Weekday Distractions

To all of those looking for some way to kill some time, please consider the following (pop culture reference, look it up). 

Paste Magazine's Josh Jackson tells a really wonderful story about the power of great, honest music in a time when all fame requires is an audition with the Disney Channel and a maladjusted father-figure. Also, bonus points for the fact that it focuses on Brandi Carlile, one of my favorites. 

One of my favorite columnists, Witold Rybczynski, who writes on architecture for Slate Magazine, put together an excellent photo essay a while ago on the proposed plans for the new Museum of African-American History in Washington, D.C.. In it, he touches on a lot of the concerns I looked at in my entry about Arthur Erickson a while back- architectural fancy vs. continuity with the surrounding world- something Witold phrases much more simply as "pink flamingo or garden gnome?"

Following a brutal spring of civil warfare in Sri Lanka that represented the final motion of the Tamil independence movement, the Tamil Tigers, the militant forces fighting the Sri Lankan government conceded defeat near the end of May. For a lot of people, this was a clear-cut fight: Sri Lankan government against radical terrorist organization. But take a look at John Green, another of my very favorite lay-cultural observers, explaining the situation, and maybe try and consider this in a perhaps more moderate light (I'm so self-indulgent it kills me).

Another reason why the United States still scares me: Jennifer Steinhauer for the New York Times reports on a more-or-less horrifying wing of the Boy Scouts of America which preaches preparedness and skills in the wilderness....only with guns and xenophobia. 

Mark Kingwell's stunning book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City was released in paperback this week to excited yelps from tools, geeks, nerds and literati around the globe. In this book, Kingwell takes a new philosophical perspective on what seems like the lowliest of subjects- concrete. Channeling everyone from Walter Benjamin to Sigmund Freud, Kingwell turns concrete, through precise strokes of beautiful prose, into a spectacular metaphor for hope in the modern, globalized megacity; into a way of looking at the convergence of hope and hopelessness, in and out, here and away, in a world where the very validity of those concepts seems to be slipping away. 

I'm going to bed because work began at 6am this morning. Hulk smash.