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On Willow Street

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I am a pigeon. A big-city pigeon.

I am walking. Another pigeon is walking behind me. We are looking for food.

When I stop walking you may notice I stand with one foot up, as if I am injured. When I walk, you may notice that I am dragging a small branch with me.

The branch is stuck to my foot. I don’t know why it’s stuck to my foot, but it is. I am dragging it around with me when I walk, and holding it up off the ground when I rest.

I walk in a straight line, just back from the curb. The pigeon behind me wanders. If you stop to look at me and my branch I will walk around you and continue in a straight line.

If you move in front of me again I will stop and wait to see if you leave. If you don’t leave I will wait longer. If the other pigeon sees something to eat lying on the sidewalk in your shadow I will run to the food and eat.

If you come too close I will fly a few feet away. I won’t fly any farther than I would otherwise, but you will see the little branch is not keeping me grounded.

If you stay back just a bit more, I will stop and hold my foot up. If you move around you will be able to see my foot, but you will not be able to see what is keeping the branch attached. It may be a wire. It may be that one of my toes is stuck through a split in the branch. I don’t know.

If you stay where you are, I will stay where I am. If you wait, I will wait, too.

And I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you.

— Mark Barrett

The Missing iPad Review

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I get the utility of hype. If you can work people into a frenzy about a given brand in a crowded marketplace, you sell more of that product. Fair enough.

But after you’ve got that spanking new Ferrari parked in the garage you’ve still got to take your three kids to school, including their sports equipment. After you’ve had that delicious pedicure or manicure, you still need to plant your garden or rake your leaves. And of course there’s all that gizmo-driven exercise equipment in your basement, which you used exactly twice.

Point being: it’s one thing to buy yourself something cool and another thing to use it in your day-to-day existence. Products that require a lot of care and maintenance generally get neither, meaning we tend to avoid those products or destroy them in short order.

Now that all of those how-the-iPad-will-change-the-fabric-of-the-universe-twice posts have faded into the coffers of Steve Jobs, I find myself confronted with a deafening silence on more banal points like utility and usability. If you’ve had an iPad for a while, and you’re using it regularly — or, alternatively, not using it regularly — I think you could corner the market on iPad news by answering any or all of the following:

  • What’s it like to lug an iPad around?

    It weighs 1.5 pounds. You can talk all you want about how that’s super-light for a laptop, but it’s still 1.5 pounds. The average person is not built to carry a weight like that, let alone manipulate it in one or both hands. (If you think I’m kidding, grab yourself a much-easier-to-carry 1.5 pound barbell and lug it around for a day.)

    • [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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It’s an interesting time. Spring is busting out. Oil is washing ashore.

I’ve been in a low gear for quite a while now, partly for reasons of my own and partly due to circumstance. I feel like an upshift is coming, and that I’m personally ready to pick up speed, but the corners are still blind.

Do I need to keep my foot on the brake, against the straining engine, or can I drop the pedal and go? An interesting question, which I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to answer in advance.

It’s an interesting time.

  • The Big Picture: April 30, 2010

    I would give the first image a Pulitzer on the spot. The last image — if the hurricane-shaped sprawl is indeed oil — is rife with irony.

    If you’re wondering how hard it’s going to be to clean up this oil spill, imagine that a crude-oil bomb has exploded in your closet and your job is to clean your clothes. The immediate response you just had — that you would simply throw away your clothes and start over — is not available to flora and fauna. They have to wear it.

  • Shakespeare: The Question of Authorship

    A book review about a smart book that takes apart all those entertaining claims that Shakespeare could not have been Shakespeare.

    Every mystery is not a secret. Every silence is not a lie. The play’s the thing.

    • [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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Welcome to the independent writer’s life. Put up your short story collection at the beginning of the week, get pounded by malicious code injections the rest of the week.

To help keep your own chin high and lip stiff, I offer herewith a helping of distractions and items of interest that could very well make or break your ability to ever again confront the horrifying solitude of the keyboard. Drink up.

Weekend Reads

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Over the past two months I’ve had three people work on my furnace. In order to use both outlets on the nearby drop box, one of these people unplugged the sump pump, then neglected to plug it back in.

Have I mentioned that it’s been raining a lot lately?

In order to take our minds off the joy of clean-up, I offer these links of interest. How much interest I can’t say, but definitely more than you would have in cleaning up a flooded basement.

  • How to Leverage Twitter When You Have Little Time

    I have a general distaste for the idea of maximizing anything. Books or people who encourage me to get the most out of everything from my in-between moments to my entire life are invariably asking me to heighten my already heightened sense of awareness to the point of overload. I understand that time-saving procedures and efficient processes can produce benefits, but only if they are themselves simple to understand, implement and practice. As such, this link passes the minimalism test.

    Twitter can take a while to understand precisely because you can’t really understand it until you’re using it. So take what you want here and ignore the rest. It will help.

  • “World Press Photo” Contest Winners Gallery 2010

    Found this link via my good friend, Jurie. I was particularly drawn to the images of street fighting from Kiev, Ukraine — a city I visited in 2008 while working on an interactive title.

