Weekend Auto-Fun :: 6-21-08

quotes: "My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself." (Nan Goldin)

"To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same." (Susan Sontag)

photo (left): Photos by Nan Goldin, words by Susan Sontag.

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links:
1. "Glamorous lesbians -- no that is not an oxymoron -- have always been here, but were invisible to mainstream culture until relatively recent": The Triumph of the Lipstick Lesbians. (@the village voice)
2. Irvine Welsh on why he wrote Trainspotting (@the guardian uk books)
3. Compared to these guys, I defo owe Visa only one of my limbs, not two: Bankrupt! 65 Famous People Who Lost it All (@popcrunch)
4. I hope everyone stopped multitasking after that Atlantic Monthly article I directed you to last year, 'cause multitasking is ruining the whole wide world: "The Myth of Multitasking" (@the new atlantis)
5. I've really got into Jezebel lately, especially "Fine Lines," which dotes on old-school YA novels. From the archives, one of my favorite childhood reads about my number one fantasy (getting trapped overnight in the Metropolitan Museum of Art): "From the Mixed-Up Files of Ms. Basil E. Frankweiler." (@jezebel):

"I miss New York. Not the New York somewhere over to my left. A New York before The Squid & The Whale brought divorce to the Museum of Natural History. A New York before nannies got groped; a New York before private-school girls intertwangled lustily on beds in some benighted plan to rule the school. It was a New York that had room for a notepad-toting minor to spy unaccompanied on people through dumbwaiters; a boy to wander Chinatown having adventures with a cricket; teenagers to contend with a genie in a mystery at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Not a world where children playact adult dramas, or unhappily contend with the chaos adults leave in their wake. It's a New York that keeps adults perpetually at shoulder-level, briefcases and purses jostling, while the children, front-and-center in the frame, get up to whatever children get up to."

6. Two poems by Sara Messer: "It’s true I slept with Abe Lincoln. / I now know everything there is to know about this country. /Believe me, I carry a tapeworm for you the size of Kentucky." (@ guernica)
7. Shel Silverstein's unusual route to becoming a children's author. (@poetry foundation)
8. Mourning America's Lost Amusement Park Icons: Out of Service -- includes Back to the Future, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Autworld! In Flint!, Captain EO, and some amusement park in New Jersey where people kept dying 'cause the workers were always drunk. (@RADAR)
9. I knew a fraternity that hazed its brothers by locking them in an attic overnight listening to "Fly Away" by Enya on repeat. The U.S. Army uses the same tactic: "How US interrogators use music as torture." (@the guardian uk)
10. The 80's are back for men's fashion, check it out, lesbos: "Recalling the 80's? Try Selective Memory." (@the ny times)
11. Much ado about semicolons. (@slate)
12. Could you go w/o email for a week?NPR investigates (@lifehacker)
13. Bumper Stickers = Road Rage. (@newsweek)
14. I know deep down inside that Tinkerbell isn't real, but she's geting a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. Go Tinkernell! (@people)