Pasadena Pictures

Charles Bukowski & Sean Penn.

Mon, 28 May 2012 11:15:21 -0700

Charles Bukowski & Sean Penn.

Richard Feynman — Nobel-winning physics icon, curiosity...

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:44:46 -0700

Richard Feynman — Nobel-winning physics icon, curiosity champion, graphic novel hero, bongo drummer, wager-maker, no ordinary genius — would have been 94 today. To celebrate, here is one of Feynman’s most beloved classics, a 1964 lecture in which he distills with equal parts wit and wisdom the essence of the scientific method:

Contronyms

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:22:55 -0700

Contronyms:

Contronyms are special cases of homographs (two words with the same spelling). Some examples:

anabasis - military advance, military retreat
apology - admission of fault in what you think, say, or do; formal defense of what you think, say, or do
aught - all, nothing
bolt - secure, run away
by - multiplication (e.g., a three by five matrix), division (e.g., dividing eight by four)
chuffed - pleased, annoyed
cleave - separate, adhere
clip - fasten, detach
consult - ask for advice, give advice
copemate - partner, antagonist
custom - usual, special
deceptively smart - smarter than one appears, dumber than one appears
dike - wall, ditch
discursive - proceeding coherently from topic to topic, moving aimlessly from topic to topic
dollop - a large amount, a small amount
dust - add fine particles, remove fine particles
enjoin - prescribe, prohibit
fast - quick, unmoving
first degree - most severe (e.g., murder), least severe (e.g., burn)
fix - restore, castrate
flog - criticize harshly, promote aggressively
garnish - enhance (e.g., food), curtail (e.g., wages)
give out - produce, stop production
grade - incline, level
handicap - advantage, disadvantage
help - assist, prevent (e.g., “I can’t help it if…”)
left - remaining, departed from
liege - sovereign lord, loyal subject
mean - average, excellent (e.g., “plays a mean game”)
off - off, on (e.g., “the alarm went off”)
out - visible (e.g., stars), invisible (e.g., lights)
out of - outside, inside (e.g., “work out of one’s home”)
oversight - error, care
pitted - with the pit in, with the pit removed
put out - extinguish, generate (e.g., something putting out light)
quiddity - essence, trifling point
quite - rather, completely
ravel - tangle, disentangle
rent - buy use of, sell use of
rinky-dink - insignificant, one who frequents RinkWorks
sanction - approve, boycott
sanguine - hopeful, murderous (obsolete synonym for “sanguinary”)
screen - show, hide
seed - add seeds (e.g., “to seed a field”), remove seeds (e.g., “to seed a tomato”)
skinned - with the skin on, with the skin removed
strike - hit, miss (in baseball)
table - propose (in the United Kingdom), set aside (in the United States)
transparent - invisible, obvious
unbending - rigid, relaxing
variety - one type (e.g., “this variety”), many types (e.g., “a variety”)
wear - endure through use, decay through use
weather - withstand, wear away
wind up - end, start up (e.g., a watch)
with - alongside, against

via tumbledore

Simple Rules for Life in London

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:02:27 -0700

On June 9th of 1908, as his youngest daughter, 12-year-old Elsie, prepared for a trip to London, author Rudyard Kipling wrote her a letter in which the following list of “rules for Life in London” was included.

Dear Bird,

[…]

I send you a few simple rules for Life in London.
Wash early and often with soap and hot water.
Do not roll on the grass of the parks. It will come off black on your dress.
Never eat penny buns, oysters, periwinkles or peppermints on the top of a bus. It annoys the passengers.
Be kind to policemen. You never know when you may be taken up.
Never stop a motor bus with your foot. It is not a croquet ball.
Do not attempt to take pictures off the wall of the National Gallery or to remove cases of butterflies from the National History Museum. You will be noticed if you do.
Avoid late hours, pickled salmon, public meetings, crowded crossings, gutters, water-carts and over-eating.

