Writingstatic

Somebody from Australia who is a good writer.

Omie

Colorful illustrations.

Wild Ones

What do Marlon Brando, Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker have in common?  Jonathan Jones connects the dots, with a side stroke at the dreams and nightmares of American democracy.

“Sometimes credited as Der Führer”

IMDB’s page on the film career of Adolf Hitler.

The worst album covers ever

A fine selection.

Trapped Miner Wishes He Could See the Coverage

The Onion, bloody brilliant.

Adventures

“In 1930, in September, on a boat trip to Cairo, I fell into the Mediterranean Sea.”  More from Witold Gombrowicz.

Eternal Winter: Lessons of the Aral Sea Disaster

As the wind goads salt drifts across the expanse of the former seabed, abandoned ships rust in the sand, whalelike.  Harper’s apocalyptic glimpse of possibly the world’s worst ecological disaster.

Dubyaspeak

“Border relations between Canada and Mexico have never been better.”

Overqualified

Cover letters that sure as hell won't get the job.

The Infography

Professors, librarians, and other scholars recommend the best sources of information about their subjects of expertise.  A searchable reference tool the likes of which I despaired to find.

The Duke in His Domain

Truman Capote’s brilliant, partial profile of Marlon Brando, insightful and infuriating by turns.

A Little Iliad

Finally, an intelligent reading of the Iliad and a proper roasting of Troy the movie.

The Rat

Of the giant, the judge, and the rodent that tied them.  By Witold Gombrowicz.

Dog Toys

“As with most pathological behaviours, this one may be traced back to the patient’s childhood.  As a developing puppy he bonded closely with a teddy-bear I had won on Brighton pier earlier that year.  As our pup matured, he initiated a quasi-sexual relationship with this teddy, who thereafter became known as Bitch.”

The Mysteries of Translation

Some good advice for choosing among various translations of Haruki Murakami and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others.  Here is an interesting follow-up discussion.

Molvania: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry

If you were cruising at 30,000ft, heading north-east over Romania and downwind of Chernobyl, would you or any of your fellow passengers know that below you lies the tiny former socialist republic of Molvania, with its sleazy-sounding medieval towns of Scunge, Vajana and Skrotul?

Louisa, Johnny, and the North Shore Huldre

A fine piece of speculative fiction.  By S. Evans.

Lotus Eaters

The best part if waking up is the [brand name censored] in your cup.

Babylon by Bus

The beginnings of an article for Modern Gypsy magazine.

Klotilda: A Fragment

Climax of an unstarted play.  Also worthy: Why I hate the internet, or “I was looking for pædophilia and it sent me to Philadelphia.”

St. Nicholas

The patron saint of nearly everybody, including children, bankers, lawyers, poets, murderers, prostitutes and the Lemko people of the Ukraine.  Also known as Santa Claus.

Music Videos by Dougal Wilson

Good concepts, good special effects and a sense of humor.

Kids in the Hall Video Clips

The only show that would make me watch TV again, with commercials.

New York Public Library Picture Collection Online

One day, the laziness of certain people notwithstanding, I will migrate this site to a semantic web framework.  A complete redesign will happen then, and I know where I’ll go for the pretty pictures.

The Triplets of Belleville

A trailer for one of the best cartoons I’ve seen in years (also known as Belleville Rendez-Vous).  Here is a review.  Here is the Oscar-nominated title song, the French version.

GreenCine

Like Netflix, but specializing in arthouse, indie and foreign titles and, therefore, better.

DirtDirt

Hours (or at least minutes) of warm clickety fun.  Dreems is particularly groovy.  Thanks for the arrow in the sand, Caterina.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

An in-depth study by Jonathan Janson.

How to Succeed with a Career in Advertising

“Not your father’s brain parasite.”

Exactitudes

Astute and artistic photographic studies of the styles of various social groups.  Fun to browse and compare to your own wardrobe.

How to Make Money from Internet Music

Gareth Lloyd’s lucid piece of economic analysis on how internet irrevocably alters music buyers’ choice and why online music stores are the wave of the future.  There is a small error in the final graph but it doesn’t affect the conclusions.

