August 2006 Archives
I was very pleased to hear that Chicago O'Hare finally has wifi available for travellers. They've been lagging behind other airports in that regard. Previously the only option for getting online were booths where you pay around $5 for 15 minutes access.
The new system is not free, but it does seem to have pretty good coverage across the terminals. Unfortunately it is also painfully slow quite a bit of the time, making me wonder if the convenience of being online is worth the frustration of waiting quite so long for sites to load.
In true "web 2.0" style, the service is marked "beta". Hopefully that means it'll improve with time.
Tags: wifi, chicago o'hare
The first lyrics to grab my attention during a first listen to Lamchop's new album Damaged were from the beautiful, sprawling first track, Paperback Bible:
i have always thought
That handguns were made for shooting people
Rather than for sport
Why not use a rifle in most other applications?
You might find a rifle or a musket
But you'll never hear a pistol
There may always be Someone looking for or finding some
Guess I'd like to sell
A good used paperbacked living bible
They're a perfect example of how Kurt Wagner's lyrics can seem so surreal out of context but, when paired with his vocals and arrangemments, become simply sublime.
It sounds like Andy Whitman's spent more time with the album than I've yet had a chance to. I hope I enjoy it as much as he clearly does. I think I will.
Little Miss Sunshine feels like a more mainstream sibling of films from last year like The Squid And The Whale and Me and You and Everyone We Know and unsurprisingly given the film's wider distribution it doesn't have the same psychological weight, deadpan humour, or dysfunction as those films.
That may be just as well as several parents seemed to have chosen the film's title above its 'R' rating and brought small children along to see it. Hopefully those children were able to enjoy the soundtrack—so well put together by DeVotchKa—and ignore the less appropriate scenes and language.
The fact that the film didn't appeal to me quite so much two of my favourite films of 2005 is not to say this film doesn't have its fair share of humour—or dysfunction—and it definitely provides an enjoyable couple of hours of movie viewing. It's worth seeing for the last ten minutes alone, which demonstrate perhaps the only reasonable response to their setting.
Tags: little miss sunshine, me and you and everyone we know, the squid and the whale
To pick up a theme from the previous post, I was very interested to hear (probably via cityofsound) a few months back that Bloomsbury were working on a new series called The Writer and the City. In their words:
The Writer and the City is a series of beautifully produced, pocket-sized books featuring great authors writing about cities they know best.
Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town is the first I've had a chance to read and it's a great collection of three short stories set in New York City, moving from the tragedy of the War of Independence (when much of the city was burned to the ground), through the bustle of the city's explosive growth as a financial center in the 19th century and on to the tale of a psychiatrist dealing with her own feelings about the destruction of the World Trade Center as she seeks to manage a patient's situation.
The real power of the stories lies—as I'm sure was the intention when they were chosen for this series—in the tapestry they together weave, portraying the city in several stages of its development, telling tales of characters from different classes, living through markedly different situations, but all part of the history and the fabric of New York.
This weekend saw me making my first proper foray into Canada, having previously not been further across the border than Windsor, Ontario, and that only for lunch after having my green card approved. This time we headed to Cameron, Ontario on the far side of Toronto for Culture Is Not Optional's Practicing Resurrection conference.
The conference seemed to go extremely well and was a great time away with friends and meeting new people. It took place on a farm owned and operated by Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat and Henry and Sarah Bakker. Their experiment in sustainable farming provided a great location that was also appropriate for the conference which, whether purposefully or not, ended up adopting an agrarian theme.
That theme was largely implicit as talks focussed on design, fashion, food, fair trade, place, and more, but emerged consistently as discussion raised questions about how to maintain awareness of our impact on and interconnectedness with others as we go about our daily lives. Much of that came back to maintaining a commitment to a physical space, not only through the now familiar refrain of purchasing locally but also through a commitment to understanding your place's history and nature.
That discussion became (al)most heated after the second keynote address by Norman Wirzba. Whilst I'm assured that Wirzba is most definitely not anti-city or anti-technology, it was possible to hear his keynotes as such, and that revealed a tension that runs right through the 'sustainability movement' between agrarianism and urbanism.
As most attendees seemed to agree, true rural and urban settlements are usually complementary and it is the sub- and ex-urban spaces that tend to have an abrasive effect on their surroundings, but coming to an understanding of what it means to appreciate the beauty of urban spaces and commit to environments that are so often transient is difficult, and hopefully future events will be able to address that more directly. With Wendell Berry being so frequently quoted, I found myself wishing for a similarly wise and articulate writer to speak into the conversation from an urban life.
The key question I was left with was what it means to commit to place in the context of an innately displaced lifestyle, such as that of a transatlantic marriage. While ideals of young people returning to their place of origin after studying are noble, I'm not sure I'm willing to accept that they're the only way or even necessarily more good than alternatives. Even if they were, it's too late for us! We will always have one eye on another place, and I wonder what, given that, commitment to the one place means.
Tags: culture is not optional, practicing resurrection, cameron, ontario, norman wirzba, agrarianism, urbanism, wendell berry
In the current climate it's difficult to believe that anything that should give pause to the US administration (or public, for that matter) will. Nevertheless, it's still good to see such things getting some attention and maybe something will gain the critical mass and longevity to really make a difference.
The latest is Harpers Magazine's coverage of a document thought to be from the safe house of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (either the mastermind of the Iraqi insurgency for many months or a buffoon, depending on which day's governmental press releases you chose to read) stating that:
The best way to get out of this crisis is to entangle the American forces in a war against Iran. A war between the Americans and Iran will have many benefits in favor of the Sunni and the resistance
More can be found here.
(via slacktivist)
Tags: iran, middle-eastern crisis, iraq, iraqi insurgency, al-qaeda, us government
It used to be said that no two countries in which McDonalds had set up its "restaurants" had ever been to war with one another.
I suppose it was some sort of capitalist mantra about how global trade makes us aware of our interdependence, rather than simply suggesting that all the chemicals ingested at McDonalds' reduced our inclination towards warfare.
This morning it occurred to me to check the ongoing veracity of that claim. There are/were nine McDonalds' in Lebanon, and there are more than 80 in Israel.
