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Two very different lists of the best movie posters from last year: the more indie-oriented list from Mubi and the mainstream one from FirstShowing. The Mubi list is better but you may recognize more of the films from the FirstShowing list.
The mega list of best of 2010 lists is up and running at Fimoculous. Prepare to lose yourself in this for several hours.
Patrick Filler took Ben Greenman’s New Yorker holiday party playlist (one song for each year from 1925 to 2010) and made a Rdio playlist out of it so that you can listen to the whole shebang online.
Items on this pimp’s handwritten business plan — aka “Keep It Pimpin’” — include:
- my word is my bond
- take my game to the next level (from the concrete streets to executive suites)
- take care my bitches more better
- minimize my budget (cash cars, houses, etc.)
- keep a good photographer
For the New Yorker holiday party, Ben Greenman whipped up a music playlist containing one hit song from each year of the New Yorker’s history, from 1925 to 2010.
At the party, the mix worked like a charm. Jazz and blues greeted the early arrivals, and as the party picked up, the mood became romantic (thanks to the big-band and vocal recordings of the late thirties and forties), energetic (thanks to early rock and roll like Fats Domino and Jackie Brenston in the early fifties), funky (James Brown in 1973, Stevie Wonder in 1974), and kitschy (the eighties), after which it erupted into a bright riot of contemporary pop and hip-hop (Rihanna! Kanye! M.I.A.! Lil Jon!). It was rumored, though never proven, that party guests were leaving right around the songs that marked their birth years.
Where the hell is Hey Ya!? Oh, right. Crazy in Love.
The Millions annual Year in Reading mega-feature is back for 2010 and features contributions from Al Jaffee, Margaret Atwood, and Stephen Elliott.
For a seventh year, The Millions has reached out to some of our favorite writers, thinkers, and readers to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these ruminations, cheers, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help make your year in reading in 2011 a fruitful one.
From The Atlantic, twelve timeless rules for making a good publication.
3. Don’t over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.
7. A sound editor never has a three-months’ full supply in his cupboard. When you over-buy, you narrow your future choice.
…and how to get them.
Epic Swarm badge: Check in to a venue that has at least 1,000 people checked in. Yes, if you are number 950, you will get the badges when person number 1,000 checks in.
Without even looking, you could probably guess that scenes from Pulp Fiction and Requiem for a Dream would make a list of film’s greatest drug scenes. But there are 28 other worthy scenes on there as well.
Douglas Coupland’s list of 45 tips for the next 10 years is excellent; even the stuff that seems wrong makes you think. Some of my favorite bits:
In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.
You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual. You’ve become a notch in the Internet’s belt. Don’t try to delude yourself that you’re a romantic lone individual. To the new order, you’re just a node. There is no escape.
It will become harder to view your life as “a story”. The way we define our sense of self will continue to morph via new ways of socializing. The notion of your life needing to be a story will seem slightly corny and dated. Your life becomes however many friends you have online.
You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell. Over-criminalization of the populace, paired with the triumph of shopping as a dominant cultural activity, will create a world where the two poles of society are shopping and jail.
Much of this list seems Cowen-esque, particularly this for some reason: “musical appreciation will shed all age barriers”.
Wired has a go at defining liberal arts 2.0.
It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swing through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie.
Kenji Lopez-Alt busts six stubborn food myths.
4. Searing “Locks In” Juices. This is the oldest one in the book, and still gets repeated-by many highly respected cookbook authors and chefs!-to this day. It’s been conclusively proven false many times, including in our own post on How to Cook a Perfect Prime Rib, where we found that when roasting a standing roast, it in fact lost 1.68% more juice if it was seared before roasting rather than after! The same is true for pork roasts, steaks, hamburgers, chicken cutlets, you name it.
The NYPL blog has compiled a list of books ripped from the scenes of Mad Men.
Some of the titles are featured prominently in the series and others are mentioned in passing. Remember the book Sally read with her grandfather at bedtime? The book on Japanese culture the agency was told to read? The scandalous book the ladies passed between each other in secret? You can find all these and more!
(via mad men unbuttoned)
A great list of tips, tricks, and advice for travelling with kids.
18. Don’t do too much BUT don’t do too little either. I think the biggest mistake parents traveling with kids make is doing too little not too much. Get out there. Enjoy. Experience. Wear the kids out and get them tired.
(thx, meg)
Robin Hanson lists 20 reasons why your opinions “function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth”.
2. You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
9. You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
16. Your opinion doesn’t much change after talking with smart folks who know more.
(via mr)
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is on the list…click through for the rest. (via @tcarmody)
Originally written for mathematics students, this list of useful habits of mind is applicable to nearly anyone doing anything.
A collection by Roger Ebert from 1995. The moments include:
Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discuss what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in “Pulp Fiction.”
Jack Nicholson trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in “Five Easy Pieces.”
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” dialogue by Robert Duvall, in “Apocalypse Now.”
The list includes Roman concrete, Damascus steel, and a napalm-like weapon called Greek fire. (via @ebertchicago)
A list of the most important typefaces of the last decade.
