bookofjoe

Black-Eyed Squid Carrying Its Eggs (For 6-9 Months)

[Most species of squid lay their eggs on the seafloor but this devoted black-eyed squid (Gonatus onyx) mother carries them with her for months.]

From DiscoverWildlife:

Deep-Sea Scientists Just Filmed Something Enormous Swimming Over The Seafloor In Chile

Deep-sea scientists were amazed by the rare sight of a mother squid carrying her eggs through the ocean, putting herself at risk to protect her offspring.

The Schmidt Ocean Institute's underwater robot captured the extraordinary video above while exploring the seafloor off the coast of Chile. 

Most squid lay their eggs on the seafloor and don't provide any parental care.The black-eyed squid (Gonatus onyx) is one of the few species that brood their eggs.

"A female Gonatus onyx will carry her large egg mass for months, keeping it suspended from hooks on the squid's arms," says Schmidt Ocean Institute on LinkedIn. "It is a dangerous time... brooding squid cannot move very quickly, and may be easy prey for deep-diving marine mammals."

There are up to 3,000 eggs in this cluster. The incubation time could be around six to nine months and the expectant mother will keep pumping water over her eggs the entire time to make sure they have a good oxygen supply. This movement also helps the more mature hatchlings break free off their eggs when they're ready to swim off independently.

"After laying the eggs she will go without feeding, and by the time they hatch, she will be close to death," says the Institute.

Mick Jagger hires Andy Warhol — Possibly the best client letter ever

[via swissmiss and hellomuller]

What is it?

Answer here this time tomorrow.

Hint: bigger than a bread box when fully deployed, as shown in the photo above.

A second: cotton.

A different perspective:

'Autobahn' — Kraftwerk

Above, the original first track of their 1974 album "Autobahn."

Back story here.

2009 remaster below.

Use Your Illusion

Hey, wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Doh! — this was too easy and obvious...

World's Largest Dust Bunny — 'It takes one to dust one'

From websites: "Hilariously squished flat, magnetic to everything that gathers on your shelves and collectibles, tipped with a soft chenille tail, this microfiber bunny turns chore day into a hopping good time."

Machine wash; 11" high.

Works with any size hand, left or right.

€6.99.

Guruguru Shakashaka — '600 Varieties of Salt'

But wait: there's more!

"Customers can make and buy their own custom blends."

From Spoon and Tamago:

This summer, a unique store opened in Tokyo.

Located just a few steps away from Tokyo Sky Tree is "Guruguru Shakashaka," a salt specialty store that lets you explore 600 varieties of salt and then blend your own.

Equally unique is the name, which is based on the Japanese onomatopoeia for mixing and shaking.

You can browse the store on your own but the real deliciousness occurs at the counter where, for 2970 yen, staff will guide you through 5 different varieties of salt defined by sweet, umami, sour, salty and umami.

The taste testing is accompanied by beautiful blue kanten (agar jelly), which helps accentuate the flavors, and black bean tea, which helps cleanse the palate.

Finally, visitors will blend their own salt based on preferences from the taste test and take home 100g of salt.

Repeat visitors can of course purchase their own blend for 1500 yen/200g.

The fixtures also have a color scheme inspired by salt, where the blue parts are made from dyed linden plywood," explained Torafu Architects, who designed the interior.

"The neon sign 'SHIO (Salt)' installed behind the counter

corresponds to the neon sign 'Ume' of the UMEBOSHI shop across the street," added the architect.

Indeed, if you do visit, note that right across the corridor is an umeboshi specialty shop

operated by the same company.

The neon lights are an indication of their sisterhood.

If you decided to visit both, be sure to watch your sodium intake!

Guruguru Shakashaka is located on the 4th floor of the Tokyo Solamachi shopping mall.

[via Kottke]

'The Clock' — Christian Marclay

Above, 10 minutes of Christian Marclay's "The Clock," which took three years to create and upon its release in 2010 was instantly recognized as a great work of art.

You can see it in its entirety at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City through May 11, 2025.

From MoMa:

Due to limited seating capacity, entry to The Clock is not guaranteed. MoMA members receive priority access. Visitors may stay inside the exhibition as long as they like during open hours, but must rejoin the queue if they exit for any reason. Food and drink are not allowed, and we ask that visitors refrain from talking or using cell phones. The use of recording devices, including mobile phones, is strictly prohibited.

More?

Below, Zadie Smith's April 28, 2011 New York Review of Books awed appreciation of the piece.

