(via)
Nice piece by Philip Bump in Atlantic:
Our always-on society is, in fact, becoming a Golden Age for introverts, in which it has become easier to carve out time for oneself
If my research -- conducted primarily via Netflix -- is correct, America used to be a paradise for introverts. If you weren't a lone cowboy riding the range in a driving snow, you lived on a farm miles from town, opening your front door onto a field of seven-foot-tall corn stalks. Social interactions were planned weeks in advance. (Elections are held on Tuesdays, after all, because that was the soonest people could get to the county seat.) In a time when towns tried to encourage interaction by scheduling seasonal barn dances, the pressure to attend a friend's cocktail party was obviously far lower. Introverts had weeks to come up with good excuses -- and all sorts of ailments (whooping cough, scarlet fever) to blame.
Then the industrial revolution ruined it. Encouraging people to move to cities, the new world forced interactions from the moment you left your house. Telegraphs made it simple for people to send you messages and telephones then removed even the need to answer your door. Cars were invented, meaning you had no excuse for not traveling across town. Then planes removed any excuse to not travel across the country. The darkest hours for introverts were at hand.
But technology, long the domain of the geeky introvert, stepped up to the challenge. A brilliant first volley was the answering machine: ostensibly a device meant to ensure that a call wasn't missed, it quickly became a tool to ensure that you could miss any call you wanted.
Technology has steadily gained ground. What some describe as an always-on society is, in fact, becoming a Golden Age for introverts, in which it has become easier than ever to carve out time for oneself while meeting the needs of our extroverted friends. That's a key distinction: we live in a time in which introverts can regularly mask their introversion if they so desire.
It's worth considering, of course, what introverts actually find challenging about social interactions. For a thorough, thoughtful answer to that question, see this 2003 piece from The Atlantic. For a cursory and superficial one, read on.
For introverts like myself, it takes energy to engage with other people. Doing so requires thoughtfulness. It's tiring. Expending energy, for us, isn't energizing. Please note: we're not talking about shyness, some character flaw. The problem isn't with the introvert -- it's with the demands you make on the introvert. An introvert can't force an extrovert to sit quietly in a room and read a book, but extroverts (and the stigmas they've inadvertently created) can impose social demands with ease.
So how are we helped by the technology our nerdy allies have built?
The illusion of busyness. You know what I did over the weekend? Took a road trip to Baltimore, attended two work-related parties, and spent most of Sunday offline, hiking in the woods.
Yeah, no I didn't. But with a few simple posts on Facebook, changing my status on GChat, it's simple to pretend that I did. I could spend all weekend at home -- which I did (it was hot out) -- and no one would be the wiser. I can make it appear that I've met society's request that I "live life to the full," while living my life to the full in my own way.
Serial communication at work. In the Mad Men days, everyone worked together in one location, walking to each others' desks or offices, or exchanging occasional memos. Now? We're in offices all over the place, using email. We sit quietly hunched over laptops, transitioning even our water cooler conversations to our keyboards.
Email is often fingered as a key factor in the lamentable perpetual accessibility characterizing modern American communication. But it isn't. It allows you to respond when you're ready to do so. In fact, sometimes not responding to email in a timely fashion can give the impression that you're already busy doing other things. Which helps create the space that introverts need.
Serial communication everywhere else. This is maybe the most remarkable achievement. Interacting with people primarily online or serially is now the norm. It's easier to send a message to a friend on Facebook than to call; even for extraverts, it ensures that the outreach isn't a waste of time.
The reduction of communication to information-sharing. Moreover, people expect streamlined transfers of information. A text message, a Facebook message, a tweet -- each is a discrete, articulated piece of information being shared. Rather than riding the texture of a live conversation to figure out how to give and receive information, people are now used to simply pushing their thoughts out into the world, to be responded to at some undetermined future point. Even voicemail messages are now more often the point of a phone call than an actual conversation.
A quick interlude to talk about the psychology of introversion. Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you're not interested, though introverts will definitely find it engaging.
