Remains of the Day

Bon Iver

I have not heard the entire album yet, but the one single I've heard from Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago is "Skinny Love" and it's friggin' gorgeous. You can hear it at his MySpace page, and you can hear other tracks here.

There's even a Walden-like story behind the album. Bon Iver is a deliberate misspelling of bon hiver, French for "good winter." Justin Vernon holed up in a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin at the start of winter, and out of that came this album.

Obama, the design element

Maybe one underrated strength of the Obama campaign is its design cohesion. Michael Bieruit analyzes Obama's branding campaign and comes away impressed, especially with his consistent typeface use.

And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

Meanwhile, Hoefler & Frere-Jones shudder at the typography of the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

2008 is clearly a year of unusual thinking in political circles, because none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary's snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you're feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain's typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain's campaign themes is "Making Tough Choices:" is this the one you would have made?

Technorati Tags: barackobama, branding, design, gotham, typeface, typography

Can you hit floor 279 for me please?

I would like to visit Dubai sometime, if for no other reason than it seems like one of the most peculiar places in the world, a Las Vegas of architecture. If it's not Agassi and Federer playing tennis on the helipad of a hotel, or the world's tallest tower, the Burj Dubai, it's news that Hyder Consulting is designing a structure that will be twice the height of the Burj Dubai, or nearly one mile tall.

BLDGBLOG whipped up a graphic to illustrate how this building would fit in with the world's other tallest structures. It is sublimely ludicrous.

Technorati Tags: architecture, dubai

Notes from Buffett

Great notes from a meeting that some b-school students had with Warren Buffett. Lots of sage advice, as always, not just about investing, but life and happiness.

Win-win

From here:

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount. So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all. Is that so far from the reality we observe?

Seems like the incentives are aligned all around on this. It's rough flying with kids, both on the parents and all the other fliers who empathize but really wish their noise-canceling headphones could filter out the high-frequency screaming of a distressed child.

Original sin

Interesting analogy about the plagiarism flap between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Nevertheless, to understand why Clinton’s borrowing is worse than Obama’s, I’ve prepared some analogies of my own. First, consider what Obama did to his friend, Deval Patrick. Let’s say that last night I was out two-stepping at some tavern along the Monongahela River and I spotted a young and barefoot, curly-haired deli girl from the Giant Eagle wearing tight jean cut-offs and a red-checked restaurant napkin for a top. I suddenly remembered a line you used to great success when we were trolling the singles bars during the 2003 Appalachia Festival of the Book, a line that this gal would surely go all Patsy Cline for.

So I walk up to her and I pull my lower lip all the way out so she can see my tobacco chaw, big as a Bumblebee Hummingbird, and then I drop my cell on the bar—just the way you did—and I say, “Sweetheart, if the governor of Pennsylvania calls on this phone tonight, it’s because he heard your tongue might be trapped in the Skoal mine.”

Should I have given you credit for that can’t-miss line, even though it would have totally broken the mood? Probably. But you are my friend, and even though you were a thousand miles away at the time, you clearly would have supported me in my efforts to have anonymous, one-off hillbilly sex in the litter-strewn cab of a Ford F-150.

Now let’s adjust the scenario to describe what Hillary did to her rival John Edwards. Let’s say you and I were both in that Monongahela roadhouse and we simultaneously spotted the curly-haired supermarket deli girl. Each of us wanted to take her out to our respective F-150s and make dirty redneck love to her on a fry-scented bed of McDonald’s bags. But supposing, when you briefly turned your back for some emergency flossing and an Altoid, I approached the helpless object of our attentions and I used your awesome Skoal line to seduce her. By the time you turned around she and I would already be out in the parking lot with the heat and the Allman Brothers turned all the way up.

So to summarize, Barack Obama’s speech probably does not meet the definition of “plagiarism,” but Hillary Clinton’s speeches clearly meet the definition of “cockblocking.”

Trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars

No embeddable link, so you'll have to go here to watch the trailer for this summer's animated movie filling in the gap between Episodes 2 and 3.

Trailer for Indiana Jones and the...uh, whatever it's called

Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Those first few notes from John Williams' Indy theme are like notes from my childhood, reaching out across the years to tickle me.

Technorati Tags: movies, trailer

Yes he can?

Dick Morris now thinks Obama will defeat Hillary.

What a slugfest between two political heavyweights.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, politics, hillaryclinton

Ah, Jack

With the writer's strike over, here's hoping Alec, er, Jack, is soon to be back.

Hilton Als on activist actors

In his post "On Heath Ledger" Hilton Als denounces the activist-actor:

When an actor’s charming, vulgar, and childish desire to be seen and felt by a large number of people becomes perverted by self-seriousness, the performer slips into insipidness, thus deadening the carnival spirit that should inform his theatricals.

And if an actor forsakes greasepaint and sparkles to make public pronouncements about the evils of the media, Hollywood, the red carpet, or certain Third World countries, pomposity is never far behind.

