Seriously?? When asked, 34% of Americans say they want to live in Orlando, making it the fifth most desirable city in the country? Are these people talking about the same Orlando I grew up in and now assiduously avoid? The country’s preeminent symbol of suburban suck? In what the New Yorker recently nicknamed “The Ponzi State”?

And my beloved Minneapolis, with its resplendent lakes and parks and great restaurants and arts and culture and evenforPetessake the Mall of America, is one of the five least popular?! That’s just messed up.

Willing Davidson, “Great Book, Bad Movie: How Hollywood Ruins Novels”:

This isn’t an original complaint: Liking the book better than the movie is a middlebrow rite of passage. And novels are a constant, renewable source of stories for Hollywood, with ready-built brand appeal

On my Google Docs dashboard, I have a folder called NLA Book.

In that folder, I have 24 entries, from 21 different people, on subjects that include: home economics, micropolitics, journalism, reality engineering, coding and decoding, creativity, media literacy, negotiation, play, brevity, inaccuracy, mythology, mapping, attention economics, photography, translation, urbanism, futurism, and design.

If this sounds like a book sent back in time from some slightly-wacky future, I think that is exactly the point.

The entries are quite heterogeneous, with a wide variety of voices and approaches. I think you’re going to enjoy reading them all together, and deciding which are your favorites.

We’ll use the rest of this week to finish editing the entries and begin the design of the book. Next week we’ll design in earnest, and find out about all the production details we can’t anticipate ahead of time.

And then… we print! The book is going to be between 4″×8″ and 6″×9″, a slim paperback. We’ll post the PDF, and give it a CC license so you can do interesting things with it, but there will be a couple of really good reasons to buy the book, even above and beyond the pleasant physicality of it.

I’ll keep you posted as production gets closer so you can pre-order, and/or tell your nerdy friends about it.

It’s been an exciting week as the entries have come rolling in. I wish you could see my Google Docs interface as I do right now: It’s a long list of smart collaborators (all fellow Snarkmarket readers!) whose names keep blinking to life beside their entries as they dip in to make changes, leaving funny time-stamps because they’re halfway across the world, or up all night.

Discussions around the consequences of a truly connected planet have been going on for some time in our organisation, and maybe also in yours. Fivedollarcomparison.org is a small step to broaden the discussion and explore how the impact might vary across cultures and contexts by asking a simple question: What can you buy for five dollars?

For five dollars, you can buy a giant bucket of potatoes in Peru, park a bike in Montreal for two hours, or get a pound of licorice in California. On the one hand, this is a vivid representation of costs of living across the world. On the other hand, I’m hungry. (Via Bruno Giussani.)

It’s not playing in Philadelphia, and I don’t have cable/IFC, alas — but Medicine for Melancholy looks terrific.

(See also A.O. Scott and Dennis Lim in the NYT.)

Here’s a pitch: The three great democratic arts are law, education, and journalism. You need skilled practitioners in each, free to do their work openly in the public sphere, in order to have a healthy democracy. Specifically a meritocratic democracy with true social mobility.

I’ve seen the phrase “democratic arts” plenty of times, but never attached to a list like this — though it’s possible I’m unconsciously cribbing it from somewhere. I like these three because, besides being concrete and important, they’re each fun.

I really like this Jonathan Abrams article on LeBron James. It’s not about anything off-court. It’s not about his relationships with his teammates, coaches, or management. It’s not about a particular game or set of games. It’s not even really about him, except in a refreshingly limited way.

Instead, it’s a well-researched article featuring multiple interviews (mostly with James’s opponents) about a single aspect of his game — his unique and nearly unstoppable ability to drive to the basket.

Read more…

The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, twenty years later:

Paul’s Boutique is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky, early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades’ postmodern identity as sure as “The Simpsons” and Quentin Tarantino did. It’s an album so packed with lyrical and musical asides, namedrops, and quotations that you could lose an entire day going through its Wikipedia page and looking up all the references; “The Sounds of Science” alone redirects you to the entries for Cheech Wizard, Shea Stadium, condoms, Robotron: 2084, Galileo, and Jesus Christ. That density, sprawl, and information-overload structure was one of the reasons some fans were reluctant to climb on board. But by extending Steinski’s rapid-fire sound-bite hip-hop aesthetic over the course of an entire album, the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers more than assured that a generally positive first impression would eventually lead to a listener’s dedicated, zealous headlong dive into the record’s endlessly-quotable deep end.

With no other album did I spend as much time transcribing and deciphering lyrics, beats, ideas — staring at the radio, staying up all night.

Craig Saper is an amazing guy. When he couldn’t get travel funds to deliver a paper on Bob Brown’s “Readies” at a panel I chaired at the Modernist Studies Association conference a few years ago, he sent a DVD of himself, reading his paper from an airplane seat, wearing sunglasses. Midway through, the video began speeding up and slowing down, and the audio track was punctured by bleeps, like a badly edited R-rated movie on TV. It was all part of the performance, on reading technologies and obscenity. I wish I still had a copy of it.

— Kenny Goldsmith, “Littany (for Albie)”

Well, Craig’s curated (with Theo Lotz) an exhibition at the University of Central Florida called TypeBound, on books-as-sculpture. Warning: the web site is actually kind of crummy, animated image files and links that download PDFs instead of going to pages. But the exhibits! Amazing stuff: books made of shoes, books with type written on the edges of pages, books with pages going in every direction, and a slew of typewriter poetry. Well worth checking out.

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