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The 1979 game console connected to the TV. The screen black, a white square representing the ball, and 2 white lines, moving up and down on either side, representing the player-rackets. It is the middle of the day, people sleep or take a swim, blinds are lowered, silence—broken by the spongy boing accompanying each shot. By the time Harold reached the Bering Sea and was forced to turn back he had been running for 5 years without rest, and after that he descended through Canada, entered the U.S. in his pleated chinos, his red polo shirt, and his bomber jacket, and it would be another 3 years before the strict randomness of his erratic path brought him to his front door again. No one had been inside. No sign of even the slightest looting. Nor letters in the mailbox. Everything intact. The sea, through the far side of the building, a skin of mercury, and the console still connected, a score on the screen registering many thousands of defeats. He made another request for all the cornflakes boxes with that sell-by date because he now understood that he could not live without that memory, without taking flight, without that memory, without taking flight. Like someone hearing the thunderclap at the same moment they see lightning.
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Q: And yet there’s this idea that the way you combine different styles is the result of a chaotic and unplanned process, when in reality your records are totally thought-through, even the mistakes.
A: Yes, it’s all intentional, very thought-through. You have the occasional accident, but they do a job. Controlled chaos is a good description of what I do, maybe because of the conscious wish to create music that’s three-dimensional. Most of the recordings are very flat, so that if you add new elements into the sound you can take the pop song to a different level. And this is the area I’m drawn towards, that I find exciting. It’s the reason people who listen to traditional pop music can find my work chaotic or “damaged,” but actually it’s meant to sound like that.
BECK, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL
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2 months after reading the review in The New York Times, on a mild April evening, Polly was sitting for the first time at one of the tables with checkered tablecloths, vinegar bottles, and small lamps. The restaurant, crammed. In the background, but still loud, strains of George Gershwin. Steve came out of the kitchen howling into a megaphone: Nude Spider-Man doll boiled in carrot-and-leek broth, outfit bleached clean off, for the blond lady on her own at Table 7! Polly turned crimson and looked at the floor—but did not leave, and indeed stayed on, watching everything, until after the last customer had gone. Through the porthole in the kitchen door she saw that Steve had nearly finished tidying up; she thought he looked just like an animal in that astrakhan shawl, fit to be put in the oven himself. And then he came out, sat down at the table, and said, What’s up, how are you? Very well, said Polly, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that melted Spider-Man, I’ve never seen a superhero in the buff before. Resting his elbows on the table, head propped against his hands, he said, Girl, I’m beat, but what’s your name, how about a drink? Sure, she said, gin and orange. The first thing that came to mind. Steve went over to the bar and came back with 2 drinks. They didn’t drink any more, but talked into the night. She was the New York representative of a large jewelry company, she told him, single, living in Upper Manhattan. At 4:00 a.m. Steve said to her, Come on, Polly, how about you let me cook you tonight? Intertwined, a gigantic astrakhan shawl and a petite woman went up the stairs. The neon STEVE’S RESTAURANT sign stayed on all night long.
105
Malcolm Gladwell opens Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking with the story of a kouros, an ancient Greek statue of a youth that came on the art market and was about to be purchased by the Getty Museum in California. It was a magnificently preserved work, close to seven feet tall, and the asking price was just under $10 million. The Getty did all the normal background checks to establish the authenticity of the piece. A geologist determined that the marble came from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thasos. It was covered with a thin layer of calcite, a substance that accumulates on statues over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. After 14 months of investigation, the Getty staff concluded the thing was genuine, and went ahead with the purchase. But an art historian named Federico Zeri was taken to see the statue, and in an instant he decided it was fake. Another art historian took a glimpse and sensed that while it had the form of a proper classical statue, it somehow lacked the spirit. A third felt a wave of “intuitive repulsion” when he first laid eyes on it. Further investigations were made, and finally the whole scheme unraveled. It transpired that the statue had been sculptured by forgers in Rome in the early 1980’s. The teams of analysts who did 14 months of research turned out to be wrong. The historians who relied on their initial hunches were right. There is in all of our brains, Gladwell argues, a mighty backstage process, which works its will subconsciously. Through this process we have the capacity to sift huge amounts of information, blend data, isolate telling details and come to astonishingly rapid conclusions, even in the first two seconds of seeing something.
“BLINK: HUNCH POWER,” NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW BY DAVID BROOKS
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It must be very strange to see your face burning on an advertising billboard as your face also feels the heat of the fire. That February night, Josecho, in his Windsor Tower hut, after an evening stint on his new transpoetic project, for which he was using the videos recorded on his Vespa rides, found himself writing to Marc for the first time in a little over a year, explaining his silence and telling him that, in reality, he did not want to be a hermit, he wanted to be a normal kind of person—and then he smelled burning. Looking up from the monitor, he saw smoke reaching between the overlapping asbestos sheets and shot out of the hut. Careening between the multitude of satellite dishes and lightning rods, he came to the roof edge. A sudden up-gust of flames hit his face—a fire on the top floor. In the same moment, the flames reached one of the huge photos of his face advertising his book throughout Madrid. The frames of the glasses on that smiling face burned, he saw them burning, just as the plastic of his own glasses began to melt.