Ever your

Daddo

Orson Welles is The Batman! by Nick Perks Too much old time...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:00:14 -0700

Orson Welles is The Batman! by Nick Perks

Too much old time Hollywood brilliance not to post..

Shakespeare Insult Chart via kate—the—great/ilovecharts

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:06:25 -0700

Shakespeare Insult Chart

via kate—the—great/ilovecharts

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself | Sad to finish...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 15:55:00 -0700

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself |

Sad to finish this, but truly great to access the inner workings of David Foster Wallace. Below are my final highlighted excerpts from page 97 until the end of the book. If you missed my first post of this book-length interview with David Lipsky, those excerpted highlights are available here.

pg. 97 “Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”

pg. 104 PA: (as airplane is landing): “Just a reminder: The airport here in the Twin Cities is a smoke-free environment. Smoking only is permitted outdoors.”

DFW: “Permitted only outdoors. Its not the only thing that permitted outdoors.”

pg. 118 “The great thing about not owning a TV, is that, when you do have access to one, you can kind of plunge in. An orgy of spectation. Last night I watched the Golf Channel. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus. Old footage, rigid haircuts.”

pg. 132 “The worst-case nightmare of this is that- is that though I don’t feel it yet, I truly, truly, enjoy it. And I’m startin’ to turn into somebody who flies to New York every weekend for publication parties, shove my snout in front of other people’s photographs, and becomes this grotesque, capering figure. I think my terror of that is sufficient to keep me from doing it.”

pg. 150 “I mean, this in a way is that the book’s about (Infinite Jest). Its not about, “He watched television until his bladder let go,” or something like that- it’s more just, it’s a reliance on something.”

pg. 155 “I mean, there’s lots of times where I’ve read for three, four days in a row, pausing only to eat and sleep.”

pg. 156 “I began to see… a significant similarity between my relationship to television, and some of these people in the halfway house’s relation to, say, heroin.”

pg. 157 “So addiction is also a metaphor for how much you want readers to love a book. To be hooked. It’s an artist’s great ambition.”

pg. 158 “…you can’t find the middle until you hit both walls.”

pg. 162 “…what’s terribly pernicious about a lot of movies, is that they make the bad guys wholly unlike you. They turn them into cartoons. That you can feel superior to. Instead of making you realize that there’s a part of the villain in all of us.

pg. 166 “Don’t indulge your love for really cool special effects. Make a story that like- that hangs together and treats the audience like grown-ups and means something.”

pg. 175 “…whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9 percent of it is absolutely real.”

pg. 180 “Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there’s nothing like- there’s no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older. Who’s written something, or won some tournament, that you particularly admire.”

pg. 186-187 “Yeah, if I’m playin’ a little dumb I’m not, I’m not trying to condescend to you or act you you’re stupid. It’s just I don’t, I don’t want to feel every edge of this quite yet… So I would be an idiot, you know, if I were not playing various psychic games and erecting defenses.”

pg. 191 “…to what extent have I been a willing accomplice in that invasion, you know? To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how very many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now. But what if, you know, what if I become this grotesque parody of just what the book is about?”

pg. 196 “… I really need to find a few things that I believe in, in order to stay alive. And one of them is that this is-that I’m extraordinarily lucky to be able to do this kind of work. And that along with that luck come a tremendous obligation to do the best, to the the very best I can.”

pg. 198 “… there’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.”

pg. 201 “Loving somebody who’s absent, you know? Their presence didn’t satisfy but you feel their absence so much more keenly.”

pg. 214 “…I think if you’re writing out of a place where you think that you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re either condescending to the reader, of talking down to ‘im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are.”

pg. 237 on the movie City Slickers: “I didn’t even see that movie. Jack Palance scares me. I don’t see anything with Jack Palance.”

pg. 257 “You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded.”

pg. 270 on Infinite Jest: “Probably one answer is that I wanted something that had kind of the texture of what mental life was like in America right now.”

