Chris Burden Gone
Chris Burden dies at 69: Artist’s light sculpture at LACMA is symbol of L.A.
Artist Chris Burden created Urban Lights, a sculpture in front of the entryway to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that consists of guniune street lamps from Los Angeles historic past. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Chris Burden, the protean Conceptual artist who rose from doing controversial performances in the 1970s to become one of the most widely admired sculptors of his generation, died early Sunday at his home in Topanga Canyon. He was 69.
“Urban Light,” Burden’s 2008 sculpture at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has become a symbol of the city. It takes the form of a Classical temple composed from 202 restored cast-iron antique street lamps.
Emasculating Porn
Porn and video game addiction are leading to ‘masculinity crisis’, says Stanford prison experiment psychologist
by DOUG BOLTON
A leading psychologist has warned that young men’s brains are being ‘digitally rewired’ by unprecedented use of video games and pornography
A leading psychologist has warned that young men are facing a crisis of masculinity due to excessive use of video games and pornography.
Psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University Phillip Zimbardo has made the warnings, which form a major part of his latest book, Man (Dis)Connected.
In an interview on the BBC World Service’s Weekend programme, Zimbardo spoke about the results of his study, an in-depth look into the lives of 20,000 young men and their relationships with video games and pornography.
He said: “Our focus is on young men who play video games to excess, and do it in social isolation – they are alone in their room.”
“Now, with freely available pornography, which is unique in history, they are combining playing video games, and as a break, watching on average, two hours of pornography a week.”
The Industrial Fish Complex
When Humans Declared War on Fish
Credit Josh Cochra
ON Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of a campaign of violence against our taxonomic classes, one that has resulted in trillions of casualties.
Oddly, the war itself was a great reprieve for many marine species. Just as Axis and Allied submarines and mines made the transportation of war matériel a highly perilous endeavor, they similarly interfered with fishing. The ability to catch staple seafoods, like cod, declined markedly. Freed from human pursuit, overexploited species multiplied in abundance.
But World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans. Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous, but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s catch for months at a time.
Transgender Kraut-rock w/ Jazz Hands ’78
Dorothy Must 5 (NYT Bestseller List Woo-hoo!!)
Biggest Book Ever!
Author Aims to Set New Guinness World Record with World’s Largest Published Novel
Yahaya Baruwa, 27-year-old best-selling Canadian author, aims to do more than just release another commercial success, but also release the world’s largest published novel.
Struggles of a Dreamer: The Battle Between a Dreamer and Tradition will measure 8 ft. 5 in. high and 5 ft. 5 in. wide, resulting in an 11 ft. length when fully opened. The novel will be approximately 200 pages and bound in hardcover, rendered in full color. Due to its size, Struggles of a Dreamer will be crafted by hand, made from a combination of aluminum and tear-resistant paper, all sewn together with nylon stitching.
The novel seems to draw from the author’s own experiences of being a Nigerian immigrant, with characters Tunde, a beggar on the streets of New York City, and Toku’te, the son of a farmer in a faraway land, both testing the boundaries of tradition.
A Heartbreaking Read
My daughter, who lost her battle with mental illness, is still the bravest person I know
The author with daughter Natalie in 2004, soon after publication of their book “Promise You Won’t Freak Out.” (Courtesy of Doris Fuller )
I lost my darling daughter Natalie to mental illness last month. She killed herself a few weeks short of her 29th birthday by stepping in front of a train in Baltimore.
Natalie and I wrote a book together when she was 16: “Promise You Won’t Freak Out: A Teenager Tells Her Mother the Truth About Boys, Booze, Body Piercing, and Other Touchy Topics (and Mom Responds).” The idea of a teenager telling the truth about her secrets was such a startling concept that we were feature-page headliners in the Baltimore Sun and about two dozen other newspapers, went on TV coast to coast, including on one of the morning shows, and got paid to give speeches. “Oprah” called.
In the book, we used a device to signal whenever a wild turn was about to take place: And then . . . . In the introduction, I defined an And then . . . moment as “one of those critical junctures when my cheerful sense that all was right in the world collided with inescapable proof that it wasn’t.”
[Doctor: How I discovered the most important question I should ask every patient]
The book was published to great reviews the week before Natalie finished high school. Amazon named it the best parenting book of 2004. It was nominated for a national prize. It was translated into Lithuanian and Chinese.
And then . . . .
¡Muchas Gracias, Mundos de Papel!
Go Go, Amoeba, Go!
