The litter in littérateur. Ricky Opaterny on Books, Music, Art, and Sports

3/27/2010

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-27

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:18 am
  • Clearly, @FrancesSF is the best new restaurant in San Francisco: http://bit.ly/cZyzhR #
  • I'm hoping for big wins today from Coach K and Speaker Pelosi, who can redeem herself after having wrecked the economy. @atcal #BeatCal #
  • RT @BarackObama: Yes we can. #
  • A great piece by William Deresiewicz on leadership: http://bit.ly/bG7j6P #

3/20/2010

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-20

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:18 am
  • "…these days, it seems, the really unhappy people are working in offices." http://s.nyt.com/u/xQd #
  • This video's form mirrors my personal motto: "Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!" http://bit.ly/cWYk8f (via @GinaGarzaNYC) #
  • On @MLBNetwork John Hart just said Kenshin Kawakami has "Asian hesitation" and that the Braves bullpen is full of "Irish rogues." #racism? #
  • Michael Lewis's The Big Short is the biggest disparity of great writer, awful paper.What were the colleagues of @norton_fiction thinking?;-) #

3/13/2010

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-13

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:18 am
  • Is there a translated work of literature that readers consider to actually be better than the original work? #
  • It's a testament to Sushi Zone that its waitresses waited 30 minutes for seats at the bar on their day off tonight. #
  • “[It] is in failure and through failure, that the subject constitutes itself." –Michel Houellebecq #
  • Tracey Thorn's "All the Divorces" from her new album isn't a pop song, it's a panorama of adulthood's disappointment: http://bit.ly/ccRHFG #

3/10/2010

Hear Tracey Thorn’s “Oh, the Divorces!” from “Love and Its Opposite”

Filed under: General,Music — Tags: , , — Ricky @ 5:59 pm

More than, perhaps, any other songwriter, I’ve found Tracey Thorn’s songs from the past three decades to be consistently evocative. Every album has something that ignites my memory or feeling, and her new one is no exception. Love and Its Opposite is due in May, and its first track, “Oh, the Divorces!” isn’t a pop song; it’s a panorama of adulthood’s disappointment. Click here to download it as an MP3.


Tracey Thorn / ‘Oh, The Divorces!’ by buzzinfly

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3/8/2010

Drawing Google Street View

Filed under: Books,General,Technology — Ricky @ 5:15 pm

 

This is the best use I’ve seen of Google Street View.

 

3/6/2010

Yanidel street photography Aperture presets

Filed under: General,Photography — Tags: , , , , — Ricky @ 11:19 pm

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I’m a big fan of Yanidel’s photo blog of his street photography in Paris. I’ve long tried to get a similar look to his photos by decreasing the desaturation slider and then selectively increasing the saturation of colors or spots in my photos. However, I’m nowhere near as good at it as he is. I recently posted on DPReview’s forum about this issue, and Ian Wood responded to me by creating a few Aperture presents that achieve a baseline for Yanidel’s look. You can download the Yanidel Street Photography presets for Aperture. I tested them out tonight, and you can see the results here.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-06

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:18 am
  • What a comeback by Finland in the Bronze Medal game! Nice to see Selanne still out there. #
  • Where are the technologists who oppose this personal branding trend? http://s.nyt.com/u/70p #
  • That was the best hockey game I've ever seen. (No, the perfect ending didn't hurt.) #
  • RT @paidContent Mags To Their Digital Units: Drop Dead http://bit.ly/946M3P (This is a deliberately provocative + misleading headline.) #
  • My friend Russell did a much better job than @paidContent in covering the "Power of Print" campaign: http://bit.ly/9BNcDI #
  • Before today, this was clearly the best hockey game I had ever seen: http://bit.ly/d28GsZ #
  • This is my favorite Neil Young song. #ClosingCeremony #
  • The USPS complains about its losses and yet hires Accenture, BCG, and McKinsey. There's its problem right there. http://bit.ly/bvH8GW #
  • I just finished reading Patti Smith's tremendous and tremendously beautiful memoir, "Just Kids," from @eccobooks #
  • My photos from yesterday's protest at the Civic Center in San Francisco. Lots of @atcal kids were there! http://bit.ly/9uJXjR #march4 #

3/2/2010

Adam Gopnik on Canada’s gold

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 12:58 am

I’ll be writing about Canada’s hockey victory at the Olympics shortly. In the meantime, enjoy this piece and the following line by Adam Gopnik on the subject:

Anything that depends on a single bounce or giveaway, though it can fairly be called victory, can’t really be called a triumph. But anyone who didn’t understand the role of hockey in Canadian life at least got a glimpse yesterday.

3/1/2010

I’m not a doctor but I still want to save lives

Filed under: Books,General — Ricky @ 8:46 pm

I just recalled one of my favorite quotes from anyone: Ricky Moody in an interview with the Times Book Review stated his aspiration to “save lives” with his fiction. After all, why shoot for anything less?

I still want short stories to save lives. I want people to feel about the short story the way they feel about “Strawberry Fields Forever” by the Beatles, like their lives were changed by it in some way. And that requires I think a real commitment to dealing with . . . you know, the human passions and not being . . . not feeling that that’s in some way uncool.

New York in miniature

Sam O’Hare spent a week making a neat video of New York City. He shot the entire thing with consumer-grade lenses on a Nikon D3 in burst mode. He added stabilization and the tilt-shift effect in post-processing. You can find more details about the production of the video here.

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