pg. 273 “Who felt this way? Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else.”

pg. 275 “I think with writing it’s really feeling that, their brain voice for a while becomes your brain voice. And that you feel- the Vulcan Mind Meld perhaps is a better analogy.”

pg. 288-289 on books becoming passe: “For me the interesting question is, what’s caused books to become kind of less important parts of the cultural conversation? … I don’t think they’re passe. I think they’ve gotta find fundamentally new ways to do their job. And I don’t think for instance we as a generation have done a very good job of this.”

pg. 290 “I guess my first inclination would be to say that most of that would be- to create stuff that mirrors sort of neurologically the way the world feels.”

pg. 305 “… the more people think that you’re really good, um, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is. … If bad attention hurts you, then you realize that the caliber of the weapon that’s pointed at you has gone way up. Has gone from like a .22 to a .45.”

Good & Evil in the Age of Radical Transparency

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:00:05 -0700

For the second year in a row, the number of murders in the City of Los Angeles dropped below 300. When last that happened, it was 1967 and the population was 30% smaller than it is today. Former LAPD Chief of Police Bill Bratton quickly praised the police force.

“It’s human beings who decide intentionally to commit a crime, criminals, or many others who get caught up in the moment of passion under the inducement of alcohol or drugs and commit crimes. That’s what police exist for, to control behavior.” – Bratton on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

However, rather than intervention by police upon errant Angelenos, I offer another idea: that the spread of technology has a major role in the falling numbers of violent acts, namely the ubiquitous mobile phone, working as both an adequate deterrent and an effective means of containment.

Allow, if you will, one writer a chance to elaborate.

To say that Occupy Los Angeles rang false and failed to capture the spirit of the 1960s would be both trite and obvious. In the end, the effort appeared more to be a symptom of the times than a true and definable cause. The movement became easy to ignore, especially considering the vast sprawl of Los Angeles and the current state of economic affairs for those who are employed. Who has time to stop and support an effort in the midst of such a troubling economic shakedown?

American writers like Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson both captured and uplifted the bohemian ideal, a principle receding from the subset of American cultural values, supplanted instead by the spreading tentacles of technology. Why else would Occupy LA come and go as such a flash in the proverbial pan? Those bohemian standards simply do not resonate with any depth in our increasingly modern society.

This city’s wholesale dismissal of the months-long Occupy LA movement and its timid cluster of campers around City Hall, compared to the attention given the recent spate of vehicle arsons (a series of rare, violent exceptions to relatively tranquil parts of the city) is telling of both media outlets and citizens alike.

We long ago became numb to the plodding humanistic plight of the Occupy crowd, despite its relative popularity, fringe-movement-wise, versus the even shorter-lived flash-in-the-proverbial-pan Tea Party endeavor.

That convoluted experiences have more US citizens embracing elements of beliefs into their cultural-philosophical lenses, rather than wholesale indoctrination by “noble causes,” appears to be the real story here. That we’re not necessarily disaffected or cynical, just ever more complicated, multi-faceted. Americans identify themselves in greater and greater numbers as politically independent. A December 21^st, 2011 Gallup poll reported that a majority of participants responded with a no, when asked “Is there any candidate who would make a good president.” (Which is not to mention universally dismal Congressional job approval figures.)

We are entering again the choppy American political season. To follow national politics closely is to have your heart repeatedly battered and bruised, no matter with which party you most closely identify. Unlike the Occupiers or Tea Party-types, I am careful not to dismiss outright my many Libertarian friends. They are generally young, technologically savvy, and, on the balance, intelligent.

Their’s is a political platform with genuine potential that speaks to the possibility of governance with far less federal regulation that the US currently exhibits. Considering our post-industrial existence -this information age- aspects of Libtertarianism seem to speak directly to our more progressive behavior, though I am very careful not to embrace any nascent political ideology prematurely.