Still spinnin’: America’s classic record stores
(CNN)Like phone booths and typewriters, record stores are a vanishing breed — another victim of the digital age.
Camelot Music. Virgin Megastores. Wherehouse Music. Tower Records. All of them gone.
Corporate America has largely abandoned brick-and-mortar music retailing to a scattering of independent stores, many of them in scruffy urban neighborhoods. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Yes, it’s harder in the Spotify era to find a place to go buy physical music. But many of the remaining record stores are succeeding — even thriving — by catering to a passionate core of customers and collectors.
On Saturday, hundreds of music retailers will hold events to commemorate Record Store Day, an annual celebration of, well, your neighborhood record store. Many stores will host live performances, drawings, book signings, special sales of rare or autographed vinyl and other happenings. Some will even serve beer.
Freedom From SIZZLER
“It wasn’t me, Officer, I’m tellin’ ya! Like I said, I shot the armadillo – and then it was the armadillo what shot that bitch mother-in-law of mine.”
Georgia man shoots armadillo, bullet bounces off critter’s shell, hits shooter’s mother-in-law inside mobile home 100 yards away: Police (VIDEO)
JCRADER/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
Armored and dangerous!
A Georgia man shot his mother-in-law in a freak accident after a bullet he fired at an armadillo ricocheted off the creature’s back.
Larry McElroy, 54, was outside 74-year-old Carol Johnson’s mobile home in Lee County on Sunday night when he took aim with his 9-mm pistol at the animal, WALB reported.
The critter was killed by the round.
But the projectile bounced back off its armor, hit a fence and traveled 100 yards to fly through the back door of the property, police said.
The Lee County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the bizarre incident.
He recommended McElroy use a shotgun next time.
ENDGAME: “As intriguing as it is ambitious”
from The San Jose Mercury News
With Endgame: Proving Ground, Google’s Niantic Labs aims to improve on Ingress formula
by
Google’s Niantic Labs specializes in video games that revolve around the real world. It’s a heady space that mixes elements of massively multiplayer online experiences and augmented reality games. Ingress was the first example. It was a science fiction title that pits two factions — The Enlightened and The Resistance — against each other as they vied for real-life landmarks that contain portals.
The core gameplay concept was fine. It lured gamers outside, where they used the GPS on their mobile phones to locate important touchstones and battle rival factions for them. The only issue I had with it is that the systems were too complex and the fiction too complicated. There was a lot to digest and learn.
With Niantic’s upcoming project, Endgame: Proving Ground, the developers aim to fix at least one of those problems. They are teaming up with authors James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton whose novel Endgame: The Calling was released in October. The book, the first of three in the works, has been optioned to be a film. This sets up the franchise to be a transmedia project with different hooks into the universe and the mobile game is going to be one doorway into that.
Günter Grass Gone
The Greatness of Günter Grass
BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY RENE BURRI / MAGNUM
In 1982, when I was in Hamburg for the publication of the German translation of “Midnight’s Children,” I was asked by my publishers if I would like to meet Günter Grass. Well, obviously I wanted to, and so I was driven out to the village of Wewelsfleth, outside Hamburg, where Grass then lived. He had two houses in the village; he wrote and lived in one and used the other as an art studio. After a certain amount of early fencing—I was expected, as the younger writer, to make my genuflections, which, as it happened, I was happy to perform—he decided, all of a sudden, that I was acceptable, led me to a cabinet in which he stored his collection of antique glasses, and asked me to choose one. Then he got out a bottle of schnapps, and by the bottom of the bottle we were friends. At some later point, we lurched over to the art studio, and I was enchanted by the objects I saw there, all of which I recognized from the novels: bronze eels, terracotta flounders, dry-point etchings of a boy beating a tin drum. I envied him his artistic gift almost more than I admired him for his literary genius. How wonderful, at the end of a day’s writing, to walk down the street and become a different sort of artist! He designed his own book covers, too: dogs, rats, toads moved from his pen onto his dust jackets.
After that meeting, every German journalist I met wanted to ask me what I thought of him, and when I said that I believed him to be one of the two or three greatest living writers in the world some of these journalists looked disappointed, and said, “Well, ‘The Tin Drum,’ yes, but wasn’t that a long time ago?” To which I tried to reply that if Grass had never written that novel, his other books were enough to earn him the accolades I was giving him, and the fact that he had written “The Tin Drum” as well placed him among the immortals. The skeptical journalists looked disappointed. They would have preferred something cattier, but I had nothing catty to say.
