I found the world’s most boring website.
Posted: October 9, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 CommentI mean it.
I am proud of this discovery.
In every way: content, style, it is perfectly, wonderfully flavorless.
I think if you pitched on boring websites for a long time you would not do better than this.
I’m building it up like this because I’m confident in it, in its boring beauty.
It keeps giving, all the way to the end, like a well-crafted work of art.
Here it is.
Insight
Posted: October 8, 2013 Filed under: comedy, painting Leave a comment
Reading this interview with Mark Normand, comedian I had not heard of, on Splitsider.
This got my attention:
It’s often said when starting in comedy, you’re doing someone else’s act. What was your style when you first started?
I hate to say it, I was Seinfeld all the way.
“What’s the deal?”
Not really “what’s the deal,” but like, rhythm, and that weird voice thing. I’d have jokes like, “Adult books? Get the movie!” It was so bad that I remember one time I walked on stage in New York and one guy went [Seinfeldbaseline], and it crushed me. It was like a stab in the heart, and after that I was like, “I have to change my ways!” It killed me.
How long did it take, then, to find the voice that you use now?
Phew, a while. It took a meltdown. I had a meltdown in New York at some open mic because I was bombing and bombing for like a year, and eventually I was like, “Fuck you, I can’t take this anymore!” It broke me. But it took that meltdown. And I was fighting against it in my head, like, “Just keep it together buddy, keep it together,” when something had to get out. Then I was finally myself, and that’s what did it.
What was the crowd’s reaction like when you had your meltdown? Were you just like, “Fuck you all?”
Yeah, yeah. I was like, “I’m fucking funny, I hate all of you.” And then they started laughing, like, “All right, this is the real you.” Because crowds don’t want the polish. They want a comic who’s the same guy on and off. That’s the best comics – like, Louis C.K., walking on the stage, doesn’t go, “All right, pick it up, here it comes.” He’s just the same. Even if you see a comic bombing, and he goes, “Well, this is awful,” that gets a laugh. Because that’s the first real thing he’s said.
That last line. In my experience watching amateur/bad standup this is super true. In all the best comedy interviews they eventually get to the weird paradox of how hard it is to be honest, how uncomfortable and painful and terrifying it is to find your actual honest self and present it. The drunkest, dumbest audience in the world can distinguish fakery/honesty in about two seconds.
Cruel twists:
- the you that you want to be or think you are probably isn’t the you that you are. Learning that must be crushing/terrifying/impossibly frustrating.
- if you’re doing standup comedy in the first place, you at the very least have some unresolved tension between the “you” you’re living with and the “you” the world perceives
- being on stage is so weird and unnatural that achieving the comfort to project your best “you” while standing there will require agonizing failures that will hurt and rattle you and could possibly turn you back on yourself in a way that’ll make you worse at being the best you, in a wrenching spiral!
A long process of reconciling various yous, amazing when achieved.
That painting of commedia dell’Arte is by Karel Dujardin. Here’s his self-portrait:
He gets it.
the young Dujardin went to Italy, and joined the Bentvueghels group of painters in Rome, among whom he was known as “Barba di Becco”, “goat-beard”, or Bokkebaart. Here he encountered his first artistic successes.
(Mark Normand photo from his twitter)
Don’t forget that the ocean is full of monsters
Posted: October 7, 2013 Filed under: marine biology 1 Comment
That guy is an ocean sunfish, photographed by the blogger off Great Point, Nantucket. I was hunting for these guys:
That is a little tunny. Cap’n didn’t think we’d enjoy eating it because “it has too much blood in its body.” (? pseudosciene? I dunno, look at my pants). Wikipedia counters:
There are many ways to eat the Little Tunny, such as Tuna Salad. To do this, the fillets are first baked, then chilled and flaked, then mixed in with the salad. Removing the dark strips of meats that extend the length of each fillet helps to reduce the naturally fishy flavor. Another way to prepare the Little Tunny is first to bleed it, barbecue it in foil, remove the meat from the bone, and then let it chill overnight. Various seasonings can be used to enhance the flavor. Fresh steaks can be quite good if seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon, and thinly sliced tunny makes good sashimi. It is commonly eaten as such in Japan.
Anyway, this guy lived to fight another day.
