Setting sun just catching the chimneys and tops of the walls, staining them red for a minute or three, with the valleys between the houses already twilit and lamplit. And gone, in the time it took me to type that, except for a single high plane, bright as a star as it turns…
Since Gaddafi’s speech, I’ve been working at home with Al-Jazeera English live streaming on in the background. Last night there was a moment in an interview which really struck me: in as a guest was a former upper-tranche goon of the dictator’s, saying to his quite recent old boss “All this is just embarrassing rubbish: step down now!”
At one point, the bright young anchor-person/interviewer — they have impeccably bland English accents and media-manners — asked this fellow, who was sinister and absurd and fascinatingly self-composed*, what he felt about the regime’s plundering of the nation’s resources. “And did you, to your shame, ever enrich yourself?”
The fellow pulled a mildly “oof” kind of face, and said, “Well luckily I never needed to. I’m from a very rich family.”
*Stupidly I didn’t get his name: he had what looked like dyed red hair, cut short, and shades. These are not exact quotes, either — I was cooking while this strand was on, and not taking notes.
last week was pressweek, which always makes it hard to sustain conversations or develop ideas: even so, i appear to have wanted to start several arguments which i then had no taste to return to, even to see how they were turning out
one went nowhere at all and the thread has reached auto-closure; one led to a not very satisfying but extended discussion; one is about proportional representation ffs and the obvious insanity of returning to it is i hope going to dissuade me from doing so; one is on-going and will i hope actually help me write a RECORD REVIEW blimey…
anyway the content is relatively unimportant in most of them: what leaves me a bit despondent is the lurch from “MUST GO TO WAR ABOUT THIS NAOW YEAH” to next morning’s “CAN’T BRING SELF EVEN TO CARE HOW PPL TOOK MY INTERVENTION”
Now partly i do think this is an artefact of the weird state of mind a magazine deadline can bring, when you are simultaneously tired, adrenalised, jaded, hyper-alert for error, attuned to creative last-minute problem-solving, frantic for distraction yet basically very busy, and geared towards triage (meaning the point where you are choosing between problems to solve on deadline, and decide, of this or that problem, “let it go”).
But partly I think it has always been my temperament: I take up projects with great intensity, but I have a completion allergy, and find unconscious ways to dodge away before I reach that stage — and also in some moods get a significant sense of dread, of even opening a document (let alone a thread i’ve been misbehaving on).
There’s something very attractive about Kasparov’s unwriterly directness.
Hi MB:
The first instruction here is actually ambiguous as written. It isn’t clear whether it means “Do as little as possible, the intended result being the lowest possible total level of sound” or “Imagine the lowest possible total level of sound, and the actions needed to achieve this. Do as few of such actions as possible.” The second interpretation will get you to the loud stage much faster, of course!
For a solo performer or a small ensemble
Do as little as possible in order to make the total level of sound in the room as low as possible.
If the volume starts to increase, either due to…
“All the Things She Said” is eight years old today!!
Gap between Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself”: 22 years.
Gap between Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself”: 18 years
The Social Backlash: The War Against Social Culture | Stowe Boyd (via treblekicker)
(via tomewing)
I’m mostly reblogging this from a linguistic perspective: what the holy fuck does he mean by “social culture?” There are those of us who believe that social relations create culture, which feeds back into social relations, etc. All culture is inherently social culture, in other words. Which means that this guy sort of starts to sound like he’s making a Bill O’Reilly-style, generic “culture warrior” argument to me. Too many fucking buzzwords, man. Also: who is this guy?
(via marathonpacks)
It’s not at all clear I agree but I *think* he’s actually saying what you’re saying: ie that it’s Sherry Turkle and etc who are waging “culture war” against this (new) generation of “social culture”
The Social Backlash: The War Against Social Culture | Stowe Boyd (via treblekicker)
Hard for my Gen X-er suspicious instincts not to kick in when a dude with big David Crosby style facial hair starts talking about a “new consciousness”!! Not that I disagree with him about FACEBOOK ATE MAH BRAIN type articles.
(via tomewing)
If this critique were properly extended to the entire post-Gutenberg technology of books and reading, and the alleged alienating effects of mass literacy, we might actually be being confronted with something worth thinking about. As it is it’s just the usual parasitic counter-faddism…