Honey, those spots are getting bigger.
Mystery of Ceres’ bright spots grows
Data from NASA mission suggest varied origins for tantalizing gleams on dwarf planet’s surface.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
The surface of the dwarf planet Ceres (shown here) has fewer large craters than researchers expected.
Not all of the puzzling bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres are alike. The closest-yet images of the gleams, taken from 45,000 kilometres away, show that at least two of the spots look different from one another when seen in infrared wavelengths.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spied many of the bright spots years ago, but the observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft — which began looping around Ceres on 6 March — are the first taken at close range. The images were released on 13 April in Vienna at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union.
Scientists say that the bright spots might be related to ice exposed at the bottom of impact craters or some type of active geological features. The areas glimmer tantalizingly in a new full-colour map of Ceres that was obtained in February, but not released until the conference. The map uses false colours to tease out subtle differences on the otherwise dark surface of Ceres.
“This is the first idea of what the surface looks like,” said Martin Hoffmann, a Dawn scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.
The Dawn spacecraft’s view of the bright regions is sharpening as it gets closer to Ceres. The new infrared images reveal differences between spot 1, near Ceres’s equator, and a pair of bright spots collectively known as spot 5. Some scientists have speculated that the latter could be an icy plume.
Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?
Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space
by Sarah Scoles
Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?
BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometres across at most – so they can’t be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn’t match what we know about cosmic physics.
“Endgame is one of the first truly 360 degree content propositions to really excite me.”
Lessons From SXSW
by Caroline Norbury / CEO of Creative England
Beau Willimon’s first thought when he wakes up every day is that he is going to die. This is apparently what “concentrates the mind” for the lead writer and creator of House of Cards. It’s a great axiom and one which I think I might adopt. It’s certainly better than Roman Polanski’s start to the day, which is with a cold shower on the basis that the day can’t get any worse…
I have been to many film festivals but this is my first outing to SXSW. I’m here because there are two films supported by Creative England in the festival. The first is Julien Temple’s amazing documentary on the living legend that is Wilko Johnson, of Dr Feelgood fame. The second is The Goob, Creative England’s first completed iFeature, which premiered at Venice Film Festival last year. SXSW is the film’s first US outing.
Both films have been very well received – particularly The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson. You should check out the reviews on Indiewire and AintitCool – there definitely seems to be a competition going on for the most thoughtful and insightful critique. And as an avid cultural consumer it’s not often I can say that!
As well as watching some amazing indie films, I’ve also been to a few sessions in the interactive and film workshops, where two in particular stood out. The first was a session with writer and author James Frey – whose novel Endgame is one of the first truly 360 degree content propositions to really excite me.
Endgame is the story of 12 teenagers dispersed around the world playing a competition to survive the forthcoming apocalypse. All come from a particular tribe and woven into their journey is a rich tapestry of mythologies and stories of ancient civilisations. These are then translated into to a much larger alternative-reality game.
Frey has teamed up with Google’s Niantic Labs to create both a virtual and a real-life gaming experience that has the potential to work anywhere in the world. Think Second Life but playing in Real Life, connecting with people to collect treasure and weapons, defeat enemies and helping your dispersed team to win. To complete the IP circle Frey has also just signed a deal to transfer the stories into a theatrical franchise.
Bad Moon Rising
Solar eclipse, Supermoon, Spring equinox: Friday will see three rare celestial events
Eclipses have long been feared as bad omens, but the equinox is celebrated as a time of renewal
As the eclipse plunges the UK and other places into darkness this Friday, two other rare if less spectacular celestial events will be taking place, too: a Supermoon and the Spring equinox.
A Supermoon, or perigee moon, happens when the full or new moon does its closest fly-by of the Earth, making it look bigger than it normally does. And the spring equinox refers to the time of the year when the day and night are of equal duration, mid-way between the longest and shortest days.
The solar eclipse refers to a phenomenon where the sun and moon line up, so that the latter obscures the former. And while it won’t be affected by the two other events, it is rare that the three events happen even individually.
Gene Gene The Dancing Machine Gone
Gene Patton, Gene Gene the Dancing Machine From ‘The Gong Show,’ Dies at 82
Gene Patton, the NBC stagehand in Burbank who stole the spotlight as Gene Gene the Dancing Machine on NBC’s wacky The Gong Show, died Monday, his family announced. He was 82.
Patton died in Pasadena, according to a spokeswoman at the local Woods-Valentine Mortuary. He had suffered from diabetes.
