It is sad to see that Madison was unable to support a store of this type, and yet I understand why - with Whole Foods, Metcalfe’s Sentry at Hilldale, not to mention the Farmers’ Market, there are many other, slightly more convenient, one-stop-shopping choices in the area, and the very narrow range of merchandise Artamos carried didn’t help it.
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An interesting post by Mary Hodder on TechCrunch: do algorithms decide what we get to see and what we don’t? The discussion of the issue at the heart of the controversy would probably have been by far more productive if the specific group of books in question (gay-themed books) wasn’t one that generates lots of emotions, less-than-civil blog posts, and response comments. The issue is more complicated than it seems.
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Click on the image to sample TWELVE MONDAYS on iTunes
I have always liked Ari Hest’s albums - moderately - they were OK. This one is different - VERY different. Can sound be spectacular? Audicular? Whatever the word - 12 Mondays is it.
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Streaming movies on Netflix do not always offer a great selection, but sometimes there are little gems hiding among many run-of-the-mill choices. One of those gems is a 5-episode BBC series titled Shakespeare Re-Told, originally aired by BBC in 2005 (Wikipedia). By now I have watched only two of the four relatively short films: The Taming of the Shrew (a few weeks ago), and Much Ado About Nothing, tonight. I always admire creative ways in which writers and directors manage to bring to life, and renewed relevance some of the great works of the past, an these two TV films are both spectacular examples of how satysfying and rewarding watching a modern adaptation can be.
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In early 17th century it wasn’t uncommon for painters to convceive of their painings as “pendants”: paired images, meant to be displayed side-by-side, with the full force and meaning of their content brought to focus by mutual juxtaposition and contrast. They were “images in a paradoxical relationship with one another, images that are at once both cohesive and separate, the same and different.” (reference) It seems to be yet another unnecessarily complex baroque conceit, and yet, it actually works, sometimes quite brilliantly…
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There is no shortage of screen-capture utilities, especially on the Mac side of the Great Divide, but finding a perfect app that does it all is tougher than it seems: Need to grab a web page that extends beyond the screen? Paparazzi will do it (for free), but it cannot do anything else. The website you are visiting happens to be mostly Flash? You’re out of luck. SnapzProX, the “gold standard” of Mac screen-capture utilities will do most things, but it’s awkward to use (I mean really wakward); SnapNDrag offers a basic, free version, but it only captures on-screen windows, with web pages out of reach. xScope is perfect at capturing the same area over-and-over again (it’s perfect for many other things too), but is otherwise, for screen capture, it’s quite limited. It would be really great to have just one app that could do it all. And perhaps now there is one!
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The Ceysson + De Maistre recordings are addictively beautiful. Especially the Carl Reinecke Concerto in E-minor for Harp and Orchestra, on De Maistre’s solo album. I have never heard anything by Reinecke before, and this lovely, romantic piece definitely deserves more playtime than it gets. More than anything, I have to admit I have never heard anyone play the harp like Xavier de Maistre does - it’s quite incredible, actually.
With just a few hours before the Apple iPhone 3 announcement, I thought it would be interesting to post a short list of my “I wish they added…” stuff, just so I can compare it to what actually got announced.
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I was absolutely under the spell of The Bird and the Bee’s first, eponymous album release (listened to it many a time, driving from Appleton to Madison, and back).
It was a strange mixture of very classic Burt Bacharach (especially I’m a broken heart, which BB might as well have written, if he were some 50 years younger), with a dash of cooly stylish, downtempo-ish Air, and a few unpredictable, key-shifting transitions of Röyksopp, with just a pinch of a totally unique magical je ne sais quoi, that was totally their own.
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