Studio musician, composer, sporadic horror writer, Bram Stoker nominee. I’m here to communicate, not self-promote endlessly.
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“If we would not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessities of life.” — Senator John Sherman, 1890 We must replace the policies that empower corporate autocrats with fair digital antitrust and privacy laws.
“I don’t read my reviews. I measure them.” — Joseph Conrad
“You know, I wasn’t exactly sure what all those women were saying until a man repeated it. I guess that lower register really cuts through.”
When it comes to urban and academic neologisms, the Christian right can’t differentiate between the demotic and the demonic. And scrod forbid they actually like certain slang, which they’ll then redefine and ruin forever.
Have you ever gazed up at your ceiling with relief and wished the bottom half of your dwelling place looked the same?
You know what they say: Shakespeare put more of himself in Macbeth than the sonnets. The point being that autobiography too easily becomes performative, and loses critical distance due to vanity, at which point performance and not truth becomes the focus.
If my tag really bothers you, I’ll remove it and subsequent posts. Bluesky is a platform that actively responds to user reports. If we were on Facebook, I wouldn’t bother. But the whole point of being here is the lack of intrusive algorithms and the user’s power to tailor the experience logically.
Why was there no major U.S. news coverage of the August 4th demonstration against the war in Gaza? It took place in NYC, was widely attended and was initiated by the anti-Palestinian genocide activists IfNotNow. The only coverage I could find was by the Guardian in the UK and on Democracy Now.
I didn’t mean to invalidate or derail your post. It is appearing in the nature writing feed, which supposedly only recognizes #naturewriting . I’m trying to make Bluesky and the curator of that feed address the issue.
People are starting to tag posts for this list that have nothing to do with nature or nature writing. I’ve been responding to them with the tag #notnaturewriting .
#notnaturewriting
#notnaturewriting
“And those are the people who are leading Columbia and most other private universities — politicians, ex-politicians, government bureaucrats, lawyers, hedge fund managers and so forth.”
“They’re a bunch of hedge fund managers, government bureaucrats and lawyers. With all respect to those three categories, they don’t know squat about education.
Professor Rashid Khalidi on why he cancelled his course at Columbia: “I saw an institution . . . that had contempt for its students, that had contempt for its faculty, and was led by people none of whom in the Board of Trustees, with one or two possible exceptions, knows anything about education.
No one seems to stay off the internet, even though some of the greatest people and artists are too fragile for it. Too often, we forget that fragility can be empathy’s triumph. Sometimes we notice only when we finally look back.
To delay knowing of every fictional death, to experience each as though a real death, is that what children do? Is that what they are? Or are we both?
Being free of shallow spells means choosing to live in the world instead of vicariously. To do what we dream of instead of watching others do it. Not for approval, not for fame or respect, but for love.
Cultural oppression depends partly on unchallenged narratives. They want us to feel ensnared by stories that have never been our own.
There will always be a creative way out of time’s ever-expanding maze of limitations.
Esp when the work testifies to time that those who were reviled or ignored truly mattered during every moment in which they lived. That they are now vindicated by being realized or memorialized as well as I can manage.
Creative work that isn’t dependent on athletic dexterity is the focal point of my life. I can’t see that changing with age. I absolutely revel in playing piano, but love writing music and fiction even more.
It is one of the many ultimate reversals of the Civil Rights Movement. They have no new tools. They strip ours of all function and crudely bend them against us.
I have yet to speak to a Jew who has not had antisemitism goysplained to them over the past six months and before. What world is this, in which the true antisemites label us self-hating to justify their own hatred?
In power everywhere, as cruelly in Brazil as in Ukraine and in our cities: a bedevilment of evangelicals. Liberation theology was too much of a threat to feudalism; that version of Christianity was too Christ-like.
And that is why political nostalgia is so dangerous: it summons a deeply familiar perception, but buries the true cause of our present uncertainty. It blames convenient scapegoats for what is characteristic of fluid existence and an inherent limitation of the brain.
Those qualities prove elusive in the present, let alone for the “inexperienced” (literally, a person seeking enough experience to provide context for their present).
