‘Blank and White’ is censored even on uncensored versions of the album with the line “or the President of whatever” removed (replaced with a beep) from “Let’s shoot up the mall/The school/or the President of whatever/or whoever wants to fight”.

Because I’m awesome, I dug up a version that’s not beeped out:

Give me a picket sign
Make it blank and white
Like all those stupid teenage girls
We’re gonna need ‘em where we’re going tonight

Let’s make sure the music’s loud enough,
Let’s make sure the music’s loud enough,
We won’t even hear it end!

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

Compare the quick-change sequence in “Funny Face,” with Audrey Hepburn robed in one Givenchy masterpiece after another, and you sense not merely the greater snap in Stanley Donen’s direction (with more than a hand from Richard Avedon), and the hotter bloom of the coloring, but the way in which Hepburn herself outglows the frocks, with her smile and her imperious shout—“Take the picture, take the picture!” No thoroughbred was ever just a clotheshorse.

Following up with: “All the film lacks is a subtitle: ‘The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.’ ”

Anyway, here’s Martin Schneider with lines from The New Yorker’s 2008 Conference: Day 1, Day 2.

Examples:

“Miles per gallon is the new high score.” — Jane McGonigal

“Malcolm Gladwell has a new book coming out next year. It has already sold two and a half trillion copies.” — David Remnick

“Ninety-nine percent of what policemen do is relational—resolving disputes and so on. So why are all cops big beefy guys?” — Malcolm Gladwell

“I can tell a California cook from a New York cook any day of the week—they’re slower… I’m calling out all of California, pretty much.” — David Chang

“The poster child for that ‘no sellout’ thing was Bob Dylan, and he ends up in a Victoria’s Secret ad.” — Steve Stoute

“H&M is kind of like a gateway drug.” —Kal Raustiala

“Change is inevitable; progress is optional.” — Andy Stern

“Like in ‘06, you’ve got to go take it from [Republicans]. They don’t give up power easily.” — Rahm Emanuel

Also covered by Jason Kottke. Event videos are online.

Rolling out around the world from February 2008, ‘Connectivity’ is a striking artistic showcase of true originals who define the essence of the Converse brand since 1908. The advertising visually ‘connects’ past and present Converse icons brought together by their optimistic rebellion and homage to the Chuck Taylor All Star shoe.

I went through Polly’s luggage.

I went to find PJ—I love U2, but the show was too big and Peej wasn’t getting enough love. Everyone was in the famous people room, so I went to find her and she had already split and there was nothing but me and her luggage, so I looked.

It was really tidy and together.

All the shoes were in separate bags and all the gowns were in muslin dress bags.

Her makeup was all Mac and in a perfectly contained storage unit.

There was no sprawl or excess.

I’m still freaked out and feel the need to confess.

She was pretty much a minimalist right? Someone needs to make me feel better about this.

The deli platter hadn’t been touched and there was no evidential signs of booze—why can’t I be more like her?

I wore this great flapper dress onstage the other night and it just fell off, like it burned off and the doors fell off and a mirror broke and rooms get trashed—like why can’t I be tidy like PJ?

Any intellectuals have a theory on her tidy luggage, it was so fucking Zen.

It was either Rock Star totally and I just don’t understand or—I don’t know, I’m confused.

Maybe I need to let her know I went through the luggage, like not riffed, and OBVIOUSLY I would never open a journal but I just wanted to sort of see what she does with her bags.

I mean bag.
It was one suitcase—tasteful.

I mean, I have like racks and racks and shit everywhere and feathers and sequins and the blood of virgins, etc. etc., and here’s PJ with one tidy-assed bag and I felt very confused.

Here’s my other me and PJ story.

I had heard of this hotel in London, the Portobello. It was supposed to be really cute and special—I just came back from France and was for some reason all into my French Riviera rich-lady outfit thing, like i was really really put together. …

I go to this little teeny lobby and there’s these little eccentric people and they show me this little teeny perfectly appointed room—it’s so small, barely my shoes fit—this is their biggest room—it’s also got a quill pen and ink pot.

I immediately call my assistant and say, “Hey, you know, you gotta get me into a big hotel. I’m way too big for this place…” I’m now walking up the stairs on the cell phone. “I mean listen, if I was PJ Harvey I could like… fit and use the quill pen.”