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Sandra flies from London to Palma de Mallorca. She flicks through the in-flight magazine British Airways News. Reports on wine production in Ribeiro and Rioja, the latest high-tech architecture works in Berlin, mail-order Majorica pearls. A tear falls onto a photo of a Caribbean beach, but the beach has not pricked it from her, and neither has the Caribbean, nor the gravity to which all tears are subject; she looks out the window, looks ahead, sees neither clouds nor earth. The verification of something she already knew: on airplanes, there is no horizon. She takes out the keys to her Churchill Street apartment, attached to a dinosaur key ring with a compass needle quivering in its head.
In the summer of 1993, the American paleontologist Michael Novacek left behind the calm of his office at the American Museum of Natural History to lead an expedition of scientists in the inhospitable climes of the Gobi Desert, where temperatures fluctuate between −45°C and 50°C. The former rock guitarist still laughs to remember their truck getting stuck in the sand and forcing them to stop by some outcrops. “We’d gone hoping to explore, and suddenly the trip was over.” They ended up finding the largest-known site of dinosaur and mammal bones from the Cretaceous period, a mine of extraordinary, 80-million-year-old fossils—predating by 15 million years the asteroid that brought an end to the dinosaurs.
Q: What happened in the Great Cretaceous Extinction?
A: We aren’t sure precisely. We know a mass extinction took place with 70 percent of all marine and land-based species being wiped out. And we have evidence that an enormous object from space hit the earth at the same time, at a point in the Caribbean near the coast of modern-day Mexico. The impact caused huge destruction and brought about drastic changes in the atmosphere, sending temperatures so high that some organisms were literally cooked alive and a wave of huge fires broke out across the planet. However, it’s the mammals rather than the dinosaur
s that I focus on. Dinosaurs are the past, mammals are the future—after all, they filled the gap left by the extinct dinosaurs.
MICHAEL NOVACEK INTERVIEW, EL PAÍS, MARCH 16, 2005
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Over time, the world of jewelry gave way to the world of Steve’s Restaurant, which began to take up every second of Polly’s life. At the start she waited tables, until then the preserve of Steve; she became an efficient helper. She also instated the open days, an idea she took from artisan jewelry conventions. Other things that happened: an affluent set becoming regulars at the restaurant, attracted by the well-connected Polly; Steve deciding to cook the horizon; Steve announcing, to the surprise of all attending the Third Annual Open Day, Come on, everyone! I’m cooking the horizon! And him putting them all in a rental bus [rented by Polly] and pulling up in the parking lot at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, and walking them single-file along the path to the left of the traffic, until they were halfway across, where he stopped them and said, Look, the horizon! The sun was going down, and it smoldered on that horizontal axis, it burned. There you have it! he cried. The group looked on in silence, utterly rapt at the vision, and applause broke out among them when the sun disappeared, and they toasted with red wine. Passing drivers rubbernecked. The event was reported in the news. During the Q&A on the TV program Cooking Today, someone asked him to reveal his secret. His answer: My secret is that I don’t bother with the insides of things, I cook the skins and the skins only; the skins of all objects, animals, things, and ideas are apt to be cooked, and this is to do with light and nothing else: the skins are the places the light reaches. You might say that the way I cook is the logical next step in the spread of sunlight across the surface of the earth, my cooking is the point where sunlight causes mutations, becomes total across the surface of things. Doing up his astrakhan shawl, he left with his arm around Polly’s waist. That night, as they always did now when celebrating special moments in their relationship, they went to the yard where Polly had first caught sight of him jumping up and down on a car. They usually took a little food and would sit on a couple of wheels or a backseat strewn somewhere in the yard, open a couple of cans of Pepsi, and she would tell him about diamond-cutting and he would talk about the advantages of astrakhan fur over rabbit pelts. A tall, fairly fat man with hands like octopuses, a regular in the yard at that hour of the day, would sometimes come and sit with them; people called him Frankie, though not because his name was Frank, rather after Frankenstein. Wrapped in his tweed jacket, he told them how, in his earlier days, he had written a novel called Hopscotch, but it was Hopscotch B or, as he called it, the Theory of Open Balls, which was really good—and was also top-secret. They offered to share their food, their Pepsi. By the way, said Steve, I loved that stuff about cooking only the points where the sun reaches, and the thing about skin, loved it—it gave me the perfect out when those hacks started asking questions. Don’t mention it, said Frankie. I’m glad it was useful. I got that idea from a guy I met in Armenia—that’s near Russia, by the way—a pig farmer, he had an idea to use his 8-story pig farm to produce a carpet of pigskins that would stretch from his front door to the glaciers of Pakistan, said he’d be killing 2 birds with 1 stone that way: first, the layer of skins would maintain the temperature of the planet and, second, ward off attacks by the Turko-Muslims, since, seeing as they refused to go anywhere near pig meat, they wouldn’t dare set foot on lands covered in the skins of that animal … Pass me a sandwich, Polly. She held one out to him and said, And you, what were you doing around there? Frankie, taking a large bite, said, Oh, nothing, really, looking for some wall I might stick myself to, but then I got sidetracked. I wandered around those moors for a number of months, and then one day I heard Chet Baker playing his trumpet off in the distance—unmistakable, it was the same recording I owned when I lived in Paris, and as it mixed together with the grunting, complaining pigs, it created a terrifying kind of harmony. I stayed, lingered in the area for a while—until the Armenian government came and took the whole thing down, I’m thirsty, Polly, pass the Pepsi, would you?