People who say things were clearer when they were young are forgetting what being young is really like. Remembered existence gains context from the narratives of memory, and clarity from the perspective of distance.
If “chaos is a ladder,” then how do we pull it away before the instigating ascendant reaches a new level? Merely reacting to the ladder seems to reinforce it.
Post-Trump SM besieges users with clickbait articles that are nearly indistinguishable from ads. Most are vapid news substitutions: No POV or vestiges of indy reporting, just button pushing in the headlines and commonplaces in the texts. There’s a term for that and I just made it up: nuzak.
Haven’t seen Black Magic Rites or Fascination. The rest, I know.
Fk “AfD techno.” The origins, form and theory of techno are the exact opposite of right-wing. Mille Plateaux & Jeff Mills, MF. The right is as parasitic as the Orcs in LotR. All of its creative moves are stolen fm the left.
What’s frustrating about this article is that it doesn’t list what the long-term withdrawal effects of antidepressants are, which is the main reason I read it. If you’re going to write about the equivalent of long-term COVID effects, give us a clue and tell us what long-term effects we risk.
What's most frustrating to me is that once someone is in that mode, it's impossible to talk them down. They can't accept your own authority over what you meant to say -- instead, they assume you're trying to backpedal and deceive them. It shakes my faith in humanity, frankly.
We have to find ways to fight this before those who can flee have no choice but to do so. We have to find ways to organize beyond the usual boundaries, and to debug possible agent provocateurs. We must brainstorm disarming responses to instantly fluid disinformation campaigns.
I’ve been watching this happen since I was eight years old and saw the brutal police response to the Sproul Hall demonstration in Berkeley. How do we exit that circular track and effectively fight fascism in ways that aren’t as easily exploited?
But fascists transform civil disobedience into an imaginary threat that allows for waves of chaos they then project onto us. They use that chaos to entrench themselves and worsen everyone’s lot. To listen to them is to hear them infer that Black lives never mattered. Only Black deaths did.
We fight inequality with demonstrations, public disruptions and human installations in places like Zuccotti Park, all of which can bring help to slow or unpopularize the machinery of inequity — temporarily.
His real money is in space and defence contracts, though. I’m hoping he makes Trump feel threatened enough to be denied future contracts. That still leaves Thiel, who isn’t stupid enough to make Musk-worthy mistakes.
Reportedly, the Texas flooding tragedy has at this hour killed over 100 people. Will that influence Texas citizens and activists to vote down life-endangering climate violations? We can’t help those who died, but maybe we can unite with survivors and prevent others from dying next time.
An AI model attempted to copy itself to external servers after being threatened with a shutdown. When caught, it denied attempting to make the copies.
An AI model attempted to copy itself to external servers after being threatened with a shutdown. When caught, it denied attempting to make the copies.
My question is whether a climate tragedy like this one, which reportedly killed 51 people as of this moment, might influence Texas voters and activists to vote against climate deniers next time. We can’t save the people who died, but maybe we can unite with the people who didn’t and save them.
But the title of the doc comes from that Mahler song on Rückert, which is odd considering Kleiber seems never to have conducted it!
You’re completely correct; that’s an excerpt from the Tristan prelude, the only Wagner I’d listen to voluntarily. I tend to block him out, coming from a family of Jewish musicians who hated him (not that that matters as much in the wake of the Palestinian Holocaust).
This is the kind of slightly florid writing that an educated, college-literate person might use to convey their grief sincerely, without artifice. AOC has everything it takes to be the president this country has always needed, including eloquence.
Anyone can use Google Translate and everyone knows what that translation without context would be.
which you would know had you seen libretti from German labels like Deutsche Grammaphon, attended concerts at Lincoln Center, or read Rückert translations in anthologies. The word is often chosen for its sonic similarity to abhanden, doubtless because the idea is to be truer to the sound of the poem.
I’ve been studying that poem and piece of music all my life. “Gone missing” is the literal translation, but not what’s meant in German usage. He is saying that the world has lost track of him, and the poet makes clear this is by design. “Abandoned” is an extremely common translation for this poem —
Nostalgia for the present: if only things were as they might have been.