One fixation that both Democrats and Republicans enjoy, provided they can remain civil, is an ongoing dialogue of parry and thrust, both within their political circles and between their political circles. This is true both publically and privately. The Libertarians I often encounter have an odd way of sounding that like that crazy guy who repetitively mumbles to himself while waiting for a bus that has not, nor may ever, arrive. Flat tax! Smaller government! End the Fed! It’s a well-organized rant, not a two-way discussion.

If Libertarianism seeks to rise beyond the sadly symptomatic Occupy and Tea Party spells, it must find a means to position its ideas into the national conversation.

Many young Americans claim to be independent but default to the Democratic Party for what, to them, are fairly comprehensible reasons. After being lambasted as spoilers in 2000’s Gore-Bush fiasco, numerous younger voters see any effort away from the Democratic Party as by-proxy assistance to the GOP.

The younger generation takes it as a given that to grow up in an age of increasing global awareness -in which the entire world is accessible, visible, and on superficial terms, outright knowable- was an unavoidable aspect of our 80s and 90s media diet. Place this perspective against that of many older conservatives with more mono-cultural life experiences, and many young people can’t help but be embarrassed, in some cases mortified, by a GOP who seems to represent everything about the US that is abhorred abroad and to the culturally phobic, far too comfortable.

This is not a call for a Libertarian uprising. This is a plea to examine elements of a distinct philosophy that might better serve a technologically enmeshed society. To be abundantly clear, I am not talking about Ron Paul, who’s past ideologies and associations remain suspect and whose son is one of those Embarrassing Americans. Nor am I talking about Gary Johnson, who frankly, nobody’s really heard of.

I am speaking directly to those who knew the words of Marshal McLuhan and his predictions about “the electric age” and the evisceration of private identity. To coin a phrase I recently overheard, “That was now. This is then.”

In an era defined by vanishing privacy and increasing information transparency, the two-party system stumbles on, a petrified relic of political duality. Every American would be better served by a more nuanced selection of presidential candidates, perhaps not in this election, but certainly in those to come.

opinion by Zach Urbina

Higher Worlds | As per usual, this long-neglected ritual snapped...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:15:06 -0700

Higher Worlds |

As per usual, this long-neglected ritual snapped back like a wrist-bound rubberband and I’ll damned if the sting doesn’t feel spectacularly cathartic. Sincere apologies to the late Henry Miller. - ZU

Television with Taste | As you could probably guess, there are a...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:15:00 -0700

Television with Taste |

As you could probably guess, there are a lot of “Mad Men” fans here at FSG. Think about it: what other show on television features so many characters reading books? Or penning an autobiography, as Roger Sterling does, out of spite for a competitor’s success?

So with the new season starting on March 25th I thought I’d share the official “Mad Men” Reading List. Each of these titles has appeared or been referenced on the show:

Season 1

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
Exodus by Leon Uris
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Season 2

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Season 3

Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
The Group by Mary McCarthy
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Season 4

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict
The Clue of the Black Keys by Carolyn Keene
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré

via fsgbooks

Your Brain on Fiction

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:30:09 -0700

Your Brain on Fiction:

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL l NYTimes Sunday Review March 17, 2012

Amid the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.)

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

via itwonlast

Beholding Holden, by writer Mike Norris and artist David...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:46:35 -0700

Beholding Holden, by writer Mike Norris and artist David Richardson, an illustrated imagining of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck Abandon the idea that...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:37:00 -0700

Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

via nevver

Genre lit in China: The commercial warfare novel and more...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:06:00 -0800

Genre lit in China: The commercial warfare novel and more |

Brilliant article about Chinese niche literature in the 6 February New Yorker.

Certain professions have their own subgenres. The “commercial warfare novel” pits sales teams against each other in mortal combat over a large order. The “financial novel” wrings drama from stock prices. The “novel of officialdom,” which dates to imperial times, trades in the secrets and scandals of the bureaucracy.

Like their protagonists, these books strive to be efficient and useful. They include rules for getting ahead in the workplace:

Socialize with rich people. They know more than the poor.