Here is another picture of an ocean sunfish, caught off Catalina Island right here in California by the famed big game hunter of East Africa, W. N. McMillan. Photo is courtesy the Library of Congress. Want to go see that photo in person? You can’t because of the shutdown!
Curious about the character on the bottom right of the photograph. A child or a little adult?
Gauguin
Posted: September 27, 2013 Filed under: art history Leave a comment
In November 1882 a stock market crash put an abrupt stop to Gauguin’s double life as broker and artist. The crash cost him and his friend Schuffenecker their jobs. And it left Gauguin free to indulge the wayward life of a dandy to his heart’s content. He had always longed for the bohemian existence that suddenly became available to him; but the snag was that now he had a family to care for, five children to feed, and a house. None of this fitted in with the image of a drop-out adrift in the big city…
At any rate Mette, unable to share her husband’s euphoric view of art, went to stay with her parents in Denmark.
Sea urchins
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: marine biology Leave a comment
Used to be called “whore eggs.”
Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language
Posted: September 22, 2013 Filed under: New England Leave a comment
The Founder Effect.
Possibly getting a slam in on his neighbor island, Nathaniel Philbrick claims in his Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island And Its People, 1602-1890:
Unlike some towns on Martha’s Vineyard, whose original settlers moved in a group form England only to continue a longstanding tradition of inbreeding (with serious genetic consequences, which included deafness and hermaphroditism), Nantucketers began with a fresh gene pool collected from towns throughout the [mainland] Merrimack Valley.
Martha’s Vineyard.
It’s apparently true that deafness was extremely common on Martha’s Vineyard. Wiki:
In 1854, when the island’s deaf population peaked, the United States national average was one deaf person in 5728, while on Martha’s Vineyard it was one in 155. In the town of Chilmark, which had the highest concentration of deaf people on the island, the average was 1 in 25; in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as a quarter of the population of 60 was deaf.
The island even had its own sign language:
The ancestry of most of the deaf population of Martha’s Vineyard can be traced back to a forested area in the south of England known as the Weald—specifically the part of the Weald in the county of Kent. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language may be descended from a hypothesized sign language of that area in the 16th century, now referred to as Old Kent Sign Language. Families from a puritan community in the Kentish Weald emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony area of the United States in the early 17th century, many of their descendants later settling on Martha’s Vineyard. The first deaf person known to have settled there was Jonathan Lambert, a carpenter and farmer, who moved there with his hearing wife in 1694. By 1710, the migration had virtually ceased, and the endogamous community that was created contained a high incidence of hereditary deafness that would persist for over 200 years.
By the 18th century there was a distinct Chilmark Sign Language, which was later (19th century) influenced by French Sign Language, forming Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (19th and 20th centuries). From the late 18th to the early 20th century, virtually everyone on Martha’s Vineyard possessed some degree of fluency in the local sign language…
The last deaf person born into the island’s sign language tradition, Katie West, died in 1952. A few elderly residents were able to recall MVSL as recently as the 1980s when research into the language began. Indeed, when Oliver Sacks subsequently visited the island after reading a book on the subject, he noted that a group of elderly islanders talking together dropped briefly into sign language then back into speech.
Oliver Sacks.
The hermaphroditism seems like a touchier subject. In looking into it I found this, from Walter Pitkin’s 1921 book Must We Fight Japan?
Anyway. Walter Pitkin went on to write the bestselling nonfiction book of 1933, Life Begins At Forty.
From a quick image search for “Life Begins At Forty”
Tough review
Posted: September 20, 2013 Filed under: writing Leave a comment
Joseph C. Hart wrote a bestselling book of the 19th century, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835). It was based, apparently, on real life Nantucket smuggler, war profiteer, and sharp-eyed businesswoman Kezia Coffin (ht Nathaniel Philbrick’s Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island And Its People, 1602-1890).
At the end of the novel, Miriam is instructed by her husband to literally go back to the kitchen where she belongs.
Hart also wrote a book called The Romance of Yachting, which Wikipedia describes “as a narrative of his travels to places that give him occasion for musings on a variety of topics.”
Herman Melville, who was apparently influenced by Miriam Coffin, did not care for this one. Says Wiki:
Herman Melville scathingly described Hart’s book in his review as “an abortion” which “deserves to be burnt in a fire of asafetida, & by the hand that wrote it.”
