After 2005, I thought, there’s just not a lot of good hip hop, but this mix is four years in the making and there’s a lot of great stuff in here. I searched for the least misogynistic tracks, but couldn’t resist putting in a few just for their innovative beats.
Dharma Arts profiles my favorite digital DJ, CPI. You can download all 195 minutes of City Hearts Aimed Skyward at thetastates.com.
I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms.
Alan Moore Will Be ‘Spitting Venom All Over’ Watchmen | The Underwire from Wired.com
A Proud India Launches Its First Mission To the Moon - washingtonpost.com The probe launched Wednesday will not land on the moon but will orbit it. The mission will create a three-dimensional map of the lunar surface, looking for traces of water, uranium and minerals. Government to Take Over Airline Passenger Vetting - washingtonpost.com The Department of Homeland Security will require travelers for the first time to provide their full name, birth date and gender as a condition for boarding commercial flights, U.S. officials said Wednesday. eMusic Q&A: Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes - eMusic Spotlight I really felt this freedom to take chances and go somewhere that would have been more insecure in the past, and let it all out there. Part of that is the soul influence, the freedom that people Sly and Prince had. People that are basically — I don’t even know if this is a term, but “freak-funk.” Bracing for a Storm - washingtonpost.com Several stalwarts of American business said their profits fell over the late summer months as the financial crisis heated up. Many are now bracing for the likelihood that the world is spinning into a prolonged recession.
The idea of interacting with the world before my eyes through the mediating forces of a machine which disaggregates reality into a sterile digital code and reconstitutes a small and inferior electronic simulacrum of it inches from my face is distasteful to me.
The best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.
That strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home.
A Critic’s Notebook: Verbage: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.
Poet Charles Bernstein, speaking at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008.
As I started to read it my heart began quaking! By the time I was three quarters down the page I was bawling, wailing, sobbing, even laughing. My feelings were heartshots ricocheting off inner walls, ricocheting off each other, ricocheting off the very boundaries of my own little world. The metaphysical whiplash lasted for days.
The Online Photographer: The Amazing Gift of Woo Lai Wah — this story is utterly amazing.
So much of what I hear and see strikes me as unnecessary. We become wrapped up in national and world news while being almost entirely ignorant of, say, what goes on so much closer to home every day, in the soil, the water, among the people who cross our paths.
Fifteen degrees or so above the horizon, the thin beaming sliver of a waning crescent moon hovered over the not-yet-revealed sun. Taking this in, I realized the admittedly banal fact that when we gaze on the crescent moon, we are looking at the backside of the orb, its back on us to face the source of light. Watching this near conjunction, it is like peaking through a window on lovers lost to us. With next morning’s unscripted wedding on my mind, I recalled the fact that, while our culture codes the moon as female and the sun as male, these genders could be reversed, as they are in Japanese Shinto and, indeed, the Atlantean mythos. The supple dynamics of this cosmic gender-swap charged the sweet sky with potency, with the sun and moon providing the polarity that drove the horizon’s brimming, candy-colored transformation.
Erik Davis shares his impressions of this year’s Burning Man.