I got into storytelling very much through music, not through journalism. I was never good as a pure composer, but doing it in the service of storytelling somehow makes it so much easier. When you’ve got hours and hours of raw tape, it becomes a compositional exercise. To figure out what the story is, you try to approach it in terms of sound and texture. With musical composition, you want certain parts to be dense and others to be sparse. You’re thinking in terms of syncopation, beats, and rhythms. It’s very gestural, and it applies almost exactly to storytelling. Sometimes, you feel like a story is too regular, too metronomic. You can change a story’s “time signature,” so to speak, by creating little surprises and altering the rhythms on a micro level.
Jad Abumrad of Radio Lab talks with Boldtype.
]]>For the poor Christian Moslem Jewish saps duped by fundamentalist nihilism the Last Day is both horrorshow and Rapture, just as for secular Yuppies global warming is a symbol of terror and meaninglessness and simultaneously a rapturous vision of post-Catastrophe Hobbit-like local-sustainable solar-powered gemutlichkeit. Thus the technopathocracy comes equipped with its own built-in escape-valve fantasy: the Ragnarok of technology itself and the sudden catastrophic restoration of meaning.
MAGPIE: ENDARKENMENT MANIFESTO by Peter Lamborn Wilson. (Gemütlichkeit?)
]]>IDLER: Titles are important to you.
HIRST: I think they just come out of an urge for naming, it’s like naming your fucking baby. It’s like, you’re called Tom, and you can never separate that from you.
IDLER: Why do so many people do things which they call “Untitled”?
HIRST: It’s a big responsibility. You have to do what you’ve already done in the work in a verbal way, and if you’re a visual artist there’s not really any reason to do it. [picks nose, displays result]
IDLER: Nose-picking is a also great pleasure.
HIRST: Oh yeah. Anything you can do with your hands and feet. Great. Arse picking.
IDLER: Do you pick your arse?
HIRST: Er … I’ve messed about with it?
The Idler’s Tom Hodgkinson interviews artist Damien Hirst.
]]>>OPEN CAN OF WORMS
Opened.
Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org
]]>…I think that, returning to philosophy, that we are not enriched by its solutions, as these solutions are doubtful, they are arbitrary, and philosophy does enrich us by demonstrating that the world is more mysterious than we thought.
(This is always how I feel after watching Waking Life.)
]]>People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.
Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine - New York Times. I’m delighted by this suggestion that the Wii and the iPhone represent a coming shift in human-computer interface design; apparently the generation driving design demands new paradigms. A welcome development — my patience wears thin!
]]>His very name was a microcosm of the system he invented: the exotic “Gygax,” calling to mind the pantheon of Lovecraftian gods and remote regions of Hyborea; the mundane “Gary,” reminiscent of suburban kids all over the nation who were ignoring their algebra homework in favor of The Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Deified and Demagogued by Matthew Baldwin - The Morning News
]]>Which candidate will pledge to be the Gardening President? Who will be the one to take the lead in teaching food self-sufficiency and good nutrition to the American public? What a fine example it would set if the food miles traveled by presidential produce added up to zero.
]]>After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind.
]]>My parents homeschooled me so that I could get more experience in the world, not so that I could shelter myself from it.
]]>It’s obvious we are not going to finish with pain in this lifetime. The Buddha said, “Everything dear to us causes pain.”…Those of us who have chosen relational life have made the choice that the pain is worth it.
]]>The name is a genteel hangover from another era, reeking of civility and respect, of Ahmet Ertegun in a spun-silk suit leafing through some sheet music with Ray Charles. The reality was somewhat different: a generation of twentysomethings blasted to the gills on cocaine, tearing around the world trying not to lose their jobs by doing something crazy. Like actually signing a band.
John Niven in the London Times on life as an A&R man in the '90s. Via The Contrarian.
]]>As a country singer approached a microphone near home plate to sing the national anthem, our jaws slackened as [Albert] Ayler’s sax purred the plaintive opening notes of “Spirits Rejoice,” which quickly becomes a tight, triumphant military-style march before disintegrating into crushing trumpet bleats by Albert’s brother Don. On the silent screen gigantic flags were unfurled, pyrotechnics exploded, a military flyover happened and Americans rejoiced while Ayler’s band evoked twin towers of war—pageantry and battle—masterfully, if psychotically.
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