I was in Long Beach last week to see my good friend Joshua Prager give a riveting talk, related to his book Half-Life, at the TED conference. Above you can see the talk that he gave at the TED talent search in New York last fall. Below are a few of the photos I took of Josh at TED on Friday.
When I go home, I don’t start a second life—it’s more of the same. There are no Saturdays or Sundays.
The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.
Courage is not a virtue frequently associated with the criticism beat, but it lies near the heart of [Pauline] Kael’s achievement—not because she was unsqueamish about praising and slamming movies (though she was) but because, from the time she wrote her first review until the moment she retired, in 1991, her authority as a critic relied solely on her own, occasionally whimsical taste.
Here is the speech’s full text, and here is a Wordle.
I went to the theater to see this lost interview with Steve Jobs from 1995 that was originally shot for Triumph of the Nerds and came away from it inspired. Because what other executive in Silicon Valley would ever cite Picasso and Thoreau? And that he did makes me believe that, perhaps, there’s a place in the Valley for someone like me.
EXCLUSIVE: Steve Jobs ‘The Lost Interview’ Teaser – YouTube
To make the monthly minimum wage of $1,160, a musician needed to sell 143 self-pressed compact discs. To make that from Spotify, they would need people to stream their songs more than 4 million times — not humanly possible unless you happen to be Lady Gaga.
Is my passion for Spotify destroying the musicians I love? – San Jose Mercury News
One of my favorite things about going to Stanford Shopping Center when I was a kid was seeing the old Banana Republic store.
Store info and other Republic Business | Abandoned Republic
Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.
“[Steve Jobs] used to talk about the aesthetics of magazine making. He always fancied himself as better than anybody else at anything. And I think one of his fantasy jobs would have been as a magazine editor.”
(via Master of the Media Marketplace, and Its Demanding Gatekeeper – NYTimes.com)
Inevitably, there are some things that I would like to mention that I liked during the year but, for one reason or another, didn’t quite make the list. Here are the honorable mentions:
Henri Cartier-Bresson at the MoMA — I’ve only gotten a quick preview of this show, but it’s very promising, and I can’t wait to take the time to really take it in. Without Bresson, the sort of photography I practice wouldn’t even be possible, so I’m looking forward to the chance to see so many of his prints in person.
Audrey Tautou — I love her acting, her films, her style, and the fact that she uses a Leica to photograph people she meets.
Difficulty — This one really should have been on the list, but I chose to write it into a couple other entries. I feel like we’ve become less and less patient when it comes to difficult things—people, art, technology, and work. But one of the things I learned in my life as a reader is that difficulty often conceals great value. And that’s something I remembered in 2010. Difficulty is something to engage with, not run away from, because the rewards for doing so can be so great. It’s closely related to insistent compassion and creating possibilities, which both made the list. You can find someone difficult to know and just throw your hands up and walk away or you can insistently try to know them because, perhaps, their worth will justify their difficulty. You can leave Gaddis and Proust and Foster Wallace and Pynchon on the shelf because their books are too long and confusing or you can take the time to read them and, perhaps, find yourself changed. And, ah ha, wouldn’t that be worth any level of difficulty?
Yanidel — The street photographer Yanick Delafoge calls himself Yanidel, and his post-processing techniques produce a look that it utterly unique and European and brilliant. I especially enjoy his photographs from Paris.
Cosi on rue de Seine in Paris — In April I returned here for the first time in nearly nine years. It still serves the best sandwiches in the world.
Ken Griffey, Jr. — He was the hottest minor league prospect in baseball at the time when I really became fanatical about the sport, and I followed his entire career until it ended this summer. His swing was beautiful, and he should go down as the greatest player of his generation. I got to see him play in the 2007 All-Star game when he started in the same outfield as Barry Bonds in San Francisco, something I’ll never forget.
