Our coffeemaker broke. I can hear it in the next room, panting and wheezing, making all of the noises that coffeemakers are supposed to make while percolating. But there’s no drip. And I’m getting a headache. Damn caffeine addiction. And I should add that this is a new coffeemaker, a replacement for the $10 Mr. Coffee machine that reliably dripped for more than a decade. We bought the new coffeemaker on a whim. That’ll show us. Never walk through the kitchen appliance aisle at Target when you’re craving coffee and have a credit card. This is one of those days when I really hate living in the ‘burbs. Ah, to be able to walk a block to the corner coffee shop.
En lieu of, you know, content, here are a smattering of things that I enjoyed reading this week:
From Jen Lemen’s interview with Karen Neudorf:
In strange times, people may need to use different words to breathe new meaning into something. And sometimes people have to live the meaning back into old words in order to make them breathe again. ‘Magazine’ is a word, an idea that the Beyond community of readers and contributors are trying to live new again. The magazine format is an amazing way to be collaborative and imaginative and engaging — all in an incredibly portable package. And creating objects, deliciously tactile objects that can get lost in the world — behind couches, in coffeeshops, left lingering in odd places — is an important part of the way art surprises and finds us.
From Girish’s remembrances of childhood:
Grandpa traveled a lot, and we saw little of him. Once, when I was five, he took us out to the ritziest restaurant in town. When he asked Papaji what he’d like to order, I blithely interjected, as my parents watched in horror: “Beer!” My grandfather’s eyes narrowed, he fell silent, and it is said that he was always a little suspicious of poor, abstinent, clean-living Papaji from then on.
From the San Francisco’s Chronicle’s coverage of Roxanne Messina Captor’s decision to “step down” as director of the SF film festival. This paragraph could run unedited, I think, in The Onion:
She was hired in 2001 on the strength of her Hollywood connections. Interviewing for the job, her first running a film festival, Messina Captor stressed her experience as TV producer, director of the feature “A Clean Kill” and dancer in the movies “Xanadu” and “One From the Heart.” The latter was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, whom Messina Captor referred to at the festival dinner as “my mentor,” although she was unable to get him to any recent festival events.