First popularized by Carl Jung, the word introversion describes exactly what you'd assume: a tendency be focused inwards (intro-) as opposed to the external focus of extraverts. As Wikipedia states, introversion is "the state of okay I think that's enough pretending." I have a secret to share with you. If you haven't heard of Slydial, delay not one second further. It is a tool that allows you to connect directly to someone else's voicemail without giving them time to answer the phone. Brilliant, right? But obviously, we can't let everyone know about it, or everyone will catch on to the fact that you're intentionally avoiding them. (For the record, friends and family, I've never used this tool at all.) What follows is the link to the site, masked to deter the casual observer. You are hereby sworn to secrecy. The Stockholm trials were a success, as you can see from the partial data set from the 2004 study in .CSV format. So, in other words, Jung was right.
I speak of the struggle between introverts and extroverts in antagonistic terms. But it shouldn't be considered that way. Extroverts, we love you. We just don't want to talk to you all the time. Happily, we live in a time when the expectation that we do so is much lower. We've reached an elegant balance between the two factions, one that doesn't require that we all become rugged cowboys, singing "Home on the Range," as we push our herd on to Topeka.
Even though that's what I said I'm doing right now on Facebook.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzu3Ihyq50c&w=700] Mindy Smith. Jeepers. I need to listen to some music from The Jungle Book or something.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqMG3VR5PP4&w=700] I'll set the scene. Grey light filters in through the curtains. Don't know if it's cloudy or sunny. Don't really care. The alarm is about to go off but you're already awake. You make a cup of tea and get back into bed. You half roll over to swat the radio on. This plays. You turn it up and just listen. Slowly feeling a bit sad and brave at the same time, maybe thinking about stuff, maybe just a bit blank. It's the sort of song that sends you places.
Plus of course there's always this bad boy: [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/12717179" params="show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=341e67" width="100%" height="81" ]
One of the greatest photographers of his time, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a shy Frenchman who elevated "snap shooting" to the level of a refined and disciplined art. His ability to catch "the decisive moment," his precise eye for design, his self-effacing methods of work, and his literate comments about the theory and practice of photography made him a legendary figure among contemporary photojournalists. In the practical world of picture marketing, Cartier-Bresson left his imprint as well: he was one of the founders and a former president of Magnum, a cooperative picture agency of New York and Paris (look at his Magnum portfolio here or his own website here).
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908, in Chanteloupe, France, of prosperous middle-class parents. He owned a Box Brownie as a boy, using it for taking holiday snapshots, and later experimented with a 3 X 4 view camera. But he was also interested in painting and studied for two years in a Paris studio. This early training in art helped develop the subtle and sensitive eye for composition, which was one of his greatest assets as a photographer.
In 1931, at the age of 22, Cartier-Bresson spent a year as a hunter in the West African bush. Catching a case of backwater fever, he returned to France to convalesce. It was at this time, in Marseille, that he first truly discovered photography. He obtained a Leica and began snapping a few pictures with it. It was a pivotal experience. A new world, a new kind of seeing, spontaneous and unpredictable, opened up to him through the narrow rectangle of the 35 mm viewfinder. His imagination caught fire. He recalls how he excitedly "prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve life in the act of living."
Thus began one of the most fruitful collaborations between man and machine in the history of photography. He remained devoted to the 35 mm camera throughout his career. The speed, mobility, the large number of exposures per loading, and, above all, the unobtrusiveness of the little camera perfectly fitted his shy, quicksilver personality. Before long he was handling its controls as automatically as an expert racing driver shifts gears. The camera itself, in his own famous phrase, became an "extension of the eye".
When World War II erupted, Cartier-Bresson served briefly in the French Army and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of France. After two unsuccessful tries, he escaped from the camp where he was held as a prisoner of war, and worked with the underground until the war’s end.
Resuming his interrupted career as a photojournalist, he helped form the Magnum picture agency in 1947. Assignments for major magazines would take him on global travels, across Europe and the United States, to India, Russia and China. Many books of Cartier-Bresson photographs were published in the 50’s and 60’s, the most famous being ‘The Decisive Moment’ (1952). A major milestone in his career was a massive, 400-print retrospective exhibition, which toured the United States in 1960.
As a journalist, Henri Cattier Bresson felt an intense need to communicate what he thought and felt about what he saw, and while his pictures often were subtle they were rarely obscure. He had a high respect for the discipline of press photography, of having to tell a story crisply in one striking picture. His journalistic grappling with the realities of men and events, his sense of news and history, and his belief in the social role of photography all helped keep his work memorable.
