When I was in LA, I got to visit Gallery 1988. If we'd gone a couple weeks later, we would have been able to see The Butcher Kings show.



Lots of good stuff in there, full of puns. My favorite might be Karate Kid N' Play. Check out the whole show.

Michael Lewis's latest chapter length depresso is about California and how many of the cities there are pretty royally fucked because of pension promises that will begin to come due very soon, and in some cases have already begun to cause problems. One thing I learned, the states won't ever have to bust their budgets because they can force more and more costs on to the cities. (I guess counties can do this, too, because this is exactly what happened in Topeka yesterday, where the city council voted to decriminalize domestic battery in order to force the county district attorney to start trying these cases again. He stopped last month citing budget concerns.) Anyway, we're screwed, so here's Lewis talking about a bike ride he took with Schwarzenegger.

He hauls a bike off the back of the car, hops on, and takes off down an already busy Ocean Avenue. He wears no bike helmet, runs red lights, and rips past do not enter signs without seeming to notice them and up one-way streets the wrong way. When he wants to cross three lanes of fast traffic he doesn’t so much as glance over his shoulder but just sticks out his hand and follows it, assuming that whatever is behind him will stop. His bike has at least 10 speeds, but he has just 2: zero and pedaling as fast as he can. Inside half a mile he’s moving fast enough that wind-induced tears course down his cheeks.

He’s got to be one of the world’s most recognizable people, but he doesn’t appear to worry that anyone will recognize him, and no one does. It may be that people who get out of bed at dawn to jog and Rollerblade and racewalk are too interested in what they are doing to break their trance. Or it may be that he’s taking them by surprise. He has no entourage, not even a bodyguard. His former economic adviser, David Crane, and his media adviser, Adam Mendelsohn, who came along for the ride just because it sounded fun, are now somewhere far behind him. Anyone paying attention would think, That guy might look like Arnold, but it can’t possibly be Arnold, because Arnold would never be out alone on a bike at seven in the morning, trying to commit suicide. It isn’t until he is forced to stop at a red light that he makes meaningful contact with the public. A woman pushing a baby stroller and talking on a cell phone crosses the street right in front of him and does a double take. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” she gasps into her phone. “It’s Bill Clinton!” She’s not 10 feet away, but she keeps talking to the phone, as if the man were unreal. “I’m here with Bill Clinton.”

As a bonus, here's a profile of Lewis from NY Mag.

This looks great. "A movie giving mountain lovers a unique chance to experience the mountain from Xavier de Le Rue’s point of view, when serious business starts."


Via Stellar

I like reading Chuck Klosterman's writing, books included. His last novel, Dowtown Owl, was his first stab at a novel, and I liked it well enough. Klosterman's latest book The Visible Man came out recently. Here are two excerpts.

Preface

Part 1

I'm looking forward to reading the book.

This piece about Steve Jobs' admiration for Edwin Lands, the founder of Polaroid, had a bunch of interesting bits to pull out.

At Polaroid, Land used to hire Smith College’s smartest art-history majors and send them off for a few science classes, in order to create chemists who could keep up when his conversation turned from Maxwell’s equations to Renoir’s brush strokes.

Most of all, Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. In a perfectly art-directed setting, sometimes with live music between segments, he would take the stage, slides projected behind him, the new product in hand, and instead of deploying snake-oil salesmanship would draw you into Land’s World. By the end of the afternoon, you probably wanted to stay there.

The two men met at least twice. John Sculley, the Apple C.E.O. who eventually clashed with Jobs, was there for one meeting, when Jobs made a pilgrimage to Land’s labs in Cambridge, Mass., and wrote in his autobiography that both men described a singular experience: “Dr. Land was saying: ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me, before I had ever built one.’ And Steve said: ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said, If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’”

The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Via Stellar

Update:
Chris drew the quotation from the title of this post.

Last week we from from Boston to LA and then flew back on Wednesday. The long flights gave me a chance to clear a bit out of my Instapaper backlog. I was going to do some sorting, but I though it was also interesting to see what order I read everything. Expect to see some, but not most, of this blogged over the next couple weeks. Especially good articles are starred. Check out the list, you'll find something to read this weekend.

Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles.

Das Racist And Other Friends I Never Made In College | The Awl.

Dynamite the Levees: Amazon’s Triple Threat to Undercut the Consumer Biz | Epicenter | Wired.com.

Amazon's new Kindles.

The Sporting Scene: Baseball’s Wild Night : The New Yorker.

A VC: Minimum Viable Personality.

Rays, Cardinals to Playoffs: Baseball's Unforgettable Night - TIME NewsFeed.

**On Why We're Not Doing A Food Truck : Lonestar Taco.

Kal Penn: It's Time to Ignore the Paralyzing Cynicism and Get Engaged.

The Fraying of a Nation's Decency - NYTimes.com.

The Call of the Feral | HiLobrow.

Dishing - Boston food blog.