The Gong Show, dreamed up and hosted by producer Chuck Barris (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game), aired on NBC in daytime from 1976-78 and then in syndication. Acts — most of them amateurish and just plain awful — auditioned for three celebrity judges, who banged a gong on stage to mercifully send the bad ones packing.
At a random moment during the game show, Barris would introduce Patton, and the curtain would part, bringing the shuffling stagehand with the painter’s cap onstage to the sounds of “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” a jazz tune made popular by Count Basie. His dance sent everyone on the set — Barris, the judges, the cameramen, the audience — into an uncontrollable boogie.
I Like Pi
10 stunning images show the beauty hidden in pi
By Ana Swanson
Saturday — March 14, 2015, or 3/14/15 — marks an extremely nerdy holiday. It is the official celebration of π, the magical, mathematical and infinite constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
For any circle you can imagine, if you divide the distance around the circle by the distance across it, you will get pi, or 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749
445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066
470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385…
We could keep going, but you get the picture.
Some people will celebrate the holiday by making and eating pies (Washington restaurants are offering specials on everything from pizza to banana cream). Others will run a Pi-K race of 3.14 kilometers. And some data tinkerers are making art that visualize pi’s infinite and random digits.
One of the best known of these data tinkerers is Martin Krzywinski, a scientist who specializes in bioinformatics, or using computer science and statistics to understand biological data.
Why Pi Matters
Why Pi Matters
The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY COOLIDGE / GETTY
Every March 14th, mathematicians like me are prodded out of our burrows like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day, blinking and bewildered by all the fuss. Yes, it’s Pi Day again. And not just any Pi Day. They’re calling this the Pi Day of the century: 3.14.15. Pi to five digits. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I’m dreading it. No hope of solving any equations that day, what with the pie-eating contests, the bickering over the merits of pi versus tau (pi times two), and the throwdowns over who can recite more digits of pi. Just stay off the streets at 9:26:53, when the time will approximate pi to ten places: 3.141592653.
Pi does deserve a celebration, but for reasons that are rarely mentioned. In high school, we all learned that pi is about circles. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around the circle, represented by the letter C) to its diameter (the distance across the circle at its widest point, represented by the letter d). That ratio, which is about 3.14, also appears in the formula for the area inside the circle, A = πr2, where π is the Greek letter “pi” and r is the circle’s radius (the distance from center to rim). We memorized these and similar formulas for the S.A.T.s and then never again used them, unless we happened to go into a technical field, or until our own kids took geometry.
So it’s fair to ask: Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. Even young children get this. The digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. They go on forever, seemingly at random—except that they can’t possibly be random, because they embody the order inherent in a perfect circle. This tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi.
Why Pacquiao-Mayweather Matters
How Much Does Pacquiao-Mayweather Matter?
BY KELEFA SANNEH
Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY ESTHER LIN/SHOWTIME®
In a humid boxing gym in Hollywood on Tuesday, members of the sports media outnumbered world-class boxers by about twenty to one. They had come to watch Manny Pacquiao, by most measures the second-best welterweight in the world, prepare for his fight against Floyd Mayweather, Jr., by all measures the best. As Pacquiao shadowboxed in the ring, Michael Koncz, one of his closest advisers, looked at the reporters and videographers and seemed to wince. “After these two weeks, that’s it!” he said. He had agreed to a brief media invasion, but he wanted as much brevity as possible.
Fred Sternburg, Pacquiao’s publicist, just laughed. Pacquiao-Mayweather will almost certainly be the most lucrative boxing match in history—it’s being called the new Fight of the Century, and it requires a publicity push to match. The fight is scheduled for May 2nd, in Las Vegas, and until then everyone in both fighters’ orbits will have to accommodate and ignore the non-stop stream of outsiders bearing notepads and cameras. The fight will be broadcast on pay-per-view, as part of an unusual arrangement between HBO and Showtime—the rival fighters are attached to rival premium cable networks, who therefore have had to find a way to collaborate. As far as the fight’s promoters are concerned, members of the media have one job to do: help them entice more paying customers.
The promotion began in earnest the next day, with the Press Conference of the Century, which took over the Nokia Theatre, in downtown Los Angeles. There was a red carpet, where each fighter could take a hundred-yard stroll in front of broadcast media. A number of outlets, including ESPN and CNN, had erected temporary anchor desks, which heightened the illusion that something important was about to happen.
