Lackey's Ramblin's

Defining Hip

2006-10-22T18:38:01Z

For something that is by definition subjective, hip is astoundingly uniform across the population. It is the beatitude of Thelonious Monk at the piano, or the stoic brutality of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, performing songs of drugs and sadomasochism as a projector flashed Andy Warhol's films on their black turtlenecks. It is the flow of Jack Kerouac's "bop prosody" or Lenny Bruce's jazzed-out satire, or the rat-a-tat tattoo of James Ellroy's elevated pulp lit. Walt Whitman was hip; Lord Buckley was hip; Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is too hip for her own good. Hip is the way Miles Davis talked, dressed, played or just stood - and the way Bob Dylan, after his own style, followed in kind (though both men strayed into injudicious leather in the 1980s). The streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn or Silver Lake in Los Angeles comprise a theme park in the key of hip. Its gaze is the knowing, raised eyebrow of Dawn Powell or Kim Gordon, bassist in the downtown band Sonic Youth - skeptical but not unkind.
From HIP: THE HISTORY, By John Leland
Newsweeek Sept 27, 2004

Defining Hip

2006-10-22T18:37:58Z

iPod history

2006-10-19T02:13:13Z

Wired News: Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like," Jobs told the Times. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

"You were expecting poetry?"

2006-09-10T19:20:59Z

Outsourcing Homework
By CHARLES McGRATH
NYTimes September 10, 2006
Examples:
Term Paper from Go-Essays
Essay from Term Paper Relief

Informal Learning

2006-08-30T00:39:50Z

The Other 80%

The Second Coming

2006-08-07T16:37:59Z

Dick Faegler closed his column Sunday, August 6, 2006 with the following:
"But unless we form a conspiracy of sanity, as a great Irish poet once said, the center cannot hold . . . "
alluding to:

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?