Killing Orson Welles at Midnight

It’s two in the afternoon. No one is groaning; no one turns over in bed or hits an alarm clock—it’s much too late for that. Love set you going like a fat gold watch.… But by two o’clock the morning song is just a memory. We are no longer speculating as to what set us going, we just know we are going. We are less sentimental in the afternoon. We watch the minute hand go round: 2:01 becoming 2:02 becoming 2:03. It’s relentless, when you think about it. Mostly we don’t think about it. We’re very busy, what with everything that’s going on. The foreign schoolchildren have already left for the day, a burly gentleman is having his tea in a glass, Billy Liar is being asked “What time d’yer call this?” (seventeen minutes past two), and Charlotte Rampling is all by herself eating chocolate éclairs and smoking, in a garden somewhere, in France, probably.

There’s no slowing it down and no turning back: the day is too far along to be denied. Though some will try, some always do. At two o’clock precisely a man screams at a grandfather clock (“That’ll be enough of that!”) and smashes it to pieces. But the day continues. It always does. The Japanese—a pragmatic people, a realistic people—deal with the situation by having a meeting at a long white conference table. Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh. The afternoon—free from the blur of hangover or the fug of sleep—is when our shared predicament on this planet becomes clear.

Coincidentally, the afternoon is also the time when many people will first go to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Not too early, just after lunch. After all, it may be good, it may be bad—you don’t want to lose a whole morning over it. But very soon, sooner than you could have imagined—in fact at exactly 2:06, as Adam Sandler patronizes a Spanish girl—you realize that The Clock is neither bad nor good, but sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen, and you will need to come back in the morning, in the evening, and late at night, abandoning everything else, packing a sleeping bag, and decamping to the Paula Cooper Gallery until sunrise. Except: Christ, is that the time? Oh well. Come back tomorrow.

The things you notice on a second visit are quite small but feel necessary for orientation, like drawing an x and y axis before attempting to plot a great mass of information on a graph. In my notebook I tried to state the obvious, to get it clear in my own mind. The Clock is a twenty-four-hour movie that tells the time. This is achieved by editing together clips of movies in which clocks appear. But The Clock is so monumental in intention and design that even the simplest things you can say about it need qualification. There isn’t, for example, a clock visible in every scene. Sometimes people will only mention the time, or even just speak of time as a general concept. Mary Poppins does less than that; she glances at her wristwatch, the face of which we cannot see, then opens her umbrella and flies, to be replaced, a moment later, by a man, also flying with an umbrella, who soon floats past a clock tower, thus revealing the time. There are many moments like this, and when you first notice them their synchronicity and beauty are a little unnerving. They reveal a creative constraint even larger and more demanding than the one you had assumed. If The Clock cares to match a flying umbrella with a flying umbrella, it must have aesthetic currents passing beneath its main flow, moving in a variety of directions, not simply clockwise.

You sit in the dark, trying to figure out la règle du jeu. Clearly there are two types of time, real and staged. There are a few ways to say that. Accidental clocks versus deliberate clocks. Time that has been caught on film versus time that has been manipulated for film. It turns out that accidental clocks are more poignant than deliberate clocks. The actors in the street valiantly approximate reality, but the clock tower behind them has captured reality, a genuine moment in time, now passed forever, unrecoverable, yet reanimated by film. It really was 3:22. 3:22 would have happened, whether it was filmed or not, and consequently this moment feels unvarnished, unmanipulated, true. By contrast, staged time obeys certain conventions. Afternoon sex is the sexiest, probably because it often involves prostitutes. Between four and five o’clock transport is significant: trains, cars, and airplanes. If the phone rings after one in the morning do not expect good news. Cuckoo clocks, no matter when they chime, are almost always ominous. When Orson Welles says what time it is, it lends the hour an epic sound. At two AM everyone’s lonely.

A few clips are anticipated and people applaud when they arrive. Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction with Butch’s father’s watch up his ass. Big Ben exploding. These are meta-clips, because their clocks were already notorious. Embedded in The Clock, all kinds of run-of-the-mill cinematic moments become profound or comic or both. A comment as innocuous as “I just don’t have the time” reduces the audience to giggles. Very unlikely people become philosophers. Owen Wilson, speaking to himself: “You’re about to die. You’re on the minute hand of a clock.” Marisa Tomei, in a rowboat: “Time is a relative thing…an emotional thing!”