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A dice may exist in which circular holes on each of the sides reveal a hollow interior. A dice not only hollow but open to the flow of light and air entering at random. So the side with 6 holes on it, we would say, becomes more permeable to the entrance of various external elements, of life, than the side with one, but also more susceptible to the destruction of the dice’s magic: the unpredictability of which number it will land on. Because in a hollow, perforated dice, the chance previously incubated inside is exposed, and if not, it is anyway a dry and banal sort of chance; a chance with neither force nor content. A boy, eating his breakfast, reads the note on the side of the milk carton he has just opened:
Think Bell invented the telephone
and then sat next to it
waiting for someone to call?
No, he went out
and did everything he could
to sell his idea,
everything to ensure
that there would be thousands
of telephones like his.
Are you a young inventor?
Have you got an idea
you think is revolutionary?
Get in touch.
HUNDREDS OF PRIZES TO BE WON!
Green Milk Company,
161 William Street, Miami,
Florida, 33125.
XXI Young Inventors competition.
RULES ON UNDERSIDE!
The boy has thousands of brilliant ideas which become gradually less brilliant as the carton grows emptier over the course of the week. At that point he stamps it flat and attempts to hit the basketball hoop of the trash can. It is also written that the angles and corners of dice are best if slightly rounded, to ensure that the dice rolls not just for a long time but that it may keep on rolling forever.
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When Mr. A returned to the U.S. having not found the Manakis brothers’ lost tapes, a search that had taken him as far as Azerbaijan, assuming they must have been destroyed in some tribal conflict or another, he went back to his daily routines as a film director. In the studio one day, drinking coffee as he edited his most recent film, an accident happened: the sound was perfectly audible, but the upper section of the rushes, approximately 1/3 of each image, had been cut off. This meant that the voices came from headless, faceless actors. Mr. A found that the sensation produced was like reading a book, not like watching a film; rather than cinema, what he had here was literature in its purest state. It dawned on him that books and reading in the future would not consist of hypertexts or any other technological offshoot, but this: decapitated films. Then Mr. A began cutting off the top third of everything he came across. Taking a pair of scissors, he unearthed every photograph in his house and, having carried out these top-third amputations, found they were now wider than they were tall: suddenly what he had were horizons. Amplitudes previously unknown. The soul of landscapes. So that whatever the subject of the photograph—a crowded Sarajevo street, food and drink on a table, 2 audacious boys he came across lost on the side of a road, the gapped teeth of a drunken Greek taxi driver, a refrigerator, or the view through his living room window of the neon sign for a place called Steve’s Restaurant—all suddenly became the landscape of a new planet, and if he allowed it to unfold somehow vertically, a kind of ascent, it would produce a new world altogether; these distorted photographs, he saw, comprised the natural habitat of a new literature, the product of a headless cinema. And over time he came to understand that those 3 lost Manakis brothers tapes, the original vision he had failed to find in the Balkans, were today precisely that, a faceless gaze, the definitive decapitation, and it led him to think of them as the most radical exponents of this new literature. On the night he came to this realization he went to bed thinking that every night was a hoax, like cloudy days when the rain never decides to fall but stays incubating up above, up in that troposphere of sorts.
111
From ins
ide all you can hear is the wind outside as it buffets the wire fences. The books line the shelves, programs are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in freezers remains intact, board games are in display cabinets, counters and dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio plays. A laborer left it switched on … “the Prime Minister has announced that 2,000 miles of new roads will be created next year using state funds. In international news, in Basra, an as-yet-unidentified man, of Western descent but married to an Iraqi woman, along with their son, reportedly named Mohamed Smith, died yesterday in a surprise attack by the U.S. Armed Forces, a reprisal for the recent Sunni suicide attacks on American positions. The family were eating together when a Marine, having rappelled down the side of the building, smashed their 4th-floor window and threw in a low-explosive grenade. And in sports, the footballer Zinedine Zidane has announced his retirement due to injuries suffered in the last 2 seasons, and in the Third Division, Endesa and Ponferradina meet later today in the promotion playoff for the Segunda División B. This is Radio Nacional de España, Radio Five, stay tuned…”
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 21