Criticism

Similar cover articles have been common for more than a decade now.
In computer magazines.
This is a women’s fashion magazine (!).
220 sites you’ve never heard of, devoted to makeup, fashion, beauty, style..
The jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks—we’re all webheads now.

This kind of video (rebus rap) is almost a genre already and it’ll just keep getting better.

We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.

What I remembered was that it was written by that famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google “federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.

This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.

The quote?

This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.

From the prolific interface genius that is Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.

Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.

As part of our music startup, I’ve been listening to all sorts of music and music apps all day long. I’ve stumbled on some great apps, some great music, and some interesting parallels. Like these 2 wonderful songs about scorned women, very similar to me and yet coming from drastically different cultures:

I wonder what would be the English parallel?

For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:

It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.

The thing that most grabbed me, though, was that I had just started making my own similar introspective list of my friends’ attributes, in the spirit of quantified selfhood. While I’m floored by Very Small Array’s commitment (it has been doing this for almost a decade—the chart above is just one of several great graphs and metapgraphs), my brief exercise in self knowledge has already told me two unexpected things: I have a history of liking extroverts and polyglots.

Fascinating, so much more enthralling to me than most museum art. Notice the lobsterish, demonic, shielding, bloody left arm, the snaking, perforating tubes beneath, the right mecha cat-paw, the “fingering” finger within it, the cat-fox-shaped helmet, the nipple patches (that’s one badge you’ll pay attention to), the pubic paleness, the CAUTION - SEX TAPE yellow tape. Such a great image—and it’s not every day you get to make a word like mecha-chimeric.

Via all the good things, Jaireh’s super awesome reblog of wonders.

Flow was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m halfway through its sequel, The Evolving self, and I can already say the same for it. I’m already having trouble remembering meself before I started reading it—it’s one of those books that stretches and rewrites you as you read it. It’s also deeper than Flow, more speculative, darker—the whole first half has been about the (inevitable) obstacles to human freedom.

After reading Flow I felt confident happiness, joy, flow, would always be at hand, always within me. Yet I also realized that happiness, joy, and flow were not enough. The Evolving Self is about what’s missing.

Hadn’t been so taken by painting since Klimt or Schiele. I love these self-portraits. The solid colors, the roughness, the sloppy daubs, the rawness, the sexuality, the odd angles, the sharp, geometrical lines, the intimacy, the posing, the light.

This is Sara Sisun, and I stumbled on her work on Stanford’s Cumming Arts building.

Boy, how much fun has this book been! Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion emocional en veinte lecciones [review] is exactly what the title implies —an emotional education, a coginitive-behavioral approach to learning to handle your emotions—, I just never thought it would be this much fun.

I stumbled on it combing the city’s book fair for books originally written in Spanish, as has been my custom for the last couple of years. It was a difficult choice, it was pricey ($200 pesos), had too facile a title and yet managed to be intimidating with its 300 pages of dense prose. It apparently lied somewhere between selfhelp and psychotherapy, both of which I dislike. But then its recency (2006), its being written by a Mexican UNAM professor, its initial quote:
its excellent typography (!), its suggestive index and its author being a renowned poet besides a psychologist made me put out.

I’m glad I did. Whatever the book’s merits the best compliment I can give it is that it has changed me, far more deeply that I can tell this close to the reading but I think and feel different ever since.

How not to love a book that manages to be densely precise and technical while still being fresh, humble, and (Mexicanly) casual—always struggling for clarity, for precision.

How not to love a book that manages to delve deep into theory while being chock-full of practical suggestions—always struggling to convince you, to change you.

How not to love a book that suggests buying a pornographic magazine as an exercise in selfcontrol, proposes a condom-buying dare, explains respiratory meditation, entrances you with the stream-of-consciousness of an addict, and finishes lessons by sprinkling a sufi story (the tale of the two brothers) or a beautiful metaphor (“Se como el sandalo que perfuma al hacha que lo hiere” / “Be like sandalwood that perfumes the axe that hurts it.”)?

If you care about selfhelp books this is by far the best I’ve ever read. If you care about psychotherapy this is by far the best I’ve ever read too (no Freudian bullshit!). I earnestly and sincerely recommend it, grab it wherever you can find it.

(I’m personally looking for extra copies to give away but Gandhi doesn’t have it in stock and its editor, Paidos, doesn’t list it online—do drop a message if you find it somewhere).