christmasgorilla = christmas gorilla = chris muscarella


May 16, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] Ratatat - Shiller

coming on the new LP
May 15, 2008
Alberto Manguel writes: “My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life.” via NY Times via ayjay

Alberto Manguel writes: “My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life.”

via NY Times via ayjay
May 14, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

themarkpike:

Prediction: Chester French is going to be huge.

  • Harvard degrees.
  • Great taste in covers (Shangri-Las!).
  • Prep aesthetic.
  • Pharrell’s blessing.

“Remember (Walking In The Sand)” Live In Richmond, VA

This video has 279 views. I think they’re gonna blow up.
May 13, 2008
“ Without the helplessness that makes kids cute, they’d be very annoying. They’d merely seem like incompetent adults. But there’s more to it than that. The reason our hypothetical jaded 10 year old bothers me so much is not just that he’d be annoying, but that he’d have cut off his prospects for growth so early. To be jaded you have to think you know how the world works, and any theory a 10 year old had about that would probably be a pretty narrow one. ” - Paul Graham, Lies We Tell Kids
May 8, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] Tom Waits - Hoist that Rag
May 5, 2008
“ If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered—the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. People are not working on things that could have that kind of influence. ” - Larry Page

I like this quotation because there’s been a lot of chatter about how the current crop of funded companies are only incremental improvements on things that came before them—and that there is no way they can create the kind of shareholder value that solving big hairy problems can. The truth is, Page is probably right. Perfectly clean energy would be more valuable than Google, Cisco, and Microsoft combined—it would disrupt the entire oil industry.

There’s something appealing about the idea of a technology that shoots for the moon. But the problem is that it’s too obvious. Google wasn’t obvious until it disrupted Yahoo, AltaVista, and all the other search-portal hybrids. Big obvious problems attract lots of attention from brilliant technologists. Big obvious problems are usually really hard to solve. Because they’re so difficult to solve, people try and compensate with money, so a lot of really smart people attacking big obvious problems end up doing their research from within the bowels of academia or large corporations (ever look at the amounts of funding biotech companies take?).

But when solutions come out of the bowels of these giants, they’re often squelched—particularly if they’re too disruptive to existing business models (just look at AOL). Big improvements come from the margins. The industrial revolution didn’t happen overnight. It came from strange little improvements like the cotton gin that allowed industries to develop around it organically. That sounds a lot more like YouTube than cold fusion to me.
May 5, 2008
“ It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly worked in terms of adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it has even really made it out of the womb, by people that find it so important that they can’t afford to really have it be a company. ” - Hank Williams

Twitter does go around calling themselves a social-networking utility…
May 3, 2008
Returning heroes: The Union Jack and the French Tricolour flutter above the lines of troops marching through Kinghtsbridge during the World War One victory parade in 1919. New photographs of Britain in colour: 1913-1924. Returning heroes: The Union Jack and the French Tricolour flutter above the lines of troops marching through Kinghtsbridge during the World War One victory parade in 1919.

New photographs of Britain in colour: 1913-1924.
May 3, 2008
Corey Arnold, Photographer Corey recently had a great audio/visual slideshow up on NPR. He’s been doing amazing documentary and artistic work based around the fishing industry. Originally posted by rach, who’s been on a tear with great posts recently. Corey Arnold, Photographer

Corey recently had a great audio/visual slideshow up on NPR. He’s been doing amazing documentary and artistic work based around the fishing industry.

Originally posted by rach, who’s been on a tear with great posts recently.
May 3, 2008
Hanging out, drinking coffee on a misty morning in Woodstock, NY in an old barn in the woods. Hanging out, drinking coffee on a misty morning in Woodstock, NY in an old barn in the woods.
May 1, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Matty Charles - Long Gone

Matty is a Williamsburg native and former neighbor. He does a great show, has beautiful sleeve tattoos, and knows how to drink whiskey.
Apr 30, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] Ratatat vs. Justice - We Are Seventeen (Casio)
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christmasgorilla is the personal web-site of Chris Muscarella—me. I am the co-founder and President of Products at Mobile Commons and an artist & technologist working with mixed media. I live in New York City. This is an impressionist web-site that exists to share things that I find interesting—and because I needed a soap box.