Watching and helping the rules bend for nonfiction storytelling.
contact me : lilahrap@gmail.com

Have you ever been to a concert where you sort of have to pee in the beginning but an hour in just give up and loosen your belt because each song is that one that reminds you of that time that… I’d never been to Radio City Music Hall but it reminded me of an abandoned 60s cruise ship. We all looked goofy and underdressed. I don’t know what to tell you about Bon Iver except that I fucking love Bon Iver. Justin Vernon’s writing is intricate and deliberate and silky and effectively obscure, his voice takes many forms and they all slay me, and his band just projected fucking audial heroin. Seeing him was like being wrapped in a really soft down comforter that has this specific smell that makes you nostalgic for like five years ago.

Schmooze or Lose

SCHMOOZE OR LOSE
Obama doesn’t like cozying up to billionaires. Could it cost him the election?

By Jane Mayer
August 27, 2012

Read this. It’s about how Citizens United lets billionaires buy an election, allowing for a severe gap between donations given to Obama vs Romney for 2 main reasons:

1. Obama’s less comfortable stroking the egos & bellies of his wealthy donors than Clinton et al, partially because he doesn’t want to owe anyone a favor (“Obama wrote, politicians who spent too much time among the wealthy risked losing touch with the ‘frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.’”).

2. Wealthy liberals like Warren Buffett are disinterested in engaging in super PACs as they, like Obama, find the institutions plutocratic and devastating to the public interest.

Say what you will about Obama’s leadership and the change you wanted versus the change you saw, but changing yr vote will put a Republican in power that is comfortable being lobbied to by some of the country’s most socially and fiscally closed-minded wealthy losers. Why won’t Mitt stand for clean energy? The Koch brothers are spending $400 million on his campaign and they want the issue buried in the interest of their fossil fuel company. Why are Republicans so eerily one-sided on Israel & Palestine? Sheldon Adelson, one of Mitt’s biggest donors, thinks the Palestinian prime minister’s a terrorist. Why are Republicans in Congress protecting Adelson’s casinos’ ability to pay a 9.8% tax rate when the statutory rate is 35 (Is fairness not a historically Republican cause?)? Appeasement. The point that these Republicans scare me feels too obvious to state on a blog, but Paul Ryan the other day called rape a “method of conception,” and making rape a talking point, diluting the severity of our connotations to such a traumatic abuse = scary. Doubtless the rights on women’s bodies are about money and the closed-minded beliefs of rich men, too.

I like many of the things that traditional Republicans stood for. Mitt’s historically moderate - he was inoffensive in Massachusetts – but any traditional Republican’s nuts to think he won’t be committed to following through on his donors’ needs. I’ve found Obama to be a stable leader in times of severe & unprecedented political polarization. He could be close to losing on such a high-road ethical stance, but he comes across as a more honest politician for it.  Last week I Googled, “Why don’t Republicans like Obama.” Call me simplistic. Google’s not built to answer that.

I come from an immediate family of swinging liberals and an extended one of Yankee conservatives. My aunt didn’t vote for John Kerry because she had a bad feeling about Theresa Heinz. One uncle is waiting to see how the two do in the debates to base an opinion, although he should have all the facts he needs (and the debates are scripted, guys: candidates know and can prepare for questions 3 weeks before it takes place). Another uncle emailed me yesterday with this sad overgeneralization that presidential candidates “all love the office and will say anything the people want to hear in order to get elected …or re-elected. The way things look and how ALL the members of Congress and the President act, there is no solution to our country’s problems.” These, my own genetic counterparts, vote with their feelings over facts.

There’s fairness and reality, and tiptoeing around reality for the sake of fairness, even to keep the peace on Labor Day, feels increasingly to be a disservice. The billionaires are looking out for themselves, and the policies they push through if Mitt’s elected are about them: they are not traditionally conservative, won’t benefit us and have none of us in mind.

Why don’t Republicans like Obama?

Jessie Ware: the newest one of us who’s dancing on her own.

Beautiful album.

Buy a book, old man.

So tired of the old & middle-aged that scorn my generation and our fractured way of consuming content. It’s such a lazy argument. Being comfortable with a reality that is not linear doesn’t mean we don’t read, innovate or value intellect. Actually, the way I consume content is more immersive & exploratory and puts the impetus on me to find an issue’s greater narrative. It’s not handed down to me from my nightly news anchor. Is that what they miss? That and the feel of flipping pages? Then they should save their breath and GO BUY A BOOK.

                            

From Good.is: Generation Read: Millenials Buy More Books than Anyone Else

According to the 2012 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Review, if you were born between 1979 and 1989, you spent more money on books in 2011 than older Americans. The survey found that millennials now buy 30 percent of books. In comparison, baby boomers, who have far more disposable income than most millennials, only made 24 percent of book purchases.”

 (photo via @dont-slouch)

On Jonah Lehrer and Self-Plagiarism.

More plagiarism & fabrication from the beloved & young.

