August 2, 2016
"Right here in the tree, my man."
Lionel Powell is an artist, a teacher, and TREEMAN — a Plantlike Amphibious Celestial Being in Venice Beach. [Vimeo, 2:47] [more inside]
Bivalve EHarmony Ads
Male bivalve looking for female (no hermaphrodites – I’m not prejudiced, just know what I like). Please be into drawing lots of water containing my sperm through your inhalant siphon. Reproduction not the goal for now.
$4,100 Gets You 6 Almonds
"During one of the hikes, she sat down in the middle of the trail and refused to go any further. She was screaming and crying, and then the trainer sat down next to her and realized she was high. Later, the program directors discovered she had a cache of pot brownies in her room. (Edible marijuana products were not on the DO NOT PACK list, specifically.)" Inside The Ranch 4.0 "wellness retreat" where celebrities and the wealthy drop in for long weekends of brutal exercise and just enough food deprivation to feel ecstatically light-headed.
Do not attempt to ford any river that is over 3 feet in depth
Little Jazz Man
will blow your mind.
Joey Alexander is an Indonesian jazz pianist and child prodigy. He released his first album, My Favorite Things, on May 12, 2015, at age 11. Joey is the youngest person to ever take the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. [more inside]
Americans call them...white trash. I call them... friends and family.
"Q: ...the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that?
J.D. Vance: I know exactly what you mean. My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively. She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it. “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”
An interview with J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a family and a culture in crisis. [more inside]
你为什么不
"Biologists have found that human language, like bird song, may evolve to accommodate its environment through acoustic adaptation. In the internet, a similar phenomenon happens to our visual languages: our memes hold something of the digital landscapes they proliferate in. In China, the digitally-active keep folders of 表情 (biǎo qíng) [gifs], which literally means “facial expression.”
An introductory field guide to the Chinese biaoqing.
An introductory field guide to the Chinese biaoqing.
VDAP turns 30
30 Years Saving Lives from Volcanoes VDAP was established in 1986 in response to the tragic eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia that killed more than 23,000 people. Recognizing that the tragedy could have been averted with assistance before the eruption, the USGS and USAID/OFDA formed VDAP.
An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest
Fluxblog 1980s Survey Mixes
Matthew Perpetua of the mp3 blog Fluxblog has curated a "series of survey mixes designed to give more context to the music of the 1980s. The frustrating thing about [how] we typically deal with cultural history is to focus on specific niches and canons, but in doing that, we lose track of parallel and overlapping cultural trends. I hope to create a set of collections that will give you – and me! – a better understanding of chronology for the music of this era, and to highlight a lot of music that for whatever reason usually gets cut out of retrospectives today." [more inside]
Now you're playing with POWER
"All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.”
Death metal band Dead Territory performs John Cage’s seminal avant-garde work 4’33”. A significantly different version, performed by EntertainmentMIG, demonstrates the range of expression and emotion that the work makes possible. Finally, drummer Edo Animus offers notes and outtakes on his solo performance. [more inside]
It's literally the worst thing created by humans as a species
Back to the future mixes / Radio DT64 / Paul Kalkbrenner
Musician Paul Kalkbrenner, perhaps best known for the (hard-to-get in region 1 but fantastic) movie Berlin Calling (trailer, Sky and Sand video, Revolte scene) grew up in East Berlin listening to electronic music on East-German Youth Radio DT64 (German wiki info, soundcloud archives). While reconnecting with memories of this time he has spent 18 months compiling a free 3-part mix series with 2 released so far, constructed from online recordings of DT64 broadcasts from the late 80s and early 90s, mostly from the years immediately after the wall fell until the station closed in 1993. [more inside]
Equal Pay For Comparable Work Becomes Law In Massachusetts
As of 2018, Massachusetts will bar employers from asking for salary history before making a job offer as part of a law mandating equal pay for comparable work. [more inside]
For Men* Who Desperately Need Autonomy
Nora Samaran writes on men, autonomy, and how it is created, not taken. "Emotionally immature men who believe that autonomy is something you take, rather than something you create, may live their lives in a continual nightmare of ‘needs they can’t meet’ that they never come to understand."
Part Two: The Tricks of Shame and Hope
Eureka! Mycorrhiza
Do trees communicate with each other? "If you're a mother and you have children, you recognise your children and you treat them in certain ways. We're finding that trees will do the same thing. They'll adjust their competitive behaviour to make room for their own kin and they send those signals through mycorrhizal networks."
anadramous techbros
A Blow to the Waxed-String-Industrial Complex
In a letter to the Associated Press, the US Department of Health and Human Services was unable to provide any evidence that flossing is an effective way to prevent gum disease or cavities. Its Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are required by law to be based on scientific evidence, had removed the section on flossing earlier this year.
Voter suppression in America
When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites. But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote. - From the county and town level to the state level, voter suppression in America is all about race.
"Toddlers and elderly women get to stand outside the male gaze."
Toddler Grandma Style, like any style, does have a message. The message is “boys, this isn’t about you.” [more inside]
Nate Wooley's guide to American Weirdos
[Nate Wooley, T]he New York trumpeter and composer celebrates the USA’s lesser known maverick composers. "So here I attempt to give positive form and definition to this term while presenting some music that exemplifies the work of those American weirdos that have inspired me in the past 15 years. I define the artists below as having committed themselves to working outside of an established musical dialectic. Instead, they hurl themselves into the void of an idea with only their personal context and history as aesthetic anchor points. The starting point of their work is self-contained. Tradition, history, theory be damned. "
I Saw the Number 9 in Gold
Tony Fitzpatrick's blog, No. 9: An Artist's Journey, is a gorgeous collection of drawing/collages from a former tattoo artist and boxer turned maker. His self-taught style will be familiar to fans of Steve Earle's albums; the Chicago-based artist's works also hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. [more inside]
Porta Polonica: culture and history of Poles in Germany
Porta Polonica is a site (courtesy of the Westphalian State Museum of Industrial Heritage) devoted to the culture and history of Poles in Germany. Some examples of the dozens of articles therein: an account of the novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s year in Berlin; a biography of the pioneering harpsichordist, pianist and composer Wanda Landowska; a piece about Jan Łukasiewicz, who devised what was once known as ‘Reverse Polish Notation’; a brief account of Rosa Luxemburg’s career; an article about star of stage & (silent) screen Pola Negri; and a piece about the letter ‘P’ worn by the millions of Polish forced labourers in wartime Germany.
Telefone, the vision and voice of Noname that is singularly her own
A few months back, Chance the Rapper released Coloring Book mixtape (Soundcloud), "one of the strongest rap albums released this year, an uplifting mix of spiritual and grounded that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to." (Pitchfork) That mixtape features a ton of guests, including Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Future, Justin Bieber ... and Noname. Who? She's a Chicago rapper, formerly known as Noname Gypsy, and with her own mixtape, Telefone (Soundcloud), she "has only further solidified her reputation as a deft and hyper-intelligent young rapper, at first a one woman Digable Planets for the melodic Chicago contemporary, but quickly something wholly unique." (Noisey/Vice)
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