Simply put, the craft of acting can’t bear the weight of ideas. Nor can the actor. Acting is thought in action; the character is merely a figment of the script and the director’s imagination. We’re interested in an actor’s personality, not his Op-Ed-informed mind. And when a performer asks to be taken “seriously”—but if we love him, doesn’t that mean we take him seriously? Is love not serious?—he insists on being real in a way that we know he is not. Movie stars are not humane. In general, what has fascinated the public about stars—and always will—is their apparent lack of mundane “niceness.” (They don’t usually share what they have, except with other stars or a publicity-worthy cause.) For the most part, movie stars are self-interested, hence their proclivity for giving interviews: they field questions because they can’t wait for their own response.

He doesn't specifically indict Ledger, but the loss he feels is more specific than that I've read elsewhere. Als wonders how Ledger might have explored the rift between his private and public selves in future roles.

Technorati Tags: acting, newyorker, heathledger

Stop the downloading =)

Technorati Tags: music, video, youtube

A good weekend for Obama

Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana, Maine, and even the Virgin Islands (carrying with them all of 3 delegates), and all by healthy margins. And he beats out Bill Clinton for a Grammy! In my lifetime, I've never known so many of my peers to attend a caucus as did this past weekend up in Washington. It's proof of the transformative power of Obama that he has aroused my generation's political hopes. I may be hasty in assigning so much credit to Obama for galvanizing the youth vote, but whatever is happening, the number of 18-29 year olds turning out for primaries and caucuses is up significantly over 2000.

In the process, perhaps we're seeing a weakening of the so-called political establishment. It certainly feels that way when you see Obama out-fundraising Clinton by collecting small amounts from many donors, rather than large amounts from fewer but thicker wallets (some enclosed in serious baggage). It feels that way when you see that Obama has won nearly every caucus state, where passionate supporters are critical. Let's hope it's a movement that isn't derailed by the peculiar Democratic Party subspecies known as superdelegates.

Arnold Kling writes:

Some day, instead of an exit poll saying that X percent of people listed health care as the number on issue, I would like to see an exit poll saying that Y percent of people were able to correctly identify correctly the differences between the candidates' proposals on health care. I think that Y would be less than 5 percent.

If the United States had a multi-party parliamentary system with proportional representation, our patchwork of prejudices would likely yield a government comparable to Italy's.

He might be right, but this young interviewee must fall into that 5%. His answers during this interview are great and seem to win over the conservative interviewer:

Clinton would make a very capable President, of that I have little doubt. And I almost certainly believe she suffers from some prejudice against women, which is unfortunate, just as Obama's skin color is an obstacle for many voters. But the chance to move past partisan politics is so potent a possibility, and it's one that I only envision with Obama. Even though Clinton-hate is less about Bill and Hillary than about those who feel it in their heart of hearts, the net effect is the same; a return to that disillusioning and toxic mood of politics in the mid nineties.

Ken and I wondered if Obama would be the first black candidate to be elected head of a country in which blacks were not a majority of the population. Does anyone know? If so, it adds to what would already be a historic victory.

I wonder how possible a Clinton-Obama ticket would be. Such a pairing would be unbeatable. For the good of the party? Doubtful now given how many blows they've dealt each other in the ring. Ken read somewhere that if Clinton won, she'd neutralize Obama by nominating him for the Supreme Court. That made me laugh.

Technorati Tags: obama, politics

A healthcare system I could get behind

I don't know much about the French healthcare system, but if it's anything like the one depicted in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly then I'm all for instituting something similar in the U.S. All of Jean-Dominique Bauby's nurses are gorgeous. His girlfriend, the mother of his children, even his literary assistant are all attractive. Having just awoken from a stroke to this assemblage of beauties, Bauby muses that he must be in heaven.

The truth is a great deal more tragic: Bauby has locked-in syndrome. A stroke has left his mind is alive but paralyzed nearly every muscle in his body. The one part of his body that still serves him is his left eye, and in time he learns to communicate using a system of blinking in response to a series of letters arranged in order of frequency of occurrence in the French language.

It's a subtle but smart choice to cast so many striking women. Bauby's recognition of their beauty reminds us of how alive he still is, despite his condition. The mind that survives need not be a sterile one, bereft of the pleasures of the opposite sex.

In addition to being a moving true story, the movie also serves as a fascinating intellectual examination of the value of communication in the human condition. A simple but brilliant movie.

Technorati Tags: film, healthcare, movies

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Jon Stewart, Stephan Colbert, and Conan O'Brien

Here's the clip from Monday's Conan O'Brien, the last in the Stewart-Colbert-O'Brien feud series that spanned the three talk shows.

Sexual Harrassment and You

Funny SNL skit featuring Tom Brady in happier times.

Super Bowl ads

Wow, what an upset! Tom Brady can take solace in being one of the few people in the world for whom this ad is not aspirational.

We've posted all the ads from the Super Bowl at Hulu. If you have an invite, you can see them here. If you don't have a Hulu invite, you can see them here.

I also have some Hulu invites to give out, so leave a comment with your e-mail address if you're interested in one but haven't gotten in yet.