Mari Naomi Schaal

A San Francisco artist with an eye for cats.  More generally, a San Francisco artist with an eye…

An Interview with Karl Marx

Marx will not take the blame for communism and the gulag.  But he enjoys his continuing influence in the academy.

INTP

My Myers-Briggs personality type.  I'm teetering right on the border with INFP, though.  Both descriptions are largely spot on.

The Purple Prose Eater

Romance writer Deb Stover on the dangers of pairing his “tumescent tube of fire” with her “hot sleeve of love” and the unfairness of women doing all the quivering while men do all the throbbing.

Salvation at the Flop

Delirium in prose by Kelvin Gordon (who, so far as I can tell, maintains a blog at The Dinghy).

Basilius Besler, Hortus Eystettensis

Arguably the greatest book of botanical prints ever created.  Related (I missed this one somehow): Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien.

Death of an Innocent

“One of his last acts was to take a photograph of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaskan sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell.  He is smiling in the photo, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.”

Project Syndicate

An association of quality newspapers from around the world that present opinions and analysis on global issues from well-known philosophers, economists and other social scientists.  A good alternative to punditry.

Assa Soundtrack

The state of the art in Russian rock avant-garde circa 1986.  The musical backdrop to one of my favorite films.  Streaming audio, WMP format.

Ocean Size

“That’s the real reason why no-one digs Jane’s anymore—it was the fuck soundtrack for an entire generation who have since broken up.”  A short, short tribute to Jane’s Addiction.

One Man’s Meat is Another’s Person

A food columnist surveys cannibalism.

Magnatune

Music as it should be.  I am probably listening to their classical webcast right now.

Platonov Fierce and Beautiful

“Perhaps this is how a mythical beast would write if he were to assume human form—some nocturnal creature who hears with his legs, sees with closed eyes, and can smell a creature of the opposite sex a dozen miles away.  He uses words awkwardly, incorrectly, he puts them in the wrong place in the sentence, where they don’t go. Most important, he tries to convey some other kind or quality of soul with these words, another sense beyond the five familiar senses.”  Tatiana Tolstaya on the ethereal, brilliant, language-bending prose of Andrei Platonov (whose Chevengur I am currently reading in amazement).

Self-Made Man

The New Yorker piece on Arshile Gorky, an Armenian/American painter.  Some samples of Gorky’s art.

Lucian Freud

Sigmund Freud’s painter grandson.

The Inevitable Essay

A comparison of closet space in New York and LA amidst post-nuclear apocalypse.  A bird dropping by Paul Ford.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Dreamlike.  Surreal.  Photography.  Need bigger pictures.  (Via Iconomy)

The End

Nalanda E-text Conversion Project

Project Gutenberg texts in PDF format.  No more raw text!  Words must be cooked.

Postmodernism is Dead.  Now What?

An essay by Samuel Smith on the coming Age of the Network.  Modernism erected monolithic structures.  Postmodernism dismantled them.  Now the way has been cleared for the new world order: distributed culture.

The Empire that was Russia

A fantastic photographic survey of the Russian Empire shortly before its disintegration in wars and revolutions, taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the last Czar.

Loretta Lux

Yikes!  Tykes.

Nonsense NYC

Street events, loft parties, puppet shows, bike rallies, costume balls, interactive art shows, movies in unusual places, parades, outlaw dancing, guerilla theater, burlesque and variety shows, loser open mikes, circuses, and absurdist pranks.

That’s Deep

What if The Matrix: Reloaded inspired philosophical merchandizing?

Kissinger Associates

Henry Kissinger’s shop maintains a pretty low profile.  Odds and ends of information.

A Small Village at the Lake of Lucerne, Switzerland

From “An Eye for the World: Photographs by Shotaro Shimomura.”

Stop Motion Studies

A series of Web-based animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage.  Made from stills of people riding the Boston subway.

The Ruin of Russia

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, on IMF’s bungling of Russia’s economy with poor advice: “Neo-liberal reform produced undiluted economic decline.”

Dirty Wallpaper

Art and filth on the walls of seedy European streets.  (Via Chris on the Move)

Sarah Bryan Miller on elitism

Assert your inner snob.

DJ Kid Koala vs. Jessica Rabbit

Is DJ-ing an inherently postmodern art form?  (Video clip, 9.8MB.)

