Matthew Culnane

the-overlook-hotel:

Jack Nicholson was around 42 years old when he filmed The Shining.

Today is his 75th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Jack.

Possibly my favourite Brendan Benson song. From Concert Los Angeles, featuring Brad Pemberton, and Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow from The Posies.

Two different takes on an age-old conundrum.

The Guardian:

To grill or fry? Fry. This is not a healthy meal. Trying to pretend it is - and cooking your bacon in a Breville - will ruin it. Grilled breakfasts lack grease. It’s not just beans and a runny yolk that provide moisture. You need that lip-smacking lubrication provided by slowly-fried unpricked sausages and bacon. Subsequently flashing the bacon under a hot grill to crisp its fat, however, is very sensible.

Gentleman’s Dictionary and Usage:

There are many different ways to cook eggs but most of them are purely of interest to invalids, children and the feeble-minded. The correct or ‘proper English egg’ is fried with lightly browned edges in the fat left over from the bacon. At the last minute, oil is flicked over the top of the yolk to seal it. This dangerous procedure causes the yolk to form a perfect, golden, viscid capsule, the violation of which with a rough shard of toast, is the nearest that an Englishman will permit himself to unbridled sexual ecstasy.

Elliott Smith - Bumbershoot Festival (by Tumtumtumenator)

I wasn’t around to see Elliott Smith’s 2000 tour, but what remains of the shows is revelatory: the finest musician of his generation turns bedroom ballads into propulsive full-band jams, giving edge even to the more boldly produced efforts of XO and Figure 8. Here’s a full hour of Smith tearing through his catalog; you’re going to want to go full screen for this.

(via)

the-overlook-hotel:

“Rubik Kubrick II” - produced from 300 Rubik’s Cubes mounted on a wood panel.

Artist: Invader

Last.fm tells me this is my most-played song since 2005 (when I signed up).

I would never have guessed that. Still, a much-missed band.

The photo sharing app Instagram was released today for Android, and with it a wave of new users came on board. Given the warm welcome afforded to it by iOS users, I was struck by some of the negative comments I saw on Twitter by Android users using it for presumably the first time.

This post is just me thinking out loud, without much of a story or conclusion, so I’ll jump straight to the bit where I tell you what I think: I love Instagram. Really love it. I was sceptical at first, thinking it as just another Hipstamatic knock-off (an app I bought and used occasionally, but ultimately found no compelling use for). Rands puts this initial reaction well:

Delivering the Instagram pitch is usually a study in disappointment.

Me: “You take pictures, tweak them with filters, and then share them with your friends.”

You: “Yeah, I have three of those.”

But here’s the kicker, if you don’t know already: Instagram isn’t a photography app. It’s a beautifully simple social network based around the everyday moments of you and your friends. Once you stop dicking around with the filters (of which there 18, more than enough; there’s tilt-shift and an auto-enhance feature too) you start to see how the app’s intentional constraints force you to think differently. Sure, you can send to the usual social networks, but it’s the self-contained Instagram universe that I love so much: one that simply doesn’t exist in the dedicated camera apps available for iOS and Android. Seeing your friends’ lives through a small filtered square is so much better than it has any right to be. Every time I open the app I see Jason has another wonderful geometric shot or Chris has had a baby girl! or that insane beauty really does run in the family.

But why not Flickr? Because my friends aren’t going to see what I’m doing right now on Flickr. There are so many things wrong with what was a great service—due to collosal mis-management by the Yahoo! team—that it is more or less unusable for me. It doesn’t fulfill a need I have.¹ In its heyday, the core strengths of Flickr were always as a personal archive and a way to see friends’ photos. I’d say there are now better photo archive applications on your computer and the way it deals with friends’ updates is, frankly, rubbish. A once-adored web service, I can’t see a long-term future for it.² It might be a place for your carefully edited portfolio, but not as a place to put what you’re doing right now.

Dan Catt has a trio of posts where he discusses Instagram and Flickr. I though this was an interesting take:

Instagram is the narrative of now, I don’t feel particularly precious about [my Instagram photos], I don’t tend to go back and look through old photos. It doesn’t matter that the shots I shoot with it are of lower resolution with a cameraphone lens, that they have filters, these are my transient photos (I understand this isn’t the case for everyone and Instamatic photos can be an art). I don’t need a central place where I can always find them, instead it’s a pooled visual stream of consciousness of myself and the people I know.

The crux of it is this: I’ve uploaded more iPhone photos to Instagram in the 18-or-so months since its launch than I have to Flickr in 7 years, and I struggle to see how that will change.

If I had to describe my ability as a photographer it would be somewhere between godawful and mediocre. But having Instagram in my pocket, and knowing that my real-life friends are going to see my pictures immediately, means I look at the world in a slightly different way. I look up and down rather than straight ahead. I see the rule of thirds like some Terminator-style eye enhancement. I can take a picture and have an inkling that the Rise filter will lift that shot a little bit, or that, yes, horses do look better with added Earlybird. I might not be good, but I’m getting better. Would I have improved if I’d stuck with Flickr, where my friends aren’t? Doubtful.

Instagram doesn’t need me to stand up for it—they had 25 million users before the Android release.³ I’m excited to see what happens next, especially as they’ll need to start turning a profit. But count me in. As long as my friends are there, I’ll be using it every day.

You Am I: ‘Berlin Chair’ (1994) (by PunsArchive)

Recently resurfaced via indefensible on This Is My Jam, and I can’t stop listening to it.

David Brown, for NPR:

More than a decade ago, an album came out recorded mostly on cassette in a house, never released on a major label — and until last month it had been out of print for almost that long. When Noel Gallagher of Oasis heard it, he declared it “amazing,” and The Guardian called it “the best album The Beatles never recorded.”

I adored Kon Tiki¹ in 1997 and I’m delighted to see its reissue. I remember Harrison’s voice being described as “The best ‘Stars in Your Eyes’ John Lennon, bar none”, and while you can’t escape the way CM wear their influences so clearly, the songs are still knock-out.

eta78:

Please come along to see my first exhibition - would be great to see you. 

My friends Emmerson and Lynsey are putting on an exhibition next month. Come along if you’re in town—it’s going to be great.

the-overlook-hotel:

From photographer Federico Chiesa’s project, “Horror Vacui”, in which he envisions the twilight years of 1980’s horror film icons.

Taken with instagram

mojomagazine:

Back in 2008, MOJO received review copies (as now, the package featured two, infinitesimally different versions of Loveless) and ran a two-page review by MOJO Senior Editor Danny Eccleston in the magazine. But the albums never came out. In tribute to their emergence, not even four years later (a wink of an eye in MBV time) here’s a reminder of what we wrote.

People enjoy remembering things, and particularly things that happened within their own lifetime. Remembering creates meaning. There are really only two stages in any existence — what we’re doing now, and what we were doing then. That’s why random songs played repeatedly take on a weight that outsizes their ostensive worth: We can unconsciously hear the time and thought we invested long ago. But no one really does this anymore. No one endlessly plays the same song out of necessity. So when this process stops happening — when there are no more weirdos listening to “Centre of Eternity” every day for a year, without even particularly liking it — what will replace that experience?

smartasshat:

I bet a priest buys it.

My favourite album cover. For Pierce.

Clifford J. Levy:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.