The New Museum Lamp: a blog post genre study

We post this item because it’s a lamp that looks like something that isn’t supposed to be a lamp. In this case, the lamp looks like a highly anticipated museum building. We may add some lighthearted copy (Talk about Unmonumental!). If courteous in nature, we might post a link to the site that gave us the idea to post it ourselves [via curbed [via Apartment Therapy [via notcot]]].

We are compelled to post at least something, either because we haven’t posted in a while and we’re stumped, or because this is a job and we have a daily quota of 10, or 20, or 50 posts. We see the lamp and make a judgment call: on a scale of boingboing to We Make Money Not Art, this lamp falls somewhere between Cool Hunting and T: The Moment. Passable.

You see it, and you click, or forward, or bookmark, or comment, or ignore, or whatever you feel like doing. We pay attention until we go pay attention to the next thing. No one ever buys the lamp, that we know.

With minor variations the same thing is true of politics blog posts. I see this lamp and it makes me think of how tired I am.

Sigh. Go check it out.

This is almost like a whole new way to think about retail…

Miuccia’s artists (NYT Magazine)
Nice Tower! Who’s Your Architect? – Nicolai Ourossof (NYT)
Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping

Aliens

NYT: Stuff of Life (but Not Life Itself) Is Detected on a Distant Planet

Our cultural interest in extraterrestrial life plummeted right after 9/11. (That, more than Robert Patrick, is why the X-Files got canceled.) To me, that’s fine, we have more urgent zombie and chthonic monster allegories to deal with.

But you know that every time an emergency hits, everybody’s all, “Nobody could have predicted this was coming.”

Pixies – Motorway to Roswell (mp3)

Five more years! Five more years!

Sentiment

I think I’m most impressed that, haters and Wolf Blitzer aside, the reaction today has been less ‘This was the speech of Barack Obama’s life’ than ‘This was the speech of my life.’

The ball’s in your court, Saturday Night Live.

I guess this means he’s not a Muslim?

Pastor’s Remarks Spark Debate About Obama Campaign (Huffington)
Pastor Defends His Predecessor at Obama’s Chicago Church (Times)
Obama Denounces Statements of His Pastor as ‘Inflammatory’ (Times)

Quote of the week: “Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Mr. Wright in his radio program, calling him ‘a race-baiter and a hatemonger.'”