Joe Stracci's blog. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: writing, art, technology, Apple, food, fatherhood, parenting, and music. And photography. And design. And sports. Oh, and probably some politics too.
Posted in: Links
Due to how long and brutal this winter has been, we decided to get together with a bunch of friends and play in the snow. here is the footage. the temperature this day was below 0. we hope you watch this when you are warm and cozy somewhere on a beach.
Southsiders, the new album from Atmosphere, is out on 5/6/14. Pre-order now.
An unreleased, leaked track from Daft Punk and Jay-Z. This track was produced around the time of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack recording, but was apparently unsatisfying to Daft Punk, and never released.
It’s a solid B. Daft Punk only puts out A+’s.
When iOS 7 was released in September, there was much hand-wringing over the flattening and cleaning-up of the overall design. This, of course, was on par with the paradoxical nature of much of the coverage Apple receives—they’re simultaneously not innovate enough and too forward-thinking. But, if you’ve been paying attention to sites like Brand New in the past six months, you’ve noticed a peculiar trend that was illustrated quite nicely in the past couple of days:
Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.
Last Sunday, the New York Times Book Review published an interview Roth did with Daniel Sandstrom in Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish newspaper. I finally got around to reading it and boy, is it a doozy. The paragraph quoted above is one of the most eloquent summations of modern America that I’ve ever seen—and the paragraph preceding it explains why he brings it up in the first place. And there’s a tremendous breakdown at the end about what novels actually tell us about the person who wrote them that I certainly agree with.
If you’re into True Detective, check this site out.
You think you know where this is going, but it takes a turn around 1:55.
/via Devour
It’s almost gotten too easy now, everyone shouting into cellphones. Without the boundary of agreed-upon politeness, and a common sense of privacy, overheard conversations can seem mundane, in their all-engulfingness. Those sharp Cubist angles that used to slice into my life threaten now to melt into an Impressionist blur in which even the most seemingly intimate facts start to sound banal. But beggars can’t be choosers, and I continue to listen.
On Tuesday, I did an interview with a student about being a writer. She asked me how I develop details and dialogue for my characters. I motioned around the café we were sitting in and said, “I pay attention.”
Rachel Kusher, writing for The New York Times Magazine:
But then there was no function: The car cut out. Cleanly. No sputter, just click. It was off, and slowing. By a stroke of luck, there was an exit just up ahead. I willed the car enough momentum to roll to the exit. It did. It rolled right into a truck stop.
I lifted the hood and stood there. It was getting dark. Several truckers came over to help. Theories were suggested, but no one seemed to know what the trouble was. A petite and wiry man walked up, grim-faced, carrying one of those Igloo coolers for six beers that was filled with a jumble of greasy tools. The others nodded in his direction and someone said, “There’s your man.”
Just a nice, neat, clean, well-written personal essay. That I loved. And you will too.
That’s why Jobs dismantled Apple’s pure R&D department, the Advanced Technology Group. The work ATG had done wasn’t all thrown away, but what continued was product-focused rather than technology-focused. Starting with the product and working backwards to the technology instead of the other way around has made all the difference in the world for Apple.
A great read if only for the Apple angle, but if you’re an artist, you would be smart to learn the lesson here—saying ‘no’ is much more important than saying ‘yes.’
