Banksy’s Latest Secret
I feel ambivalent about Banksy. I find some of his work really impressive, while other pieces are either a yawn, or overdone, or a yawn because they’re overdone. But taking over your hometown’s main...
View ArticleThat Lost Decade
George Carlin, remembering his early career: “I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing...
View ArticleAuden on the Usefulness of Critics
W.H. Auden, in the essay “Reading” from the collection The Dyer’s Hand: What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services: Introduce me to...
View ArticlePredicting the Participatory Nature of Electronic Culture — in 1964
No, I don’t mean Marshall McLuhan. I’m doing some research on Glenn Gould at the moment, and was floored at the prescience of this passage: “Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept...
View ArticleA Sense of Permission
Clay Shirky on Weekend Edition Saturday, with some emphasis added: The conversation around the digital divide, this gap between who can participate and who can’t, has shifted. In the ’90s, it was...
View ArticleWe’re All Busking Now…
Amanda Palmer said: artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art. artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of...
View ArticlePoems for Short-Haul Commuters, Etc.
“…so that might suit, say, a young couple just starting out in the catering business in the North Wales area?” — Fry & Laurie
View ArticleThe Airline Industry as a Work of Art
In an excerpt from from his recent project “A Week at The Airport“, Alain de Botton interviews the head of British Airways, and considers the true yield of ‘profitless’ industries: “Considered...
View Article“Eventually you get to Sentence Z.”
William Zinsser: The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume, is that most people now get their information from random images on a...
View Article“I would be very unhappy as a 19th-Century Man”
“I couldn’t imagine a life in which I would not be surrounded by music. It shelters you from the world, which protects you, which keeps you at a certain distance from the world. Because I think that...
View ArticleWhy would they want to do that?
Dave Allen: We live in interesting times. When The Guardian has an article with a headline that asks “Will Radiohead’s The King of Limbs save the music industry?” You have to laugh. Why would they want...
View ArticlePersona Swarm
From Ars Technica: In June 2010, the government was expressing real interest in social networks. The Air Force issued a public request for “persona management software,” which might sound boring until...
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On Sharing
From “I Thought You Were a Poet” by Joshua Mehigan: It seems to me that narcissism is ineluctably at the heart of poetry, maybe of every human enterprise. One-third of people will think I’m an idiot...
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