He has said that a sense of human dignity is an essential quality for any photojournalist, and feels that no picture, regardless of how brilliant from a visual or technical standpoint, can be successful unless it grows from love and comprehension of people and an awareness of ‘man facing his fate." Many of his portraits of William Faulkner and other notables have become definitive, catching as they do, with relaxed and casual brilliance, the essence of personality.
His first book contained an often-quoted paragraph that sums up his approach to photography and has become something of a creed for candid, available light photojournalists everywhere. The decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson tersely defined it, is ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression."
Some critics accused him of being nothing more than a snap-shooter. It is true that the "decisive moment’ approach, in less disciplined hands, can degenerate into haphazard, unselective snap shooting. But the best of Cartier-Bresson’s works, with their uncanny sense of timing, rigorous organization, and deep insights into human emotion and character, could never have been caught by luck alone, unaided by a rare talent. They are snapshots only in the classic sense of "instantaneous exposures " snapshots elevated to the level of art.
All his great pictures were taken with the kind of equipment owned by many amateur photographers: 35 mm rangefinder cameras equipped with a normal 5Omm lens or occasionally a telephoto for landscapes.
[biog edited from Photo-seminars.com]
[[ps - If you like this page, please check out some of my other quote collections here - The Guy Quote]]
[slideshow]
You just have to live, and life will give you pictures.
We seldom take great pictures. You have to milk the cow a lot and get lots of milk to make a little piece of cheese.
Of all forms of expression, photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight.
I find that you have to blend in like a fish in water, you have to forget yourself, you have to take your time, that's what I reproach our era for not doing. Drawing is slow, it is a meditation, but you have to know how to go slow in order to go quickly, slowness can mean splendor.
A velvet hand, a hawk’s eye - these we should all have.
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.
I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you want get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing. Sometimes we have the feeling that we've taken a great photo, and yet we continue to unfold. We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
Photography is nothing — it's life that interests me.
One has to tiptoe lightly and steal up to one's quarry; you don't swish the water when you are fishing. The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there’s nothing left of truth.
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.
I went to Marseille. A small allowance enabled me to get along, and I worked with enjoyment. I had just discovered the Leica. It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to 'trap' life - to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks! (circa 1930's)
What is photojournalism? Occasionally, a very unique photo, in which form is precise and rich enough and content has enough resonance, is sufficient in itself. But that's rarely the case. The elements of a subject that speak to us are often scattered and can't be captured in one photo; we don't have the right to force them together, and to stage them would be cheating...which brings us to the need for photojournalism.
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick. Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks. Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation. The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.
Of course it's all luck.
==
There's a good retrospective of his work on Slate, here.
[[ps - If you like this page, please check out some of my other quote collections here - The Guy Quote]]
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/24514128 w=700&h=480] Saw on Boooooooooom this amazing work by Bianca Chang. You might not like the music on this video of some of her stuff, but there's no denying the intricacy and patience and ALL that good stuff. I like that on her site, she tells you how many sheets of paper she uses and what weight they are.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9t_2QvXaD0&w=700]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJMFurJxxF8&w=700] You might know it from The Commitments but...it was first recorded in 1932 by the Ray Noble Orchestra (with vocals by Val Rosing) followed by both Ruth Etting and Bing Crosby in 1933. Then you get into covers by Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Rod Stewart, Frankie Laine, Percy Sledge, Earl Grant, Al Jarreau, Nina Simone, Etta James, Tina Turner, you name it - even Michael Bolton had a crack.
