Tony Hawk! Chico! Listen to me! You are coward, Mr. Tony Hawk! You are an Ignorant, a Skateboarder Immoral, a Half-Pipe Assassin! You hoard your power, birdie, while other, far superior characters such as Rune Glifberg and Rodney Mullen suffer your tyranny! You are disgustingly incapable of performing freestyle tricks, and are only mediocre at switch stance, Mr. Tony Hawk! Your Double Kick Flip Indy is not so impressive, either, Hawk Man! Your own colleagues mock you, Burro Man!
THE MIKE REVIEW of books
Long reads and articles worth your time and consideration. Enduring stuff, triple filtered, filled to the brim. Not about books at all. For me as much as you.
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Between the two operators, they have the necessary skills to navigate the aircraft, which can stay aloft up to 40 hours at a time and fly as high as 25,000 feet, responding to troops’ verbal cues (just like in World of Warcraft) and, most importantly, shooing very real ordnance, from Hellfire missiles to 500-pound bombs … Today’s remote technologies offer us an even greater ability to disconnect our soldiers and the viewing public from the human consequences of our policy decisions. Mistakes will continue, the byproduct of detachment, with an exponentially negative effect on the cause. In a world that’s getting smaller and more technologically sophisticated every day, the drone strategy, no matter how well-intentioned, may come back to haunt us.
What does he see as essential to his psyche?
“Feeling that I’m living my life to the fullest, and that means being of service to others. I don’t want to be mean to people or be selfish or cause harm.”
What else?
“Taking risks, trying to discover what’s beautiful. There are so many beautiful things. Riding on a freight train at night and looking up at the stars, realizing what a vast and gorgeous universe we live in.”
Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tacking solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to shop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.
The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been aban- doned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.
…from Romanthony’s first blissful, vocoded shout of “one more time!” the dominant emotion on Discovery is joy. A joy that wasn’t afraid to be sentimental and funny as well as hard and futuristic, and is all the better for that. When a generation looks back and tries to catch a fuzzy hold of the music that made them happy this decade, Daft Punk’s will be top of the list.
Fire trucks arrive, and the firemen swarm the scene with hooks and axes, as though there is no problem that cannot be made more manageable for being chopped into small bits.
I wake while it’s still dark, reach for a flashlight (I don’t like to turn the lights on), climb down the ladder from the attic, put a slice of toast in the toaster, put the coffee on, put a kettle of hot water on, too. I watch the burner’s blue flame. I stretch. The toaster pops. Out on the porch, the breeze blows up the valley. I watch the view beginning to take shape in the first blue light of dawn. Then I finish my toast and go inside and put my earplugs in, and pour coffee into the thick, white diner mug my brother gave me long ago. I sit at the small side table I use as a desk. I get to work.
…from underneath the closed door, a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek.
Denis Johnson - Jesus’ Son
The goal is clear: to produce a Yao Ming of baseball, a Chinese-born athlete who can galvanize the full profit-potential of the Chinese audience.
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present
As a poet who had written anti-Fascist propaganda for the BBC during the war and had taught ‘English literature’ in China both before and afterwards, he didn’t want writers or readers to trade in emotive, ineffable or overly abstract (i.e. religiose) language. Literature was there to alert us, to make us think rather than assent; close reading was the preferred antidote to indoctrination. The consequences of listening or reading inattentively, and of not seeing how language can be used to sustain inattention and sponsor cruelty, were Empson’s abiding preoccupations.
I am the only one that got through
The others died where ever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground
I’ve seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn
The others died where ever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground
I’ve seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn
BBC - Today - Radiohead: Harry Patch (In memory of)
Thom Yorke wrote a tribute to the last surving solider of WWI, based on the words of the man. Pay to download.
Perhaps the modern environment, with its increased access to people, sights, music, and food from faraway places, helps us become more creative not only by exposing us to a variety of styles and ideas, but also by allowing us to think more abstractly. So the next time you’re stuck on a problem that seems impossible don’t give up. Instead, try to gain a little psychological distance, and pretend the problem came from somewhere very far away.
What was happening was a collision of two different worldviews: the investigative mindset of journalists and prosecutors, with its normative emphasis on evidence, guilt, and verdicts; and the academic mode of inquiry, which is more discursive and wary of definitive judgments.
Doubt: A professor, a genocide, and NBC’s quest for a prime-time hit.
