Filtered

10.22, Wednesday 12 Nov 2014

1.

Maybe I should be adopting Michael Sippey’s low-pressure philosophy for ‘filtered’: I used to blog; I haven’t in a while. I miss it. So this is trying something new, without the daily pressure of a capital B Blog, or the content pressure of a the capital E Essay. Start a new draft post on Monday, dump things in it over the week, rewrite and cull along the way, what’s left gets published on Friday. Let’s see how long I keep this up.

Low-pressure filtering? Cold brew blogging.

It’s a philosophy that seems to be working.

2.

Long read on The Knowledge from the New York Times Style magazine. the Knowledge is the examination taken by black cab drivers in London… deep knowledge of 25,000 streets and everything on them.

Fascinating how revision works and how the test works. Revision: A series of 320 runs across central London that you rehearse by crossing on a motorbike and taking notes. The test: Verbal, over many months, increasing in complexity and frequency. There is no such thing as “failing” the Knowledge. You can either quit, or persevere and pass.

3.

An Interview with Stanley Kubrick by Joseph Gelmis, 1969. I referenced Kubrick and 2001 a ton at my Web Directions talk (video online soon apparently). Two favourite quotes:

Actually, film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension.

And:

One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated – as ours soon will be – by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.

4.

A Ranking of All 118 Sweaters Seen on Twin Peaks.

Diligent.

Slideshow here.

More posts tagged:
Follow-up posts: