Category: heroes

Today, February 21st, is the the birthday of W.H. Auden, David Foster Wallace, Anais Nin and Ha Jin.

Crazy! (via The Writer’s Almanac)

Reason Number #8129 why The Muppets was so brilliant. Here’s Sam the Eagle parodying Joseph McCarthy’s famous "I have a list of communists" speech.

Genius.

Calling itself "The YouTube of Ideas", Big Think is an online collection of interviews with academics scholars, writers and politicians on topical subjects. The Web 2.0 of it: You can create your own videos to answer to, say John McCain’s opinions on immigration policy. If you’re hot under the collar about such a thing.

I don’t need to do that. I’d just like to hear what smart people have to say about issues I don’t know anything about. But Big Think seems to be firmly aimed at pundits in training. I found buried in the help comments that Big Think has RSS feeds (as any browser post say 2005 does) and that other ways of consuming interviews are on the way.

I hope so. Big Think’s only in private beta and who knows what could happen?  I know its very un-2008 of me to say so but on something like this, I just wanna watch stuff. I’ll do my making elsewhere.

So why not let me?

"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill
and mountain shall be made low, and rough places will be made plains,
and the crooked places will be made straight,and the glory of the Lord
shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."

Happy Birthday.

Lest you think that you are a productive person, I direct your attention to this piece in the New York Review of Books on novelist Joyce Carol Oates, particularly the opening paragraphs.

Joyce Carol Oates still bothers people—in all kinds of ways. For more
than forty-five years she has been steadily producing novels, short
stories, poems, essays, plays. Between the beginning of 2000 and the
end of 2005 she published nineteen books. She has written over seven
hundred short stories, more than Maupassant, Kipling, and Chekhov
combined…

With her husband Raymond Smith, moreover, Oates has edited The Ontario Review
and, from time to time, published books under its imprint. She has
regularly contributed substantial essays and reviews to, among others, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books.
Somehow, the seemingly tireless writer also keeps a journal, plays the
piano, jogs, gardens, draws, cooks, and reads as indefatigably as she
writes. (But she doesn’t watch television: TV, Oates has said, is "for
people who are skimming along on the surface of life.") Her good friend
the scholar Elaine Showalter once remarked that you had but to mention
a book and "Joyce will have the novel read by next week."

I’m going back to bed.

I have no idea how I missed it but I just read that Evel Knievel, perhaps the only motorcycle stuntman you’ve ever heard of, died at the end of last month. He was 69 and had been ill from diabetes and an incurable lung disease.

In the 60s and 70s, Knievel became an American folk hero by staging elaborate daredevil stunts on his motorcycle. Rising to fame from a jump over the fountains at Ceaser’s Palace in Las Vegas in 1969 (video above), he launched his motorcycle over canyons, trucks and flaming school buses. He quit jumping in 1980 on doctor’s orders that nothing was left in his body except "scar tissue and surgical steel."

What I like best about the Evel Knievel legend is its "only in America" quality–a post-war poor kid, gone daredevil in the Space Age gone conservative businessman in the Reagan Era, all done in a stars and stripes jumpsuit. Knievel reinvented himself from petty Montana hoodlum (including a name change. He was born Robert Knievel) into celebrity via an activity most onlookers considered a novelty not entertainment. He became famous by owning a category and being the only recognizable face in it. Without him, there’d be no Richard Simmons, no Jimmy Buffet, no Weird Al, no a hundred other famous people who are famous by being the the only one’s of their kind. If that kind of willed individual acclaim ain’t American, then I’m moving to Mozambique on Thursday (via Smith Magazine).

Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin were both born on this day. (via The Writer’s Almanac)

I’ve been an admirer of poet, musician and actor Saul Williams since I saw him in the movie Slam nearly ten years ago. So I was totally geeked when I got his newsletter telling me he’s got a new album out, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! In this interview, Williams discussed the influences and purpose behind the project.

On the one hand I was inspired by Bowie and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
Stardust, by title and by concept. I also believe that Electric
Ladyland was a concept album too, and Niggy Tardust is musically far
more related to Electric Ladyland meets Afrika Bambaataa than it is to
Ziggy Stardust. Where as Starchild and George Clinton, there’s a huge
connection to that because that’s what I was listening to while I was
recording, was a lot of Funkadelic. I think that music is extremely
important when you think of the role that James Brown, Bootsy Collins,
and George Clinton have played in contemporary music, there’s nothing
like that today. It’s what transformed the bass and the sound of the
bass into what it is now in contemporary music. There’s nothing in our
generation that rivals that.

This is Williams’s third album and, at producer Trent Reznor’s encouragement and of his own accord. He’s going Radiohead. In ordering, you can either pay $5 or nothing. Your choice.

As a loyal fan of both hip-hop culture and technological innovation, seeing the two coming together is like a chocolate and peanut butter injection. I’m giving the man 5$. And a ton of praise for running towards the future.

Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift and David Mamet were all born on this day. Wow (via The Writer’s Almanac).