The litter in littérateur. » General

Visualizing President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union

Ricky — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:56:34 +0000

Here is the speech’s full text, and here is a Wordle.

Visualize President Obama’s State of the Union address Perhaps, you’re watching President Obama’s address on CNN.com with...
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Hanneli & Rag & Bone

Ricky — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:50:54 +0000

HANNELI MUSTAPARTA

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The lost interview

Ricky — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 05:30:03 +0000

I went to the theater to see this lost interview with Steve Jobs from 1995 that was originally shot for Triumph of the Nerds and came away from it inspired. Because what other executive in Silicon Valley would ever cite Picasso and Thoreau? And that he did makes me believe that, perhaps, there’s a place in the Valley for someone like me.
EXCLUSIVE: Steve Jobs ‘The Lost Interview’ Teaser – YouTube

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Erin McKeown and the problem with streaming music

Ricky — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:16:09 +0000

To make the monthly minimum wage of $1,160, a musician needed to sell 143 self-pressed compact discs. To make that from Spotify, they would need people to stream their songs more than 4 million times — not humanly possible unless you happen to be Lady Gaga.

Is my passion for Spotify destroying the musicians I love? – San Jose Mercury News

Coverage of Kepler’s Reopening San Francisco Chronicle: As Kepler’s Books reopens, customers queue at...
San Jose Mercury: “something big” is about to happen According to the San Jose Mercury News, Clark Kepler has...
Press Coverage of Kepler’s Reopening Here are some links to press coverage of the store’s...

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The old Banana Republic store facade

Ricky — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:39:56 +0000

One of my favorite things about going to Stanford Shopping Center when I was a kid was seeing the old Banana Republic store.
Store info and other Republic Business | Abandoned Republic

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Jeff Sachs on Occupy Wall Street

Ricky — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:46:10 +0000

Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.

The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.

The New Progressive Movement – NYTimes.com

Jeffrey Sachs on the financial crisis In a recent post on the Financial Times site, Columbia...
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Steve Jobs was an editor

Ricky — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 05:50:39 +0000

“[Steve Jobs] used to talk about the aesthetics of magazine making. He always fancied himself as better than anybody else at anything. And I think one of his fantasy jobs would have been as a magazine editor.”

(via Master of the Media Marketplace, and Its Demanding Gatekeeper – NYTimes.com)

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My favorite things of 2010

Ricky — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 07:47:14 +0000

At the end of 2009 I put together a quick list of things I liked from the year. Earlier in December some friends asked if I would be making a similar list this year. And indeed, I have made one, and it is more ambitious than last year’s in its scope, volume, and design. Check it out here.

Inevitably, there are some things that I would like to mention that I liked during the year but, for one reason or another, didn’t quite make the list. Here are the honorable mentions:

Henri Cartier-Bresson at the MoMA — I’ve only gotten a quick preview of this show, but it’s very promising, and I can’t wait to take the time to really take it in. Without Bresson, the sort of photography I practice wouldn’t even be possible, so I’m looking forward to the chance to see so many of his prints in person.

Audrey Tautou — I love her acting, her films, her style, and the fact that she uses a Leica to photograph people she meets.

Difficulty — This one really should have been on the list, but I chose to write it into a couple other entries. I feel like we’ve become less and less patient when it comes to difficult things—people, art, technology, and work. But one of the things I learned in my life as a reader is that difficulty often conceals great value. And that’s something I remembered in 2010. Difficulty is something to engage with, not run away from, because the rewards for doing so can be so great. It’s closely related to insistent compassion and creating possibilities, which both made the list. You can find someone difficult to know and just throw your hands up and walk away or you can insistently try to know them because, perhaps, their worth will justify their difficulty. You can leave Gaddis and Proust and Foster Wallace and Pynchon on the shelf because their books are too long and confusing or you can take the time to read them and, perhaps, find yourself changed. And, ah ha, wouldn’t that be worth any level of difficulty?

Yanidel — The street photographer Yanick Delafoge calls himself Yanidel, and his post-processing techniques produce a look that it utterly unique and European and brilliant. I especially enjoy his photographs from Paris.

Cosi on rue de Seine in Paris — In April I returned here for the first time in nearly nine years. It still serves the best sandwiches in the world.

Ken Griffey, Jr. — He was the hottest minor league prospect in baseball at the time when I really became fanatical about the sport, and I followed his entire career until it ended this summer. His swing was beautiful, and he should go down as the greatest player of his generation. I got to see him play in the 2007 All-Star game when he started in the same outfield as Barry Bonds in San Francisco, something I’ll never forget.

Subjective Time — This is the simple but not often cited concept of how we experience time subjectively in relation to our age. It’s no secret that time seems to pass faster as we get older, but it’s not commonly known that this concept has been scientifically studied and verified. In fact, there’s even an equation that describes one’s perception of time based on her age. Given current average life expectancies in the Unites States, we feel like we’ve lived half of our lives before the age of 20. Twenty is the subjective halfway point of our lives. It’s no wonder that it seems like such a formative age!

Concord, Massachusetts — Walden Pond, Mount Misery, Sleepy Hollow, and ridiculously large servings of ice cream—and only a 30-minute drive from Cambridge!

Love and Its Opposite by Tracey Thorn — That no one else writes songs about the disappointments of middle age makes this a unique album. That Tracey Thorn does so with brilliance and nuance makes it spectacular.

Printing Photos — So much better than storing them in the “cloud.”

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith — This is one of the better things that has been written about online culture, i.e. what the Internet has done to our culture.

J.D. Salinger — Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Don’t forget to read the final list. Click on the images to reveal the descriptions. And click on the Away arrow to open the page for a random favorite.

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My year in photos

Ricky — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 02:01:38 +0000

This was the first year of my life that I documented more with my photography than with my writing, especially if that whole picture = 1,000 words equation is true. Here are some of the things I saw in 2010, arranged, more or less, chronologically. For those of you who are curious about gear, I took most of the shots with a Leica M7, Leica M8, or Panasonic GF1.

A few photos from the Occupy movement Taken with my Leica M8 and 40mm Leica Summicron-C. I’ll...
40mm Leica Summicron-C: The best cheap Leica lens Steve Huff recently posted his choice for the best budget...
Jonathan Lethem on Roberto Bolaño, or the best novel of the year? In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review Jonathan Lethem offers high...

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Using HDR Efex Pro for the first time

Ricky — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 02:40:58 +0000

I use Nik’s Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro quite a bit for post processing my photos, so I felt compelled to try out their new HDR software. Unfortunately, I don’t have exposure-bracketed shots that I took with the intention of making an HDR image. So, I took a couple photos I had from a hike to Mount Misery last month and put them into HDR Efex to see what it could make of them. The conditions under which I shot these photos were not ideal—I handheld them and took my rangefinder camera away from my eye to adjust the shutter speed in between shots—but the result from only two shots is not disappointing. See below for the HDR image and the original two photos that HDR Efex combined to make it.

How to recover erased .RW2 and other RAW files from SDHC cards I recently lost all my GF1 photos from my SDHC...
Winning Eleven and Amazon I pre-ordered Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer for Xbox 360...
Rediscovering film with the Leica M7 Six years ago I gave up shooting film entirely...

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