Banana

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

It’s completely invisible amidst the stage-light glare, but here Evan Cranley, bassist for Stars, is waving a banana at the audience. (More precisely, grasping it lengthwise and thrusting it back and forth.) Why?

Later, Torquil Campbell said something along the lines of, “we could be the first generation that says, ‘forget about getting there on time, I’m going to save the planet and walk.'” Another little step in making “dead” environmentalism a little more alive and relevant to folks, I guess. A coordinated effort to make driving uncool — but who would fund it?

And yes, I managed to find the tallest guy in the place to stand behind; such is my fate.

The new iPod Mini promo copy seems awfully, er, femme, in a Cosmo-girl kind of way. Here’s the head graf:

This season�s must-have accessory? Your music. Listen in style with iPod mini, from just $199. Like any classic fashion icon, iPod mini goes with everything: Macs, PCs, sequins and tees. And with up to 18 hours of battery life, it�ll outlast the latest trend. Choose from 4GB or 6GB (super)models in kicked-up colors and show off your music collection.

I finally figured out how to fix “keystoning” in my photos during the whole export/optimizing process in Macromedia Fireworks (which I use over Photoshop mostly because it isn’t quite the memory hog). So, I went through and fixed up several of the photos in the Cascadia photo gallery. The difference shouldn’t be all that noticeable — after all, the goal is just to fix something that we see but that cameras exaggerate — but it definitely soothes my perfectionism.

(BTW, the full-size pictures, but not the thumbnails, were fixed.)

Good ol’ Raleigh’s deserved descent to punchline status — as shorthand for provincial dullery — passed me by while I wasn’t watching television.

Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons, several years ago: “Ah, for the days when aviation was a gentleman’s pursuit. Long before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.”

“Stephin Merritt is a romantic who hides his romanticism, equally ineffectively, behind irony, wit, the synth-pop sheen of his productions, and his unfailingly jaded worldview.” [Salon]

“The theater is drowning in debt, thanks in part to expensive rent in the Loop theater district. Noble Fool didn�t say how much money it owes.” And so Crain’s reports that the Noble Fool, a token attempt to bring off-Loop comedy onto the ballyhooed “Randolph Street Theatre District,” has gone dark. The economies of small scale, and especially not the economies of small scale theatre (read: no economies), just couldn’t pay for a brand-new space in a high-rent district, regardless of the city subsidies that went into the space.

In some sense, if the Loop were more residential, that would bode well for tenants like Noble Fool: not only would there be a larger home market and a larger base of nighttime entertainment options (as it is, it’s not fun to be stuck in the Loop at 10pm; there’s nowhere to eat!), but the presence of residential (instead of office) would imply somewhat lower property values.

Creative Time, a public art group in NYC that I’ve been a fan of since their 42nd Street project (I even had the pleasure of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage installation in 2001), has unveiled a new graphic identity. Now, I’ve never been fond of people who stand in art museums and exclaim “my three-year-old could have done that!” at the abstract expressionist pieces, but… is simply stamping out the firm’s name in Trade Gothic really all that amazing?

“It’s a pity that Lincoln Center�s board of directors can�t get their act together to unanimously threaten a move � to Providence, say, or Hartford.”

Hey, if it works for sports teams to have the public subsidize each ticket by $20, surely it should work for the performing arts!

[Link via djw.info]

I’ve inherited the duty of checking a general email account as part of my job. Of course, this general email account has been in existence, and liberally posted to the web, since the early 1990s and as a result receives a constant stream of spam. Oddly enough, the throwaway webmail address I set up in the mid-90s receives mostly pharma-spam, whereas the work account receives a lot of 419 “Nigerian” scam spam. One amusing message from today appeals to faith-based charity:

DONATION FOR THE LORD.
Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to church or better still a christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein.I want a church that will use this fund to fund churches, orphanages and widows propagating the word of God and to ensure that the house of God is maintained.

I visited IIT on Wednesday and snapped photos of the Rem Koolhaas-designed McCormick Tribune Campus Center. It’s an island of Kool exuberance in a somnolescent sea of sober, rigid Miesian boxes.

Of the many photos I’d seen (especially those in Metropolis Magazine this month), none made any sense as a collection, nor showed students actually using the building. Sure enough, though, the photos don’t “connect” because the building doesn’t; the many sharp corners hide plenty of things. The distinct lack of furnishings (partially because the building was wildly over budget) gives it an empty feel, even if it’s well used. The urban design is so-so: although the urban context is hardly inspiring, the building does only a bit better at engaging the sidewalk. For a long stretch along State, the building’s sunken a good eight feet; the south entrance is set back behind a lawn (it was reportedly cut short to save funds); and hallways line many outside walls, which provide neither interesting views from the outside nor light for the building interior.

Yes, you can buy Mies t-shirts — made by American Apparel, no less.

While I was on the South Side, I picked up David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of Modernity at the Seminary. It’s almost too pretty to leave on the bookshelf; it would deserve a temporary spot on the coffee table — if only I didn’t have three dozen other books vying for a spot there already.

“It’s one example of pornography’s move from the sidelines to the center of American life.” — WBEZ program announcement for Odyssey today

After much buzz, Central Air Radio, programmed by Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead, will soon be broadcasting on stations they’ve bought in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. No word yet on specific personalities, programs, or other markets — to be covered through syndication or affiliation, perhaps, since buying just those five stations will cost a pretty penny.

Strange, though, that they’re starting a political radio network without a Washington presence, or that they’re overlapping with Pacifica Radio in three markets. Then again, Pacifica has been badly bruised; maybe Central Air smells a chance to grab market share.

Update: The Tribune reports that Central Air will broadcast 24/7 on WNTD-AM 950 here. That station is being sold to a third party.