Starsailor Band Members Know About Music and Haircuts!

Some of the music I'm currently listening to as per some of your questions comes mostly from Rilo Kiley, Nada Surf, Tegan&Sarah, Keane, and Starsailor.
Starsailor has been a favorite for a while but I'm especially enjoying them these days for some reason.
Check out these vids: a poetic blend of indie rock and not-to-be-ignored aesthetics.
I want to know who cuts their hair.
Well, that, and who helps with the fusing of the classical bits in Four to the Floor.
I fully recommend their stuff. If you enjoy British Invasion sounds a la Keane, Coldplay, Stereophonics or even The Killers and The Bravery from the States, you're bound to like these guys. Starsailor hail from Manchester and here is their Myspace page.
Yes, I do like them better than Oasis. But then again, I like most music better than Oasis these days. Sorry, Liam!

The Uber-creative Rauschenberg Takes the Final Bow

The world of art suffered a great loss yesterday. Robert Rauschenberg, the very influential American artist, died at the age of 82. The NY Times notes:

"A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life."

And here's one of his statements that I truly appreciate and with which I fully concur:

“Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

He will be missed. Thank you for your uninhibited and honest art, Robert Rauschenberg!

Read full tribute here.
graph per ny times

Because ALL One Needs IS Music - Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

I don’t think one chooses music. I truly believe it chooses one. I was asked recently why I'm such a fan of indie music. I remember saying something like, 'well, I suppose I was born that way. Or something. It's one of those truths, you know? You just know it. Sort of like knowing your name, you just do, you know?' The awkward-sounding answer made full sense to me. Can't say the same for my interlocutor.
And it didn't matter. I had my playlist to fall back on and therein there's safety.
Having a soundtrack for the quotidian experience is as indispensable as air. This is one of my inalienable truths. Without it there can be no inspiration, hence no good production of creativity and forward-moving notions.

I remember growing up feeling no ounce of attraction to traditional music. Yet, many around me were all about it. I suppose it was one of those truths I wouldn’t be able to decode till much later. And I did. The reason why I’m a full endorser of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, the Bob Dylan-inspired and –informed film is because it provides a beautiful 'reading' of music.

When Dylan, while portrayed by Cate Blanchett, utters the below-quoted text, I thought, ‘yes, I now know fully what this means.’ It was one of those very rare moments when cognitive and experiential truths align ever so perfectly, and as the film also says, "yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all in the same room."
Blanchett's version of 'Dylan' says:
“Traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected.
I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand people try to own it.”
I fully concur. Just like the music-loving Socrates in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy I, also, believe that music is, indeed, the ultimate form of expression, more adequate and capable of capturing human emotion than language could ever be.

And while I meant the post to be a review of the Haynes' film, it turned out to be a modest tribute to music, the ultimate expresser of thought and emotion.
Having stated that, I'm Not There is not just a must-see, it's a need-see and need-study. And who else to 'Virgil' us through the portals than the master himself, Bob Dylan?

graphs per rolling stone and vh1

Why Don't Married Women Work?

From Tyler over at MR. Too interesting to pass up. What do you think?

" If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.

The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed -- that's larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.

And why is this?

Surprisingly, the economists argue, the most important specific thing seems to be traffic.

And if you do work in these traffic-heavy areas, you are likely to work more hours. But is it all causal?

With all due respect to The Walker Art Center, if I wanted to be a kept woman I would not start my quest in Minneapolis. High density, as you find in Manhattan, means lots of fun things to do in your copious free time as a kept woman and also a higher degree of income inequality and thus the hope of snaring a rich man. There's a reason why they didn't set Sex in the City in Paramus and most of the women there will be working even when the traffic gets worse."
Tyler got the pointer here.
chart per portfolio.com

Stepher Colbert, the Word, and Gas Prices

Here's a Colbert-ian moment. Via Greg Mankiw, another good blogger I read regularly. Mankiw is also quoted by Colbert in this piece.

Cost of Smarts

The best paragraph I read today comes from the NY Times.
"Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive."
Read on here.

Shoes Sans Socks

Quite a textile/textual presentation, I thought.
graph per sartorialist

Why Are Chinese Restaurants so Ubiquitous?

Before heading to our location last night, we stopped to speak to the owner of a local Chinese restaurant for some reservations.
Upon leaving the place I got to thinking about Chinese restaurants and the fact that there are so many of them. Everywhere I travel in the US and Canada I see a good number of Chinese restaurants. What makes them so ubiquitous?
Marginal Revolution featured a post today on this very question:
"Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work."
text per marginal revolution

BlackBerry Maker Location

Via creative classroom:


"Despite the BlackBerry's growing global popularity, the company plans to keep its research operations near its Waterloo, Ont., headquarters and close to the Ontario universities that offer a deep pool of young developer talent."

San Francisco, Cookware Style

Amazing!
Via boingboing, "Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang sculpted the San Francisco cityscape out of pots, pans, graters, and other kitchenware. The piece is part of a new exhibition of Wang's work at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum running until May 25."