And here's my favourite version (today), Otis on the Stax tour. In the album version he is (I think) backed by Booker T and the M.Gs, with an arrangement by Isaac Hayes, not sure if Booker's boys are in on this tour too, but it has STRONG energy:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dael4sb42nI&w=700]
Oh, she may be weary Young girls they do get weary Wearing that same old shabby dress But when she gets weary Try a little tenderness
You know she's waiting Just anticipating For things that she'll never, never, never, never possess But while she's there waiting, without them Try a little tenderness (that's all you gotta do, this is for you)
It's not just sentimental, no, no, no She has her grief and care But the soft words they are spoke so gentle It makes it easier, easier to bear
You won't regret it, no, no Young girls they never forget it Love is their only happiness But it's all so easy All you gotta do is try a little tenderness
Oh, she may be weary Young girls they do get weary Wearing that same old shabby dress, yeah yeah But when she gets weary Try a little tenderness, yeah yeah
You know she's waiting Just anticipating For things that she'll never, never, never, never possess, yeah But while she's there waiting, without them Try a little tenderness (that's all you gotta do)
It's not just sentimental, no, no, no She has her grief and care But the soft words they are spoke so gentle, yeah It makes it easier, easier to bear, yeah
You won't regret it, no, no Some girls they don't forget it Love is their only happiness, yeah But it's all so easy All you gotta do is try, try a little tenderness
Squeeze her, don't tease her, never leave her You've got, you've got, you've got Just try a little tenderness, oh yeah yeah yeah
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8a1_tXINWA&w=700] A shot-for-single-shot remake of LCD Soundsystem's 2007 music video for 'All My Friends' by Michael J Green. Physical elements shot with a Nikon D50. Compositing and effects done in After Effects CS5. Face designed in Illustrator CS5.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hS9lW1tC3g&w=700]
Shhh. Just press play. It's by 2tall, DJ Clockwork and Kper. You will not be disappointed (assuming, that is, you like this sort of thing). [soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/aboombapcontinuum/a-boom-bap-continuum-mixtape-beats-from-1999-2009"]
Original link - with downloads, full artwork and stuff - here. (nice spot Bob!)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjTzUMzlKoM&w=700]
Old school groove, the way it should be done. Thanks for the heads-up Mark.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/26179832 w=700&h=500] Mutiny Skates testing out their new helicam one morning at the Austin skate park. Nice song too. Hat tip Tommy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMgAo0Ototk&w=700] Very pretty song, cute (fan-made) video.
Now at last I know What a fool I've been For I've lost the last love I shall ever win
And/Now at last I see How my heart was blind To the joys before me That I left behind
When the wind was fresh On the hills And the stars were new in the sky And a lark was heard in the still Where was I Where was I
When the spring is cold Where do robins go What makes winters lonely Now at last I know
When the wind was fresh On the hills And the stars were new in the sky And a lark was heard in the still Where was I Where was I
When the spring is cold Where do robins go What makes winters lonely Now at last I know
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOurjE9s3GA&w=700]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQge_Yn-SLM&w=700] ...in case you were wondering what the founders of YouTube had in mind for their dream project.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0s0anVD104&w=700]
Strong piece by Christopher Hitchens on Slate.com: Having had 16 years to reflect since Oklahoma City, we should really have become a little more refined in our rapid-response diagnoses of anti-civilian mass murder. Rather than make it more difficult, the number of contrasting features in the most recent case of Norway actually makes this task fractionally easier. The fruit bat and troll population of the recent scenery of catastrophe, enriched with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell characters, permits a wider view of the various fields of fire and a greater variety of arguable motives for analysis.
Here is a secular Scandinavian social democracy, which is currently contributing forces to Western military efforts in Afghanistan and Libya. This consideration was what originally led some more orthodox conservatives to descry a "link." (Even though, for example, it is unclear whether the jihadist groups in Norway identify with Muammar Qaddafi or his recent calls for suicide efforts against NATO.) Moreover, the lethal attacks were launched against the youth movement of Norway's ruling party, that stout bulwark of multi-culti good feelings and outreach to Muslim immigrants. This might not have been the first objective of a terror faction striving to take Norway off the military chessboard.
Then again, the prime suspect in the pogrom, Anders Behring Breivik, seems to come complete with a Jared Loughner reading list of his own, as well as a background in white power Nordic enthusiasm. I was touched to see that a flirtation of his with Freemasonry was counted as "right wing" in some quarters. In the old days, Catholic fascism hated Masons almost as much as it did Jews. (Chilean President Salvador Allende was a Freemason, for example, in a tradition of leftist anti-clericalism that I am sad to see dying out.) And finally—though in this wilderness of mirrors it probably isn't finally—Breivik has apparently declared himself a passionate pro-Zionist as well as a sworn foe of all sorts of Islamization. More attention should be paid to that last aspect: The true "neo-Nazi" gangs in Europe have violent anti-Semitism in common with their ostensibly deadliest Islamist foes, whereas anti-immigrant populists of the Geert Wildersstripe in Holland seek respectability by standing up for Israel, very often against criticism from the multi-culti left.