                       

“Lehrer’s success and this current humiliation, how far he had to fall, is a symptom of a much bigger problem, one that is systemic, one that continues to consistently elevate certain kinds of men simply for being a certain kind of man. Jonah Lehrer fits the narrative we want about a boy genius…[he] may or may not be a genius, but we wanted him to be one.”

- Roxane Gay in Slate: “Jonah Lehrer throws it all away”

Satirical Maps of the First World War. This one’s by Louis Raemaekers, and is called Het Gekkenhuis (Oud Liedje, Nieuwe Wijs), which means approximately The Insane Asylum (Old Song, New Tune). The blog BibliOddysey writes: “Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956) was one of the most famous cartoonist/caricaturists of WWI. He crossed the border from Holland into Belgium to witness first-hand the atrocities of the advancing German army. He subsequently chronicled the brutality of theses forces in his cartoons which drew the wrath of the Germans. They forced the Dutch authorities to put the illustrator on trial for jeopardising the neutrality of the Netherlands (acquitted). A reward was offered by the Germans for Raemaekers’ arrest and he escaped to Britain where he continued to skewer the German army in his drawings. He produced a thousand cartoons during the war and gained world wide acclaim from their syndication. See many other maps here.

Satirical Maps of the First World War. This one’s by Louis Raemaekers, and is called Het Gekkenhuis (Oud Liedje, Nieuwe Wijs), which means approximately The Insane Asylum (Old Song, New Tune).


The blog BibliOddysey writes:

“Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956) was one of the most famous cartoonist/caricaturists of WWI. He crossed the border from Holland into Belgium to witness first-hand the atrocities of the advancing German army. He subsequently chronicled the brutality of theses forces in his cartoons which drew the wrath of the Germans. They forced the Dutch authorities to put the illustrator on trial for jeopardising the neutrality of the Netherlands (acquitted). A reward was offered by the Germans for Raemaekers’ arrest and he escaped to Britain where he continued to skewer the German army in his drawings. He produced a thousand cartoons during the war and gained world wide acclaim from their syndication.

See many other maps here.

The Most Comma Mistakes via the New York Times Opinionator.

The Most Comma Mistakes via the New York Times Opinionator.

I learned about Vivian Maier at This American Life Live last week. The story was about a guy, John Maloof, who in 2007 bid $400 at an auction for 30,000 negatives from an old storage locker in Chicago. They belonged to Maier, a nanny from France who was old and dying. Then he started printing off her negatives. Each was clearer and more intricate than the last. Then she died.

She was sort of a hoarder - kept old newspapers & all her negatives, though most of her photos hadn’t been printed or seen by anyone. More than anything it seemed she was obsessed with compulsively documenting her life and the world around her at that time. She took photos on the street, but also of signs, of prices, of herself, of her taxes. A nostalgist, like me. If only we could all document so precisely.

You can see a portfolio of hers of New York here and a video slideshow by Maloof here.

rumpledblanket:

Vivian Maier

For the two years before my grandmother died, she occupied the room across from mine in my childhood home. This print hung next to the door to her closet. I remember trying to give each of these women equal time. They reminded me of Polly Pockets - smaller and less relevant than Barbie, with tantalizing toothpick arms and rigid plastic skirts. I preferred the women who took on the sill, standing right on top, fully framed, chest-out, spread-eagle, marking their spot. It was like a political commentary, or a death wish, or a bid to flaunt something more artistic and complex than their bodies. Whatever that was. miriamsimard: Ormond Gigli, Girls in the Windows, 1960

For the two years before my grandmother died, she occupied the room across from mine in my childhood home. This print hung next to the door to her closet. I remember trying to give each of these women equal time. They reminded me of Polly Pockets - smaller and less relevant than Barbie, with tantalizing toothpick arms and rigid plastic skirts. I preferred the women who took on the sill, standing right on top, fully framed, chest-out, spread-eagle, marking their spot. It was like a political commentary, or a death wish, or a bid to flaunt something more artistic and complex than their bodies. Whatever that was.

miriamsimard:

Ormond Gigli, Girls in the Windows, 1960


(via jazzedloon)

JJS reviews DFW’s The Pale King

“These aren’t showy passages. Just unusually precise descriptions of things we all do and see. We enter and recognize the modern-day office environment: “the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation.” Friends left behind in a small town are imagined “selling each other insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac….

“Like all good citizens, I’m with those who wish to resist romanticizing his suicide, but there remains a sense in which artists do expose themselves to the torrents of their time, in a way that can’t help but do damage, and there’s nothing wrong with calling it noble, if they’ve done it in the service of something beautiful. Wallace paid a price for traveling so deep into himself, for keeping his eye unaverted as long as it takes to write passages like the one just quoted, for finding other people interesting enough to pay attention to them long enough to write scenes like that. It’s the reason most of us can’t write great or even good fiction. You have to let a lot of other consciousnesses into your own. That’s bad for equilibrium.”

- John Jeremiah Sullivan Reviews David Foster Wallace’s Last Novel, ‘The Pale King’: Books: GQ

Just got around to reading this review and it rules: Read here.