Selfish Crab

If you happened to attend the Museum Mile Festival this past summer, you may have entered the Guggenheim for free and been treated to the wonderous art/sculpture/movie exhibit that is Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.

The Cremaster Cycle, in case you didn’t know, is painted in all shades of fucked-up. It is a series of feature-length movies, in combination with photographs and sculptures taken from within the movie context and storylines. It’s really fucked up. Anyway, it turns out, the Cremaster Cycle has a website. I found this through this posting which gives a glowing review of the site:

While the Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney is so sprawling that it requires museum-scale installation, the web site for the five part project reveals that the opus actually lends itself to online aesthetics. As gorgeous and designed as each element seems, their rhetorical and narrative contexts are complex and often hermetic, and therefore the features of the web site — the diagramming of characters (family tree style), identification of key sculptures and the provision of synopses, video trailers, and supplemental information — are all helpful in penetrating Barney’s deliberately complex oeuvre.

While the Cremaster Cycle itself stirs my stomach, I can’t help but agree about the site. Nice use of Flash, and lays out the art exhibit well. But at the same time, I wish they used regular static pages so I could grab images of the Cremaster cycle. I want to be Fingal from the Third Cycle. Once again, to re-iterate, that is some fucked-up shit.

# 2003 Oct 27 • From the 'rompin' years' dept • #

As noted by a recent Spectator article, Columbia University has come under the attack of accusations of animal cruetly by your friendly-neighborhood animal right protection agency: PETA.

PETA set up a nice looking website for the case, where you can watch video evidence yourself, as taped by the “whistleblower veteranarian”. Or you can read about the Death Squad, which seems like a very fair and well thought-out statement, yknow, to call a research a member of a death squad.

# 2003 Oct 25 • From the 'Columbia', 'rompin' years' dept • #

hi, i’m [crab]. i have a busy week. aslo i have t been thinking alot and wshould have tihings to post soon but i’ve been too busy. also it’s a pity i ond’t have a digital camera. bewcause campus looks ridiclous with the C250 stage up by butler. weird stuff.

# 2003 Oct 17 • From the 'rompin' years' dept • #

Village Voice has come out with their annual Best of NY. Columbia’s mentioned in these:

• best place to see columbia girls strip under fake names: ( Ten’s )
• best trick architecture: ( Low Library and its Courtyard )
• best geopolitical coffeehouse graffiti: ( Hungarian Pastry Shop )
• best place to hear a wasp choir: ( Union Theological Seminary )

For you NYU readers, you guys should check out:

• best outdoor sleeping nook: ( SE corner of bleecker and Mulberry Streets )
• best reason for film students to switch majors: ( Kim’s Video )
• best place to watch bad skateboarders: ( Union Square )

And the ones I like just cuz:

• best stand-up comedy night for people who hate stand-up comedy: ( Tinkle )
• best way to destroy a sunday with …..feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt: ( Trying to get through ‘The New York Times’ )
• this place sounds really intriging
• and Friendster.com gets a mention

# 2003 Oct 12 • From the 'Columbia', 'rompin' years' dept • #

In this article about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s plans for Google, he mentions Google’s hiring process:

“Google has a rigorous hiring system to draw in people with these sorts of traits, from passion to a perspective of limitless boundaries.

Prospective Google employees are subjected to a peer review, which at times is tougher than the interview with executives and managers, Schmidt said. And job candidates who manage to pass the first hurdle are then interviewed by a second committee.

“A merciless hiring process in the first 60 days (of a company’s life) is important,” Moritz said. “That’s why Google has been able to do more with fewer people than some larger companies.”

Schmidt said he too went through a rigorous interviewing process with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “

This is good, because I’m all about AllTheWeb these days, anyway. I wonder if Overture is hiring.

# 2003 Oct 12 • From the 'nerd', 'rompin' years' dept • #

Perhaps you have seen this or one of its variants:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This was one of the fastest-moving memes I have seen in recent years. I got it forwarded to me (by mags) via AIM, and I have seen it on numerous blogs, appearing on Slashdot, and even the forward-happy Dean of SEAS Zvi Galil decided to forward the passage to the entire SEAS student body.

My take? I thought it was neat we could read it, though I suspect years of Instant Messenger use breeds the ability to see through typos and mispellings. I thought the reasoning in the passage (the “as long as the first and last letters are the same… we read whole words” reason) was complete bullshit. Here’s a counter-example (taken from Slashdot), where the first and last letters are correct but the internal letter sequence are simply reversed. It’s much more difficult to read.

“Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr.”

# 2003 Oct 1 • From the 'nerd', 'rompin' years' dept • #