Dear Brittany: Our lives are worth living, even with brain cancer
Philip you look just like this guy (he is slightly more handsome), and you’re a seminarian too!
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A car swerved in front of me this morning, at five miles per hour,
edging out advantage one car length at a time
I thought, robotically, “I hope you’re happy with that decision.”
After one hundred mindless repeats of this scene
I came to the emptiness of my words
and so uncovered the truth in them, as they were converted to prayer
I hope you’re happy with that decision.
After a brief hiatus that saw Jones cleanse himself in the beauty of Israel, SCC is back with a video for their track “Small Circle Clique”.
The master of organized noise and melodic dissonance resets your ears. Tim Hecker live and direct from the Knockdown Center in Queens, NYC.
BAMFOTD
Robert Smalls of South Carolina was an enslaved ship’s pilot for the Confederacy when he decided to seize a transport vessel and trade it for his freedom.
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What newlyweds and vagabonds have in common is their proclivity to fall off the map—for leisure, for space to breathe without judgment, for peace. Their simplicity of presence alludes to prior months of twists and turns, sleepless nights, and good stories. Everyone who meets them sees the tales in their eyes. In the past 24 months, we’ve found ourselves somewhere between the honeymooner and the pilgrim, caught up in our mutual wanderlust and ambition, telling our stories to the wind and the people we meet. And since you’re tuned in, we’ll tell you as well.
Red, red roofs.
We are back in sleepy Umbria, with the sandal dust of Roman vacationers still hanging in the air and the abating September sun warming us without scorching. But we came here by way of France. We love France for the same general reasons we love Italy: food, wine, art and nature. We saw Giverney, the home of Monet, and it opened our eyes to some of the crown jewels of human achievement. The French are masters of exploiting—in the best sense of the term. They mine cobalt and make blue like you’ve never seen it. The Eiffel tower, above all, points to what nature can provide but where it cannot go. The hedges make right-angle turns, and lead you into manicured gardens of chrome green and cadmium yellow.
Monet’s Gardens in Giverney.
But we had an itch no Gaul could scratch. Both these countries know food and art, but they are so very different. Italy knows blue, but not neon. The French know the lead white of the Sacre Coeur, but cannot bear chipping paint. Italians build monuments and wait for them to be seasoned by time and vine. What one culture calls entropy, the other calls maturation. The difference between “faded” and “pastel” is a matter of which side of the Alps you find yourself. Similarly, Italian food is crafted without being concocted. It just is. Fettunta, toasted bread scraped with garlic and slathered with olive oil, did not need to be invented—it simply needed to be cherished, to be put on the same pedestal as chateaubriand with bernaise sauce. The illumination and splendor of France made us proud to be human, but the timeless splendor of Italy makes us thankful to be earthlings. And since we are in Italy, writing about France, you know where our allegiances lie.
Since purchasing la Fattoria del Gelso three years ago, we have developed business models and battled bureaucracy and by all accounts we’ve come away victorious, or at least more festively plump. But our time in France helped remind us that the hardest part of our future work has already been done by forces that came before us. Our task is to curate. Our charge is to explore, to fall in love, and to tell a good story. Come visit us.
Seiko Ito is an unbelievable artist, an avid chess player, producer and crate digger. His twitter account is a goldmine. The ruminations on his blog, especially about chess, are quite good. DJ Baku has him on his album Dharma Dance. He rubs elbows with Yann Tobika- a legend in his own right.
Yann Tomita lookin’ like the Bodhidharma of the transistor
I heard his album Mess/Age today and it really moved me– and I don’t speak a lick of Japanese yet. It’s the sort of album that makes me WANT to learn Japanese. I want to be this man’s apprentice- pack up my family’s bags, move to Japan and learn under his wing.
“Medieval dream arrives in the flesh. Hanaregumi currently playing. the sophistication N ｰｰｰ: RT @ TANSHOKOICHI! ! ! !”
Mess/Age is an album talking about looking backward, and yet this masterpiece is timeless and sounds as though it was written in 2012. In 1989 Grandmaster Flash was doing something similar across the pond, and De La Soul was just beginning to harness this energy, flow and sample layering. As with all breathrough albums, it transcends genres. “To the Max” is unbelievable rhythm. Seiko Ito sounds caught between Gang of Four and Sonic Youth in conversation, but creating a product totally original, organically grown. “Etsu Atsu O” at 1:14 plays on what is today one of the heaviest-sampled clips ever, like he just read the future of hip hop.
From Hip Hop Japan:
One of the pioneers of Japanese hip-hop, Ito Seiko, offers telling insights into the politics of language and identity on his 1989 album Mess/Age. The double entendre of the album’s title captures a duality that Ito puts foremost in his work, namely, that a crative reworking of an era (“age”) that had become a “mess” could arise through the serendipitous cross-language fertilization of his “message.” In one song, he looks back ninety years, calling the end of the century “just a rumor” (uwasa dake no seikimatsu) because before the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan did not use the Western calendar. “It was Japan’s first end of the century.” he raps, “but no one noticed that.” Importantly, Ito views this not as an imposition of Western ways of thinking, but rather as the emergence of a widespread Japanese desire to topple old elitist Japanese ways, a desire spread by word of mouth.
I’ll do a study of his samples, and I’m pretty sure Madlib has found this record and lifted the chords from “Da Da Muffin” for a remix of a Quasimoto track. He himself samples “The Champ” by The Mohawks long before KRS did and a year before Eric B did; he was tuned into the Triple Threat as well.
Special for the day – Come on feet IRL:
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#newhome #dc #brookland #markhunterbrown #artonwhite
A group of researchers from Switzerland and Canada, led by Frédéric Dupuis, showed that it’s possible to encode large messages with relatively small quantum encryption keys, which are keys made up of subatomic particles or photons. But the result implies something else: If someone could pull out information that is encrypted quantum mechanically in a message between two parties, the same feat should work in nature. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Quantum Particles Explained]
via Mathematics Links Quantum Encryption and Black Holes | Space.com.
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