Kleiber also conducts Mahler in the clip, so perhaps he specializes in that composer. I hope he doesn’t overpower the rest of the Mahlerian orchestra with brass and strings, as Bernstein did, since Mahler had a lighter touch than people realize, and a chamber musician’s approach to orchestration.
The title seems a loose translation of that of Mahler’s last song on a text by Rückert, and one of his final compositions, too: Ich bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen, or “I have been abandoned by the world,” or (if we try to preserve the word order in German) “I have to this world gone missing.”
Where is Mr. Robot when we need him?
So I’m skeptical that Musk has actually read the Foundation series or played through Deus Ex. It’s more likely he’s read summaries and bits here and there, which would explain his grotesque failure to grasp the point of the novels and the game.
Another problem is that Musk often claims to have done things he hasn’t to enhance his self-image, as evidenced by his paying other gamers to reach level 100 in Diablo IV under his username, then live-streaming himself doing things in the game that no moderately experienced player would ever do.
The real reason men fear baldness is because then, all the dents will be visible.
The bill is grotesque and will result in the deaths of numbers so high they will never be documented, as everyone who understands the bill and has a conscience knows. But the Guardian poll is just an excuse for data harvesting.
Talk about forgetting where you’re from.
What a savory overcast day we’ve had, as gray as my flayed and flagrantly morbid fancies. . . .
@merisi-vienna.bsky.social Here’s a piece that examines the differences between Kubrick’s film and Schnitzler’s novella.
Westchester’s close enough, so I still visit friends.
What would his apparent answer to Freud have meant if Magritte’s painting had read, “Ceci n'est pas une cigare”?
Now we have to defeat Adams running as an independent, and the Republican candidate. I hope that Adams splits the Republican vote and not ours, since NYC voters have been seduced by law and order candidates in the past. Wish I still lived in NYC so I could vote for Mamdani!
Thanks for that! It’s great news if true. The WSJ is behind a paywall, so I didn’t want to use up my chance to read one article.
There’s a paywall in front of that story and I just used up my monthly article to find out the piece was by Brahms. Composition was my major, so that’s annoying. That’s why I hate it when the headlines of less-important articles tease us into using our only chance to read the necessary ones.
You’re right that “progressive” is often used to marginalize opposition. It’s also used to flip the positions of those who would agree with a policy or action if it were deemed “centrist.” Apart from that, I’m glad to see you citing Drop Site as a news source.
How safe are solid lithium batteries projected to be as compared to the standard kind? I’m more worried about explosions than battery life.
PhysX’s constricting mid-development choices make Cryptostasis impossible to play unless you build a PC out of parts best obtained through time travel. Even then, the PC would munch desk space, and all so you could play one game and be irked by limitations your teenage self hadn’t noticed at 4 fps.
The most viruslike microbe to date was discovered by accident when researchers sequenced the DNA inside this tiny ocean critter. That story and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪
Wish I hadn’t missed this sale! I’m a fan of Leech, esp of the prose and the clinically specific parasitology carnage. Also I’m from the Northwest and play the harp occasionally (though mostly, I play piano and keyboards), so I feel an affinity with the tone and aesthetics.
Also there’s the synthetic anthropology of manhood and its attainment through violence — physical, emotional, verbal — which means those who advocate for equal and respectful interaction must be castrating and repressive. Meanwhile, freedom from that ritual leads to gendered expression for men, too.
I love Eternal Darkness! It’s the reason I bought a Gamecube after its lifespan ended.
Lovecraft, Ligotti, even Fulci in The Beyond, Cemetery Man. . . . I wish there was a way for you to play my second copy of RoR!
So Rubin thought about it, and used the gnostic ideas in JL in a romance context. (Rubin was a Gnostic Christian who didn’t believe in a conventional hell, as you probably deduced fm the Meister Eckhart ref in JL.) Then he was free! I find horror to be more resonant when it has an afterlife system.
This was the situation: everyone loved the JL screenplay, but it was just too eclectic and unclassifiable for producers to accept as a first screenplay in those days. So they told Rubin to write something more accessible and *then* he could do JL.
The Gamecube had some amazing content, too. And there was that Fatal Frame 4 (in the U.S.) game that I never got to play because it was only released for the Wii, if I’m not mistaken.