Asafoetida is an interesting plant. Wiki tells us it’s used as an antiflatulent in the Jammu region of India.
Jammu.
I’m guessing it also burns pretty hot? There’s also this mysterious claim on the asafoetida wiki page:
Penrod, an 11-year-old boy in a 1929 Booth Tarkington story set in the midwestern United States, suffers intensely for being forced to wear a bag of asafoetida on his neck and encounters a girl in the same condition.
You remember Penrod of course:
The Big Hole
Posted: September 19, 2013 Filed under: Africa 2 Comments
In Kimberley, South Africa, there’s the largest hand-dug excavation on earth: the Big Hole.
I’ve always been enthusiastic about holes.
Diplomacy
Posted: September 18, 2013 Filed under: history Leave a comment
from yesterday’s NY Times:
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov completed the plan sitting by the pool at a Geneva hotel.
Lavrov:
At the United Nations, he was known for his elaborate, seemingly absent-minded doodling during lengthy meetings but also for a command of the issues.
“He was a great doodler, but his mind was always spinning away,” said Charles A. Duelfer, who was deputy head of the United Nations’ weapons inspectors program in Iraq in the 1990s and frequently met with Mr. Lavrov at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
…Mr. Lavrov, a chain-smoker, is known as an old-school diplomat. He flatly ignored an effort by Secretary General Kofi Annan to ban smoking in the United Nations headquarters, saying Mr. Annan did not own the building. He enjoys whiskey and cigars, and his hobbies tend toward action sports like rafting and skiing.
He can show flashes of anger. When a photographer asked Mr. Lavrov, Mr. Kerry and the special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to pose after a meeting in Geneva, Mr. Lavrov said: “You don’t give us orders; you just capture the moment.”
And:
The former Austrian foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik, called Mr. Lavrov “one of the most knowledgeable and respected foreign policy actors in the global village.” On her first visit to Moscow, she said, Mr. Lavrov was waiting for her outside the legendary Café Pushkin with a bunch of yellow roses.
Cafe Pushkin
Ursula Plassnik
The history books:
Georgi I. Mirsky, a political scientist at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, said that the Syria plan was really Mr. Putin’s but that Mr. Lavrov will get the credit.
“In history textbooks, it will be Lavrov and Kerry — Lavrov the great man, he saves Syria from American military strikes, and also saves Barack Obama from a humiliating and embarrassing situation in the Congress,” Mr. Mirsky said. “He is a bureaucrat, he is a good diplomat. He knows the score. And he will never ever say anything that will contradict the official line.”
Who is gonna read that boring ass history book? Not me unless Margaret MacMillan writes it.
(AFP photo of Lavrov and Kerry from here, Lavrov smoking from here credited to Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters, top photo is the Intercontinental Hotel Geneva)
Sniffen Court And The Amateur Comedy Club
Posted: September 16, 2013 Filed under: New York Leave a comment
Reading, as one does, about Robert Murray, once owner of the most shipping tonnage in New York, until he retired to a 29-acre farm on Manhattan which he called Inclenberg but everyone else called – and still calls – Murray Hill.
Mrs. Murray is sometimes credited with delaying the British as they pursued the haggard Continental army across Manhattan after being nearly destroyed at the Battle of Brooklyn. Supposedly she offered them tea and cakes and her feminine charm. David McCullough in 1776 counters: “she may have been extremely charming, but she was also a woman in her fifties and the mother of twelve children.”
In Murray Hill today is Sniffen Court, an alley off 36th Street built in 1863-4. Here’s some good photos.
And this curious bit from Curbed:
Right on 36th Street, 1 Sniffen Court has been owned by the Amateur Comedy Club since 1884, and the building is registered as a legitimate theater. Additional research shows that the amateur theater group was a private one, operated strictly by and for the amusement of its own members and social circle with no public performances. The group dramatically broke their private character during World War I, when it became a dramatic theater company for the entertainment and benefit of military service members.
