The Puget News

Interview with Rem Koolhaas.

10 things to write in your journal. If you don’t keep one you should (at least, that’s what I try to remind myself all the time when I’m not writing in mine).

I’m heading to Paris in November. It may be worth dropping by this fascinating looking house, The Maison de Verre, at 31 Rue Saint-Guillaume. It is apparently open for limited touring.

Quoted: With the help of an American collector, a glass house’s enchanting secrets are revealed.

Hyy you code breakers out there, check out next May 1st’s Arizona Daily Wildcat for a new cryptic advertisement.

Quoted: Every year since 1981, more than once a year, and almost always on May 1, the [Arizona Daily] Wildcat has published a cryptic ‘advertisement’ from an unnamed source. These messages typically contain images, mathematical diagrams and formulae, quotations (literary, philosophical, religious, and commonly in the original language) and other fragments of text…

The Nestlé chocolate museum in Mexico City looks sweet! Pun intended.

A nice post at Make showing sculptures made out of old books. I especially like the Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter Table.

..and vengeance is Jodie’s. Looks like a female version of Mel Gibson’s “Payback.”

A public art project to show Brooklyn City Dwellers what happens when the city floods by 10 feet as a result of climate change.

Quoted: high water line

Quoted: This three-minute video created by EggMan consists of images from 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art.

This new movie with Kevin Kline on human trafficking looks pretty intense and worth seeing.

An excellent monster gallery over at The Morning News.

Video for the new “You Don’t Know What Love Is” by The White Stripes.

37signals spent a little time with the work of Stéphane Mallarmé today, showing some of his inventive typography and poems which blended the visual, musical, and poetical.

Love the video. Love the song. I smiled when I saw smiley faces on a waterslide.

This film trailer makes me want to travel to Iceland as soon as possible. It’s for a new film called “Heima” featuring Sigur Ros.

An appraisal of where one reporter places Philip K. Dick among the literary/writerly pantheon.

Quoted: Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick’s books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series—owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.

The trailer for this movie shows a spooky look at a fringe community living life in the American desert. It looks like it will explore issues of violence, frontier justice, and isolation.

I’d love to check this out.

IFC has posted the “50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema.”

Quoted: The oldest film on this list is from 1896; the newest is from last year. You’ll notice we decided to leave certain standards in the field off. And as always, these lists are a launching point for you to tell us what you think. Are we wrong? Are we right?

The Personal MBA site has been relaunched and looks fantastic!

Their slogan is “mastering business through self-education.”

Quoted: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” - Will Hunting, “Good Will Hunting”

A photo-list of various data visualization approaches. Some of them are quite stunning and useful.

Quoted: Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion.

An art exhibit based on light-sensing aperture controls.

A fantastic post on 4 different types of luck and how they apply to entrepreneurial endeavor. I am looking forward to the next posts in this series.

Quoted: Marc Andreessen, technology entrepreneur, Internet, Mosaic, Netscape, Opsware, Ning

A fantastic list of the top 10 movies that never got made, replete with funny descriptions of why. I have to admit, a Peter Jackson “Halo” production with Guillermo del Toro directing would have been awesome.

My favorite tid-bit? It’s pretty random but I love the following quote -

Quoted: Once again, [Kevin} Smith’s career was evidently set back by his insistence that he only work with actors he’s had at least one drunken pillow fight with. Since this limits his choices to Lee and Ben Affleck (and we’re thinking the latter would not only have ruined the franchise, but would have incited fans to pile up all the copies of the novel and hold a Nazi-style book burning) the studio is wisely developing Fletch with another writer and director.

Quoted: In an interview with SPIEGEL, prominent Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn discusses Russia’s turbulent history, Putin’s version of democracy and his attitude to life and death.

The Seattle Arts and Lectures series has a spectacular lineup this year. I may be buying a couple season tickets!

Quoted: Seattle Arts & Lectures has begun selling series tickets to its 2007-2008 season, headlined by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This looks like it will be a fun movie.

Quoted: A sweet, hilarious and slightly subversive romantic comedy that examines the issues of marriage, monogamy and whether “I do” is the only path to life-long love and happiness. Ira Black, 33, is brilliant, neurotic, Jewish and has so many issues he can’t fit them into 12 years of analysis. He can’t finish his dissertation, he can’t commit to his longtime girlfriend, and he’s incapable of making a decision, even if it’s just what to order at the diner. Abby Willoughby, 30, is a free spirit who’s better at solving her friends’ problems at the gym than selling memberships. When the two meet, the impossible happens: they fall in love, meet each other’s parents and decide to get married, all in a few breathless hours.

A collection of resources for writers. Very helpful!