It is finally summer. Sure, the solstice has long since passed, but I’ve only just now come to feel that I have turned my cheek to the sun as has the earth. When I was younger summer was defined, the three sticky months of freedom and boredom that fell between two school years. It was a tidy package, bookended by anticipation and a sense of relief. The last day of class was always one of impatient joy, while the first day of the new school year one of bittersweet, but awaited, return to structure and society.

Parents must have a bizarro-world perspective on the school-defined summer, as they have to figure out what to do with their kids until September rolls around again. For childless American post-grads, summer at least remains symbollically bounded by Memorial Day and Labor Day, with the Fourth as its bombastic, official greeting. In France, however, it’s a bit harder to pin down. The long weekends of May make the dregs of spring almost intolerable, as the working nation waits for its collective shutdown in August. Until the last weeks of July, when the mass exodus to the provinces begins, the only words on everyone’s lips are, “I need to be in vacation.”

But vacation is different from summer - vacation is the season’s rationalized format, its sanctioned apotheosis, but hardly its spirit. Summer is not so much a season - demarked by astronomy or meteorology - as the state of mind and the range of activity that the weather affords. It is long weekday evenings that beg to be shared, long weekend afternoons that preclude long nights, or long warm nights spent against the heat of the dog days. And it is finally here.

Last weekend, Mat and I joined a bunch of folks out at the estate of our friend Lucy’s family. Only in summer can you schedule a party from 2 to 8pm. We arrived just as the first flames leapt from the oil-drum grill, which had been tucked in a quiet lawn back behind the 18th century chateau and it’s high garden wall. The rest of the day was spent in textbook activities. We grilled two immense rounds of sausage and steak, drank beer and rosé, kicked around the soccerball and shuttled the badminton cock. Soy made many excellent attempts to catch a marshmallow in his mouth. Tony posed on the riding mower. Cumuli piled above the wheat beyond the treeline. Sitting on the grass became laying, laying became sleeping. Then, up for a couple of dodgeball matches. I don’t think there’s any sport more invigorating than the smiling malice and casual exertion of playground games.

Afterwards, we toured the community potager - a perfect mix of utility and ornament maintained by 20 local families. Tomato vines and dwarf appletrees were heavy with green fruit. Purple cabbages unfurled like monster flowers, while zucchini blossoms puckered, ready for the fryer. Between these and the leafy greens, the swollen pumpkins and tiny berries, roses and pansies throbbed with bees. Lola’s 3-month-old, Simon, slept in Mathilde’s arms as we walked. A duck and a drake rounded up their young in the pond. For all it’s mew and squeal, spring would be hard pressed to produce a more fertile tableau.

We left just shy of 8, taking the rental with Laure and Rachid back through the crush of Porte Maillot. Jo and Damien met us for dinner on the Bassin de la Villette, where we put back a cold Brouilly and digested with a walk along the quai. We were home before 11, the day too full to try for a night, just as the season would have it. Vacation begins on Friday. I am glad to have had some summer before.

Pictures of the afternoon here.

Scott Beale has a post on McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon that makes me misty, and thirsty.

Although the “oldest bar” title is disputed by the Seaport’s Bridge Cafe, among others, that takes little away from the “olde New York” ambience and hoary charm of the place. That it is so emblematic of the brickbat-and-bowery-boy era may be, I suspect, why Joseph Mitchell titled and led his excellent collection of fin-de-siecle Knickerbocker profiles after it.

By night it is often mobbed by tourists and fratty bingers; my advice is to go mid-afternoon during the off season. When I worked across the street, on the occassional Friday I would pop in for a one-and-one and a burger lunch. If you’re only a bit peckish, there’s also the the “cheese and crackers”: a good hunk of aged cheddar, a sleeve of Saltines, and some raw onion, it is a direct descendant of the British “ploughman’s lunch”.

Looking back on my last three posts - each of them an embedded video - I feel, as the last one’s title implies, rather lazy, even a little ashamed.

