An excerpt from Peter Rose’s The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough. Recent photos from an anonymous someone having scaled the Golden Gate Bridge reminded me of this film that I saw first on 16mm in a class taught by Liss Platt. This scene is scored by Ornette Coleman and shows the actual scaling of the Bridge, haunting my memory, the “rapture of vision” indeed.
But alcohol is a natural part of the Watts style; as natural as LSD is around Hollywood. The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe so much in escape, escape as an integral part of life, because the white L.A. Scene makes accessible to him so many different forms of it. But a Watts kid, brought up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for some calm, some relaxation. And beer or wine is good enough for that. Especially good at the end of a bad day.
—A Journey Into The Mind of Watts Pynchon goes deep into the mind of Watts one year after the Riots.
Designing for mathematical consistency ignores three related factors: that identical widths and shapes appear differently to the eye in different combinations within a letter or glyph; that identical shapes blend together and are harder to differentiate across words and lines; that letters in a typeface are placed alongside each other, and one must adjust to deal with common juxtapositions.
—Yahoo’s Logo Reveals the Worst Aspects of the Engineering Mindset on Mayer’s suggestion that Yahoo “wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.”
Beyoncé isn’t Beyoncé because she reads comments on the Internet. Beyoncé is in Ibiza, wearing a stomach necklace, walking hand in hand with her hot boyfriend. She’s going on the yacht and having a mimosa. She’s not reading shitty comments about herself on the Internet, and we shouldn’t either.
There is a secular trend going on, in which launching a start-up is a more common thing to do. It used to be there were two things you could do after college: go to grad school or get a job. Soon, I think there will be three things: go to grad school, get a job, or start your own company. I suspect this will be one of these economic transformations on the scale of the industrial revolution.
If you listen to the rhythms of your conversations or your internal mood, it doesn’t just sound like a 17-second-long reverb with a kick drum on it. It’s a lot more interesting than that.
—Ad Hoc “Yo, I’m Making These Choices”: A Conversation with Oneohtrix Point Never on the state of electronic music’s Burial obsession.
Yes I am,” Todd screams, “I am. I am dying. I’m alone and for me, alone is like fucking dying. Don’t you see that? I don’t have a blabby kid in kindergarten whose clever remarks I can share with my beautiful wife. I don’t. And this story? I didn’t sleep all night. I just lay in bed and thought: it’s almost here, my friend from Israel is about to throw me a lifeline, and I won’t be alone anymore. And while I’m taking comfort in that cheering thought, you’re sitting and writing a beautiful story.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
—From Marx’s Communist Manifesto, seeming more relevant in the context of this article about the microgenre vaporwave and it’s purported accelerationism.
I think that’s what Fugazi always did, but in a difference sense. I always felt like, as per their song “Reclamation,” that was always part of their project, was to try to pull something out of the wreckage and to carry on. With regards to doing the same thing over and over, there were people who were just eternally jaded about the band, who wrote off the whole band as some kind of boring, repetitive, Marxist clique, when the reality was that it was a group of hilarious goofballs who also had a lot of legitimate anger and a lot of astonishing musical activity. What can I say? There are a lot of people who don’t think politics should be in music, and as far as that’s concerned, they’ve deprived themselves of the Minutemen, and fuck them.
—Jem Cohen (director of Museum Hours) | Interview | Tiny Mix Tapes responding to “If you’re going to embrace a form of naiveté in the face of apocalypse, there could be worse terms for it.”
Gangloff melds a whole bunch of approaches here, all focussed on maximal third eye squozing potential, re-wiring classic Appalachian string-sawing with all the mesmerising minimalist weight of Henry Flynt.
—Maximal third eye squozing potential! Volcanic Tongue reviews Mike Gangloff (of Pelt)’s Poplar Hollow LP.