Lost in Transit

Another place where I write sometimes.

Spira Solaris and the Universal Ouroboros

A good information resource on the mystical world snake.

Autopoesis: Demo-nic

MPEG art.

The Metaphysician’s Nightmare

Some practical advice on vanquishing Satan.  A short story by Bertrand Russell.  (Via Alamut)

Netherlandish Proverbs

Also known as The Topsy-Turvy World, this Pieter Bruegel painting gives a picture really worth a thousand words, give or take a few.  Annotated.  (The images are a bit hazy, so here is a nice and crisp one for your viewing pleasure.)

Caligula Nation

“The promise of democracy is fulfilled in me; every man an emperor, every man his own Caligula.  Dancing girls for everyone!”

François Villon

A short biography of the poet thief (or a thief poet—can we tell which one comes first?).

The History of Spoonerisms

Of Reverend Spooner and his mischievous tongue.

My Own Self

The dismal sanctuary of Asya Schween.  Memorable self-portraits.

Interview with Asya Schween

About Asya Schween, a 22-year-old photographer.

Ymi

“James,” I said, folding the wax paper back over my untouched sandwich. “What was it like, being dead?”

Future Power

Think Same:  Despair, Inc.’s Dr. E.L. Kersten explains the necessity and inevitability of conformity to the soulless Wintel masses.  (Related: Apple’s 1984 commercial.)

The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

An argument put forward by the philosopher John Searle that intends to show that the mind is not a computer.

Memento Mori

The story that inspired the movie Memento.  By Jonathan Nolan.

An Interview with Dorothy Gambrell

Meet the mind behind the delectable Cat and Girl.

Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur

A book of beautiful lithographs inspired by the fantastic shapes of animal and plant life forms.  (Via Bhikku)

Conversations Kill

The real-life mellow-drama of Vassar students abroad in Russia, in two short acts.

The Cremaster Cycle

On my “To Watch” list… It’s playing at the Castro, a jewel of a theater, May 25–June 15, and it just so happens I’ll be getting seasick on a cruiseship in the Mediterranean at that point.  Life is a bitch, eh?

Hoogerbrugge

Short animated clips in gif and flash.  Disturbing and wonderful.  Don’t forget to check out his links!  (Via Eeksy-Peeksy)

Logical Fallacies

A guide to logical fallacies.  What I’d like to do one day is study how these correspond to the patterns of bounded rationality whose discovery earned Daniel Kahneman his Nobel Prize.

Celestial Kingdom

“The Constitution, like the tender bamboo stalk, bends but does not break in the Winds of Change.”

Cabinet

Calendar, curtain… Pretty words.

Mary Ellen Bute

A pioneering animator who, apparently, made a film out of Finnegan’s Wake.  I’ll believe it when I see it.

Science Made Stupid

Again, by Tom Weller.

Minims

or, Man Is The Only Animal That Wears Bow Ties.  Written and illustrated by Tom Weller.  (Via Giornale Nuovo)

Donald Barthelme’s barthelmismo

A page dedicated to Donald Barthelme.  Stories, articles, sundry goodies.

Codex Seraphinianus

A strange book describing a strange world in a strange language.  I gotta get me a copy.

Cricket

Insect destruction is a topic dear to my heart.

Book Burning

A portal of links that tell about the burning of books, starting with China in the 3rd century B.C.  Does not tell about the like fates of the Great Library of Alexandria and its less famous rival, al-Farabi’s Library of Otrar, whose destruction apparently merits no websites but probably was mentioned in this movie.

Reinventions of Human Language

The author of Guns, Germs and Steel talks about how we are more eloquent than monkeys.

Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend

By Sir Thomas Browne.  “I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation … of Browne’s Urn Burial,” Borges wrote.  This site is a good introduction to the 17th-century author.

B.A.’s Weblog

I’m a sucker for places with outstanding links.  B.A. Rosenblum’s blog is one such place.  Now I know what a chiasmus is (but a chiasmus does not know what I am).

Sex, Dreads and Rock’n’roll

A somewhat cranky article about Suicide Girls, a punk-goth-emo porn site.

The State

A complete online archive of the great erstwhile MTV sketch comedy show.  All I need now to make my life complete is the same thing for Kids in the Hall.

