"The only real difference between the people working in the creative industry and the people working at the airline counter is that the creatives are rude," he said. "Everyone we know assumes they're intellectually and morally superior to normal people, but our friends are just as normal, just as conservative and boring as anyone else. The main difference is that they're rude all the time. And they pan that rudeness off as authenticity."
Lonely Planet's Top 10 Countries to Travel to in 2020
Lonely Planet has released their list of the top 10 countries to travel to in 2020, based on both sustainability and experience, among other factors. We won't spoil all the surprises and excitement for you, but there are a few destinations on here that you wouldn't expect! All of them, certainly, make you want to rush off to the nearest airport and buy a one-way ticket immediately.
Lonely Planet has also compiled a few more travel lists, grouped by cities, regions, and economic value.
Top 10 Cities: here
Top 10 Regions: here
Top 10 Value: here
Singing & Signing: How Christine Sun Kim Brought Her Whitney-Biennial “Rage” to the Super Bowl
After making a powerful impression at last year’s Whitney Biennial with her six drawings of pie charts plotting Degrees of Deaf Rage, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim reached a much wider, more diverse audience — at the Super Bowl. – Lee Rosenbaum
“After all, the point of art––like war–– is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.”
Dead Letters
Correctly, it seems, if belatedly, book blogging is pronounced dead. That the ‘golden age’ of book blogging is passed seems hardly worth debating. The conversation in diminished form is taking place elsewhere or perhaps nowhere. Whatever your passion or interest, blogging itself died as the marketing departments moved in offering swag and the illusion of influence.
Social media, occasionally blamed for distracting fickle blog readers, simply threw some dirt on a coffin that was already being lowered into the ground. For a moment, it seemed to offer an alternative, but was always destined a place for commerce, less agora and more commercial break without the intervening substance. There is still a possibility of connection, of finding a handful of people that get excited by the same set of things, but the anonymity of social media leaves you open to distraction from the type of opinionated men you’d cross the room to avoid at parties. I think a lot about Seth Godin’s comment in his On Beinginterview, “We are flying too low. We built this universe, this technology, these connections, this society, and all we can do with it is make junk? All we can do with it is put on stupid entertainments. I’m not buying it.”
All sorts of ‘dead’ languages are studied today, some less ‘dead’ than others. Literature may be dead, literary criticism is dying, serious novels are in steep decline, yet we continue to read. There is still the frisson of my RSS reader signalling a new post at This Space or flowerville. The book blog died a long time ago, but keep reading the ones you love as zombies in any part of human culture remain as effective as ever at reducing their subject to the bare, intricately nuanced essentials.
