My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous facade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.
PROTECT IP is a lunatic proposal, penned by a dinosauric industry concerned solely with the preservation of its own profits. It will do nothing to curb piracy while at the same time eroding fundamental freedoms of the internet.
The only people who can possibly be in favor of this bill are either ignorant of its implications or stand to gain by its passage. This desperate power grab by a diminishing elite fails to even comprehend the problems it aims to solve, and its blunt force methods are wide open for abuse, and very possibly unconstitutional.
The Psychic Paramount – “Intro/SP”
II
While not as mind-shatteringly intense as the near-nuclear Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural, The Psychic Paramount’s new album is still louder and more powerful than 99% of music. The songs lack some of the traveling I liked on their previous album – the tripartite “Para5,” the ambient freakout of “Ex-Visitations,” the hypno-slow-build of the title track. There isn’t as much of that here, but there are plenty of moments where the noise and the drums and the chaos and the noise seem to transcend themselves and achieve something akin to cosmic glory, and if you were hearing it live, your eardrums approaching the limits of their durability, you would fall on your knees and worship.
heliograph: a device with shutters and mirrors used for sending Morse code via sunbeams
auscultation: listening to internal organs for medical purposes (e.g. with a stethoscope)
erethism: physiologically or psychologically, abnormally sensitive or irritable
appanage: something one is entitled to by rank or position, real or figurative
arras: a tapestry or hanging, or a gift given by the husband at marriage
trepidant: characterized by trepidation (an uncommon adjective)
indurate: to make enduring, unfeeling, or hard, or to accustom
strathspey: a type of slow Scottish dance
corant: a quick but stately dance
pleach: to interweave or braid
Ghosts and Vodka – “Futuristic Genitalia”
Addicts & Drunks
I’m not sure how to categorize this instrumental guitar play-date, but I love it anyway.
“Grand Piano keystone type, about 7 feet in length. Asexual in disposition, it serves as a pleasant-enough nap area for two toddlers curled in fetal position.”
Stills from North By Northwest
Literature, like virtue, is its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of a vast library, have far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches; that delicious beverage which they have swallowed, so thirstily, from the magical cup of literature.
Voltron Opening Theme (no narration)
A break from the usual. This one lacks the opening narration (“This… is the story… of the super force… of space explorers”) and lets you focus on the sweet horn breaks.
Post-Moon immigration form
Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation
So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.
Whitenessmovesdownward – “Decay / Renewal”
Meditation: Ground Zero
A bit of atmospheric electronic piano I collected around ten years ago, in the supreme madness of the Audiogalaxy years. Obscure to the point of near non-existence.
Steve (Mint Foundry)
Double exposure portrait (Dan Mountford)
Hydra (Albertus Seba)
Drafting My Fantasy Picks & Tackling Nobel Trends
“On Monday, me and some dudes are gonna tailgate outside the Kellogg School of Management before the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is announced. You should totally come. It’s gonna be ill. My pick to click this year is N. Gregory Mankiw. They’re gonna say it’s for his work on menu costs and price stickiness, but that’s bunk. It’s really so they can hand it over to someone who isn’t Paul Krugman.”
That can’t be good for the needle. (ishback)
Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Not sure how I missed this.
Men are continually in search of some sequestered retreat, some villa on the sea-shore, or on some airy mountain. And you, my friend, were formerly very much attached to retirement. But this is evidently a mere vulgar conception of things. You have it in your power, at any time and in any place, to retire into yourself; and where can a man find a more peaceful or more undisturbed repose than in his own soul? Especially one who, when he looks into his own breast, finds nothing there but a perfect calm; such a calm I mean as arises from order and well-regulated passions and affections.