It is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons. Instead, I am going to let the readers of this blog see if they can figure out the contribution that each of these ten faces makes.
The Guardian has the famous last words of 10 authors. As I am fundamentally opposed to lists in slide show format, especially lists with one list item per slide, the quotations are below. Click through to see the pictures. The chance all of these last words are 100% accurate is something much less than 100%. Points to the Guardian for including 2 women on this list. A lot of lists like this would be male-only.
Samuel Johnson - ‘Iam moriturus’ (I who am about to die)
Lord Byron - ‘Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!’
Emily Dickinson - ‘I must go in, the fog is rising’
Robert Louis Stevenson - ‘What’s that? Do I look strange?’
Anton Chekhov - ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne’
Mark Twain - ‘Death, the only immortal, who treats us alike, whose peace and refuge are for all. The soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved’
Leo Tolstoy - ‘We all reveal … our manifestations … This manifestation is over … That’s all’
Franz Kafka - ‘Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, (is) to be burned unread’
Virginia Woolf - ‘I feel certain that I’m going mad again …’
James Joyce - ‘Does nobody understand?’
(Via Sagatrope)
Sports Illustrated is out with its list of 50 highest paid AMERICAN athletes. (This distinction is important because there’s also an international list.) I wouldn’t say I was surprised by the list, but there were several ‘huh’ moments. For instance, close your eyes. Close them. Now picture the 3rd highest paid athlete on the planet. What sport is he playing? If you said boxing, you’re right. Floyd Mayweather made $60m last year. I’m curious if I were to make a list of the 50 highest paid American athletes how many of these names I would have come up with.
Other tidbits:
$28,847,406 separates #1 Tiger Woods ($90m) from #2 Phil Mickelson.
$73,733,163 separates Tiger from #50 A.J. Burnett.
Shaq still makes more than Kobe, which must really bug Kobe.
#2 highest paid QB is Matthew Stafford, who is the 2nd year QB of the Lions.
#28 Darrius Heyward-Bey is the first player I hadn’t heard of on the list.
There are 15 football players on this list, not one of whom is Tom Brady or Drew Brees.
Maria Sharapova is the only woman on either list, #20 on the international list with around $19m.
There is an international list, which is filthy with soccer players and Formula 1 drivers. For some reason non-American athletes (Ichiro, Pau Gasol) that play in the US are on the international list.
Flavorwire has a post on the etymology of 10 musical genre names. This is the type of thing that you wonder about from time to time, but probably never bothered to look up.
Punk: While “punk” was once (and still, occasionally) catch-all slang for a young delinquent, “punk rock” first appeared in a 1970 Chicago Tribune article, uttered by Ed Sanders of The Fugs. Although the band was one of punk’s immediate ancestors, Sanders went on to define the term as “redneck sentimentality.” The next year, Dave Marsh of Creem used “punk rock” to describe ? and the Mysterians. Its meaning evolved from there, originally encompassing a slew of Nuggets-era garage-rock bands and eventually solidifying into a more rigid description of the mid-’70s bands we think of as “punk.”
(Via @tcarmody and @brainpicker)
Bill Simmons recently compiled a list of the MVPs of comedy from 1975 to the present. Here’s a portion of the list:
1989: Dana Carvey
1990: Billy Crystal
1991: Jerry Seinfeld
1992: Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Myers (tie)
1993: Mike Myers
1994: Jim Carrey
1995: Chris Farley
1996: Chris Rock
Unlikely Words has the full list and you can go to Simmons’ site to read the list with annotations. Such as:
1982-84: Eddie Murphy
The best three-year run anyone has had. Like Bird’s three straight MVPs. And by the way, “Beverly Hills Cop” is still the No. 1 comedy of all time if you use adjusted gross numbers.
Author Janet Fitch wrote a list of 10 Writing Tips That Can Help Almost Anyone.
Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words.
An annotated list of the best film criticism blogs. (via the house next door)
A two part (one, two) series on using psychological techniques to improve your creativity.
Interviews with 22 Nobel Laureates in physiology, chemistry, medicine and physics as well as Pulitzer Prize winning writers and other artists has found a surprising similarity in their creative processes (Rothenberg, 1996).
Called ‘Janusian thinking’ after the many-faced Roman god Janus, it involves conceiving of multiple simultaneous opposites. Integrative ideas emerge from juxtapositions, which are usually not obvious in the final product, theory or artwork.
Physicist Niels Bohr may have used Janusian thinking to conceive the principle of complementarity in quantum theory (that light can be analysed as either a wave or a particle, but never simultaneously as both).
(via lone gunman)
Pretty much why everyone else fails (minus a lack of intelligence).
1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
From a panel of 52 experts surveyed by Vanity Fair, a list of the 21 most important works of architecture created since 1980. The top three:
1. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao
2. Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection in Houston
3. Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland
Here are the complete results of the survey.
On the list are kottke.org favorites like Hilobrow, The Sartorialist, Shorpy, The Awl, and Roger Ebert’s Journal.
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