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Mended Spiderweb #19 (Laundry Line) - Cibachrome, 30 x 20 inches, 1998

Nina Katchadourian, The Mended Spiderweb series:

“The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.”

(Via 3QD.)

Marc Andreesen, If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo:

“We have seen extensive press coverage of Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo over the last few months, including notably excellent coverage from Silicon Alley Insider and the Wall Street Journal. However, I have not seen a detailed analysis of how a full hostile takeover might play out — the kind of analysis that you would be receiving if you were a Microsoft or Yahoo board member.

So I asked a pair of expert corporate attorneys — Michael Sullivan and Ed Deibert at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk and Rabkin in San Francisco — to work up such an analysis. What follows is their take blended with my commentary. (…)”

Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky (blip.tv) - ‘A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.’

Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.”

‘Bushmen, or San, wearing skins and carrying bows and arrows cross a salt pan in Namibia’s Nyae Nyae Conservancy.’

National Geography News, After Near Extinction, Humans Split Into Isolated Bands:

“After nearly going extinct 150,000 years ago, humankind split into small groups - living in isolation for nearly a hundred thousand years before “reuniting” and migrating out of Africa, a new gene study says.

At one point our species may have been down to as few as 2,000 individuals, probably due to climate change - a longstanding theory bolstered by the new findings.

The research fills a gap in our understanding of what was happening in Africa before humans first left the continent.

“The assumption has always been that the original population [in sub-Saharan Africa] was very small but probably a single population,” said Spencer Wells, head of the Genographic Project, which oversaw the study.

“Turns out, that is not the case.”"

Horecaprofiel stadsdelen in Amsterdam en het gemiddeld besteedbaar inkomen per inwoner per jaar. (Amsterdamse horeca: opmars restaurants - O+S)

Station Bijlmer ArenA - Photo by remco.brinkhuis.

BNA Gebouw van het Jaar 2008: Station Amsterdam Bijlmer ArenA. Uit het juryrapport (pdf):

“Dit superieure stationsgebouw met zijn weergaloze uitstraling en zijn vanzelfsprekende ligging is uniek in Nederland. Het heroïsche gebouw is op alle fronten een toonbeeld van vakmanschap. Het is bovendien een wonder van openbaarheid, dat ver uitstijgt boven zijn functie van vervoersknooppunt. De ruimtelijke consequentie van het hoog optillen van de spoor- en metrolijnen is ten volle benut. Aan de ene kant van het maaiveld komen twee voorheen gescheiden wijken in een royaal gebaar bijeen, aan de andere kant lopen reizigers vloeiend het stationsgebouw binnen, om vervolgens in een adembenemende bovenwereld te arriveren. De immense overspanning van de stationskap met zijn dynamiek en expressiviteit zorgen voor een betoverende en aangename ruimtelijkheid en een fenomenaal lichtspel. Over elk detail is nagedacht. Het hout in de kap biedt een prettige akoestiek. Grote atria zorgen voor daglicht in de onderwereld. Wel vindt de jury het jammer dat de ruimtelijkheid en het overzicht in de onderwereld worden aangetast door commerciële voorzieningen, toegangspoorten en andere sporen van onvoorzien gebruik en pleit ervoor om ook deze aspecten voortaan beter te beheersen.” (vet - hvi)

“Amsterdam, Amstelveenseweg (bij de achteruitgang van het Vondelpark). Pleegzuster waagt zich in het vuur om een gewonde verzetsman te helpen. (07-05-1945)”

Beeldbank WO2:

“Alle afbeeldingen van de Tweede Wereldoorlog van de Nederlandse oorlogs- en verzetsmusea, herinneringscentra en het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (NIOD) zijn bijeen gebracht in deze databank. Iedereen kan beelden inzien en bestellen.”

‘Rabbit with Hot Apple Jelly’

View from the Wing, Off to Roses, and diner at El Bulli:

“We were greeted warmly, of course, and then offered a visit to the kitchen. The chef came over and took photos with us while he clearly managed to continue to oversee the kitchen staff while visiting and greeting us. Kitchen had several rooms and we noticed perhaps three dozen cooks.”

Meer over ’s wereld beste restaurant elBulli en chef Ferran Adrià: Meet the world’s best chef.

Forbidden Ensemble - Porno Soundtracks:

“What happens if you put three professional musicians in a recording studio and … have them watch porn movies?

While you probably begin imagining strange situations, these guys made it a creative venture. They created a new soundtrack to the 70ties adult movies they were watching - turning off the sound and just letting their instincts come up with vivid musical imaginations. And it worked.

