Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Monday, December 23, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
A candle in the cold and the dark: 17 years without Carl Sagan
Saturday, December 14, 2013
go see Suspiria at the Museum of the Moving Image
Yes, it gets shown all the time at revival theaters. But there is no movie that more demands to be experienced in the very best possible visual and sound quality, deservedly celebrated for both its gorgeous cinematography and stunning soundtrack. I've even been to a screening where the theater had the truly unenviable dilemma of putting the film either on a screen with sound-system problems, or one with better sound but markedly worse visual quality. And this is almost the Platonic ideal of a presentation: in the Museum's gigantic main theater with the most impeccable revival screening environment in New York, in not only a 35mm print in an era when that is becoming increasingly rare, but an "imported 35mm print of uncut UK version"!
Sunday, December 08, 2013
the opening sentence of an upcoming book review
Friday, December 06, 2013
Santa Claus Conquers the Gray Lady
Little-known fact: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians received a positive review in The New York Times praising Pia Zadora's "appealing" performance. No, really.
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Lost in Non-Non-Translation
Saturday, July 06, 2013
Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre on Project Gutenberg
Monday, May 06, 2013
dorkbot-.gif
As mentioned by dorkbot's founder, NYC meeting organizer and sexy geek douglas irving repetto earlier today, he has just replaced the static dorkbot logo on the dorkbot home page with my animated GIF version assembling the several alternate-color-schemed logos douglas had previously created. Though I've contributed in various small ways to dorkbot over the years, this is a true honor! And I think it's the perfect encapsulation of the dorkbot spirit that an animated GIF, whose frames are images created by douglas with an old-school analog pen plotter, joins a BLINK tag on a webpage that's remained in plain-vanilla HTML all these years while waiting for the world to catch up with it.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Writing the Libertarian New York Times Sunday Dialogue
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
Garbage in, garbage out
Likewise, many teachers have an intuitive sense that different students have different learning styles: some are verbal and some are visual; some are linear, some are holistic. Teachers imagine they will improve outcomes if they tailor their presentations to each student. But there’s no evidence to support this either.
Monday, January 07, 2013
History Lesson
- Les Misérables: everything Americans know about French revolutions.
- The Big Lebowski: everything Americans know about the New Left.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail: everything Americans know about anarcho-syndicalism.
- Monty Python's Life of Brian: everything Americans know about leftist sectarianism.