Boffo Socko Jaco
By Kevin Gosa
Bassist Jaco Pastorius’ seminal work, The Birthday Concert.

Belief in the Bones
By Alisa Harris
Rationalism, mystery, and forensic science - in prime time.

I brewed the coffee a little too strong, but it was still delicious and I’ll perfect my amount soon - I always brew too strong, anyhow. I settled down to write a bunch of work emails while Tom got ready to head to work. He’s on a new TV show now, hopefully through the winter and into early spring, and he’s enjoying the work so far.

In the course of the day, I managed to do three loads of laundry, make and eat lunch, write a movie review, clean the apartment, catch up on a bunch of work, plan meals for next week, order groceries (I’ve broken down because next week is so busy and I won’t have time to shop, so FreshDirect it is), and put together some spreadsheets for Comment. All in all, a good day.

Tom got home a while ago and our fellowship group is showing up any minute, so I threw some brownies in the oven and have a coffeepot ready to brew, and we’re having ravioli (frozen, from Whole Foods - I am lame), dressed with olive oil and sage and a bunch of black pepper, and some red wine for dinner as we wait. I promise I feed him vegetables.

On Tuesday night we saw Tom Stoppard in conversation with David Remnick (you know, the guy who edits that little magazine called The New Yorker. It was so good, and we were so delighted that we left with a BAM membership and a signed copy of The Coast of Utopia. We live four blocks away. It seemed like a good time for it, and their winter/spring lineup is amazing.

People are here. Ciao!

Chocolate Tasting
By Daniel Nayeri
Want to knock your significant other’s socks off?

3191: A Year of Beautiful, Ordinary Mornings
By Jenni Simmons
A long-distance friendship spawns an intimate photographic examination of daily life.

Also, I am twenty-five.

So today I am here quite early to let the piano tuner in, and early this afternoon I am hopping a train and heading northward to spend time with my Mom this weekend. My birthday is on Tuesday (the universe’s gift to me will hopefully be that this election is OVER) and so my family is rather happy to see me this weekend, and I, them. In the meantime, Tom will be wrapping the current project and starting a new one soon afterwards.

I have no linkdump for you this Friday, but you should check out The Curator this week for fun with the Met and Doctor Atomic, a documentary film about exclusive Manhattan preschools, and a piece on bizarre performance art by a couple of my friends.

Lastly, for all those who giggle uncontrollably when someone says, “My SPOON is too big!”, this should be good news.

Pre-School Mayhem in Nursery University
By Sarah Hanssen
If you thought college applications were grueling, wait until you find out about Manhattan’s most competitive nursery schools.

Performance and The Odd Lamb
By Sam Kho
On becoming co-pilot with The Odd Lamb and the mandatory veering off involved.

It snowed a bit on the way in to work today, and incidentally, this is my last day working at NYU. A day worthy of celebration.

Never Underestimate the Power of Cartoons
By Christy Tennant
Political cartoons: child’s play, or public conscience?

Broken Windows and Internet Civility
By Alissa Wilkinson
Could better internet aesthetics make for better virtual neighborhoods?

In brief, though:
• Tom is busily finishing up the current shoot and hoping the next one is around the corner.
• I am busily plotting to take over the world as full a slate of programming as a nonprofit can handle in times of recession for 2009, writing, editing, and trying to study somewhere in there too. Next week is my last week working at NYU, which will hopefully take some of the load off.
• Since the last iBook I had was four years old, not mine, and subsequently stolen, I finally decided it was time to have an actual computer to, you know, write on and use at work and do all that studenty stuff. Hence, I got a shiny new MacBook (the cheaper version) and plan on it lasting me a very long time. And I love it - it’s small and light.

Am actually too scattered to think about much lately. But these articles have been provocative, when I’ve crammed them into short subway rides:
• A country so polarized that consuming arugula has become a political act: A conservative thinker is branded a closet liberal based on the food he eats.
• Malcolm Gladwell’s article on late bloomers, essential reading for everyone.
• Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to Run Artists’ Space on Governors Island
• Farmer in Chief - why food is important, and why it’s possible to change as a nation, for our health, our resources, our economy, and the way we treat the poor.

I’m not a huge fan of the “unschooling” method (which has been around for a couple decades now), so I was kind of on the fence through the article until I got to this paragraph:

“In one sense it is hyperparenting, an extreme version of bourgeois parenting,” he said. Parents, he said, are anticipating a world in which children will have to be ever more flexible and creative, and some home-schooling parents believe their approach will provide that edge.

But Ms. Rendell and her group aren’t thinking about admissions to Stanford, she said.

Count me as one of those homeschoolers whose parents (neither of whom went to college) weren’t thinking about admission to Stanford. Oh, but wait; I earned my undergraduate at a top-tier private university, and now I’m in graduate school at another. Somehow, it didn’t matter. Every kind of schooling turns out some good students, some mediocre students, and some bad students.

On Fantasy Fiction;
Or, You Should Read Cyndere’s Midnight
By Annie Young Frisbie
In defense of speculative fiction and great stories, and an introduction to one such tale.

A Red Balloon of Hope
(Part 2)
By Jenni Simmons
Part two of our interview with singer/songwriter Sandra McCracken.

Republican commissioner Lary Bugbee admits that despite the staff members whose job is to proof them, this mistake got through.

Edward McDonough, the Democratic commissioner said that usually they catch most everything and apologizes for this ‘terrible mistake’.

To make things fair, they should print some with “McBain“. Now that’s change we can believe in.

In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? . . .

The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of “Saturday Night Live” and “Monty Python”, the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over televisions’s control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to maket he programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.

Not so nonsensical, Neil, and perhaps more effective than you’d like to think:

So anyhow, I’m near the end of the book, and in chapter eleven, there’s this statement:

To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

And next to it, in old handwriting, is this handwritten gem:

The TV is not a Cylon, people. Seriously.

Part of the reason this crisis occurred is that everyone was living beyond their means – from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street. CEOs got greedy. Politicians spent money they didn’t have. Lenders tricked people into buying home they couldn’t afford and some folks knew they couldn’t afford them and bought them anyway.

We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save.

Now, I know that in an age of declining wages and skyrocketing costs, for many folks this was not a choice but a necessity. People have been forced to turn to credit cards and home equity loans to keep up, just like our government has borrowed from China and other creditors to help pay its bills. But we now know how dangerous that can be. Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what’s necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again.