"An older Walter Becker would later fancy his early-LA status as one-half of 'the Grateful Dead of Beverly Boulevard.'"
- posted by cjb @ 5:43 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 12:56 PM

 


Who the fuck forces a guy to play bop notes on an electric sitar?!! Who else would play 1967 instruments found on Doors and Beatles albums, pulsating to a Latin beat, with the chorus rife with chords more fit of hard bop and cool jazz artists. But yet the verses stutter step over only one chord!! E minor - like some weird Bavarian jazz Tomorrow Never Knows 

"Denny Dias’ hands until recently had been playing a Barney Kessel-styled jazzbo log, the sort of wood you could endanger a Tiger Stadium transformer with.

Dissatisfied with the setup, 'an offense to eyes and ears alike,' Becker and Fagen peeled off enough advance to outfit Denny with a Telecaster and Marshall half-stack aimed at teaching jazz slides to the previously unaware.

Before Denny could play with his new toys, though, Becker and Fagen decided to strap him to a Coral Electric Sitar...."
- posted by cjb @ 3:21 PM

 

"The 'Adorno-Ampel' (Adorno-traffic light) on Senckenberganlage, a street which divides the Institute for Social Research from Goethe University Frankfurt—Adorno requested its construction after a pedestrian death in 1962, and it was finally installed 25 years later." (Wikipedia)
- posted by cjb @ 11:00 PM

 
"The most prominent and largest smart contract to date, an investment vehicle called the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), enabled its members to invest directly using their private cryptographic keys to vote on what to invest in. No lawyers, no management fees, no opaque boardrooms, the DAO 'removes the ability of directors and fund managers to misdirect and waste investor funds.' And yet, due to a software bug, the DAO 'voted' to 'invest' $50m, a third of its members’ money, into a vehicle controlled by very clever programmers who knew a lot about recursion issues during balance updates. Some said this was a hack or an exploit because the software had not functioned as intended, while others said that there was no such thing as a hack — the whole point was that the software made decisions autonomously and there were no two ways to interpret it, and if you didn’t understand how the software worked you shouldn’t have participated. In the end, everyone got together and voted to retroactively amend the software contract and move the money back to its original owners. What’s the takeaway? Even the most die-hard blockchain enthusiasts actually want a bunch of humans arguing about the underlying intention behind a contract, rather than letting the software self-execute."
- posted by cjb @ 10:44 PM

 
The Wister Mud Pot Lineament: Southeastward Extension or Abandoned Strand of the San Andreas Fault?

"Abstract


- posted by cjb @ 6:33 PM

 
Open Letter: Against Westbank

"From this point forward, we, the undersigned, commit to not working for Westbank Corp in any capacity, including commissions for Westbank-sponsored public artworks.

In solidarity with communities facing gentrification, we disavow art that perpetuates and/or justifies the displacement of a wide range of demographics that include but are not limited to: long-term communities within the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown such as Indigenous peoples (whose violently stolen, unceded, traditional land we are guests on) and first generation Chinese (who live in Chinatown formed out of racial segregation in the late 18th century), working class families surrounding the Joyce Station development, artists and grassroots arts organizations and other non-profit organizations across unceded Coast Salish territory.

Westbank is not a cultural producer. Gentrification is not an art practice. It’s crucial that the colonial implications of Westbank’s development practices are recognized. By sustaining imperial narratives of an untouched, unclaimed city, developers play a part in the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples.

As Westbank continues to expand across Canada, we reject their efforts to instrumentalize artists and ‘cultural creators’ as their projects continue to deteriorate standards of living and ways of life.

The imperial developer 'aesthetic,' that treats housing as an elite commodity, rather than a right, is an insult to the notion of art itself. Westbank’s 'cultural practice' does not support artists; in reality, its real estate ventures are instrumental in the long-term disenfranchisement and precarity of the majority of working artists. Luxury developments artificially inflate property values driving rents skyward, and ultimately place artists’ homes, places of work, and livelihoods in perpetual uncertainty as a result.

We as artists come together in solidarity with our communities and all communities suffering in the face of ongoing housing crises. Westbank profits from these crises. We refuse their attempts to appropriate the vernacular of art, creativity, aesthetics, and to use the arts and artists as a facade from which they continue to strip culture and the communities that make it."

Signed by me, & many others
- posted by cjb @ 12:35 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Stephen Waddell, Hive Burner, 2017. Installation view courtesy the Polygon.
- posted by cjb @ 6:56 PM

 

NW: See?  It looks like a human being, but the shadow's wrong.

-or-

(William Friedkin remix)

NW: We may ask what is relevant, but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar, the demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Michael. And powerful. So don't listen, remember that, do not listen.
- posted by cjb @ 10:45 PM

 
"To sit back and be a spectator in your own life."  (John Le Carre)
- posted by cjb @ 10:34 PM