Other tendencies are more obscure and may be your own solitary delusion. Watching The Clock is a trancelike experience, almost hallucinogenic: you’re liable to see things that aren’t there. For instance, isn’t it the case that the charm of certain actors is so overwhelming that they seem to step out of the time of the concept? To operate outside it? When Paul Newman lifts his foot onto the bed and ties his shoe and smiles, you find you are no longer waiting for the next clock. You settle in to watch a Paul Newman movie. And when the inevitable cut comes, a sigh passes through the gallery. Is that what people mean when they speak of “star quality”? The ability to exist outside of time? (This side effect happened rarely, and didn’t seem connected to relative fame. Nobody sighed when Tom Cruise came and went.) Repetitions occur, and appear to be meaningful. If we see a lot of James Bond and Columbo it is because time, staged time, is their natural milieu. Fake clocks drive their narrative worlds: countdowns and alibis, crime scenes. This may also account for the frequency of Denzel Washington.

The Clock makes you realize how finely attuned you are to the rhythms of commercial (usually American) film. Each foreign clip is spotted at once, long before the actor opens his mouth. And it’s not the film stock or even the mustaches that give the game away, it’s the variant manipulation of time, primarily its slowness, although of course this “slowness” is only the pace of real time. In commercial film, decades pass in a minute, or a day lasts two and half hours. We flash back, we flash forward. There’s always a certain pep. “Making lunch” is a shot of an open fridge, then a chopping board, then food cooked on the stove. A plane ride is check-in, a cocktail, then customs. Principles dear to Denzel—tension, climax, resolution—are immanent in all the American clips, while their absence is obvious in the merest snatch of French art house. A parsing of the common enough phrase “I don’t like foreign movies” might be “I don’t want to sit in a cinema and feel time pass.”

Given that nobody has given you the rules—given that you have imagined the rules—how can you be indignant when these rules of yours are “broken”? But somehow you are. If Christian Marclay returns to the same film several times—a long “countdown” scene, say, from some bad thriller—it feels like cheating. And because you have decided that the sharp “cut” is the ruling principle of the piece, you’re at first unsure about music bleeding from one scene into another. But stay a few hours and these supposed deviations become the main event. You start to find that two separated clips from the same scene behave like semicolons, bracketing the visual sentence in between, bringing shape and style to what we imagined would have to be (given the ordering principle of the work) necessarily random. Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.

And still The Clock keeps perfect time. And speaks of time. By mixing the sound so artfully across visual boundaries (Marclay’s previous work is primarily in sound), The Clock endows each clip with something like perdurance, extending it in time, like a four-dimensional object. As far as the philosophy of time goes, Marclay’s with Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: the present reaches into the future, the past decays in the present. It’s all about the sound. The more frequently you visit The Clock the more tempted you are to watch it with your eyes closed. Is that the Sex Pistols leaking into the can-can? Nostalgia is continually aroused and teased; you miss clips the moment they’re gone, and cling to the aural afterglow of what has passed even as you focus on what is coming, what keeps coming.

So far The Clock has had few opportunities to play to audiences for its full twenty-four hours, but whenever it has the queues have been almost as long as the film itself. Naturally everyone wants to see midnight. “Why does it always happen at midnight?” asks a young man by a fireplace, underneath a carriage clock. “Because it does!” replies his friend. In the run-up, only Juliette Binoche in France is able to remain calm: quietly, foxily, ironing a bag of laundry, while wearing a bra-less T-shirt. In America everyone’s going crazy. Both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford start building to climaxes of divadom early, at around a quarter to the hour. Jaws going, eyeballs rolling. At ten to midnight Farley Granger looks utterly haunted, though I suppose he always looked that way. At three minutes to midnight people start demanding stays of execution: “I want to speak to the governor!” And the violins start, those rising violins, slashing at their strings, playing on our midnight angst.

This works up into a joke: Marclay can cut seamlessly through dozens of films for the last two minutes without manipulating the sound at all: they all have the same screeching violins, the only difference is the key. At midnight a zombie woman pops out of a grandfather clock and gets a big laugh, but I preferred the clip that came a moment later, when a twelve-foot clockwork soldier, swinging out of a bell tower to mark the hour, impales Orson Welles on his giant sword. It reminded me of Owen Wilson’s memento mori: You’re about to die. You’re on the minute hand of a clock.

Thirst, Taxi Driver, The X-Files, a lot of Kurosawa, Fatal Attraction, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, some Woody Allen, a little Bergman—Marclay’s sources will be very familiar to his New York and London audiences. Maybe if The Clock had been drawn from a more alien culture it would have a different emphasis, but as it is, it’s our film and looks at time our way: tragically. “Do not squander time. That is the stuff that life is made of“—so reads the engraving on an old sundial. We recognize its provenance (Ashley Wilkes’s estate, Gone with the Wind) and accept it as the gospel of our culture. Time is not on our side. Every minute more of it means one minute less of us. Witness Jeff Bridges in The Vanishing (and also some other guy, in the original Dutch version), taking his own pulse and writing it out neatly next to the time. We are tied to the wagon and it’s going in only one direction, whether we like it or not.