This music sounds like a combination of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and the Emanuelle sequels of adult movies. Feisty and furious with a sugarcoat of sensuality.

This is the first volume of their ventures, played on real instruments and treated to have the authentic sleazy sound of the 70’s.”

Kona Kampachi. Zie ook: A ‘new’ fish from Hawaii is delighting chefs (Slideshow).

Fortune, The Wonder Fish:

“So just what is Kona Kampachi? Think of it as a more versatile cousin of hamachi. It’s not genetically engineered in any way, just well bred. It’s sashimi-grade and sustainably farmed without hormones or prophylactic antibiotics. It’s richer in omega-3 than just about anything else in the ocean and has no detectable mercury. It melts on your tongue, holds up on the grill, and is so rich in oils that it’ll fry in a pan without butter.

Pregnant women, nursing moms, young children: Eat as much as you want of what might just be the best-tasting fish you’ve ever had. Really. It’s that good.

Kona Blue calls its designer yellowtail the “fish of the future.” In truth, it’s more like a fish of the past. After all, sea life wasn’t always scarce or poisonous. But the cultivation does involve scientific and technological advancements. The most obvious example is the sea station. Sims helped modify submersible pens to make them flippable and therefore more easily cleaned. Every few weeks a net is raised, turned over, scrubbed, and dried in the Hawaiian sunshine. The company also regularly takes water and seabed samples beneath the pens and at various control sites, records the process with webcams, and posts the data and video online.”

Website: Kona Blue. Via Serious Eats, Kona Kampachi: The Wonder Fish.

Prospect Magazine, Portrait Christopher Hitchens by Alexander Linklater:

“His father couldn’t find it in himself to go to Athens, so Hitchens went alone to bury his mother. A note that she had left revealed that it had been a suicide pact. He also discovered that she had been trying to contact him in the days before her death.

In May 1973, Georgios Papadopoulos’s military junta, which had seized power six years earlier, was busy suppressing an attempted counter-coup. “One thing that defined the late 1960s for a lot of us, and that is forgotten now, was the unbelievable fact that in 1967 the army had taken over Greece in a fascist coup.” What had been, for the teenage Hitchens, a politically catalysing event—evidence of US complicity in the overthrow of a Nato member state which also happened to be the birthplace of democracy—was now the backdrop to a personal catastrophe.

The bodies hadn’t been discovered for two days, and even with the room cleaned, the stench was appalling—she had taken pills; he, shockingly, had gutted himself with a knife. “So I go to the window because I think I’m going to be sick… and suddenly I get my first view of the Parthenon, across from the hotel, in brilliant sunlight. And down below there are tanks, and armed men, and bloodstains in the streets.” When Hitchens talks about this moment, he associates it with his first memory of sailing into Valletta harbour with his mother. “I’ve had that feeling several times,” he says. “I’ve felt it in Cyprus and Lebanon, in Crete, and recently in Tunis. It’s how I felt about the Mediterranean. The flash of light, the coincidence of the white, the green and the double blue. It makes me feel that I’m still at home.”"

Bessemer Venture Partners, AntiPortfolio:

“Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

Over the course of our history, we did invest in a wig company, a french-fry company, and the Lahaina, Ka’anapali & Pacific Railroad. However, we chose to decline these investments, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company. “

Apple, Intel, FedEx, Ebay, Google… Via Freakonomics, Misadventures in Venture Capitalism.

“(…) Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator in New York City’s McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Here is a condensed look at White’s ordeal, as captured by the building’s security cameras.” (video)

Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, Up and Down. The lives of elevators:

“The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.”

Salon, Israel’s Nazi-porn problem:

“As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early ’60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as “Stalags,” whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.”

Zie verder FilmForum.

Martijn Hendriks, Give Us Today Our Daily Terror. Still. (2008 - ongoing).

Martijn Hendriks, Give Us Today Our Daily Terror:

“Exact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed. Single channel video, color, 119 minutes.”

(via)

The Flip Ultra (Amazon: $100-$150.)

David Pogue in The New York Times, Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot:

“The lesson is one that the electronics industry seems to miss over and over again: that creeping feature-itis often impairs your product instead of improving it. In the Flip’s case, the size, shape, ruggedness, low price and one-button simplicity take it places where no real camcorder would go. Purses, coat pockets, beach bags. Skiing, playgrounds, house walk-throughs, museums, casual interviews, YouTube stunts, classrooms, airplanes — and, with the $50 acrylic sealed case, even underwater. (Just about everywhere but live performances and sports; the zoom just isn’t good enough.)”

Sean Flynn on GQ Blog, Papa:

“”You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they’d flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey’s to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?” Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)”