Here’s the Amateur Comedy Club website. One hopes they provide welcome relief from the excessive professionalism of other comedy clubs.
a veritable ogre
Posted: September 12, 2013 Filed under: science Leave a comment
A good article in Nature about temperamental herpetologist Edward Taylor:
There is a darker side to Taylor’s legacy, however. He was a racist curmudgeon beset by paranoia — possibly a result of his mysterious double life as a spy for the US government. He had amassed no shortage of enemies by the time he died in 1978. An obituary noted that he was, to many, “a veritable ogre—and woe to anyone who incurred his wrath”
“I named about 500 species,” he would later tell a reporter, “but I can’t always remember the names of my own children.” His wife, Hazel, could not bear his long absences, and they divorced in 1925.
Here’s one of his favorites, the Philippine parachute gecko:
Handsome Devil
Posted: September 6, 2013 Filed under: history, painting Leave a comment
In 1899 companies were crazy.
This man, James Hazen Hyde, inherited the Equitable Life Insurance Company from his dad when he was 23. The company had $400 million in assets.
A few years later he threw a crazy costume party. J. P. Morgan and some other tricksters claimed he’d charged the party to the company, which I guess wasn’t true. Hyde lost his job, and the tricksters got their hands on the company themselves.
I hope he didn’t lose his good looks, though.
(Learned that from here and here and here).
Djokovic
Posted: August 29, 2013 Filed under: writing Leave a comment
Reading this New Yorker profile of Djokovic, which reprints his daily schedule. I’ve decided I’m going to copy it, just replacing tennis stuff with writing:
7:30 Wake-up. Tepid glass of water. Stretching. A bowl of muesli with a handful of mixed nuts, some sunflower seeds, sliced fruit, and a small scoop of coconut oil. Chew very slowly.
8:30. Writing. Drink two bottles of energy drink, adding a hydration drink with electrolytes if it’s humid
10:00 Stretching. Check color of urine.
11:00 Sports massage.
12:00 Lunch. Gluten-free pasta with vegetables.
1:30 Writing. Drink organic protein shake made from water mixed with pea protein.
2:30 Stretching.
3:00 Sentence practice.
4:30 Stretching
5:00 Business meetings.
7:30 Dinner. No Alcohol. No Dessert. Protein. Vegetables, but not beets, potatoes, parsnips, squash or pumpkin, which are too high in carbs.
(picture found here, credit Picture: Dita Alangkara Source: AP)
History is crazy
Posted: August 28, 2013 Filed under: history Leave a comment
From this review of this book, about an executioner in 16th century Germany. Being an executioner was, needless to say, a bummer job and here’s how he ended up with it:
His own apprenticeship as an executioner was the result of a catastrophic fall in family fortunes, originating in an episode of almost cinematic vividness. In October 1553, the erratic and unpopular Prince Albrecht Alcibiades von Brandenburg-Kulmbach suspected three local gunsmiths of plotting against his life. Invoking an ancient custom, he commanded a hapless bystander to execute them on the spot. Frantz’s father, Heinrich, had no option but to carry out the commission and, tainted by the act, no options thereafter but to become a professional executioner.
Q: What is this?
Posted: August 19, 2013 Filed under: Africa Leave a comment
A: crossectional mineral map of kimberlite rock in South Africa.
More Milch
Posted: August 16, 2013 Filed under: TV, writing 1 Comment
QUESTION: I work for a homeless newspaper, and I encounter a lot of writing by people who are mentally divergent. In your years of self-confessed madness and drug abuse, did you have any moments of clarity?
MILCH: Once I was burying myself in Mexico . I had sold my passport to some criminals, and I got drawn further in by steps, as these things usually happen. There was a lunatic chemist who contracted a stomach ache, and a consort of his named Yum-Yum decided to treat it with an enema. Turns out he had peritonitis and she killed him. We were all down there illegally, so I was digging this guy’s grave, and I tossed the body in. I figured I should grab his ID just in case I eventually decided to do the right thing and contact his relatives, and found my own passport that I had sold six months before. That was a moment of clarity, but thanks to liberal amounts of chloroform, it didn’t last.
Leadership Shirt
Posted: August 12, 2013 Filed under: Met, museum Leave a comment
Yeah, I’ll say!
That’s today’s Artwork Of The Day.
Going through my closet to determine which are my leadership shirts.