Subjective Time — This is the simple but not often cited concept of how we experience time subjectively in relation to our age. It’s no secret that time seems to pass faster as we get older, but it’s not commonly known that this concept has been scientifically studied and verified. In fact, there’s even an equation that describes one’s perception of time based on her age. Given current average life expectancies in the Unites States, we feel like we’ve lived half of our lives before the age of 20. Twenty is the subjective halfway point of our lives. It’s no wonder that it seems like such a formative age!
Concord, Massachusetts — Walden Pond, Mount Misery, Sleepy Hollow, and ridiculously large servings of ice cream—and only a 30-minute drive from Cambridge!
Love and Its Opposite by Tracey Thorn — That no one else writes songs about the disappointments of middle age makes this a unique album. That Tracey Thorn does so with brilliance and nuance makes it spectacular.
Printing Photos — So much better than storing them in the “cloud.”
Generation Why? by Zadie Smith — This is one of the better things that has been written about online culture, i.e. what the Internet has done to our culture.
J.D. Salinger — Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
Don’t forget to read the final list. Click on the images to reveal the descriptions. And click on the Away arrow to open the page for a random favorite.
This was the first year of my life that I documented more with my photography than with my writing, especially if that whole picture = 1,000 words equation is true. Here are some of the things I saw in 2010, arranged, more or less, chronologically. For those of you who are curious about gear, I took most of the shots with a Leica M7, Leica M8, or Panasonic GF1.
I use Nik’s Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro quite a bit for post processing my photos, so I felt compelled to try out their new HDR software. Unfortunately, I don’t have exposure-bracketed shots that I took with the intention of making an HDR image. So, I took a couple photos I had from a hike to Mount Misery last month and put them into HDR Efex to see what it could make of them. The conditions under which I shot these photos were not ideal—I handheld them and took my rangefinder camera away from my eye to adjust the shutter speed in between shots—but the result from only two shots is not disappointing. See below for the HDR image and the original two photos that HDR Efex combined to make it.
Claudia Gonson of the Magnetic Fields recounts her life as a reader and academic over at the NYRBlog.
All these years, I’ve assumed that Patti Smith wrote “Because the Night”—that is, until I was listening to Springsteen’s The Promise, yesterday. It turns out that Bruce started writing the song, and Smith finished it.
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz discusses returning to Ground Zero with the Leica S2 in a video from TIME’s website.
I loved this line from Ian Parker’s profile of Rory Stewart in the New Yorker: “To remain attached to the stories that fill a boy’s dreams is not peculiar or immature: it’s a way to get things done.”
When Brian Wilson struck out Ryan Howard to end the sixth and final game of the NLCS last night, I immediately thought of Carlos Beltran’s looking K against the Cardinals to end Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS and the question that Phillies fans will be asking all offseason, “Why didn’t he swing?” Others have made the same remark in the press.
However, just as puzzling to be was the Phillies failure to give Jimmy Rollins the chance to steal second base in the ninth last night. When Kevin Millar of the Red Sox walked in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the ALCS with his team facing elimination against the Yankees, the Sox put Dave Roberts into the game as a pinch runner. As reiterated in Ken Burns’ recent Tenth Inning, everyone at Fenway knew that Roberts was going to steal second. And after three pickoff attempts by Mariano Rivera, he did. The rest, of course, is history. Rollins reached base in a nearly identical situation last night, and I was certain that he would attempt to steal second. And yet he didn’t. Granted, the Phillies did eventually get a runner to second base in the inning, but that didn’t happen until there were two outs when Howard walked to the plate and back to the dugout after having watched strike three graze the outside corner.
Some other, brief notes from last night’s game:
I’ve been listening a lot to Arcade Fire’s record The Suburbs this weekend, and I’m reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s line that seems entirely applicable to the Canadian band: “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Whoever picked one of their songs for the Where the Wild Things Are trailer could not have done better.
If anyone’s interested, there’s currently one Leica M9 available on Amazon with no mark-up over MSRP.
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