Maira Kalman Lecture

Last night at Stanford. She seemed like a well-adjusted female version of Woody Allen.

At one point she thought she was at Berkeley ;) – a faux pas only a New Yorker could have made (and gotten away with).

The talk should be up on iTunes university in a couple of weeks.

It was interesting to see 10 year olds waiting in line to get their books signed and then some design students get their “Elements of Style” signed. All in the same line. :)

The talk was very much like her blog posts and books, going from how she decided she was in love with A. Lincoln, while researching him in the Presidential  Library to her Proust Map, that she took along to DC.

 

Unfortunately not much insight into the method behind her madness.

Brushes

Caved in and bought Brushes. Here is my first finger-painting. Lovely app, but will take some time to adjust to using just my index finger, instead of a pen/brush.

Happy Deepavali

wave

Anyone else on the google wave know what it is all about? I am a bit disappointed, waiting for all the “stamps to get licked”

Red

Sydney is looking unreal right now. Excuse me while I go bother my one Aussie coworker on skype…If you are from the red planet, you are an Alien, right?

http://blog.flickr.net/2009/09/22/red-dust-over-sydney/

photo source : Highranger@Flickr

weren’t we all on the interwebz

so we can make bad jokes. anyone care to share some?

Remember when they wanted to sell us stars, so you could get one named after a loved one, as a gift, for a birthday or xmas.

Well, what about letting people adopt Angels? For a good price, that is. Of course, there are tons of them floating around in the Christian angelic hierarchy, aren’t they? The question then is, what are you, as a consumer, be paying for? The angels are there to protect you, so they really aren’t looking to be adopted themselves.

But, what if you could bid for the protection they could offer? As in, good old protection money?

In any case, if you were paying for angels, would you be an Angel Investor?!

(friday afternoons are going to kill me, if they don’t get to me fast enough, my demented mind will drive others to do the job…sigh..weekend, so close, yet so far.)

One’s got to get the technique down

Creative Nonfiction

K30.1300 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Cris Beam

Creative nonfiction marks the intersection between journalism and literature, and bears the hallmarks of both. Stories feature strong character development, well-developed, nuanced scenes, and a tangible narrative arc. But they also privilege thorough research, live reporting and a writer’s quizzical, intelligent stance. In this course, students will not only learn the components of a good story, but what makes an idea compelling to a diverse audience to begin with. Students will choose their own topics, but we’ll all write and revise one profile and one long investigative-style piece of researched and reported literary nonfiction. We will workshop these longer stories in sections, and students will learn effective editing strategies for their own writing by working closely with their peers. We’ll read masters of the genre like Joseph Mitchell, Katherine Boo, and Alex Kotlowitz as well as some newer or more experimental voices like Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela and Lauren Slater. We’ll also look at broader ethical questions like going undercover, cloaking source identities, and writing outside of one’s own experience.

gallatin NYU

Bangalore 24th Airborne

Picked up a Tee from Old Navy yesterday, just because I had to.

Can’t find it online though..

Steve McCurry has a blog

And our dear Professor thinks we should show traditions some respect – so I will not just add a link on facebook, but go old school and blog about it.

the blog.

An aside.

I had to deal with the Geniuses at the local Apple store today. It all ended well. The ‘Lead Genius’ (his words) conceded that he had no real power in getting what I wanted done, though he agreed with what I had to say, in principle. sigh.

Wait, that isn’t the aside.

The real aside – people watching at the Apple store.

The woman next to me was in an off-white Chikan work kurta, green corduroys, hawaiian flip flops, had a knit handbag and a custom-made laptop sleeve – browsing the news in Hebrew. That is Israeli hipster chic for you.

Two Buddhist monks, in their typical saffron and deep red robes, and a jhola walk in. One of them consults a Genius about some video editing tools for his cameras. Yes, cameras – a sony video cam, a canon DSLR and one more, all appear from his jhola. The other monk, oh, he is having a conversation on his iPhone. And that would be iZen.

A digital media student who had all his work on his Macbook, before it decided to go kaput. There were some ER/House like scenes, panic, drama and the all knowing Genius saving the day – unfortunately no insurance – the laptop was more than a year old. Poor little rich kid.

Though the best part was watching advertising dollars in action. In the 40 minutes I spent in the store, 3 people waiting to be helped asked someone at the store, “Is it true that Macs are more expensive than PCs?”

heh.

the power of numbers

the power of statistics (real or otherwise) and back-of-the-envelope calculations in the hands of idiots is grossly under-estimated.