Avoid unpromising work assignments by feigning illness. Women should fake pregnancy when necessary.

If your boss makes a pass at you, smile and flirt back.

Hire subordinates who are barely adequate or they’ll make you look bad.

When bribing an official, have your business partner deliver the money so your hands stay clean.

full article

[image: Erni Cabat]

Although, Of Course… There is a substantial portion of my...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:17:05 -0800

Although, Of Course…

There is a substantial portion of my personal library cornered off for the work of David Foster Wallace. I don’t think I need to justify this fact. Having gobbled up most everything that he’s written (save The Pale King), eventually I arrived at David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

Transcribed from an interview (well, more of a very long conversation) this 300+ page tome is pure DFW. Lipsky guides the frail genius along as best he can (like a sheepdog might a passing train), and this mid-90s era lost gem springs to life and offers a peek into the life of DFW at the height of his ~~fame~~ recognition. (Rockstars and rap artists experience fame. Authors, not so much.)

I’m intentionally taking my time with this one, so two weeks in, I’m only at page 94. Below are some gems that I underlined along the way. After reading, perhaps you will feel compelled to buy this fine book. I’ll likely post again about Although Of Course, a bit later on.

pg. 8 “The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment.”

pg. 40 “If your life makes linear sense to you, then you’re either very strange, or you might be just a neurologically healthy person - who’s automatically able to decoct, organize, do triage on the amount of stuff that coming at you all the time.”

pg. 41 “… if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

pg. 41 “But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less right, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, make me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”

pg. 42 “To the extent that I think of myself as different from other people, then I’m not gonna be having a conversation with the reader.”

pg. 63 “Cause see, by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing, right? It’s the only thing that I’ve gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted.”

pg. 64 “What it is, is that, at a certain point you really, you have to grow up a little bit. You have to impose your own discipline- you’re not in a workshop anymore.”

pg. 78 “[Philip] Roth writes for two years, but mostly to get voice. Throws away all for 18 months, writes a book in last six.”- Lipsky, not DFW

pg. 81 “So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just- we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape-in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way- that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, “Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is David Wallace, that you have a imple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due.” And that that’s fine, in low does. But there’s something about the machinery of our relationshop to it that make low does- we don’t stop at low doses.”

pg. 88 “If you go back to Hobbes, and why we ended up begging, why people in a state of nature end up begging for a ruler who has the power of life and death over them? We absolutely have to give our power away. The Internet is going to be exactly the same way. Unless there are walls and sites and gatekeepers that say, “All right, you want fairly good fiction on the Web? Let us pick it for you.” Becasue it’s gonna take you four days to find something any good, through all the shit that’s gonna come, right?”

pg. 91 “I have this- here’s the thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

pg. 92 “Which means that if people are reading in more short bursts or whatever, that art will find a way to form conversations with readers in the brain voice or vernacular that they’ve got.”

pg. 94 “I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.”

observing Oscar Sunday: Behind the scenes of Black Swan, Ray...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:28:47 -0800

observing Oscar Sunday: Behind the scenes of Black Swan, Ray Lewis

via murmurandshout

Snoring hummingbird snores | Solid article in the 16 January...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:09:00 -0800

Snoring hummingbird snores |

Solid article in the 16 January issue of the New Yorker about the rise of YouTube and the fragmentation of audiences. Who knew this snoring little bugger was such a threat? And I quote:

Like television itself, the business of TV advertising has had to learn to cope with audience fragmentation. Through the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was not unusual for the three major networks to capture eighty-five to ninety per cent of the available prime-time audience. That made it possible for advertisers to create national brands.

In the eighties, as cable caught on, with channels like CNN, TBS, MTV, and Lifetime, it began to chip off pieces of the audience from the networks. “The Cosby Show” was the last TV series to command a mass following. During the 1985-86 season, more than thirty per cent of all households with televisions tuned in. (Last year, “American Idol,” the most popular show on TV today, pulled in fewer than nine per cent of all television viewers in the U.S.)

continue reading | John Seabrook

Do you mind if I ask why you've given up photography?