Dishing - Boston food blog.

Sam Sifton Out As 'New York Times' Restaurant Critic, Named National Editor.

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) | TomDispatch.

Very Deep in America by Lorrie Moore | The New York Review of Books.

Culinary school grads claim they were ripped off - Yahoo! News.

As a chain, value comes in simpler, hearty dishes - Food & dining - The Boston Globe.

**Jody Adams Under Construction - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com.

How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop | Fast Company.

Eric Schmidt challenges teachers: get with the program — Tech News and Analysis.

Square, the iPhone Credit Card Machine, Goes Mainstream - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic.

Cochinita Pibil at El Centro - Feed.

**How to get $12 billion of gold to Venezuela | Felix Salmon.

**California and Bust | Business | Vanity Fair.

Bill Simmons' NFL preview has a some relatively bold predictions and a message about the value of togetherness - Grantland.

**Malcolm Gladwell on Bruce Ratner and the Barclays Center - Grantland.

**Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better? : The New Yorker.

rickwebb's tumblrmajig (Disrupt, Disruption, and the Nobility of the Tech Scene).

**Chuck Klosterman interviews Bill James - Grantland.

**Everybody Loves Our Town – Full Chapter Excerpt | MTV Hive.

Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden.

Are You Building The Right Product? | TechCrunch.

Q&A: Paul Ford, writer, nerd, father | DADWAGON.

American Drink | The Old Fashioned.

Don’t ignore Tim Cook’s sexuality | Felix Salmon.

I don't often feel sad or feel sadness, but I do sometimes in times of collective sadness. I'm not sure why. Last night I was on an airplane when it was announced that Steve Jobs had died. When I saw 4 random posts about Jobs on Tumblr, I knew right away. Growing up, the first computer I remember using was a IIgs, but we had at least one model before that. We also had a Performa after that. My first computer at college was a black and white Mac laptop with a 500 MB HD. Etc etc.

I sometimes collect as much about a story in one place as I can, almost as a personal reference for the future. (The Comprehensive Election Reactions Round Up from Obama's election is a good example). I haven't done it recently, but figured now would be a good time. Here's most of what I looked at yesterday, loosely sorted. You've probably seen some of this stuff, but probably haven't seen all of it. The sources are Twitter, Stellar, and Tumblr, along with just clicking around.

RIP, Steve Jobs. Peace and strength to your family and loved ones.

Daring Fireball | Wired.com | NYTimes | BusinessWeek | Chicago Sun-Times | The A.V. Club | Wired.com memorial of quotations | Brian Lam | Walt Mossberg | Tim Carmody | Frank Chimero | Neven Mrgan | Mike Monteiro | John Siracusa | Marco Arment | Dan Dickinson | Michael Sippey | Anil Dash | Rick Webb | Pat Keirnan | Alexis Madrigal | Bill Gates | Tim Berners-Lee | Jim Dalrymple | Horace Deidu | Mike Davidson | New York’s Tech Community | Steven Frank | David Carr | Ken Auletta | Byrne Reese (Pixar intern) | Andy Ihnatko | Mindy Kaling

The 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, and the text.


“Doug, do you have 10 more ideas. Steve”

Different images/art/etc I saw you might want to see. This or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish or this or this or this.

The Think Different ad text, narrated by Richard Dreyfus and Steve Jobs.

Other round ups and slide shows: Kottke | BuzzFeed | The Daily What | TPM Media | Longreads | Apple’s Ads | CNET News | Steve Jobs’s Patents

Apple User Acting Like His Dad Just Died | The Onion and Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies | The Onion

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

Time stops the presses for the first time in 30 years and the NYTimes.com first mention of Steve Jobs in 1977.

Some contrarianism: here and here and here.

Some random articles What Steve Jobs Understood That Our Politicians Don't | Arabs embrace Steve Jobs and the Syrian connection | Pixar's Secret: Rewrite, Re-edit, Recut | Steve Jobs and Pixar changed animated movies forever | Steve Jobs and the idea of letting go

Tom Junod in Esquire: Steve Jobs Dying | Steve Jobs Obituary and a profile from 2008

Some videos: Wozniak Tearfully Remembers His Friend Steve | 1983 Apple Keynote-The "1984" Ad Introduction | The iMac Introduction | The iPod Introduction | Steve Jobs interviewed just before returning to Apple | Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council

My other posts.

Here's Method Man's Sour Patch Kids commercial. It's awesome. If you like Wu-Tang Clan, Method Man, Sour Patch Kids, or awesome stuff, you'll like this.

Via Jay Smooth / David Jacobs

This is just wonderful. Do yourself a favor and watch it. Great music, fun tricks.



Via Matt Haughey.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is right next to the #occupyboston campground. This was taken from the 23rd floor of the Fed's office. There's something to the fact the picture was taken from high above in the Fed, right? It's symbolic of something...



(via @timlanning and @BostonTweet)