In addition to the video embeds, I’ve tried two gimmicks to makeup for my negligence of this blog: Ma.gnolia’s daily link posting job (imperfect, but still pretty top) and a Twitter plugin that publishes a daily digest of my (nonexistent) tweets. In the end, both were pointless - not their fault, but mine. Instead of fleshing it out, these tools diluted my blog and confused my intentions, vague as they may be.

The Twitter tool proved useless on two counts. First, I hardly ever use the tool. Second, I found that the digests produced during rare spurts of activity were embarassingly inane and, by nature, always out of context. So much for that.

The Ma.gnolia post job was more problematic. I had chosen Ma.gnolia because it didn’t truncate a bookmark’s description like Del.icio.us does. “Easy,” I thought, “I’ll just translate bookmarking activity into blogging.” I was wrong to confuse the two: there is a difference between simply pointing, and actually commenting. If I am prepared to write at least 100 words on something, shouldn’t I at least commit to giving it its of its own post? Conversely, why pressure myself to write about something I only find fun, or cool, or useful? There are better, faster tools for that.

Last night I reconciled myself to the fact that there is no technological way around the writing process. If I want this site to be a reflection of what I’m thinking or doing, a random video embed or a cronjob is not going to cut it. From here on out, I will only post here when the impulse to share something is compounded by the impulse to say something.

To divide the editorial from the curatorial, I have given in to that wonderful little tool that makes clapping up the tasty bits of the web I find very, very easy: Tumblr. Tumblr is a lightweight blogging platform that has received a good deal of praise recently. Its greatest strengths are its simplicity, ease of use, and it’s bookmarklet, which makes posting quotes, chat, video and photos quick and painless. No need to worry about tags, HTML hotlinks to external content, or attribution - Tumblr takes care of the last two, and doesn’t really care about the first. Click, click, done. Virtual pointing couldn’t be more straightforward.

My tumbleblog can be found at thelayenthusiast.tumblr.com. I will keep - and even maintain - this Wordpress blog for personal riffs. I expect that a handful of things I set aside for Tumblr will interest me enough to treat here, and hope that separating collection and commentary will give me more focus and drive for the latter.

But PES is so on point.

To think that in the US, sexual education is still a matter of debate…

Even so, it’s rather amazing the level of frankness in French anti-AIDS Public Service Announcements. This is but the latest in a randy series. I, well, I’m just glad this kind of thing airs late. But then, I guess that’s the audience they’re targeting. Kudos for the straight-shooting - and the catalog of fetish.

And the pool of tits!

I’ve always wanted a rough-hewn wooden table. Simply joined. Oil finished. Heavy, durable, earthy, something that gets better and better with age and hard wear, like bridle leather.

The Velia table, designed in 2006 by Ulrich Koessl, Tishch and Stuhl Willisau of Lucern, turns this physical romance on its head by encasing a prosciutto-thin slice of treetrunk in glass. It looks like a giant microscope slide.

via International Design Awards

Parskid’s work in paint, print and plush is full of mystery and threat. I really don’t want to get that into it. Just have a look - Forests and Streams and Landscapes of the Forgotten are a good place to start.

An interview with the artist is at CrownDozen.

Uniqlo doesn’t nap when it comes to innovative digital marketing. Their savory-sweet UNIQLOCK invented a new form of commercial art by combining performance, catalog, and clock into a screensaver. Schoolgirls in cashmere dance, make cat’s-cradles, and execute solo secret handshakes with their bodies, each in a bite-sized four-count before the time flashes and another video loads. You can literally while away the hours watching it.

Their latest, UT LOOP!, is a excellent interactive effort. It is a rhythm composer using video samples of various hip young kids making little noises, sometimes words - “dum”, “ti,” “pi”, “uo”, “okasan”, you get the picture. It clean, lovely and fun. The interface design is a typically understated, white-red-black affair, and keeps the focus on the figures in action. There’s plenty of ajax and flash about, and though I would suggest some changes to the “edit” mode, overall its quite usable. Bonus points for the embeddable player.