Nantucket Shark Mystery
Posted: August 8, 2013 Filed under: New England, the ocean Leave a comment
From The Boston Globe:
A dead shark was found lying in front of the Sea Dog Brew Pub in Nantucket this morning and removed by the Department of Public Works.
The Department of Public Works assures is this is not a common occurrence:
“It’s not too often we find sharks on land like that,” said John Braginton-Smith, a foreman for the department.
He offers a theory:
“In summertime, someone can get one too many beers in them and think that’s amusing,” he said.
(ht Chestnut Hill office. Photo is credited to Jimmy Agnew with caption “A fishy mystery.”)
A. J. Liebling
Posted: August 6, 2013 Filed under: boxing Leave a comment
“The pattern of a newspaperman’s life is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty,’ ” A. J. Liebling wrote. “Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.”
(found that today on this New Yorker blog post about Bezos/WaPo. If I had a business I really loved and I had to sell it, I think I’d be happy if Jeff Bezos bought it?)
Well, that resolved me on spending a profitable few minutes digging out my old copy of The Sweet Science and finding a choice paragraph of Liebling for Helytimes fans (“Heliacs”?). How about:
By the time the first of the feature eight-rounders came on, the crowd was in fine voice. It was a neighborhood crowd, except for the concentrated groups of fighters’ friends, and the neighborhood is not tough but hearty. As it happens, this [Sunnyside Garden at 45th and Queens Boulevard] is the region to which the authentic Manhattan accent has emigrated, according to a learned cove I met at Columbia years ago, who went about making recordings of American regional modes of speech. The more habitable quarters of Manhattan, he told me, have been preempted by successful inlanders who speak Iowese and Dakotahoman; the inhabitants of West Harlem talk like Faulkner characters, and East Harlem speaks Spanish. “Just as the anthropologist who wishes to study pristine African culture must find it among the Djuka Negroes of Surinam, who were snatched from Africa in the eighteenth century, I must carry my tape recorder to Queens to study the New York speech of Henry James’ day,” he said.
Remember: he’s writing about a boxing match.
The Sunnyside Garden no longer stands but it must’ve been around here.
Inside my copy of The Sweet Science, I found a chart I once made. I was trying to link Lennox Lewis, whose hand I once shook, as far back into the history of boxing as possible by an unbroken connection of people who had punched each other.
Looks like I made it to Jem Mace (1831-1910)
The goal was to get back all the way to Cribb and Molineaux.
I believe I later did this, but I don’t know where that chart is and it’s time to start my day.
Tom Molineaux was born a slave in Virginia, fought Tom Cribb in England in 1810, and “died penniless in the regimental bandroom in Galway in Ireland from liver failure [when he] was 34 years old.”
Difficult Men
Posted: August 2, 2013 Filed under: TV, writing Leave a comment
I enjoyed this book. (A sequel about Amy Sherman-Palladino etc.?) Here are a few items of interest.
David Chase talking about what he learned from Stephen J. Cannell:
“Cannell taught me that your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long as he’s the smartest guy in the room and he’s good at his job. That’s what we ask of our heroes.”
Cannell:
“I’m not a mogul, I’m a writer. I write every day for five hours. If that doesn’t make me a writer, what does?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vo9cJhsXQ
And here’s a good tidbit:
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood [the book] was finished three years after the project began. (“Simon was very heavy into fantasy baseball one of the years,” Burns said by way of explaining why it took so long to write.)
There’s some great stuff about how cool Clarke Peters is.
Peters was an erudite, fifty-year-old native New Yorker. He had left the United States as a teenager for Paris, where there were still the remnants of a great African American expat community. Within weeks of arriving, he’d met James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and the blues pianist Memphis Slim, among others.
While Peters was running basically a salon in Baltimore, Herc and Carver were playing video games all day and going to strip clubs.
David Milch does not disappoint:
The actor Garret Dillahunt, who first played Wild Bill’s killer and then the character Francis Wolcott, was given and asked to study 190 pages of biographical material about a sixteenth-century heretic named Paracelsus.
Later, talking about John From Cincinnati:
“My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is [that] any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters. And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or character that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end.”
Um, yeah no shit duh.
Say what you will: for my money, the opening sequence to JfC is the best ever in TV history:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrWZlh7DnBE
Helytimes 
