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Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.The thing is, I still believe that...

I’ve already mentioned Tom Harrison’s “Headline of the Day” email list, which is always entertaining and often good source material for Lowering the Bar items. I highly recommend signing up (email: tomharrison711 at gmail.com). I have an email distribution list too, of course, but HOTD can offer you similar entertainment in far fewer words. The cost is the same. A recent link led to the headline, “A World Naked Bike …

No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a profile of Nathan Cleary, the Panthers halfback, and veritable introvert: Nathan Cleary could have the time of his life, “just the most …

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in …

By Joseph Nechvatal. Suzaan Boettger, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) The 440 pages of the heavily illustrated book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson are Suzaan Boettger’s deep dive into the incongruous religious and raunchy roots of American artist, art theorist and literary essayist Robert Smithson — famous as the creator of the minimalist abstract earthwork masterpiece, Spiral Jetty, that …

Officials from the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) have told local elected officials that the work will begin on Monday on several safety upgrades near the location where a driver struck and killed John Corcoran last week on a busy riverfront bike and jogging path in Cambridge. Rep. Mike Connolly, who represents Cambridge neighborhoods to the north and northeast of the crash site, told StreetsblogMASS that he and several …

Hope you’ve had a great week. Eva just rolled away and we had a good ol’ time chatting it up for this week’s In The Shed episode. Check (mostly) all the fun stuff we mentioned in the links below. Cool solo art exhibition Eva saw at Director Park: Orquidia Violeta – Chalecos Protector Exhibition Our popular How’d She Get There?! segment: Eva’s route from North Portland to Director Park How …

EFF, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Mississippi, filed an amicus brief on Thursday asking a federal appellate court to continue to block Mississippi’s HB 1126—a bill that imposes age verification mandates on social media services across the internet. Our friend-of-the-court brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argues that HB 1126 is “an extraordinary censorship law that violates all internet users’ First …

Angela Milne, Theodora Benson, and reading deeply – welcome to episode 131 of Tea or Books?! https://www.stuckinabook.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/tea-or-books-131.mp3 In the first half of the episode, we discuss a topic suggestion by Heidi – do we read deeply or shallowly? Do we like critical editions? Or do we just ‘switch off’ and enjoy? In the second half, we pit two British Library Women Writers titles against each other – Which Way? by …

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Happy October!For some reason this month has a plethora of daily blogging or other creativity prompts. Here’s a list of the ones I found so far:* #Blogtober (consider this post my first for this, retroactively day 1)* Inktober — https://inktober.com/* LOLtober - https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2024/10/loltober-2024* Looptober — https://looptober.com/* Mathober - https://mathober.com/* Viztober — https://www.instagram.com/evalottchen/p/DAiNm3ZtuTj/Having found so many for the month I created an “October” page on the #IndieWeb wiki to document them …

I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo I've not read, written by Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall, which describes the ceiling of the Gesuati, painted in 1738. The surrounding roofscape reflects and absorbs light and 'Alpers and Baxendall seem to have spent days observing the …

Today's striking apple, somewhere between medium and large, has a blush that ranges from deep to streaky over yellow. ¶ title="Legace"> Classically shaped and lightly ribbed, Legace wears many small light lenticel dots in its scarlet coat. ¶ I'm not sure why, but the color of this apple in my photo is less vibrant and saturated than in person. That might be due to lighting or perhaps the existence of …

If my birthday present was Dublin, the birthday meal was Cuubo. The early dinner before the early bed time before the early flight. Only one of those things went to plan, and without going into specifics, Sophie pinpoints the exact moment she knew it wasn’t going to be a 9pm bedtime to the picture she received at 2pm of one man and two martinis, which was my lunch and not …

I gave up growing carrots for a few years. I was failing at them; I got discouraged and quit. I first got back in the game because I was wearing the title “Master Gardener” and felt ashamed to do so while being incapable of something so fundamental. And then the way I started growing carrots again […] The post Growing carrots in Southern California appeared first on Greg Alder's Yard …