This little toy/marketing tool is so great because it is in and of the internet. In, because it is necessarilly a web object: it requires interactivity, viral networks, and participation to succeed. Of, because it is an obvious nod to Lasse Gjertsen, a first-wave webvideo star whose edited-webcam beatboxing will be familiar to most YouTube natives. Another happy feedback loop between creatives, commerce, and the crowd.

Jing Quek, a 25-year-old photographer originally from Singapore, has a body of work that is both fun and compelling. His latest work, “SG Idols”, is a series of group portraits - Star Wars cosplayers, pedicab drivers, schoolgirls, martial artists, skaters, ping-pong players, soldiers, bikers, boxers, etc. Computerlove calls it an exercise in “examining the forming of communities, and identities by association,” which I might rephrase as “examining communities and the forming of identities by association.”

When I first glanced over the set, I thought “community by intention” (sports, cosplay), but soon realized that the “community by necessity” (soldiers, students, workers) debunked that approach. The photos are all well composed, the subjects richly lit and purposefully arranged. The more I look at them, however, the more this last point - their arrangement - struck me as unfortunate, an aesthetic liberty that diminishes the potential gravity between the portraits by homogenizing some details.

• @Suchablog Christ, I thought I was up late - is this when you usually post? #
• I should be asleep. Henceforth, no computers in bed - at least until they come out with the "basic pleasure model" #

Sex position dice are plenty boring. This dodecahedral gem, however, combines humor and commentary with, uh, potentially very real use-value for the lonely post-adolescent gamer. All the elements of the conceit work perfectly together. I like to think that this is what you roll when you’ve already lost a RW saving throw for will. To all my old AD&D buddies out there: it was good times, but aren’t we glad it never came to this?

via ffffound

• @Pierre "GFY Code Red" is excellent. I think we need a Roadmap-GFY flowchart. Is on list? Yes - continue. No - GFY! #
• File under - Things I’d Rather Not Know But Cannot Now Unlearn: The Definition of Duck Butter http://tinyurl.com/t7evn #
• @Obstructionist I’ve always thought that, like "synergy", another shit-dicator is using "interface" as a synonym for "talk to" #

This weekend, Julien introduced me to an interesting Nordic take on minimal techno called Skweee. It is, essentially, a happy, retro-synth loving genre that goes in for funk- and soul-powered rhythms and melodies. From what the Internets tell me, its blowing up in Sweden in Finland, grace á the label Flogsta Danshall and its producer-founder Pavan - you can checkout an interview with him over at DJMag.com.

The first track I heard was “Muni” by the Stockholm artist, Beem. It immediately reminded me of some of the late-90s output of the Swedish leftfield-IDM label, Dot: they share the same effusive, borderline-cheesy take on stutter-funk. It is, to be sure, very white on its face, but once each track is built up there is an undeniable, downtempo groove that begs a little livingroom shuffle.

Not all skweee is so friendly, however. Spend a little time with the player at Nation of Skwee, or watch some live shows on the YouTube, and you’ll that some veers towards piercingly-acid noise, some to broken-beat hip-hop pretense, and some that is simply uninspired, high-treble noodling. This is to be expected in any young subgenre, especially when one hallmark of electronic music overall is isolated, bedroom amateurs, but I’ll give the project the benefit of the doubt.

“Minimal”, as she is spoke today in France, has in my experience become such an overwhelmingly hard, funless region of unending arpeggios and unreformed fours-on-the-floor, that the goofy risk taking of a few Norseman comes as a welcome change. Flogsta Danshallis bringing a stable down to SONAR in May, and I will be curious what effect that southern exposure has on skweee’s prospects for the rest of the year.

You can download Beem’s album at his website. Enjoy!