Mayweather versus Pacquiao has been the most talked-about match-up in boxing for more than six years, and many observers had been skeptical, in recent months, that the fighters would finally agree to fight. Now that the date is set, boxing fans can go back to doing what they do best: complain—in this case, about the fact that it didn’t take place years ago, when both men were younger and quicker.
Enceladus Moon
Why the Warm Ocean on This Moon of Saturn Could Be Perfect for Life
One of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth just got even more tantalizing
Move over, Europa. It looks as though the most life-friendly habitat ever discovered outside of Earth is Enceladus—Saturn’s sixth-largest moon.
Astrophysicists working with NASA’s Saturn sweeping Cassini spacecraft have just announced that Enceladus has a warm ocean at its southern pole with ongoing hydrothermal activity—the first ever discovered outside of Earth. This new research, published in the journal Nature, builds upon last year’s discovery of the moon’s 6-mile-deep ocean, which is also believed to contain many of the chemicals commonly associated with life.
“We now have very strong evidence that there is a hot hydrothermal environment at the base of Enceladus’s ocean, perhaps like those where we believe life began on Earth,” says Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who works with the Cassini spacecraft but was not involved in the new research. “This is yet another discovery in a series of really remarkable findings that have come one by one, to tell us that this may be the place to go look for life in the outer solar system.”
Mining The Moon
Billionaire teams up with NASA to mine the moon
by Susan Caminiti
Source: MoonExpress
Moon Express, a Mountain View, California-based company that’s aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year, just took another step closer toward that lofty goal. Earlier this year, it became the first company to successfully test a prototype of a lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The success of this test—and a series of others that will take place later this year—paves the way for Moon Express to send its lander to the moon in 2016, said company co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain.
Moon Express conducted its tests with the support of NASA engineers, who are sharing with the company their deep well of lunar know-how. The NASA lunar initiative—known as Catalyst—is designed to spur new commercial U.S. capabilities to reach the moon and tap into its considerable resources. In addition to Moon Express, NASA is also working with Astrobotic Technologies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, to develop commercial robotic spacecrafts.
Jain said Moon Express also recently signed an agreement to take over Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. The historic launchpad will be used for Moon Express’s lander development and flight-test operations. Before it was decommissioned, the launchpad was home to NASA’s Atlas-Centaur rocket program and its Surveyor moon landers.
Moto Colombia
Heart of Glass How-to
How Blondie Created ‘Heart of Glass’
Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein talk about ‘Heart of Glass’
By MARC MYERS
Until 1978, Blondie was a punk band with a cult following and not much visibility in the U.S. beyond New York’s Lower East Side. Eager for a hit album, Chrysalis, the band’s label, paired Blondie with Michael Chapman, an inventive producer who had success recording other downtown artists, including Suzi Quatro and Sweet.
The result was “Parallel Lines,” Blondie’s third album, and the single “Heart of Glass.”After the song’s release in early 1979, it became Blondie’s first Billboard pop-chart hit, climbing to No. 1 in April 1979, helping to pave the way for synth-pop and electronic dance music (EDM).
Mr. Chapman and the song’s co-writers—Debbie Harry (who opens at New York’s Cafe Carlyle March 24) and guitarist Chris Stein(author of the recent “Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk”)—talked about the hit’s evolution, Donna Summer’s influence and the struggle to adapt the high-impact Euro-techno sound. Edited from interviews:
Chris Stein: When Debbie and I were living in our top-floor apartment at 48 W. 17th St., I often messed around on a borrowed multitrack tape recorder. It let me record a rhythm guitar track and then layer melody and harmony lines on top. I wrote and developed my songs this way. In the summer of 1974, I wrote a song and referenced the catchy feel of “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation, which was a big hit then. Debbie and I began calling it “The Disco Song.”
Debbie Harry: I used to keep a notebook to jot down lyrics and ideas that came to me. On this one, Chris was constantly experimenting with the song, and the lyrics just floated into my head. The words I came up with expressed a very high school kind of thing, of falling in and out of love and getting your feelings hurt. But instead of dwelling on the pain, the words sort of shrugged off the breakup, like, “Oh, well, that’s the way it goes.”
Chris and I both came from an art background, and we were familiar with existentialism, surrealism, abstractionism and so on. The feeling I wanted to get across was, “Live and let live,” like this is what happened and now it’s not happening, you know? I threw in the “Ooo-ooo, ohhh-oh” fill when we started performing the song at CBGB. It was a 1960s “girl group” thing. Chris and I both loved R&B.
