Erik Moe Art & Design

The tag “700club” on Flickr is an amusing amalgam of Philly hipsters drinking beer at the 700 Club (located at 700 N. 2nd Street) and friends of Pat Robertson’s religious talk show The 700 Club. These are the dangers of folksonomies.

Three quick items posted from DC on a lovely September day:

1. My old stomping grounds at documentaries.about.com are up and running again. Stop by and say “hi” to to Jennifer Merin, your new guide to documentary film.
2. Good luck to Agnes Varnum, who is moving to Austin to work for the Austin Film Society.
3. I’ve been pondering A.J. Schnack’s About A Son Soundtrack Challenge for the past week or so. Perhaps I take these things too seriously. 14 songs to score a biopic about yourself? Maybe I’ll have the answers before Thanksgiving.

…The Nietzsche Family Circus, pairs random Family Circus cartoons with Nietzsche quotes.

NaNoWriMo is on! All it takes to participate is 1,667 words per day (about 5 or 6 pages). The goal is quantity, not quality - so start typing now and you’ll have a 50,000 word jumble of ideas (if not a novel) by the end of the month. It sounds like Kate’s in - how about you?

The 215 Festival is underway back in Philadelphia (where most of the phones answer to that prefix). Take a gander at the impressive lineup pulled together by my good friend Jamie and her team of stalwart programmers (I did my part by sprucing up the website a bit). The fest is a celebration of all things literary - from wordy indie rock to comics, poetry and the common novel. Take a look around and plan your weekend now.

Two books starring the 1893 World’s Columbian Expo have been on my favorites list for some time – and have shaped my understanding of Chicago ahead of my move there next month. Sunday’s Sun-Times reports that both Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth and Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City are being made into feature films (via Gapers Block).

If done right, the Expo could be a perfect subject for the big screen. It was itself a sort of fleeting fantasy that was (mostly) destroyed after its six-month run. It is unlikely that any other event did as much to craft the American cityscape of the 20th Century (for better or worse, I suppose). Most fascinating to me is the monumental scale of the Expo. Quoting Chris Ware in the Sun-Times:

“Ironically, to the modern mind, the whole fair seems a wondrous and practically inconceivable ‘folly,’ something I think people today unconsciously hunger for, though they might not be willing to admit it… The scale and expenditure that went into the 1893 Exposition is really only matched today by Hollywood blockbuster movies, and is just about as transitory, but there’s still something so much more reassuring, dignified and hopeful about it being a real place to visit and encounter rather than simply a brief flickering of colored shadows on a screen.”

It would be great if Hollywood could do a good job recreating the 1893 Expo, but it would be better if cities were inspired to take more risks with fantastic architecture. In these conservative times, would any city take on something like a Statue of Liberty or a Mount Rushmore? On that note, Mayor Street has still not commented on my proposal for 8th and Market.

Pictured: vintage playing cards from the World’s Columbian Exposition

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel also purchased Everything Is Illuminated. For this reason, you might like to know that Everything Is Illuminated will be released on March 21, 2006. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 29% by following the link below.

Is it me or does this “smart recommendation” from Amazon sound like something that might appear in a Jonathan Safran Foer book?

The informal snarky (sharply critical, cutting, snide) seems to be gaining in popularity. Of course, it’s been in the animated header of this blog for some time, and before that it appeared in my (cringe) Friendster profile. Yesterday’s Times used the word in a critique of the annual music issue from The Believer.

The column “Sometimes Snarkiness Is Preferable to Sincerity,” asserts that the magazine dotes too much on obvious indie-rock darlings at the expense of the wider weird world it generally portrays in its non-music issues. Critic Kelefa Sanneh pointed to The Shins Will Change Your Life, a blog that simply excerpts hyperbole from rock music criticism without any additional commentary, as his pro-snarkiness example.

I’ll admit that I laughed quite a bit at some of the entries in that blog. After all, rock music criticism is often absurd — particularly the 100-word blurbs written by interns whose only compensation is the very CD they chose to review. Still, as much as I like snarky, I’d like to take this opportunity to state my preference for sincerity over snarkiness in case there is any confusion among my readers. Note that when I contributed to the Soundmonger mix group last year, I attempted to explore this very topic.

Come to think of it, I have actually discovered quite a bit of decent music through those 100-word blurbs in the back pages of music mags and weeklies. Also, I’m not ashamed to admit that The Shins actually have changed my life. For the better.

Did that sound snarky? I meant it sincerely.

Flâneur, the journal of urban wandering, has finally been updated. The new postings include a nice piece on New Orleans, but the most remarkable is The Lance Project by Mindy Tucker, which is a series of photographs of anonymous people who resemble her deceased friend Lance. The series perfectly captures that momentarily haunting sensation of seeing a friend from anther time or another place in the face of a stranger.

WORD: Downtown. You may have noticed the inexplicable appearance of the word downtown on this website in recent weeks. It might be best to explain its use to the uninitiated. Downtown has recently become the synonym of choice for cool as hell. Please use it regularly. Its current revival is owed to a group of art students at Tyler (as is so often the case with contemporary trends). The earliest citation in this incarnation seems to have been an effort at distinguishing Downtown Debby from other Debbys (presumably those who do not reside in or near Center City, Philadelphia). This pattern was then extended to include yours truly. How downtown was then extended to mean cool as hell follows logically: Downtown Debby is cool as hell (Downtown Erik is too modest to consider whether his own downtown status was the cause of this shift in meaning). Lest there be any confusion, this has nothing to do with Julie Brown , who is clearly not downtown at all.