Bas bleu

My name is Alaina and this is my commonplace book, circa 2007 - 2020.

[alaina]

Tarkovsky’s Instant Light Polaroids (via Snakes & Ladders newsletter)

[alaina]

A new thing to do at the beach! (by Belgian type designer Clotilde Olyff via kottke)

[alaina]

I’ll take it.

[alaina]

Amazon is moving to my neighborhood in 2019 :( 

[alaina]

Gwyneth Paltrow, whatever. Her wedding, meh. The fire pit at her wedding, I WANT. 

[alaina]

Yoshida Hiroshi - Hotakayama, 1926

This database of Japanese Woodblock Prints is wonderful.

[alaina]

Text is surprisingly resilient. It’s cheap, it’s flexible, it’s discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there’s nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it’s endlessly computable — you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things. In short, all of the same technological advances that enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up. And text itself will get weirder, its properties less distinct, as it reflects new assumptions and possibilities borrowed from other tech and media. It already has! Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral — text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it’s still remained text. It’s still visual characters registered by the eye standing in for (and shaping its own) language. Because nothing has proved as invincible as writing and literacy. Because text is just so malleable. Because it fits into any container we put it in. Because our world is supersaturated in it, indoors and out. Because we have so much invested in it. Because nothing we have ever made has ever rewarded our universal investment in it more. Unless our civilization fundamentally collapses, we will never give up writing and reading. We’re still not even talking to our computers as often as we’re typing on our phones. What logs the most attention-hours — i.e., how media companies make their money — is not and has never been the universe of communications. (And my god — the very best feature Facebook Video has, what’s helping that platform eat the world — is muted autoplay video with automatic text captions. Forget literature — even the stupid viral videos people watch waiting for the train are better when they’re made with text!) Nothing is inevitable in history, media, or culture — but literacy is the only thing that’s even close. Bet for better video, bet for better speech, bet for better things we can’t imagine — but if you bet against text, you will lose.

Tim Carmody

[alaina]

Recipe: Garbanzo, Tomato and Feta Salad - from the most recent Rancho Gordo newsletter . . . I made it last night and can confirm that it’s really tasty, especially with fresh tomatoes, and a perfect no-stove-or-oven-when-it’s-hot-as-hell-outside-dinner.

4 medium or 2 large, ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped, or 1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, halved 3 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling Rancho Gordo Pineapple Vinegar or white wine vinegar, to taste Flaky salt and freshly ground pepper 2 cups cooked Rancho Gordo Garbanzo beans, drained 2 ounces French sheep's milk feta cheese, crumbled (about 1/2 cup) 1/4 of an onion, finely chopped 1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro, flat-leaf parsley, or mint some chopped cucumber Serve 2 to 4 In a serving bowl, combine the tomatoes, olive oil, vinegar, and salt and pepper. Let sit for at least 20 minutes. Add the Garbanzo beans, feta, onion, and cilantro to the tomatoes and mix gently. Season with additional salt and pepper, drizzle with additional olive oil, and serve.

[alaina]

Scientists from the University of Catania and Cairo University found a “solidified whitish mass” in a jar, left, in an Egyptian tomb. The substance turned out to be a 3,200-year-old piece of cheese, among the oldest ever discovered (via Tyler Cohen)

[alaina]

Oliver Sacks’ copy of “Cartesian Linguistics,” by Noam Chomsky

[alaina]

Johnny Marr’s guitar <3 <3 <3

[alaina]

GOATS were on subway tracks this morning! 

[alaina]

Can someone please buy me this 19th Century cast iron box stove from Paul Rand's estate sale? 

[alaina]

From 1903 until 1969, Siglufjörður, Iceland was the capital of the herring industry. The “Herring Girls” in the North Atlantic countries processed the fishermen’s catch, standing for long hours on the piers, sorting, chopping, filleting the herring before brining and packing them in barrels.

[alaina]

Alex Katz -  Sunset Cove, 1957

[alaina]

Tove Jansson looking through a telescope (via Austin Kleon)

[thenearsightedmonkey]

A Former Janitor Collects and Photographs the Items Seized from Immigrants and Thrown Away By U.S. Customs and Border Patrol

Read about it here.