Tram Spark

Malcolm Davidson is well-linked-to, and I wasn’t going to bother, but to hell with that.  I love his poetry.

Collective Terms for Animals

If I’m not mistaken, one may properly say “an unkindness of ravens,” “a stubbornness of rhinoceros,” “a piteousness of doves,” and “a shrewdness of apes,” all to designate a group of particular birds or animals.  Lexicographers must pee their pants when they see this stuff.  Anthropologists, too.

Megolaponera Foetens, Stink Ant of Cameroon

“On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella …  After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant.”

A Gray Box with Words Inside

A good blog written by Bobby Burgess.

The Lem Chronicles

The story of a writer surrounded by idiots.

Bush or Chimp?

The 43rd president of the United States: deciduous or simian?

Wheels

A robotic touch of your distant lover awaits in the future.  For now, just use your own hands.

Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs is a hoax artist; he does things like drag crucifixes with attached fake rotting human remains around New York, or open up a pimping business for dogs (“Cat House for dogs, featuring a savory selection of hot bitches”).  The latter has become an urban legend.

Vadim, Lord of the Underground

A subterranean excursion with the leader of the Diggers of the Underground Planet.

Mysteries Under Moscow

Diggers of the Underground Planet are urban spelunkers who go into the labyrinth of tunnels under the 850-year-old city.  A chronicle of abandoned secret labs, pagan rites, and strange subterranean denizens.  Very J.G. Ballard-esque but supposedly real.

On the temperature of Hell

“Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?  Support your answer with a proof.”

Vitrifax: The Writing of Stanislaw Lem

The new Solaris is in theaters.  My loyalty lies with Tarkovsky’s version, but this isn’t about movies.  This is about the book.  And the guy who wrote it.

Riley Dog

When my links suck, Steve Laidlaw’s links don’t.  One of the best portals to all things artistic, photographic, literary, or just plain weird.  Updated daily.

Jerry Springer Gets Deep

Or what happens when people start bitch-slapping one another in the name of abstract ideas.  Check out also Jenny Jones on the Perils of Postmodernism.

The Adventures of Fiznik and SHOUTY

Dis a comic.  Dis be funny.

The Doomsday Argument Primer

The Doomsday argument purports to prove, from basic probability theory and a few seemingly innocuous empirical premisses, that the risk that our species will go extinct soon is much greater than previously thought.  Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, elaborates.

Interview with Victor Pelevin in the BOMB Magazine

More Pelevin stuff.

Identialism as the Highest Stage of Dualism

I can’t just link to a Russian site and leave my English-speaking readers high and dry.  Here’s an incestuous link to my own translation of an excerpt from a Victor Pelevin novel.

Works of Victor Pelevin

All things Victor Pelevin.  PoMo sci-fi in the CIS.  The site is entirely in Russian.

Flightless

This site is no longer updated.  Its archives are a wonder, though.  It’s a journal narrative of the usual story of a girl going to college, being homesick, losing her virginity, etc.  Done wrong, it would be trite.  This is done right: literate, warm and wistful.  Not bad for a college freshman.

Excerpts from “The Subway Diary”

Paul Ford may be a fiend from hell with suppurating oily green skin, but his writing has a wonderful tinge of old-school pedophiliac nostalgia that has me all a-shiver.  It reminds me of the times when people still took their tea with lemon, curdling milk be damned.  I write blurbs better when I’m sober.

Root Garden

Richard Ames Hart writes poetry.  I don’t know much about poetry but I think his is good.  I like to read it.  What do you like to do?

“Identity Is a Construct” (and Other Sentences)

A sci-fi glimpse at how postmodernism will get us yet.

Anal Advisor

Ooof, time for bad puns!  This page features penetrating insights on the ins and outs of backdoor love.  Plenty of good advice.

“No Hay Banda” (A Long, Strange Trip Down David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive)

Allen Ruch of The Modern World tells you what the hell that movie was about.  A good compendium of theories.  (Via Alamut)

One Man’s Eye

Alan Siegel’s collection of photographs, from which I steal remorselessly.

Brazil the Movie—FAQ

My all-time favorite movie dissected.  Yum!

Links and Power: The Political Economy of Links on the Web

A look at the Web’s currency—links.