by Anonymous

8788? 8688? I didn’t hear the other number. Probably because I was talking. Ha ha ha ha.

I told them that. They said just use that. It didn’t matter. But it does matter.

Someone punched me in the mouth. I tasted the blood. It gave me booger snot. Is that what it did? And then I could breath. Or I thought I was breathing OK. Ha ha ha ha.

I didn’t want to live there either. Or I didn’t know what. So I left. See.

Whatever people they put me with, I didn’t know there was two sides to every town, and I can’t tell the difference. I don’t get along with people. I keep getting beat.

I slept too much. I told you, they made me think something. Ha ha ha. That was last year. December of last year. And I left in January. Or they made me sleep too much, so I left. Or I need to eat more food. Though it will make that swell worse.

How could I? In all my life I’d only taken antibiotics like seven times. For like two weeks. I am like 55 now. After some people have been forcing me to take stuff. I tried to go buy beer. It tastes like NA beer. It tasted like it does not have alcohol in it. That was like 2005. This year is 2010? Or is it 2009?

It will be what time? I already know it will close out before I have to get there.

Someone cut my toe off, and they put it back together, only bigger. Then they did the same thing to the other one. Someone took my feet and went “zzcxck” and knots are starting to form there. I thought someone stuck knots there. It’s been making me walk more. I don’t want to. It hurts more.

You should tell all these people that doesn’t necessarily mean… Pugh ahhh. Oh boy. I have bad headaches.

You know what I don’t want? They stuck plastic in my brain. They squashed my brain and flattened it, then put plastic over it.

My blood doesn’t go in the direction it usually goes. I don’t have air. That’s from — they’re out there — their IVs.

A78 A68. A78. Ha ha ha ha.

Anonymous really needed a Social Security card. Photo by Solo from Flickr.

One man’s brief guide to baseball playoffs.

Oh God! The Hungarian government has declared a state of emergency after a million cubic feet’s worth of toxic red sludge spilled out of a ruptured waste reservoir at an aluminum plant 100 miles southwest of Budapest. The nasty goop has spread across 15.4 square miles and killed five people and injured many other and threatens to contaminate the Danube. So this is sort of like the volcano and the oil spill meet Three Mile Island?

“I hope the ghost of Walker Evans punches me in the face,” wrote producer Eric Spiegelman last night. He likes to take pictures with his iPhone and then quickly tweak them, as the people do today, with the filters and the apps. He has his own process: “I adjust some levels in Photogene, crop the image, run it through one of a handful of CameraBag or Lo-Mob filters, then use TiltShiftGen not to make a tilt-shift image but because a little bit of blur goes a long way, and because TiltShiftGen has a killer vignetting tool. But this is a farce. It’s like saying I’m a cook because I mix and match TV dinners.”

This epidemic of easy-to-manipulate “arty” images infesting our blogs and our Facebook pages is way out of control. And it’s not just photography. Take a look at the Vimeo HD channel.

Every trick in the book is showing up in pretty much every photograph and video these days. Super-limited depth of field! Film emulation! Diffraction! Long exposures, tilt-shifting, faux Polaroid, high contrast, faux lomography! When was the last time you saw a video without a beautiful, sweeping time-lapse segment?

And you know what it all means? It means every picture and every video looks the same.

That’s not to say they don’t all look spectacular, and the videos, in particular, definitely show “craft”! Like that’s actual work, for the most part.

There are times when processing and effects are coupled with talent and narrative and skill, sure! Like this video.

This is made doubly complicated because it’s actually a movie about photography and a photographer. One thing he says is that he shoots like this because he wants to show things the way he sees them in his head. But artificial contrast and saturation aren’t the way we see things in our head. The eye-eyes! There are two of them, and cameras only have one “eye,” and they operate differently!-and the brain are not at all like the camera. And yet this is a pretty incredible film, but only because it’s about something.

But we have learned to “think” in images this way. These are romantic and really somewhat infantile image techniques. They’re childish and nostalgic. They’re about sunny days and buzzing bees and reading books on a porch, and about road trips and romanticizing urban grime and being oh so gently alienated.

And really, it’s gross.

The good news, or at least the retrograde news, is that there are Flickr groups like Cross Processing — FILM ONLY, of all-analog photography. And the always-active I Shoot Film and Film is not Dead!!.

Online at web resolution, though, can you tell the difference between film effects and digital effects? Sometimes, yes, you can! That’s because the actual analog film effects aren’t as “interesting” as the quicky digital ones. They aren’t as thrilling to the eye. They’re not as cheaply emotionally evocative. They’re just pictures.

Okay, what now, Science? “Fighting the flab isn’t just a case of watching what you eat, but also how you sleep, scientists have found. Dieters who get a good night’s rest lose twice as much fat than those who scrimp on their time in bed. Sleep deprivation also increases levels of hormones that cause feelings of hunger, the study revealed.” You know what? Fine. Losing weight while sleeping is exactly the kind of exercise regimen I can get behind.

Bad news for flaccid periodicals: “The postal service is subjecting newspapers to a “droop test,” to determine if they’re fit for the machine sorter. The post office places the paper on a counter with a flat edge, with half of the item hanging from the edge. If it droops more than 3 inches, it fails. No bulk discount. The non-discount rate will raise mailing costs from 5.9 cents per item to 9.9 cents, a 68 percent increase, or to 10.5 cents, a 78 percent hike, for newspapers without barcodes.”

It’s the unwritten history of “The Simpsons”!

by Seth Colter Walls

Attention all European music-scribblers who are guests in this country: this is how you composer-in-residence. Finland’s Magnus Lindberg, currently posting up for his second season with the New York Philharmonic, has just raised the bar by taking the band to a Staten Island salvage yard in order to look for the metal scraps that will be used in the local premiere of his early masterpiece “Kraft,” which you should really consider going to see this Thursday, Friday or next Tuesday. (Student rush: just $12.50!)

“All the classical instruments using metallic sounds have beautiful, resonant sounds,” Lindberg says in the video, “so one of the purposes of this trip is to find metallic sounds that don’t always have that resonant … or more … getting to that drum [klang klang klang klang].” Finland, between this guy and Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kaija Saariaho, you are so awesome.

Here’s the first minute from Salonen’s recording of “Kraft.”

[wpaudio url=”http://www.tomscocca.com/04%20-%20Kraft%20-%20I%20(%2301).mp3″ text=”From ‘Kraft’” dl=”0″]

And huh, wow: you can download that piece and Lindberg’s Piano Concerto on Amazon for $4.45, I guess? I remember this release being more expensive-slash-unavailable a couple years back.

But the live experience is definitely going to be something to behold: musicians roaming around among the audience, percussion scraps held aloft from the ceiling, speakers throughout the hall, plus the loud banging stuff and the spectral harmonies in the woodwinds and brass. Also: Debussy and Sibelius on the program.

Here’s another video with Lindberg, in which he talks about his punk-ish early years, and pronounces Einstürzende Neubauten correctly. Score.

Seth Colter Walls is The Awl’s chief correspondent for the difficult arts.

The long-haired crab, the Darth Vader jellyfish and the vampire squid are but three of the new species discovered in the “global marine census.” You know what? It’s all pretty cool. Enjoy.

Alan Partridge is back!