Film constantly reenacts and dramatizes this struggle with time: except in film, time loses. We are victorious. Narrative is victorious. We bend time to our will. We tie a man to the floor, put a gag in his mouth, and set the clock ticking—but we will decide how fast or slow that clock moves. ESTABLISH TIME: a note written in a thriller. And this is film’s whole challenge and illusion. Without it there is no story, no film. If we believe Marclay, no shot in the history of cinema is as common as the desperate close-up of a clock face. ESTABLISH TIME! But the time thus established has, until now, always been a fantasy, a fiction. The Clock is the first film in which time is real.

A lot of people speak of a crisis in the purpose and value of the fictional realm. The Clock feels to me like a part of that conversation: a factual response to the fantasies of film. It has a very poor predecessor in the TV show 24, which also promised an end to “narrative time” but instead bent to commercial concerns, factoring in ad breaks, and was anyway, with its endorsement of torture, ideologically vile. With its real-time synchronization The Clock has upped the ante exponentially. Honestly I can’t see how you could up it much more. It’s the art object Sontag was hoping for almost half a century ago in Against Interpretation, which reminds me that this supposed crisis of the Noughties has in fact been going on a long time: “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” A very long time. Plato would recognize it.

But what I love about The Clock is that while appearing to pass “beyond” fiction it also honors and celebrates it. Fiction is Marclay’s material; after all, he recycles it. What else is The Clock if not thousands of fictional interpretations of time repurposed to express time precisely. That’s why you don’t feel that you are watching a film, you feel you are existing alongside a film. People even leave the gallery following the conventions of time: on the hour, or a quarter past. No one can seem to stand to leave at, say, 6:07. Most wonderful is listening to people on their way out. “How did he do it, though? You can’t Google for clocks. How did he do it then? Did he have hundreds of people or what?”

The awe is palpable, and thrilling because it has become so unusual. A lot of the time, when standing in a gallery, I am aware of two feelings, one permitted, and one verboten. The first is boredom: usually the artist’s subject is boredom (the boredom of twenty-first-century life, etc.), and my reaction is meant to be one of boredom, or, at the most, outraged boredom. The second is “wonder at craft.” I am not meant to have this feeling. Asking how something was made, or having any concern at all with its physical making, or being concerned with how hard the thing might have been to make—asking any of these questions will mark me out as a simpleton. The question is childish, reactionary, nostalgic.

But The Clock is not reactionary, and manages to reintroduce these questions, without being nostalgic or childish. Marclay has made, in essence, a sort of homemade Web engine that collates and cross-references an extraordinary amount of different kinds of information: scenes that have clocks, scenes with clocks in classrooms, with clocks in bars, Johnny Depp films with clocks, women with clocks, children with clocks, clocks on planes, and so on, and so on, and so on. You’re never bored—you haven’t time to be.

Really an essay is not the right form in which to speak of it. A visual representation of some kind would be better; a cloud consensus, or a spectacular graph. It’s hard to convey in words what Marclay does with data, how luminous he makes it. And if this data were all lined up on a graph, what conclusions would we draw? That life is epic, varied, and never boring, but also short, relentless, and terminal. The Clock is a joyful art experience but a harsh life experience because it doesn’t disguise what time is doing to you. At 2:45 PM, when Harold Lloyd hung off the face of that clock, I couldn’t access the delight I have felt in the past watching that fabulous piece of fiction, because if Harold was up on that screen it meant I had somehow managed to come at the same time again, the early afternoon, despite all my efforts to find a different moment, between childcare and work. I looked around the walls of the gallery where all the young people sat, hipsters, childless, with a sandwich in their bags and the will to stay till three in the morning. I envied them; hated them, even. They looked like they had all the time in the world.

Still not done?

I hear you.

How about YouTube's compendium of excerpts from and appreciations of "The Clock," which you can find right here.

Fair warning: there goes the rest of your life.

ZipHolder — 'Prevents your zipper from accidentally coming open'

From websites:

With the ZipHolder your zipper will stay up at all times.

Prevents your zipper from accidentally coming open.

No more embarrassing exposure.

1. Pull the ZipHolder through the pull tag on your zipper (as shown in the picture above and drawing below).

2. When you have fastened the ZipHolder to the pull tag, pull the zipper up and place the loop around the button on your fly.

3. When you have buttoned up the fly the ZipHolder is invisible.

4. This will prevent your zipper from coming down at any time.

Made in Sweden.

3-Pack: €7.90.

Just how Goth are you? Bob Partington's Blood Pen

Well?

Experts' Experts: The Way You Cut An Onion Affects Its Flavor

Who knew?