    I didn’t get to see that side of town.

  • Art Is Everywhere

    Note: this is an image-intensive site, and as such may take a while to fully load.

    Back when the internet first burst onto the scene, this is what it was like. You’d find a site where someone had dropped anchor in order to look around, and it was invariably interesting to experience that person’s point of view. Today the average garden-variety site is sophisticated, breathless, trendy and slick, in keeping with a culture that cares more about being looked at and talked about than doing or saying anything of interest.

    Give me a point of view any day:

    I started this blog to show that Art is Everywhere.

    That’s site-owner Ashley Spencer’s mission statement. And she’s right: it is.

  • Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

    Speaking of sophisticated, breathless, trendy and slick, it’s clear that Esquire magazine lost its way at some point. Now a caricature of its former self, Esquire currently rides the cutting edge of metrosexuality, cutting ever closer to the bone. If you know what I mean.

    Real men don’t objectify women, and particularly not under the pathetic pretext of ogling revering them. If you can’t tell me why a woman is interesting as an individual without also showing me a two-page, soft-focus flesh-drape across a $9,000 divan, then your pictures are not actually worth thousands of reverential words.

    Which brings us to the eternal problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, the baby is a profile of Film Critic Roger Ebert, which answered a lot of questions for me. I knew he was sick, and that he’d lost the ability to speak, but I didn’t really know what hand he’d been dealt. I don’t think I ever really thought of the man as tough, even when it looked like he was going to come out of his chair and punch Gene Siskel in the mouth, but the man is tough.

    Like men used to be.

Stay dry.

— Mark Barrett

Be Bold

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I was reminded today of this:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
~ Goethe

It was probably two or three years ago when I came across this bit of pith, and it really hit home. Key to me is the fact that it scales: whatever you consider being bold, that’s your bar. You don’t have to compete with people who have deep pockets, or who were born into a family hard-wired with connections. You just have to try.

I also think it’s true. Or at least it’s been true for me when I’ve been bold in the past. I’ve had my ass kicked, I’ve swung and missed more than once, but in general I’ve come out ahead for being bold. I know that magic.

In a (mostly) amazing coincidence, I visited Goethe’s resting place in Weimar, Germany last year while traveling on business. He didn’t have anything to add.

Update: Maybe because the quote doesn’t actually come from Goethe. As near as I can tell after trying to nail this down, it seems to have originated with this guy.

— Mark Barrett

Greatest Song Ever

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In a post about the Beatles in early November I wrote this:

A week later I’m listening to I Am The Walrus again and it’s just genius. It’s over forty years old and it’s as relevant and good and insane and perfect as anything anyone is doing today. It’s not just holding up. You can’t name a better song. There are no better songs. Goo goo gajoob.

Last night I listened to I Am The Walrus again, and I stand by what I said. I think it’s the greatest song ever. I don’t have a massive analytical treatise to back me up, or sales figures if that’s the only thing that matters to you, but on every level that a song is supposed to work, I Am The Walrus works transcendentally.

Tell me I’m wrong. Point to a better song by anyone. Classical, disco, whatever you’ve got. I don’t think you can do it.

Update: a link to a YouTube clip of Walrus from Magical Mystery Tour. I think the song has outlived the images, so feel free to look away.

Later Update: I found myself wondering where I Am The Walrus ranks in the various all-time great songs lists, and after a while I found myself reading through the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time (full list archived here). The first thing that caught my eye was the fact that Walrus isn’t listed, meaning Rolling Stone doesn’t think it’s one of the 500 greatest songs of all time. They do have Rick James’ Super Freak at 477, and Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe at 444, and Don Henley’s Boys of Summer at 416, but no Walrus.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that a list like this has to spread the wealth around, and you’re right. There are 4 Beatles songs in the top 20, 7 in the top 30, 10 in the top 100, and 21 in the entire list. By Contrast, the Rolling Stones have 4 in the top 100, so you know the Beatles are getting their due.

But here’s the problem. The last Beatles song on the list is Ticket To Ride at 387. For 1965, maybe it was head-turning stuff. But forty years later, it’s simply another catchy pop tune from the pre-Martin Beatles era. Whereas I Am The Walrus was and still is the kind of timeless musical statement that transcends its own context. (Look at the dated clip of the song from the movie Magical Mystery Tour and you’ll see what I mean.)

Any Top 100 Songs of all Time list that doesn’t have Walrus on it is a fail. Any Top 10 Songs of all Time that does include Walrus is a list I would pay attention to.

— Mark Barrett

PC Mag: 50 Fave Blogs

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Yeah, I know…it’s PC Mag. They can’t get out of their own way, and they refuse to walk the clarity-between-advertising-and-content walk that they (rightly) expect everybody else to walk. Such is publishing today.

Still, there’s some good tech content there, and the reviews are useful, and sometimes they still do that fun web thing of pointing people in new and interesting directions. If you’re in the mood to explore, take a look.

My fave for the upcoming holiday? Cake Wrecks.

Happy Thanksgiving.

— Mark Barrett