deep sense of shame wallowed in my stomach.

Freshman year continued and we went our separate ways. I occasionally encounter people from that dinner and we chat in the manner of acquaintances. I only ever talked to him once more — a lunch sometime sophomore year — and he had the same ibanker voice.

—-

But it is possible to be a bad tipper out of sheer ignorance. I try very hard to avoid this. When I was in Europe this summer, being unfamiliar with the rules of tipping put me quite out of balance.

Vampire Weekend - Horchata Here comes a feeling you thought...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:02:09 -0400

Vampire Weekend - Horchata

Here comes a feeling you thought you’d forgotten

The one and only horchata I’ve ever had was from Felipe’s, the standby burrito place of late nights. It had a strong dose of cinnamon and a few too many heaps of sugar disguising what tasted like the dishwater from an emptied bowl of rice pudding. Additionally, it came in a paper cup emblazoned with Coca Cola logos. No lid or straw even! I let it sit, unfinished, on my desk as the ice melted and the drink went lukewarm. When I finally dumped it out, there was chalky white gunk on the bottom.

You can download Vampire Weekend’s now not-so-new single here.