Bering in Mind: Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself
Jesse Bering: “I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article , ‘Suicide as Escape from the Self.’” An exploration of the six conditions that lead to suicide — academic, informative, and imploring.
“We forget that what we have is more than what we need. Obscenely more. I know it may sound perverse, but here in the future people often feel like they need more than they have.”
Popular Mechanics: How to Survive a 35,000-foot Fall
I saw this linked as a ‘great article from 2010’ and thought ‘WTF I read about this a long time ago’ and looked in my bookmark history, and there's this little page by David Carkeet (http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html), and this Popular Mechanics article makes no mention of that (why would it?) but it is totally great.
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence: Insurrectionism Timeline
Dozens of violent, fearful, hateful incidents from just the last three years, leading up to the recent shooting of Representative Giffords.
“On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the National Rifle Association’s contention that the Second Amendment provides individuals with the right to take violent action against our government should it become ‘tyrannical.’ The following timeline catalogues incidents of insurrectionist violence (or the promotion of such violence) that have occurred since that decision was issued.”
“It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”
waycooljnr: How to Get Your Music Reviewed on Pitchfork: An Interview with Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief
“What do you recommend is the best process for getting my music reviewed on Pitchfork?
“The easiest way to contact us to email and mail something to me directly, not just to the office. I would also read some reviews, find out which writers might like what you’re doing, and try to contact them directly. Targeting people who seem open to your music is an easy way to help it along. If you do send CDs, I would expect that a one-sheet, while it could be read, is more likely going to be discarded, so if you send a promo CD you should make sure any information that anyone might want– your website, short bio if needed, contact info for booking or PR if you have it, is on the back of the CD case itself.”
“The whole joy of hearing Minaj swoop through a bunch of different registers, for me, in this verse, is that all of them are the same person making the same point. They’re not in dialogue with one another!”
Clay Shirky: Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action
On Cablegate, especially how the Pentagon Papers and our basic societal comprises play. “Whatever happens, though, this is new ground, and needs to be hashed out as an exemplar of the clash of basic principles that it is.”
“The predictive power of an anxiety-prone temperament, such as it is, essentially works in just one direction: not by predicting what these children will become but by predicting what they will not. In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold. Still, while a Sylvia Plath almost certainly won’t grow up to be a Bill Clinton, she can either grow up to be anxious and suicidal, or simply a poet. Temperament is important, but life intervenes.”
“The piece is by Mathias Delplanque. Titled ‘Call Center,’ it’s recent a stereo reduction of a sound installation of his from several years back. It was part of an exhibition titled ‘Bombay Maximum City.’ The sounds, he reports, were ‘recorded during the summer of 2006 in a call center in Gurgaon (suburbs of New Delhi).’ The result is a half hour of sound that flirts with narrative, but also manages to transform the everyday into something sonically complex. That the source of the audio is itself such a quintessential emblem of technology, of globalism, of communication services, and of interpersonal mis-communication only adds to its impact.”
Nick Davies: The Julian Assange Investigation — Let's Clear the Air of Misinformation
“Bianca Jagger last week launched a fierce attack on the Guardian for carrying my story about the evidence collected by Swedish police who have been investigating the claims of sexual assault by the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. At the heart of her attack is a repeated claim that we failed to publish exculpatory evidence contained in the police file. Those who have read her piece will have noticed that she does not cite one single example of this missing information. There are two reasons for this. First, she does not know what is in that police file, because she has not read it. Second, if she had, she would know that her claim is simply not true.”
PopMatters: The Art of Falling Apart: ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’—Separated at Birth
“Both albums are like brainwashing, insular symphonies to a painfully reactive public awareness. The music doesn’t drive outward but, instead, falls inward, bouncing along the various fractured feelings of its singer and his mates. While ‘The National Anthem’ may suggest that ‘everyone is so near/everyone has got the fear’, the reality is that Yorke feels like a misidentified Pied Piper, the ‘rats and kids follow me out of town’ tenets of the Kid A title track pleading his case to be set free. This could be the main reason why the reaction to its release was so incredibly strong. Newness and novelty can help, but there is more to it than a differing direction. Kid A sounds like the start of a surreal psychological dissertation. Amnesiac occasionally comes across as whining.”
NYTimes.com: Kanye West, Still Unfiltered, on Eve of Fifth Album
Yeah, this is that nagging thing about MBDTF.
“On Monday Mr. West, who is 33, will release his fifth album, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, and it’s terrific — of course it’s terrific — a startlingly maximalist take on East Coast rap traditionalism. And yet that doesn’t matter nearly as much as it should, at least partly because of Mr. West’s insistence on his own greatness. By not allowing for responses to his work other than awe, the value of the work itself is diminished; it becomes an object of admiration, not of study. Instead the focus is on the whole of Mr. West’s persona and character, which is more fractured, and subject to a far wider range of responses. The result is that Mr. West becomes a polarizing public figure who happens to be the most artful pop musician of the day, not the other way around.”
Thoughts on the tendency of the internet to empower and break down niches.
“You can be a niche, but you’re a public niche, so you can’t expect to be left alone about it, or understood on your own terms. The internet makes niches possible, but it’s also a massive space in which loads of different people communicate — and spaces like that tend to pull everyone toward the middle, developing conventions and enforcing a cultural center. So far, this hasn’t stopped plenty of corners of the internet from getting extremely insular and specialized, but it’s still a form of cultural policing on this front.”
A nice abstract followed by and a very nice collection of tracks centered around the recently accelerating trend of breaking down, re-assembling, reinterpreting, and re-imagining the possibility of vocals in music. Every track mentioned here is a gem.
I was trying to think of who they missed here. DJ Nate, DJ Roc, and the rest of the Chicago juke scene come to mind, but that is not ‘atmospheric’ music like most of this list. Avey Tare. Aphex Twin.
“This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.”
Sites using Facebook’s ‘social plugins’ have been chewing up memory in my Safari (stemming from, I think, based on looking at the ‘Activity’ window, a blocked request returning an error and being requested over and over again). I’m still not sure what the issue was (AdBlock or Facebook Cleaner extension conflict, probably?), but with this extension the plugins don’t have a chance to load in the first place, which is fine because I never use them and I think they’re worthless and annoying.
“There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called ‘lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!’ or something like that. Most of them are marked as ‘public’, or ‘visible to everyone’. A lot of folks don‘t understand what that means in Facebook’s context — to Facebook, ‘everyone’ means everyone in the world, whether they’re a Facebook member or not. That includes automated programs like Evil, as well as search engines.”
Another ‘response album’ from Marc Weidenaum's blog minions, this a collection of recordings that use a human sigh as their source material. The response is to the grumpy, narrow-minded art critic Richard Dorment, who questioned the integrity and quality of artist Susan Philipsz’ Turner Prize-winning ‘Lowlands‘, as well as a number of other artistic endeavors that he considers unworthy of anything more than a ‘long low collective sigh’.