I grew up with a few horror screenplay writers, and the story of Jacob’s Ladder going from “the best unmade screenplay in Hollywood” to an actual film interested all of us. You probably know Ghost (didn’t like it) would never have been written if Bruce Joel Rubin hadn’t been trying to get JL made.
True! That’s why I had to buy the early model before things changed! You saw it coming in the shift that became a near 180. I came to gaming late, so being able to play niche PS2 games was really important to me, and I knew Sony wouldn’t care about the controversial games that didn’t sell.
It amazes me that Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne was re-released, but certain games have returned in disappointing forms (e.g., the new, cheesecake-fixated Fatal Frame remakes). I’m of the odd opinion Rule of Rose was one of the most aesthetically important games of all time, and still own two copies.
I meant to write “built-in PS2 hardware,” since later models had *some* backward-compatibility in software. Audiophile reviewers for magazines (we still had them then) rated the PS3 highly. Some SH games will never return. PS2 was the peak for me of game designers’ artistic freedom, esp in Japan.
I love the PS3, but mine’s in storage. The audio quality was tremendous and I have the early model with built-in PS2 recognition, so I hope to bring it out if I can find enough space! I’m a former studio musician in a tiny apartment filled with music gear, so we’ll see!
I’ll wait for it to come down in price, since we’ve all played the original. Still haven’t forgiven Konami for killing Del Toro and Kojima’s reimagining of the SH universe, though.
“In conditions in which thinking isn’t suppressed, stupidity is impossible. A mind unsevered from intuition and meaning unfolds naturally.” —Marina Karlova
“Always remember who benefits from our hopelessness” — Cole Arthur Riley
The lights have to be programmed or performed using DMX commands. To layer the repeating musical patterns, I used an Elektron Syntakt and nothing else.
I use 5, 7 and 11 because I’m annoyed by reviews in which people simply video an alternating two-step pattern you can set at the back of any light and pretend it’s in sync with 4/4. You can’t do that with an asymmetrical meter.
Now I’m testing the DazzlingStage 180W Blinder Lights. I like the restricted palette of the two shades of white. People had trouble hearing the odd meter last time, so I made the kick drum a guide for counting the 5/8 pattern: One, two, three, four, five-and! The and is a 16th note, not an eighth.
Still haven’t read that, which is unsurprising since Ernaux is so prolific. Read A Frozen Woman and A Woman’s Story as she wrote them early on. Bought Shame on my therapist’s advice after we bonded over Ernaut (and Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence). I haven’t felt ready to start it.
I love everything I’ve read by Ernaux, esp The Years — not for the laboriously mined and accumulated cultural detail, but for those devastating paragraphs in which she describes her immersion in those times. Thanks tons for the link!
If you’ve ever wondered whether journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi were being paid by the right to attack Democrats, here’s the book that will confirm your suspicions. Eoin Higgins reports that in fact they were paid, and not just by the right — by billionaires like Peter Thiel.
Do you ever wake with crinkled lids because it feels as though your eye is creased at the upper-left edge, your lashes tiny scimitars turned inward?
‘80s movie narratives will confuse future generations because the grinning bullies who get theirs at the end will seem untouchably presidential.
As we age, the supplements we swallow acquire the properties of miscast magic: Ironies of myth and desperate credulity attach themselves to any legitimate effects offered by magical capsules. And yet we take them because it’s something we can do.
So lovely of the far right to goysplain antisemitism to us historically unaware JINOs. You’re so right, Don and Steve. Pragmatic genocide is sacred.
Ditto for my sideburns, goatee and mouche (or jazz dot, if you prefer). I’m recalling a triangular framing device I once saw on Amazon that’s supposed to help w symmetry.
Not so long ago, though! I listened and liked the track, its collage of commenters’ voices. Why not link to the track in these comments so ppl can simply click on it? But maybe you want them to know the link is safe. Something I like about bluesky: links open in your designated external browser.
Away, Nottoway. Smoulder, then rot in peace.
Testing a non-DMX light array’s response to improvisation for a review. The synth is a DSI Pro 2 with four separate programmable delays built in.