Stephen Jay Gould
He died yesterday at the ripe age of 60. I met him a few times and was always astounded by his wit, his ferocity, and his knowledge of baseball. Alas, he’s gone, a kind of dinosaur himself. This is from a Salon piece about him, by Scott Rosenberg:
“Woven through much of Gould’s writing, and at the heart of his new ‘Full House,’ is an insistent demand that we ‘cash out’ the deepest implications of Darwin’s insights — and begin to comprehend that our species, far from being the pinnacle of some inevitable trend in nature toward greater complexity, is simply a tiny accident occurring on a minor side-branch of the evolutionary tree.”
He’s one of those people, like, say, Henry James, for whom I can’t say I liked his books but I admired his brawn.

I had the good fortune of taking a walk with my friend Mary in Prospect Park today. Mary is an excellent painter and we got on the subject of the art profession. I asked the question, “Where exactly does the desire for success reside?” It’s a question that I myself could not completely answer, or answer well. Is it internally based or social scripted? Is it a part of the evolutionary mechanism or a spark of divinity in each of us? Is it Oprah-istic magik or the most profound element of human civilization?
I don’t have an answer but I do know that success resides differently for artists from what I can tell. It doesn’t just sit and grow. It matures, it snakes away, it devolves, and then it flourishes. Success is a many-headed monster for artists, unlike say, for doctors, cowboys, and educators. It’s not cool to talk about success, especially in the year 2002 but now I’m risking sounding like Andy Rooney.

The Web
My intuition about the Web has always been that it best approximates how we do our deepest, most relevant thinking. Others, like Kurzweil, may agree. My hope is that the Web will stay out of our control (in the way that Maciej Toporowicz speaks about and against control) so that we can ensure that beauty surfaces and the unknown continues to haunt us.
Of course, beauty and the sublime are not everything, nor can they be. But I still argue that the Web privileges everything that could be right with the world, offering us continuity, communication, communion, and connectedness. The word “mean,” after all, stems from the Old High German meinen meaning “to have in mind.” It’s perhaps what G-d had “in mind” in creating an evolutionary brain.

A number of interesting online contests have come my way in the past few days. Mostly, I’m interested in this one, the 5k Competition, which, as rich media continues to take over the high bandwidth Web, is an increasingly fascinating exercise in nostalgia, complex high-tech, design simplicity and code efficiency. Here is their ASCII ad that I received via email. Formatting is now, appropriately, off.
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No complaints. Maciej’s work is coming along very well and the entirety is now up for your perusal.
It’s the most elaborate multi-media (photos, text, sound) intensive artist I’ve featured on MANOVERBOARD.com and I’m looking forward to responses. This will be the first ever broadcasting of this work.
Very cool. Stay tuned for the announcement.

I saw Training Day last night and was pretty impressed with Denzel’s performance as a black man. I’m not sure how to read the whole Oscar thing, however — did Oscar give him an award for definitively playing a black male (finally! and you hear sweat wiped off the brows of Hollywood folk) or did he deserve the role, the award, and the recognition (finally! and you hear sighs of relief from the mouths of Hollywood folk). I mean, Denzel’s role was extraordinary and the filming of him was strong – I loved the messy, blurry scenes of him or of neighborhoods flying by in that dream-car (Monte Carlo) he rode. And Ethan Hawke – he looked scrawnier in this role than he ever has before. I’m not sure he was miscast, but what’s difficult is to match his brights and brawn with the character needs to fill for the film. One line I hated: “I heard this area is a jungle.” Who wrote that? The author’s brother, Billy?
Overall, a powerful film, but one that asks us to think twice about Oscar and race.

Typically, my wife puts our baby to sleep at night. I usually work late into the night and listen to the crying, the cooing, the quiet hushes, and then the quiet, period.
Tonight, with my wife out at work, I was put to the task of putting the baby to sleep. I gave her much milk and put her in her crib twice – to no avail.
I had understood that Goodnight Moon is a good book to read to children before they fell asleep. And as I read the short, almost tragic words to my daughter, she did. She fell asleep on the last page of the book, which says “Goodnight” to all the objects and the people and the animals in the room.
To me, it said, over and over, “Goodbye.” It’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. The illustrations, by Clement Hurd, are beautiful, sad, elegiac. The story is by the inimitable Margaret Wise Brown who revived the illustrated children’s story. I imagine she used her middle name often.

I woke up this morning to find that Deckchairs has been accepted by



Got to go now.

(errata)
Okay, this is more an apologia than an errata. I’m apologizing for three things:
1. The May issue is not up yet. It will be. I’m getting some super-beatiful scans from Maciej this week and they’ll be up soon, promise, as will other very fine goodies. Sorry.
2. I recently wrote about New York State license plates & how “The ‘country’ is represtented by big mountains, probably a cartoon of an Adirondack mtn.” This was dumb. Upon closer inspection, the “‘country'” is represented by the awesome Niagara Falls, where my parents went on their honeymoon. I’m an idiot.
3. For numerous reasons, this Web log is not currently searchable. I don’t know if I want to tell you why. But it’s not right now. And I’m sorry about that, too.
Also, I’m sorry for posting a link to Hot or Not dot com (see below).

I don’t know why these sites are so popular, or were until recently, but I’ll post links to them out of service to the populace. (Or, alternately) as bookmarks for my own eventual perusal. These are addictive and grotesque at the same time – much like playing Doom.
Sorry:
www.whatsbetter.com
www.celebritybattles.com
and, also,
www.hotornot.com
With the special German wersion:
hotornot.whow.de