February 2011
January 2011
“The irony of the broken Cage-Boulez friendship was that certain of Cage’s chance pieces ended up sounding oddly similar to Boulez’s total-serialist pieces. The young Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti pointed out the resemblance in two penetrating analytical articles of 1958 and 1960, concluding that Boulez and other serialist composers were not fully responsible for the outcome...
Reading Right Now:
-The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross. Taking my time with this and listening to as much concurrently as I can.
-Endymion, John Keats. Just finished rereading it a few weeks ago and immediately started to reread it again.
-Wild Pilgrimage, Lynd Ward. From the beautiful new LoA editions of his wood-cut novels.
-Sketches From a Hunter’s Album, Turgenev. Sublime and barren portraits of rural...
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I'm listed in Tumblweeds under extremely, bad,...
I’m listed in Tumblweeds, a user-generated community directory that rates Tumblr bloggers by their number of followers. Find me listed in #extremely, #bad, #opinions
“With Atget, photographs became standard evidence for historical occurences, and...”
– -Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, part VI.
Posting this as a reference for twitter.
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A Series of Tweets on Benjamin
reading ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ on its own always struck me as kind of funny
it is a lot more confusing without the background of benjamin’s very convoluted and somewhat hypocritical brand of marxism
i think a lot of people who read it in a class come away with a sort of distorted idea of the benjaminian ‘aura’ without the context...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-1-23) →
Two Door Cinema Club (4)
Theodor W. Adorno (2)
Duke Ellington (1)
The Smiths (1)
Blackout Beach (1)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Nabokov Butterfly Theory Vindicated →
Did you know that in the run-up to the 1932 elections, 25% of American voters actively wanted a socialist government and another 25% “had an open mind” about the possibility? Cool.
“How does one deepen one’s experience of life. That is a problem that...”
– -Aaron Copland, diary entry on 12/25/1930
Comforting to know that cool dude genius guy Copland was at one point as miserable and sargassoed as me. Kind of funny that he sort of put washing dishes and going to jail on an equivalent level but uh
I often wonder what Walter Benjamin would have said about the continued trajectory of Brecht’s theatre if he’d been alive to see it. Like the style of didacticism in ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ is so different from his earlier, more, I don’t know, transparently sardonic stuff. I think his commitment to ideology as a concrete thing took him to a weird place. A cool...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-1-16) →
The Tallest Man on Earth (8)
Darius Milhaud (7)
Alban Berg (5)
Theodor W. Adorno (5)
Thelonious Monk (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Today, by Frank O'Hara
Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All
the stuff they’ve always talked about
-
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
Man O’Hara makes it all seem effortless.
Glenn Beck's Jewish Problem →
kohenari:
It’s entirely possible that I am just overly sensitive to anti-Semitism and that others would view Glenn Beck’s seeming obssession with Nazism, George Soros, and Jews in general as less problematic than I do.
But, since I think it’s not just me and that more people should be wary of Beck’s rhetoric, I’ll share Jeffrey Goldberg’s thoughts from yesterday in The Atlantic:
This is a...
seedy: 36 Versions of The Internationale →
c-d:
Download
alistair hulett - the internationale.mp3 ani difranco & utah phillips - The Internationale.mp3 black - Die Internationale.mp3 Canciones revolucionarias - internationale.mp3 chinese - internationale.mp3 coro en chino - internationale.mp3 czech - Internationale.mp3 ddr lieder - Die…
Counter-balance nazi swing with a million copies of a song that owns.
seedy: Nazi Swing Music, 1940-45 (MP3) →
c-d:
I can’t express how bizarre and wild these are. What a fantastic historical artifact. Chlling, yes, improbably hilarious, sure, disgusting, well obviously, but just such a deliriously pointed intrusion from the past. I’m reeling.
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Bayard Rustin →
A lesser-known luminary of the Civil Rights movement. A cool great dude from my home-town.
Want to do a scientific survey of people who put “I Hate Reading” or whatever in their books section on Facebook but have way better jobs than me, than instead of publishing the findings I’ll just hang myself.
from 'Danton's Death,' by Georg Buchner (1835)
Camille: Quickly, Danton. We haven't got time to kill.
Danton: [dressing]. But time will kill us. What a bore to put on a shirt every day. Then the breeches over it. To crawl into bed at night and out again in the morning. To keep setting one foot in front of the other, with no prospect of it ever changing. It's very sad. And to think that millions have done it before us and millions will do it again; and what's more, that we consist of two halves each doing identical things, so that everything happens twice over. It's very sad.
Camille: You're talking like a child.
Danton: Dying men often turn childish.
Chasing Thales: What is a ghost? →
chasingthales:
In the light of Levinasian philosophy, it is the unrealized potentials of man, his fears and anxiety, and his hopes and frustrations. To himself, he is alter. Of the meaning of his being, he gropes blindly as much as he cannot contain within his cup of the Same the overflowing waters of the…
YEAHHHHHHHHHHH
“Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I’m a genius, or at...”
– Jared Lee Loughner’s Nietzsche: Why the philosopher is misunderstood by angry young men. - By Matt Feeney - Slate Magazine (via jomc)
seedy: The Music of Theodor Adorno →
c-d:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L2K0LGFY
Tracklist
Zwei Stücke Für Streichquartett Op. 2 (11:44) 1 I. Bewegt 6:44
2 II. Variationen 5:00 Sechs Kurze Orchesterstücke Op. 4 (7:25)
3 I. Bewegt, Heftig 1:29
4 II. Sehr Ruhig 1:38
5 III. Sehr Lebhaft (Gigue) 0:47
6 IV. Äußerst Langsam…
Really cool and good, actually. Adornowns.
I See a Thing on Twitter and I Get Pouty About It
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Justin Bieber song and I have no idea what his personality is like, but why is it funny to send some kid to a place he probably doesn’t want to go? And anyway the whole “heheh internet, let’s cook up a shitty place to go” mentality towards Somalia on display doesn’t sit well with me. Look, it seems like there is a ton of...
the-stapler:
Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we’ll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of...
Blood Libel →
I don’t think Sarah Palin knows what this term means?
I love theory
bricorama:
-breakyourface:
I love theory, I love theory, I love theory, I love theory.
im not the only one’
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