Boom, I’m back in the lobby—there’s PJ—she totally hears me say this. She’s in really nice black pants and a little red t-shirt, checking out to go to Germany. I totally cop to it: “This is such a you place, but I’m like a galumph, I need the Royal Suite at the whatever—so my shoes can fit.”

She just nods ruefully, and I think—like when I saw the bags last night—”why can’t I be like together like she is.”

I am so humiliated and laughing that I’m in my French Riviera costume, my luggage so overwhelming it’s falling out the door of this hotel—I mean one big suitcase is just books, one is just underwear, whatever—whoa I’m a consumer I guess.

And of all the people in the world I mention because the quill pen just drove me bananas—I could see PJ sitting at the teensy desk writing all those great lyrics, tortured beyond belief, while I have to spread out all over many rooms—even in a slum, I don’t care—and I’m barking her name “IF I WAS PJ HARVEY MAYBE I COULD STAY IN THIS PLACE BUT I’M JUST TOO BIG.”

And there she fucking is.

Funny, right? For me it’s symbolising everything I hate about the culture of graphic design. I’ve always found it difficult to articulate what I don’t like [about] the snooty, high-and-mightiness surrounding good design but here it is. If someone put a huge “THIS DOES NOT COMMUNICATE”, “BAD TYPOGRAPHY” or “Learn colour theory” sticker on a piece of my work I’d punch them in the face.

Like Jim, I get the joke, but think it brings up an interesting issue. Consider this sticker:

It’s amusing, and I’m all for the sentiment, but the psychological streak behind the tone—and other self-satisfied umbrage, such as people driven up the wall by misplaced apostrophes—is just a more acculturated version of the mother in Donnie Darko taking the kids’ dance team a bit too seriously: she wails to another woman, “sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!”

Taste matters, but creativity needs to be opinionated, not just safe and bland. My take (slightly edited from a recent message to a friend):

It’s good to for creators to produce stuff that’s hated by some and loved by others rather than stuff that goes unremarked.

I agree completely that in a way design is the art of removing things till you can’t remove any more. I think it’s good as a general life strategy too.

You know how, when you can TELL that someone is acting, it’s not good acting anymore? Same with say, writing.. sometimes if you can’t feel that something’s actually ‘written’, that’s the best-written stuff.

On the other hand, there is a way in which there is more than Coco Chanel and minimalism in the vocabulary of good design, wouldn’t you agree? That sure, a one-piece black dress can be haute couture, but that doesn’t mean that baroque styles in say architecture or elaborate looks in fashion are somehow lesser aesthetics. You pick an aesthetic and go with it is what I’m saying, and sometimes if you can execute it well, then a house full of decoration can look just as good as a modern apartment. Particular styles do not have a monopoly on taste.

Metro is now Greater Boston’s second-largest newspaper, according to audit figures released yesterday by an independent firm that showed the free daily’s circulation jumped 12 percent in the second quarter this year.

The audit showed the Metro has jumped ahead of The Boston Herald as the No. 2 newspaper in the market, behind only The Boston Globe.

Of course, The Metro is free and The Herald isn’t. But prices on newspapers and magazines aren’t substantial revenue streams; they just exist to show advertisers that readers value the content. What’s the point when your actual readership numbers are free-falling?

Our intrepid friends at Boston Magazine report:

Metro Publisher Stuart Layne, who began running the freebie 11 months ago, has been predicting this for months. “We made some dramatic, strategic changes here. We decided we were going to be a real newspaper, not just something that’s handed out on the street,” he told us today. “We doubled the sports pages, doubled the local pages. We marketed the brand. This was not ‘Cross your fingers and hand out more papers.’”

Previously: The Boston Herald Sucks

A knight-errant, looking quite pale,
Was asked, “Sir, from what do you ail?”
“I’ve been duped by,” said he,
“La belle dame sans merci,
And I fear I shall soon kick the pail.”

The death of a comrade from gas,
Led young Owen to cry out, “Alas,
this is nasty and gory,
there’s nothing of glory,
and Horace talked out of his ass.”

John Milton, whose metre still shines
Told how, midst prelapsian vines
Eve ate the fruit
And God gave them the boot
But the Devil got all the best lines.

In Xanadu, there was this guy
Built a pleasure dome for which to die
It had rivers to Hades
and mad singing ladies
and then—oh man, I am SO high