May 2012
9 posts
“romantic comedy (and its television variations) devotes its energies to...”
– On Lena Dunham’s depiction of sexual encounters in Girls.
The Loves of Lena Dunham by Elaine Blair | The New York Review of Books
“Zappa albums valorise the idea of virtuoso instrumentalists and guitar heroes...”
– The Wire pulling no punches on reviewing Zappa’s oeuvre.
Frank Zappa: Don’t do that on stage anymore
“Balancing on minor chord darkness and major chord triumphs somewhere between...”
– Seth prepares the uninitiated for psychedelic freedom on Funkadelic’s classic “Free your mind…”
Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | Unsung | The Book of Seth | Funkadelic - Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow
“In 1960 He was my friend Robbie Robinson, going to University of Maryland, we...”
– Max Ochs discusses Robbie Basho
Max Ochs : Answers some questions from the producer
“I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and...”
– Steve Albini responds to a question about downloading music.
I am Steve Albini, ask me anything : IAmA
“God was dead. The time and cause of death were variously given in sophomore and...”
– Lewis Lapham on the “leap of faith” Mandates of Heaven - Lapham’s Quarterly
“the strength to confront suffering was to be found in the thought that “you will...”
– On the unknown and unknowable in the practice of medicine.
The God in the Machine - Lapham’s Quarterly
April 2012
8 posts
“Somewhere
Behind Türkenfeld a spruce nursery a pond in the moor on which
the...”
– The Book Bench: W. G. Sebald’s Poetry of the Disregarded : The New Yorker
“This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single...”
– James Bridle discusses his work The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelog 2006-2009
“The photo does not exist. We are 6.9 billion people with no heads who have just...”
– Our place in history.
On Having No Head | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
“Art movements used to be Left Bank café tables where disaffected creatives...”
– Bruce Sterling on the difficulty in describing the New Aesthetic art movement. An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com
The Beatnik Box
charliehoey:
beatnikbox:
Poem #52362
create
her underwear incomparably
breeding
One of the first programs I ever wrote was a PERL script that generates poetry using the words from Howl by Allen Ginsberg, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot, and a handful of John Clellon Holmes poems. I dropped it in a cron job and gave it a tumblr, so it’ll generate and tumble a new poem...
“This gives way to the stunning second side which starts out with a minimal piece...”
– Typical Volcanic Tongue histrionics in describing the new No Neck Blues Band LP.
VOLCANIC TONGUE UPDATE 1 APRIL 2012
“The dilemmas the youth of the late ‘90s faced—do I vote for Gore or Nader? is it...”
– n+1 considers the fate of 1990s alternative life in the context of Richard Linklater’s Slacker at twenty years old.
n+1: Slacker at Twenty
March 2012
6 posts
“A multiple-worlds interpretation of the Huxtable narrative, however, raises a...”
– Contemplating the quantum suicide of Cliff Huxtable.
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Selections From the Cosby Codex: Selection 14: Part Two of Toward a Conception of Blakian Prophetic Mythology in (and through) the Huxtable Narrative: The Many Worlds (and Multiple Histories) of Bill Cosby and the...
“We’re like vibrating stones, in a way. Have you ever seen that movie, Meetings...”
– Violist Eyvind Kang on his collaboration with Sun O))).
The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music: Article
“I’ve made a move in the Luddite direction recently by trying to remove UbuWeb...”
– Kenny G on moving away from the center and into the margins.
The Believer - Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith
“unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a...”
– Douglas Rushkoff identifies the decentralized, network-like aspects of OWS.
Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it - CNN.com
“One of the small pleasures of working backward through pop history from the...”
– Douglas Wolk on The Smiths’ shoplifting trips through pop history. The Smiths: The Smiths Complete | Album Reviews | Pitchfork
“I would stack Music For Airports up against Glenn Gould and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely...”
– Rick Moody on Brian Eno’s sweet spot, among other things.
February 2012
11 posts
“I’ve come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your...”
– A Chinese commentator responding to SOPA.
Letter from China: The Chinese View of SOPA : The New Yorker
“The astronauts went into space carrying movie cameras—16mm data acquisition...”
– from an essay on the film For All Mankind, documenting the thousands of feet of film shot by astronauts during the Apollo missions.
For All Mankind - From the Current - The Criterion Collection
“Patrick Bateman: Did you know that Whitney Houston’s debut LP, called...”
– American Psycho
“I have now begun building a traveling commons: An eight-foot round redwood table...”
– A young man has an idea for a traveling Round Table built atop the ripped-out, sawed-in-half remains of a VW bug. O! The 90s!
The Table of Contents - Tools Ideas Environment - Whole Earth Catalog
“I dreamed of being a painter, but I let the image slide into a vat of pigment...”
– Patti Smith from ‘He of the Assembly’ as quoted in
The Mother Courage of Rock by Luc Sante | The New York Review of Books
January 2012
4 posts
Of course I heavily dig the “noisy burst of...
MIKE SNIPER: An Indie Label in 2012. →
Mike Sniper from Captured Tracks explains the role of the true indie record label in 2012.
mikesniper:
I posted a recent Facebook comment regarding our policies with signing artists and found myself getting into a discussion of what the role of an independent label is in 2012, something I’ve often been asked about in interviews but have never really been able to elaborate on.
Basically,...
December 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
“We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics,...”
– Gérard Grisey
“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (via jacecooke)
April 2011
2 posts
March 2011
1 post
“s24o is an abbreviation for sub-twenty-four-overnight, a style of bicycle...”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivendell_Bicycle_Works#S24o
January 2011
2 posts
Smattering Gong
Atop sheets at home stay in Ubud, Bali, a sarong lain across my feet to keep them cool. Do the songs I hear outside mimic the fluttering voice of the local birds, the local bugs, the local frogs? The swell of avian chorus gives way to a mirrored cluster of ringing bells. Practicing Balinese gamelan next door plays counterpoint and harmony with the opera of nightly birdsong and insect pulse....
A Flying Qi Gong
Flying to Bangkok via Beijing (formerly Peking) aboard an Air China Airbus, in the middle of some forgettable American Jennifer Anniston film (ok, ok, I was enjoying Bounty Hunter), the projected-VHS image stopped and a brief intermission of an exercise video began. Simple stretching to enliven and then cool down our twelve-hour-flight ground bodies. Not everyone joined, but I enjoyed glancing...
December 2010
1 post
About motorcycles---By Frederick Seidel (Harper's... →
“There is an ascetic, Brancusi aesthetic in the simplicity of the perfection of these boats and the loveliness of their wood. They are violins.” About motorcycles, surely, but this quote about the “severe gorgeousness of these needles that go slow” perfectly captures the playfulness and love of life/things in Seidel’s prose and poetry.
September 2010
5 posts
WatchImaginative sound design and gorgeous angles in this short film on motorcycle designer and builder Shinya Kimura. I may have just re-ignited my interest in getting a motorcycle license.
WatchTrailer for surf film Temporal Collections by Ryan Thomas. Beautifully shot foam, sound, sand, waves and riders, discovered while hounding the most excellent Mollusk Surf Shop located in the Outer Sunset. Long live silver halide grains suspended in a gelatin colloid!
Horaflora feature on foxy digitalis →
Local weirdo and man-about-town Raub (seriously, look down from the stars, brother, here he comes a-ramblin’ now) featured: “The sounds themselves include guinea pigs, broken hard drives, cell phone speakers in mouths (like a talkbox), playground equipment, E-bowed metals, all sorts of prepared instruments, answering machine feedback, found vibrations, as well as a bevy of spectral,...