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Good interview.

This is important.

The elusive singer/songwriter attempts to talk about his own mysteriousness without giving any of it up and offers insights on death, comedy, and his pair of 2011 albums, WIT'S END and Humor Risk.

Counterpoint, consistency, and variety.

‘There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.’

‘The emergence of the Social Media Exile essay has been swift and smug. A language expert dissects a genre while also being seduced by its allure.’

‘Every artist deals with critics differently—Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead, for example. But the rule is to avoid direct contact. Not for John Warner, debut novelist, who decided to seek out the man behind his worst review.’

What privilege is.

Good interview.

‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was ‘Hard in da Paint’.

‘Rooney was an unremarkable, cranky bore whose bitching about simple annoyances struck a nerve with other aging white people who were frightened by or opposed to change.’

As Paul Irish put it, ‘Some of the finest research and writing about HTML & CSS & JS.’

‘Upon reflection, it is very obvious where the problems are. There’s no universal health care to handle the randomness of poor health. There’s no free higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. Our bankruptcy code has been rewritten by the top 1% when instead, it needs to be a defense against their need to shove inequality-driven debt at populations. And finally, there’s no basic income guaranteed to each citizen to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay. We have piecemeal, leaky versions of each of these in our current liberal social safety net. Having collated all these responses, I think completing these projects should be the ultimate goal of the 99%.’

Great photos from Hallowbaloo this year, including the Baths show that I opened!

The sweatshops, the censorship and authoritarianism, the ‘rough treatment of underlings’.

‘If we stop looking to the past, we might realize that we’re living in a golden age of music listening and discussion. The Internet has enabled more people to hear more music than at any point in human history. More people are writing about music than ever — on websites, on personal blogs and Facebook pages.’

‘once something seizes the public imagination, stuff can happen way faster than you would expect or completely unanticipated things can change everybody’s perception of the situation. So I think what it has the functionality to be is a catalyst for changes we can’t even imagine right now.’

‘If Occupy Wall Street can do that — if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness — it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement.’

‘One good indicator of this norm’s normalness? The main criticism you hear about this kind of record—even outweighing references to Starbucks and/or the bourgeoisie—is that it is just too dull to even bother producing any more complex indictment of it. These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.’

‘For most people today (9/27/2011) running a typical system, try not to go over 30,000 songs if you value the user experience. There is no doubt this will not be an issue in the future.’

‘The script is called coordinate, and it works like this: While I’m taking a bunch of photos at a spot with the G10, I take a single photo with the iPhone. When I have all the images transferred to my computer I run `coordinate -g iphone.jpg IMG*` and the GPS data is read from the iPhone image (iphone.jpg) and copied to all the files from the G10 (IMG*). Boom.’

‘Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the full transcript of his speech.’ “So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main street, not Wall street,” but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest.”

‘Today corporations are becoming the single most powerful force shaping our societies and governments. While corporations have great potential to benefit society and even governments, they are entirely selfish entities – they have no accountability to the public, and no responsibility to ensure the public good. A government that is influenced by corporations can easily become a government that caters to corporations, a government that is effectively run by corporations. Such a government is not representative of its people anymore. It is therefore not a democracy.’

‘Financial struggles are isolating. We don’t talk about them—so we don’t realize how universal they are. And because we careful ignore them, we don’t give them a high priority. We worry about airport security. Or a celebrity scandal. Or something Newt Gingrich (who’s still there) said. We don’t communally address the problems that may be most important to us.’

Background images. Paper, stone, lines, patterns, pool table. Very nice. ‘Free textures for your next web project.’

‘There are some particular findings that are pivotal to issues such as readership and readability and comprehension, which is really what body copy is all about. If people won’t read it, or if they can’t read it or understand it, then what’s the point of having it?’

A successful one from April!

‘Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.’