Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
—Jim Jarmusch
—from Movie Maker (#53, Winter 2004)
pinchbeck /pinsh-bek/. noun or adjective. An inexpensive copper alloy that looks like gold. A counterfeit or a sham. The word first appears in the 1500s referring to a miserly person, of unknown origin. But it reappears in the 1700s as the name of an alloy used by jeweler and watchmaker Christopher Pinchbeck to make inexpensive products with the appearance of gold, over time coming to be known generically as a synonym for cheap and/or spurious.
“I saw you come aboard with your privileges about you like a cloud of, of pinchbeck glory!” (William Golding)
“Markson calls it ‘the precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.’” (David Shields)
“…they no more saw through Scarlett’s pinchbeck pretensions than she herself did.” (Margaret Mitchell)
“I told her of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly’s token.” (James Joyce)
A fascinating look at the first AI-generated podcast…a technology in its infancy but growing (and learning) quickly. Thanks, Reader B.
The Solenodon is a wobbly, flexible-snouted, butt-nippled mammal that injects venom through it’s grooved lower incisors [the name comes from the Latin solen- (channel, pipe) + -odon (tooth)]. It’s also one of the earliest branches of mammal that survived the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. What more could you want?
“What is involuntary to most people is a deliberate choice to them, something they can actively switch on if it helps them to achieve their goals, and ignore in other situations.” → How Psychopaths See the World
The Boston Public Library is asking for your help transcribing more than 40,000 letters between abolitionist leaders from the 1830s–1870s.
Subscribe to Letterjoy and receive “one historic letter every week, on fine cotton paper” from historic figures such as Lincoln and Einstein.
Movie poster design is intriguing and Posteritati just might be the one movie poster site to rule them all.
“False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth.” → The spread of true and false news online (from Science).
“Old” media continues to reinvent itself: National Geographic begins reckoning with its racist past; The New York Times is publishing obituaries of “remarkable women” they’ve overlooked.
Only one visible at the link, but I really want to see more of Tony Lewis’s collage art/poems built on Calvin and Hobbes. Thanks, Reader M.
Today in 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov becomes the first person to walk in space (or, in jargonese, “conduct extravehicular activity”). Turns out, it was a much more difficult, almost deadly, feat than the Soviets could admit for some time.
“On Gong Bin’s right cheek are thin scars from when he deliberately cut his face in November 2014 because UNESCO had added Japanese handmade paper to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. According to Gong Bin, that was a ‘day of humiliation for China.’ He cut the lines on his cheek not because he thought the Japanese didn’t deserve the honor, but because, in his words, ‘We lost face.’”
—Mark Kurlansky on Gong Bin, subject of the very short documentary, The Paperist.
Pairs with: The Art Behind Barichara’s All-Female Artisanal Paper Making
This toad without a face continues to freak me out because, obvious, and because…Demogorgon.
Reader F. with a reminder: “Don’t forget that other Humble Pie, the Britishest and whitest funk band of the 70s that initially featured Peter Frampton.”
Reader B. on the contention that technology is resulting in our forgetting how to read: “I wonder why I haven’t caught the reading decline yet. Actually, I have in a single way: my vision is starting to degrade, so reading small print (on paper) is increasingly an issue, mostly late at night or in bad light. But the technology experience hasn’t had that impact. ¶ Am I just too obsessed with books and reading? Or am I doing something weird?”
Reader G. on Babs’s cloned canines: “cloning a dog is a really interesting thing to do. In some ways MUCH more like cloning people. Because dogs have such personalities. I wonder if she finds that her new dogs have the same personality has her other dog, or if they have radically different personalities. And I wonder if an argument about an animal’s soul could be made based on that. Assuming animals have souls. I think they do, especially dogs. But it seems like the case of nature vs nurture could be made too. If nothing else, it is a fascinating experiment.”
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