Long story short: If you cut onions into rings, they'll be more pungent than doing it the other way.

The crack research team over at Cook's Illustrated drilled down deep to bring us this following "Test Kitchen Tip."

Taming Raw Onion Flavor

We took eight onions and cut each two different ways: pole to pole (with the grain) and parallel to the equator (against the grain).

We then smelled and tasted pieces from each onion cut each way.

The onions sliced pole to pole were clearly less pungent in taste and odor than those cut along the equator.

Here's why: The intense flavor and acrid odor of onions are caused by substances called thiosulfinates, created when enzymes known as alliinases contained in the onion's cells interact with proteins that are also present in the vegetable.

These reactions take place only when the onion's cells are ruptured and release the strong-smelling enzymes.

Cutting with the grain ruptures fewer cells than cutting against the grain, leading to the release of fewer alliinases and the creation of fewer thiosulfinates.

Water Clock

I love this.

"This elegantly minimal clock lets you create your own custom time-telling device using a combination of plates, cups, and liquid of your choice."

"Designed by Kouichi Okamoto with ceramicist Daniel Jo, the Water Clock consists of a small fired clay base topped with a pair of magnetic spheres. A pair of powerful magnets underneath the delicate clay surface move the tiny orbs in a circular path to tell the current time. The red shows the minutes, the white one the hours."

"While the spheres are magnetic, they're also buoyant, so if you fill up a glass with water, the 'hands' of the clock actually float on the surface of the water. Each of the spheres can be placed into any dish, plate, or other vessel."

2"H x 7.85"W x 7.85"D.

$279.

'You never saw Art Tatum sweat'

Above, the headline of Terry Teachout's appreciation of the master in the Wall Street Journal.

Up top, Tatum in a 1954 TV performance of Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays."

From the article:

For the critic, the word "best" is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely and you're likely to get your hand blown off. But you won't get many arguments from musicians if you toss it at Art Tatum, who was born a century ago last month. Tatum was—and is—the most admired jazz pianist who ever lived, a super-virtuoso whose whirlwind technique left his colleagues speechless with envy. "When that man turns on the powerhouse," Fats Waller said, "don't no one play him down." ... And though the greatest of all jazz pianists is as revered today as he was in his lifetime, he is essentially unknown to the public at large.

James Lester's "Too Marvelous for Words," published in 1994, is the only biography of Tatum, and it fails to give much of a sense of what he was like offstage, not because Mr. Lester fell down on the job but because Tatum was unforthcoming on the rare occasions when he talked to journalists. In his most extended interview, a conversation with Willis Conover of the Voice of America, he is well-spoken but frustratingly noncommittal. The only surprise comes when he confesses that "I don't feel that I have all of the technical facilities that I would like to have." That's the musical equivalent of hearing Alfred Hitchcock tell a reporter that he wished his movies were scarier!

Not only did Tatum keep his own counsel, but he broke a cardinal rule of success for the performing artist: He made it look too easy. Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.

Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money's worth. I can't count the number of jazz pianists who have described the experience of hearing Tatum for the first time in words similar to those of Gerald Wiggins: "I thought it was two guys playing the piano." But there was nothing to see in person, just a burly, impassive man who sat quietly at the keyboard, never moving his hands a millimeter more than necessary. In one of the few surviving film clips of Tatum's playing, a 1954 TV performance of Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays" that can be viewed on YouTube, you can see for yourself what Jon Hendricks meant when he said that on the bandstand, Tatum looked "like an accountant—he just did his work." Close your eyes and it sounds as though someone had tossed a string of lit firecrackers into the Steinway. Open them and it looks as though you're watching a court reporter take down the testimony of a witness in a civil suit.

To the small-d democrat, virtuosity is an insult, a tactless reminder of human inequality that can only be forgiven when the artist makes clear through visible effort how high a price he has paid for his great gifts. Art Tatum, like Heifetz, was too proud to make that concession. He did all his sweating offstage. That's why his exquisitely refined pianism will never be truly popular: No matter how much beer he drank, you could never mistake him for one of the guys.

WikiTok — 'A TikTok-style interface for exploring random Wikipedia articles'

English not so good?

They've got you covered:

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Electric Paper Plane Launcher

From websites:

Have you ever wished that you could throw a paper airplane as straight or as far as someone else?

This kit includes all the components needed to make an electric plane launcher.

The rubber discs spin at high speed and will launch a paper plane at up to 25mph.

An ideal gift for any budding aeronautical engineer interested in the application of technology to problem solving.

Launcher requires 2 AA batteries (not included).

Age 8+ (most of my readers — sweet!).

$31.67.