Lego art is boundless.

1500 hours = 62.5 full days

This blog has been severely neglected.

Reinventing Detroit

Looking at Detroit today, it is difficult to conceptualize what it once was.  From the Underground Railroad, Ford’s five dollar day, the implementation of our Interstate Highways system (and subsequent demolition Black Bottom and Paradise Valley), to the race riots, Great March to Freedom, and Motown – the history is all there but now, beyond Midtown, most people only see a city half abandoned and with patches of empty factories lots and rotting buildings amongst modest homes.

With the state of the economy, when we hear about Detroit in the news it is mainly about the auto industry or our nearly ten percent unemployment rate.  Given this, it was surpising to hear NPR’s latest Story of the Day.  The story talks about reclaiming Detroit, including such efforts as urban farming and the Hope District.

Give the podcast a listen here.

Modern-Day Slavery

In E. Benjamin Skinner’s latest book, he highlights that there are more slaves today than in another other time in history.  It’s a claim that is difficult to conceive until you think outside of the sugarcane harvesting slavery emphasized in the classroom.

In the popular consciousness, “slavery” has come to be little more than just a metaphor for undue hardship. Investment bankers routinely refer to themselves as “high-paid wage slaves.” Human rights activists may call $1-an-hour sweatshop laborers slaves, regardless of the fact that they are paid and can often walk away from the job. But the reality of slavery is far different. Slavery exists today on an unprecedented scale. In Africa, tens of thousands are chattel slaves, seized in war or tucked away for generations. Across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, traffickers have forced as many as 2 million into prostitution or labor. In South Asia, which has the highest concentration of slaves on the planet, nearly 10 million languish in bondage, unable to leave their captors until they pay off “debts,” legal fictions that in many cases are generations old.

“…In a Bucharest brothel, for instance, I was offered a mentally handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every one woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are at least 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor.”

Read the entire article here.

Calvin Harris is so Flyyyy

This is pretty stupid, but also interesting in the fact that a DJ feels the need to create these videos and post them on YouTube. This guy, Calvin, is top of the charts in the UK right now for his collaborating with Dizzee Rascal in “Dance Wiv Me”

Here’s is one of his many home videos. Why do I watch these? Why does ANYONE watch these?

Brian Eno and David Byrne, together again

So, in 1981 Brian Eno and David Byrne produced My Life in the Bush of the Ghosts and managed to combine ambient, electronica, and world musics together. This combination has become so familiar to listeners over the past twenty years that its influence can be seen as an anchor in both popular and alternative productions. Well, today’s the day the legendary producer and Talking Heads front men release their second collaboration, Everything that Happens will Happen Today. The entire album can be streamed here:
Everything that Happens Will Happen Today

Thoughts?

Another reason not to love Tiffany “New York” Pollard

Reality television is just another mindless guilty pleasure, right?  Wrong.  Turns out watching The Entertainer suck on New York’s toes can do more harm than making you hurl your lunch.

Montreal psychologists have already treated five men between the ages of 25 and 34 for what is called the Truman Show Delusion, where the afflicted believe that their life is a reality television show.

Read the article here.

Kanye West freaks the fuck out

It turns out, Kanye West likes to rant like a teenage girl on myspace.

Poor Kanye, with your sore knees and your expensive sets. We get it, you’re doing this all for us. Right…

Suffer for Art?

Singer/Songwriter Andrew Bird has been blogging about writing, recording, and producing his next album on the New York Time’s Blog, Measure for Measure

If you click on the blog link, you’ll be able to listen to a new song off of the album entitled “Oh, No.” I warn you, reader, it will be stuck in your head for the next week.

This blog post is particularly interesting because Bird discusses the unsettling feeling of being happy with the album. He writes that typically, at this stage in the game, he scraps his whole album. This time, he feels happy with it…so what’s the problem?

Well, anyone who’s produced anything–term paper, painting, building, etc.–knows how strange it feels to actually feel satisfied in the work.

The grand question: Must the creator suffer in order to produce a quality piece? Or, instead, is satisfaction a sign of mastery? Perhaps mastery is what is pushing Bird into the experimental realm he describes in the blog?

The Semicolon: This year’s hottest item ;)

I’ve always said that if I ever were to get a tattoo, it would be a semicolon on the inside of my wrist. For quite some time now, as geeky as this may sound, I have had a deep fascination with the mysterious and elusive semicolon. Needless to say (but apparently I am about to express it anyways), this article in Slate Magazine beckoned to me:
Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon?

The article presents a brief history and interpretation of the semicolon’s existence, but the last paragraph really drives a point home which many, if not most, writers wish to ignore.

When grading undergrad final papers recently, I found a near-absence of semicolons, save for one paper with cadenced pauses and carefully cantilevered clauses that gracefully stacked upon one another, Jenga-like, without ever quite toppling. Yet English was not this student’s first language.

He was an exchange student—from France.

I will own up to some lazy sentences in my lifetime. Hell, this entry is probably riddled with poor word choices (WC) and choppy phrases. Earlier today, I discussed taking a grammar course at the college level, and the first trouble area to surface was the proper usage of the semicolon. The fact that I have never quite fully understood the semicolon’s full potential and possibility, and further, that I use it sparingly as if it were some sort of rare imported spice sprinkled as a garnish, has pushed it into the realm of sexy punctuation.

The Big Questions: should the semicolon be eliminated or revived? Do you love them or hate them? Can they improve one’s writing? Does this even matter? Who are we? Where do we come from? Do I even exist?

grammar jokesters, lolz

Barack Obama Reggae by Cocoa Tea

On my drive home this evening, I was listening to 101.9 WDET’s world mix. This song made it very difficult to drive home. It’s just too funny.