Happy Birthday to newleaf31!! I hope you have a wonderful time today. :)

Here's a fun site for film buffs: Four Frames is a new blog consisting of photomontages that capture the mood and visual styles of various films using only four frames. (Most of the images avoid plot spoilers.)(link via kottke)

The Museo Thyssen has a great exhibit on the role of shadows in art history from before the Renaissance to modern times, including photography and cinema.

I have a fascination with recommendations engines; even when they don't work perfectly, they're fun to try. Nanocrowd is a new recommendations site that uses an interesting approach--you type in a movie you like and it suggests a set of different possible keywords associated with the movie. (link via lifehacker) It then suggests movies based on whichever keywords you select. I can see the advantage to this approach, because fans of the same movie might like it for different reasons--one might like the special effects, another the theme, a third,the plot twists. Thus, without knowing *why* two fans like the same movie, it's hard to predict if they'll agree about other movies.

The main disadvantage to the site so far is that the database is geared mostly towards relatively recent and popular movies. The first two movies I tried, Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly, weren't in the database. But to be fair, the site is still in beta and presumably the older classics will eventually be included. When I tried more recent movies, the recommendations seemed reasonably good.

I hope everyone has been having a nice weekend. I just finished an excellent, melancholy novel by Patrick Modiano called Out of the Dark.(If anyone else has read his novels, I'd love any suggestions about which of his books I should read next.)

What has everyone else been reading lately, anything good?

In honor of Saint Patrick's Day tomorrow,I've made a new book community: irish_lit. Please feel free to join,if it's a subject that interests you, and if you have any suggestions of writers you think I should include in the keywords, feel free to let me know!

A book meme, courtesy of my friend dfordoom.
( book meme )

I spent a lot of time in the past few days exploring Poetry International Web. In addition to reading the monthly issues, one can use a drop down menu to find poets from several different countries. Poems are presented both in the original languages and English translations. This week's featured poem was "A Pebble" by Jūkichi Yagi.

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

King's Nobel Prize speech
King Online Encyclopedia
King's best known speeches
photo gallery
King Papers Project

I recently started reading another of Geoff Dyer's books--But Beautiful, which is a group of vignettes centering around various jazz legends. One of the stories mentioned this interesting portrait of Lester Young by Herman Leonard, which was created not by photographing the man, but rather by assembling a still life from his possessions. Leonard also made similar portraits of Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton.

The literary blog The Millions has links and mini-reviews for every short story published in The New Yorker last year.

Here's a list of the twenty books that I enjoyed most this year; I'd love to hear about everyone else's favorites.:) ( book list for 2008 )

Fantasy writer Jeff Vandermeer will be reading and reviewing a different short Penguin classic each day for sixty days on his blog. So far, he has covered works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Swift,Michel de Montaigne, Niccolo Machiavelli,Thomas à Kempis,St. Augustine,Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Seneca. It's a fascinating project that includes excerpts from these works and an examination of whether these historically influential works are still relevant in modern society.

I hope you've all been enjoying the holidays!

Date:	2008-10-19 00:19
Subject:	music recommendations
Security:	Public
Mood:	awake
Music:	Forever Changed -John Cale & Lou Reed

So, what music have you all been listening to lately? Do you have any recommendations?

Date:	2008-10-15 19:55
Subject:	type the sky
Security:	Public
Mood:	impressed

I love Lisa Reinermann's type the sky project, which consists of an alphabet produced by photographing buildings contrasting with the cloudy sky. (via swissmiss)

Lately, I've really been enjoying the colourlovers blog, which features articles on color with gorgeous accompanying photos and design palettes. Recent topics have included noctilucent clouds, colorful bridges, and van Gogh's color use.

Remember Freerice, the site that donates grains of rice to the needy for each vocabulary word you guess correctly? They've added more subjects, including a fun art history game in which you match artists with famous paintings. Other new subjects include foreign languages (French, German, Italian, and Spanish),Chemistry, and Geography. (via Modern Art Notes)

Most of us have had the experience of some awful song repeating endlessly in our heads, but I'm curious what songs or music tend to get stuck in your head that you really like? It occurs to me that it would be handy to have a list of catchy songs that are actually cool to distract one's mind from "earworms".

Recently, Kay Ryan was chosen to be the next poet laureate for the U.S. Sadly enough, although I love poetry, I've never heard of her before this week.

Anyway, I'm curious now--for those of you from countries that have a poet laureate, which poet would you like to see selected for that role?
My top picks would be: Stephen Dobyns, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Meinke,
or Li-Young Lee.

What do the rest of you think?

Around this time of year, I usually get summer reading recommendations from my LJ friends list; I've found out about some great books this way.
So, what are everyone's favorite books that you've read or re-read this year? What books are you looking forward to reading this summer?
Here's my own list of the ten best books I've read this year so far:
( book list )