this day writhes with what?

John Leonard, a trenchant, learned, and generous critic of books and television and a clear-eyed observer of the culture at large, has died at 69 from complications of lung cancer. If you’ve never read his work, you owe it to yourself to grapple with his dazzling sentences—verbal pyrotechnics always in service of a point rather than just egotistical showoffery.

“The books we love, love us back,” he said as he accepted the National Book Critics Circle’s 2006 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. “In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them—not to pretend we’re better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.”

New York magazine has links to a rich selection of the columns he wrote for that publication, and there are appeciations at WashingtonPost.com, The New York Observer, Salon, HuffPo, and, of course, The New York Times, where he served in the early ’70s as editor of the Book Review.

[Photo: CBS News]

“And I will remember your name and face
On the day you are judged by the funhouse cast,
And I will rejoice in your fall from grace
With a cane to the sky like ‘none shall pass.’

“‘Aah, let me in!’
‘None shall pass.’
‘Aah, let me in!
‘None shall pass.’”

The rest of the lyrics here. More Aesop Rock videos here.

And the champion is…

More meta here. <via>

“When the fall came, I saw it as a moral failing on my part.”

An awesome bit of stop-frame meta-moviemaking from Evelien Lohbeck:

You can find more of her work here.

It’s not entirely new, but the Will You Be My Friend? project touches on a number of issues I’ve been thinking about in the wake of a recent spate of LinkedIn linking-in.

What do these online connections represent, really?

Are friend and friending simply convenient appropriations from the real world, like the desktop metaphor, and thus stripped of their original meaning?

Or do people these days really think that, if they have 782 friends on some social-networking site, they actually have 782 people out there in the world who would come to their side in times of sadness / joy / need / calamity?

Sorry. Did that make you feel awkward?

A couple of days ago, DustoMcNeato uploaded a remix of a-ha’s mid-’80s packet of aural aspartame, “Take on Me.” The lyrics now describe the action with a hilarious literality.

And if you need a cheerful thought to get you through the elections and the coming global Great Depression, ponder this: According to WikiPedia, a-ha are planning to drop a new album in early 2009.

Tilt-shift + The Piano + Godfrey Reggio + something undefinable = Thom Yorke’s “Harrowdown Hill” video.

For a higher-res version, click here.

For more TSTLV (tilt-shift, time-lapse video), click here.

As Sofia nimbly demonstrates, being (or feeling) caged is often just a failure of ingenuity.

Go, Sofia, go.