The misreading of these and similar indicators has led to more intellectual chaos than the anti-Islamic witch hunt that followed Oklahoma City. The ruling Spanish conservatives, making the opposite mistake, falsely accused a home-grown Iberian gangster group of committing one of the most politically and militarily lethal actions of jihad on European soil: an "operation" that affected the outcome of a general election in a NATO state and also gravely damaged the coalition in Iraq. That week probably marked the high point of Bin Laden's coordination of a serious terror nexus in Europe.
One way of phrasing the question is this: Do the extreme jihadists and their most virulent opponents really have a symbiotic relationship? In tapes and sermons from mosques in London and Hamburg, you may find whole manifestos about the need to keep women as chattel, to eradicate the disease of homosexuality, to thwart the Jewish design over international finance, and other fantasies of the Third Reich mentality. Pushed to its logical or pathological conclusion, this would involve something that Europeans and Americans have never seen before: a conflict between different forms of fascism in order to see which assault on multi-ethnic democracy was the most effective.
There were signs of this mentality at work in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other demagogues saw Osama Bin Laden being used totrace the finger of God. And some of the descendant fans of Timothy McVeigh, through the medium of "9/11 Truth" and other arcana, have also tried to confect an overarching theory of illegitimate global power as it was exposed and challenged on that day. Again, though, one notices that the CIA and Mossad drew the plush assignment of actually choosing and rigging the target and organizing collusion and coordination, while leaving lesser rank-and-filers of al-Qaida to perform the lowly tasks of detonation. This sad, self-hating world view dissolves in freeze frame in the Abbottabad villa, with the chief guest wistfully flicking the channel changer and musing on the dear dead days when he was "the strong horse."
It also culminates in the wretched spectacle of the jihadist websites in Oslo, which had been getting ready with their original posts of joy when they, too, thought that their own holy cause might be involved—and then ceasing and desisting when it became clear that the perpetrator was some loser who had quite different reasons for wanting to slaughter a crowd of young people that day. Headline writers and newscasters should have waited before making any pronouncements, and thereby committing the indecency of suggesting that the killers were being selective, even choosy. So-called "experts" should have been ashamed to reverse-engineer the motive from the modus operandi, rather as Steve Emerson had done in Oklahoma by stating that the maximization of violence was "a Middle Eastern trait." A pale Christian rider from ultima Thule with a private view of the Book of Revelation may also be said to be infected with "Middle Eastern traits" of the sort that hell has not hitherto boasted.
Meanwhile, the streets and squares of Syria and the committees of the Libyan civic opposition fill up with eager and anxious people who want to know if they have been naive to place their bets—in some cases to wager their lives—on democratic transition, peaceful tactics, the transparent allocation of previously stolen funds for long-overdue reconstruction, and the removal of a parasitic military and police caste. Having long entreated Middle Easterners to phrase their demands in this way, we then go all hesitant when they agree to do so. This last month of Western and U.N. dithering has been one of the most unprincipled interludes of recent history, with even one ambassadorial overnight stay in the city of Hama apparently regarded as a red badge of courage on our part. If it turns out to be the best we could do, then the condemnation must be fierce.
"In the safest, most boring country, the worst lone gunman shooting happens. The worst in the world, in history. But it will not make our country worse. The safe, boring democracy will supply him with a defense lawyer as is his right. He will not get more than 21 years in prison as is the maximum extent of the law. Our democracy does not allow for enough punishment to satisfy my need for revenge, as is its intention. We will not become worse, we will be better. We lived in a land where this is possible, even easy. And we will keep living in a land where this is possible, even easy. We are open, we are free and we are together. We are vulnerable by choice. And we will keep on like that, that’s how we want to live. We will not be worse because of the worst. We must be good because of the best." By OLA (via).
I don't normally do this, but the app actually looks pretty flaming nifty.
"With the new Great British Chefs app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, twelve of Britain’s most celebrated chefs have come together to connect food lovers with stunning recipes. Putting 180 dishes in the palm of your hand, the app gives users access to three customisable five-course menus from each chef, which they can either follow in full or use to make a bespoke menu of their own. The app is bursting with tips, videos, wine pairings, and a shopping list tailored to whichever dishes users want to make.
From the perfect beignets to quail mulligatawny to bubblegum panna cotta - when you make them, they’ll leave any guest begging for the recipe. We believe that people should share the recipes they love, so if you have the app you can just email them to your guests."