Second Moon
Earth’s mysterious ‘second moon’ and its odd orbit
It sounds like one of those crazy conspiracy theories: There are aliens at Area 51. Abraham Lincoln was a lizard. The Earth has a second, secret moon. However, the last of these is actually pretty widely repeated in scientific circles, though only with a very colloquial definition for the word “moon.” Though it’s technically a near-Earth asteroid, the astronomical body called 3753 Cruithne spends much of its time following the Earth like our much more famous satellite, Luna.
First, a quick explanation of why Cruithne is not actually a moon, then an explanation of why many refuse to accept that fact. It’s not a moon because, well, it’s an asteroid. Cruithne orbits the Sun, not the Earth, and its seemingly wonky orbital pattern is definitely not tied to the Earth’s in any satellite-like fashion. By no means is Cruithne actually a secondary body orbiting the Earth — so why is it so often referred to that way?
The answer is that Cruithne has a very similar orbital period to the Earth’s, just a day or so off at 364 days per cycle. This means that when the astroid happens to be close to the Earth, it will also happen to stay close to the Earth for quite a while. The tendency of this small celestial body to move in tandem with the Earth, often for long portions of the year, has led some to incorrectly dub it our second moon.
However, though it may take a similar amount of time to loop around our star, Cruithne’s orbit is anything but regular. As seen from an objective viewpoint (above right), it’s easy to see how the two orbits are independent of one another. Seen from a more realistic perspective, one which keeps the Earth stationary and simulations our view from its surface, shows a very different picture. View the video below, which offers a great three-dimensional look at Cruithne’s so-called “horseshoe orbit.” Seen from this perspective, it’s a lot easier to understand why Cruithne has been so widely mischaracterized as a moon of the Earth.
Zombieville For Sale
The 23-year Premiere
Watch: Exclusive Trailer for Tsai Ming-liang’s Long-Awaited ‘Rebels of the Neon God’
By Travis Clark
The film is finally set for a theatrical premiere in the U.S.
It’s been a long time coming, but Tsai Ming-liang’s 1992 film “Rebels of the Neon God” is finally getting a U.S. premiere thanks to Big World Pictures, and Indiewire has the exclusive trailer.
The film centers on a young man named Hsiao-kang who defies his parents wishes and runs away to downtown Kapei where an unfortunate meeting leads him down a path of trouble.
The Baller Formerly Known As Prince
Yes, Prince really did play high school basketball, and we have a tremendous photo to prove it
By Des Bieler
By now, you should have seen the hilarious “Chappelle Show” skit in which Charlie Murphy recalls a night when Prince surprisingly schooled him in basketball (if not, drop everything and check it out). And there has been some corroboration that the diminutive pop star/strange person really does have game.
On Tuesday, we got something wonderful: An old photo of Prince in his high school basketball uniform, plus some words of praise from his coach at the time. This came from Libor Jany, a reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where the man who would later give us “Purple Rain” first learned to rain jumpers.
“Everyone was willing to let the writer hang, and I wasn’t.”
One on 1 Profile: Editor/Publisher Nan Talese Continues Her Legacy in the World of Books
By Budd Mishkin
In any book, one of the most heartfelt thank yous from an author usually goes to the book editor, and for many years, some of the most prominent authors have thanked Nan Talese. NY1’s Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile.
Nan Talese was once dubbed the “high priestess of all New York editor/publishers.”
“People have said, ‘I’m so glad to meet you,'” she says. “Now, I cannot figure it out. (laughs).”
Talese: The hard thing is to write. What I do is easy.
Mishkin: Maybe it’s easy for you.
Talese: It’s easy for me.
Talese is held in such high regard that she has her own imprint, akin to her own department of the publishing giant Doubleday.
On the walls of her Midtown office hang pictures of some of the writers with whom she’s worked for decades, including best-selling authors Margaret Atwood and Pat Conroy.
At her Upper East Side home, there are notes from book projects both present and past.
“What I usually do is – I won’t do it because it’s undignified – I lie down here with my feet up here and I read the manuscripts,” Talese says. “I read very, very slowly. because I hear the words.”
Her appreciation for what writers endure is helped immensely by the fact that she lives with a writer, and a pretty fair one at that: her husband of more than 55 years, Gay Talese.
“As Gay writes his book, I read aloud the pages as they come out, and I think it puts me in the atmosphere of the writer’s working,” Nan Talese says. “I think it’s helped me a great deal.”