November 24, 2018
The Refreshing Persistence of Memory
This is a fun and fascinating read, even/especially if you don't know anything about computer memory. It's wonderful to see someone chase down a question and leave such great trailsign for any who might want to follow.
Tapers: picking up the sound at its moment of creation for the future
Like every other part of the music world, taping has changed utterly in the digital age. Once dismissed as mere bootlegging, the surrounding attitudes, economies, and technologies have evolved. It's been a long haul since Dean Benedetti recorded Charlie Parker's solos on a wire recorder. In the '60s and '70s aspiring preservationists snuck reel-to-reel recorders into venues under battlefield conditions, scaling down to professional quality handheld cassette decks and eventually to DATs. From there, to laptops and finally to portable drives ... The Invisible Hit Parade: How Unofficial Recordings Have Flowered in the 21st Century -- Jesse Jarnow writing for Wired, linking the tech pioneers of the Grateful Dead (also Wired) to NYC Taper and others sharing on Etree.
The Mystery Font That Took Over New York
How did Choc, a quirky calligraphic typeface drawn by a French graphic designer in the 1950s, end up on storefronts everywhere? [NYT]
A small riot ensued
Magician, historian, and actor Ricky Jay has died at the age of 70, or thereabouts, his origins being appropriately shrouded in mystery.
Truth Sandwiches
How the media should respond to Trump’s lies: a linguist explains how Trump uses lies to divert attention from the “big truths.” "George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley ... recently published an article laying out the media’s dilemma. Trump’s 'big lie' strategy, he argues, is to 'exploit journalistic convention by providing rapid-fire news events for reporters to chase.' According to Lakoff, the president uses lies to divert attention from the 'big truths,' or the things he doesn’t want the media to cover. This allows Trump to create the controversies he wants and capitalize on the outrage and confusion they generate, while simultaneously stoking his base and forcing the press into the role of 'opposition party.'" [ViA] [more inside]
Nicolas Roeg 1928-2018
Nicolas Roeg, the visionary film director, has died aged 90. Starting as a tea boy, he worked his way up until by the 1960s he was the cinematographer on films such as Fahrenheit 451, The Masque of the Red Death and Far From the Madding Crowd. Performance, which he co-directed with Donald Cammell, was released in 1970 (after a two-year struggle with the studios), his first solo film Walkabout the following year and over the next twenty years he made startling, shocking and hugely influential films such as Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing and Insignificance. His films were marked in particular by a disorienting editing style, cutting backwards and forwards in time.
Cyril Pahinui, slack-key guitarist par excellence, 1950-2018
The "crown prince of Hawaiian slack-key guitar" died Nov. 11 at age 68. Pahinui, a National Heritage Fellow, is "widely recognized as one of Hawaii’s most gifted slack key guitarists and vocalists, whose technical virtuosity, rhythmic adaptations, and instrumental harmonics imparted the soul of Hawaiian music, and whose beautiful, emotive voice rendered an intimate picture of his Pacific island home." -- National Endowment for the Arts. Remembrances 1, 2. YouTube
Sir Kywalker, violer d’amores
"Finnegans Ewok". What I found interesting here was how little I had to change Joyce's original text. Tweak a couple of names and basically leave it otherwise as was. [more inside]
Victorian Culinary Trading Cards Are a Feast for the Eyes
Victorian Culinary Trading Cards Are a Feast for the Eyes. But maybe not for your stomach. In 1983, Nach Waxman sought to stock his new bookstore, Kitchen Arts & Letters, with curiosities that weren’t cookbooks. He soon discovered Victorian-era advertisements known as trade cards. “I thought it would be a really interesting item to have in the store,” he says. “They’re attractive images and they’re small, so people could frame them, put them in their room, and put them on their kitchen walls.” The name “trading cards” is thought to come from the phenomenon of collectors exchanging these cards, which advertised baking powder, Heinz tomato soup, and everything imaginable with images of chefs emerging from giant pickles and poetry-spouting pigs. [more inside]
Ramming speed, officer!
Met police driving cars into thieves on mopeds in crime crackdown — To reduce moped crime, London police use tougher tactics including marking spray, remote-controlled spikes to burst bike tyres, and ramming suspects' bikes [The Guardian, 11/24/2018].
Every Breath You Take
Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson recently partnered with Bay Area musicians for a 3-day performance event that "pulled back the curtain" on iconic pop love songs to reveal the misogynistic worldview they are steeped in. Music and culture writer Emma Silvers reflects on experiencing Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy. "These are the stories replaying in women’s heads, stories of rape and harassment and lechery and violence and condescension and the understanding that our lives do not belong to us. That we are object, never subject."
Comments Kendra McKinley, who worked with Icelandic musican Kjartan Sveinsson to arrange the 26 songs for the performance, "“The reality is that patriarchy is inescapable. And you can’t get out of it. It’s in the air we breathe.”
'Star' Track
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