I have to admit that I think the LA-based band OK Go’s music is just okay. However, they consistently created clever, quirky music videos that are irresistible. Their newest release was filmed in Budapest’s iconic Keleti Station and is a knockout.
Do yourself a favor and what the video below and then watch the amazing video on how the brilliant film was created. it’s well worth the time and loads of fun.
Now, how the sausage was made.
Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.
I know no reason why our media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they’re mostly not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs.
Much of literature remains free of such co-optation, in part because a lot of books were written by dead people, who by definition are not greedy. And many living poets and novelists, though their publishers may be crawling abjectly after bestsellers, continue to be motivated less by the desire for gain than by the wish to do what they’d probably do for nothing if they could afford it, that is, practice their art—make something well, get something right. Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable.
Books may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
“Not His Best”
by
Joy Williams
from 99 Stories of God
Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer.
He also reprimanded the long-suffering Felice Bauer in a letter: “I did not say that writing ought to make everything clearer, but instead makes everything worse; what I said was that writing makes everything clearer and worse.”
He frequently fretted that he was not a human being and that what he bore on his body was not a human head. Once he dreamt that as he lay in bed, he began to jump out the open window continuously at quarter-hour intervals.
“Then trains came and one after another they ran over my body, outstretched on the tracks, deepening and widening the two cuts in my neck and legs.”
I didn’t give him that one, the Lord said.
NOT HIS BEST
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently revealed a revamped map of the city’s subway system that takes its cues from a 1970s throwback that was cheered by design connoisseurs and reviled by many traditionalists. It is the first major overhaul of the subway map to be introduced by the authority in almost 50 years. The current version (above) is serviceable, but takes time to master. The new version (below) is colorful and much easier to read.
“The new map — a brightly colored variation on the current version that sacrifices some geographic detail for clarity — is reminiscent of the 1972 Unimark map, a modernist streamlining of the subways that straightened the curvy contours of the system. The map was short lived, replaced in 1979 by a version resembling the current one.”
Tomorrow marks the opening of the Osaka World Expo, which will run until October 13,2025. The world’s fair, which is being held at Yumeshima Island outside of Osaka, is projected to welcome 28.2 million visitors.
One of Japan’s signature pavilions, Earth Mart, is shaping up to be tasty. Located within the Expo’s Green World zone, Earth Mart will make you rethink and reevaluate the current state of food by exploring new ways of eating through interactive exhibitions and installations. One iconic installation is a chandelier made from 28,000 eggs, a figure that represents the average number of eggs every Japanese person consumes in their lifetime.
Last week, Penguin Random House announced a new novel from Thomas Pynchon. The novel, his first in a decade, is called Shadow Ticket and is set to publish on 7 Oct. 2025. PRH’s copy:
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
It seems a bit incredible that F. Scott Fitzgerald originally titled the great American novel “Trimalchio in West Egg.”But in the end he called it “The Great Gatsby” and it remains one of the 20th century’s most read and beloved works of fiction.
Today marks a century since the book’s first edition, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender novel about a mysterious, lovelorn millionaire living and dying in a Long Island mansion is still among the most widely read American fictions. Like many, I first read Gatsby in high school and have since returned to re-read it many times.
In January 2021, The Great Gatsby finally entered the public domain, allowing any hack to raid the original iconic novel for second rate, rip-off content. Personally, I’m only interested in the genuine article. We can read the Project Gutenberg’s e‑book of the original text, or listen to the free audio book versions of The Great Gatsby. This five hour recording comes courtesy of Nolan Hennelly, and you can stream it below.
I’ve visited Amsterdam more often than any other city outside of North America and I only just discovered the Hotel Library. Situated in a beautiful 18th century canal house in the heart of the city on Prins Hendrikkade, the hotel offers great waterfront views and easy access to Amsterdam’s tourist attractions.
The highlight of this three star establishment is a constantly growing lending library. The proprietors cleverly ask guests to leave books at the end of their stay. And, it’s even possible to purchase reading materials from the hotel’s collection.
I almost always stay in the Jordaan, but the Hotel Library is awfully tempting.
I recently discovered a tasty mystery in New York City’s East Village neighborhood. When you enter Surprise Scoop it’s quickly obvious that this ice cream shop isn’t like the others. There are no employees in sight and no ice cream is visible in the store, which consists of just a room with two electronic kiosks and a pickup window.
Shoppers have just one choice on the menu: a $10 double scoop of ice cream. Customers order at the kiosk and don’t know what flavor they’re getting, or what the available options are.
When the ice cream is ready, a computerized voice on a speaker calls out the name on the order, the small window opens, and a barely visible employee places the order on a small ledge before shutting the window again.
The experience is the brainchild of Jackie Luu, a Brooklynite who has been in the ice cream business for nearly a decade. His first shop, Stuffed Ice Cream, sells doughnut ice cream sandwiches and used to occupy Surprise Scoop’s current space before moving to Bensonhurst.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
~ C.S. Lewis, “A Grief Observed”
Travel Between The Pages 