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:34:17 -0800

Yeah, so, my personal tendency is to treat my hobbies, interests, and areas of focus like a chemical substance. To get deeply, obsessively, and borderline addictively attached and involved with them. I’d been shooting photos since I was 13. Canon AE-1, 35mm film. Over time, photography became common, unoriginal. Everybody on social media taking pictures, either with nice professional DSLRs, decent prosumer DSLRs, or just instagram, all of which are fine. But if you truly achingly believe that what you have is different and special, the realm of photography is not the place to receive validation. Not now, anyways.

I also believe that the digital immediacy of photography gives way to a desire for the tiny red flag of validation; be it Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. There’s that old experiment that was performed on kids whereby they were offered one Twinkee immediately, or, if they waited, two Twinkees a bit later.

Kid A would grab the immediately available Twinkee and devour it, but kid B would think more carefully, forgo the one Twinkee, and then have two later. Follow-up testing revealed that the kid Bs of the world went on to far better lives, jobs, etc.

That single Twinkee, for me, is photography. Friends, family, strangers, people in general love immediately available and digestible ideas. Hell, look at the proliferation of memes across all branches of the web. But kid B, he knows that there’s more satisfaction in waiting quietly, of passing up the easy thing and accepting later substantially more deliciousness, in lieu of something quick and easy. I tend to think more like kid A, but I believe, with a slight bit of tweaking and the proper conditioning, I can act more like kid B. Kid B is all about the writing, about building out a business, about sowing seeds and having faith in a later harvest.

After some deep thinking and three weeks off, I have decided to...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:39:00 -0800

After some deep thinking and three weeks off, I have decided to return to the blog.

Yes, I am still finished with photography.
No, I cannot forsake literature.
Alas, Pasadena Pictures lives on. I will be speaking to/at/with you more. This will be run more like a proper blog.

Adventures in Pharmacology |

Basically since I subscribed, I’ve been behind on my Harper’s magazine reading. Inevitably, as I get busy the most enjoyable things in life, like reading for pleasure, are forced into the proverbial back seat. I hate this fact, or better, I hate that I allow this fact to happen.

When I finally picked up the January 2012 issue, I discovered a brilliant and absurd story from Michael Dahlie, The Pharmacist from Jena.

At the time I was living in Winslow it was fashionable for wives of wealthy men to suffer from mental disorders- a custom brought back from Europe, went the explanation in Winslow. My uncle took on something of the role of therapist for these women, the doctors in Winslow all attributing emotional distress to inadequate religious observance. Certainly the doctors were unwilling to offer medication for such problems.

In his work, my uncle most often used papaverine, although he gave his wards other opiates as well, and it was not uncommon to find in the morning one or two women anxiously waiting outside the pharmacy’s front door to renew their treatment and replenish their stores of medication. I myself never took advantage of their condition, but my uncle often disappeared with them into the expansive back rooms he used for his offices, only to return half an hour later with a pleased look and a very relived woman rushing past me with her medicines.

This story is great for several reasons, but not truly for its gift of flowery writing. Like many great stories in Harper’s plot comes first. The absurdity of criminal Swedes, leaving Stockholm to practice illegal pharmacology in rural Indiana, the languid telling of a bear’s violent indoor execution, as well as sex, cocaine, and a bit of masochism. The Pharmacist’s old world patriarchal dynamics will likely offend and repulse, but if you can see past the horror, there’s a wonderfully told gauntlet of eccentricity in tow.

50 Beautiful Women | 2007-2012 | photography by Z. Urbina

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:50:00 -0800

Taking a break from photos for awhile. A long while. Not gonna say “retiring,” because at age 30 that would be absurd. Here’s a look back on amazing adventures, with some very lovely ladies, in SoCal & NYC. -Z