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Got an e-mail from one of my teachers that I gotta come up with a good definition for art. We’re going to spend an entire semester debating just that (since the class is called “Aesthetics”), and he wants us to come up with one all by ourselves during break? Sigh.

So tempted to just quote Sybil Buck’s definition that “art is when you do something and other people talk about it” and leave it at that.

I know it’s a shorter month and all, but there were a lot less good posts from this month. Must have been when I was into that whole “school” and “homework” business. *shrug*

Memorable Quotes:

• “‘Sustainability’ means a situation in which your descendants are able to confront their own problems, rather than the ones you exported to them. If people a hundred years from now are soberly engaged with phenomena we have no nouns and verbs for, I think that’s a victory condition.” - Bruce Sterling on Sustainability
• “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” - Lewis Mumford

Funny Stuff:

• Bill Hader’s impression of There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview is still excellent, and the sketch he used it in was basically an excuse to deliver it. As you can tell from the laugh track, not very many in the audience had seen the movie and caught the reference. I enjoyed the hell out of it, though.
• I think I have almost seen this ten-minute clip-collection from Batman & Robin more than the actual film. All the boring interludes have been distilled out, just leaving the hilariously awful stuff that remains.

Wacky Images:

• Depthscrapers!
• Creepy-yet-oddly-entrancing drawings of posed skeletons!

Interesting Links:

• How cheap electricity enables the internet has become especially interesting as all the chip designs - across the board - start to move their way towards maximizing performance/watt rather than simply performance. Power-conscious designs used to be only important in the mobile domain, but watching your watts has proved to be useful in the desktop space as well. Servers are likely to follow, if they haven’t already.
• Depression in Wes Anderson films. I think this grappling-with-depression is what draws me to Anderson’s films. It’s a particular type of dramatic conflict, one that can’t rely on an easy “This is what Character A wants and this is how Character B is blocking it.” It gives his stuff this strange, disconnected, floaty feeling.
• Michael Lewis gave an interview to The Morning News earlier, and is now hailed as one of the strongest voices to speak on the current economic calamities. And to think, at the beginning of this year he was probably most popular for his sports-related writing. I guess that speaks to the benefits of not intellectually-pigeonholing yourself.

And I’m not even sharing the room with anything but my own sense of astonishment! Things that have made me f-bomb so far:

• The Cave of Swallows in Mexico, which they introduced by having someone jump into it running at full speed. A minute later they were like “lol it’s 1300 feet tall and that guy was basejumping gotcha!” but it still blew my mind.
• Cave Glow Worms! That’s the video from the episode, featuring these worms that suspend themselves from the ceiling using mucus strands and drop down big sticky loogies to ensnare insects. Plus, they GLOW to attract them. And there’s a ton.
• Hundreds of thousands of cockroaches at the bottom of the Surawak Chamber. I do not trust an ecosystem that subsists on bat guano.
• Underwater caving, which involves squeezing through incredibly tight quarters, which often kicks up a big cloud of dirt that keeps you from seeing anything around.
• A halocline, the vertical in a cave’s water between freshwater and saltwater. They separate out into layers, sort of like the parts of your salad dressing. it may look like you’re surfacing for air, but you might just be transitioning between layers.
• Snakes that hang from the ceiling and use heatvision to snatch bats from midair.
• Sulfuric Acid caves that somehow still have fish and these weird bacterial booger things that hang from the ceiling. WTF.

This is feeding into the ur-fears of endless underground passageways that House of Leaves exposed to add up to something I probably shouldn’t be watching right before I go to bed.

On MSNBC! Awesome documentary! Yeah!