Brian Eno

How To Destroy Angels

Robert Rauschenberg
via:

Robert Farber, Bonnie on the Floor
via:

Dysphoria

via: Jason Bradshaw, Boredom Pays

Your Guide to Life Under the Copyright Alert System

The Copyright Alerts System (CAS) is set to go live soon [ed. next week]. If you're an executive at a major content company like Fox or Universal, you might consider this good news.

For everyone else, well, it's complicated. The CAS has been in the works for years now—you may have heard it mentioned under other names, like the “Six Strikes” system—so it can be kind of a mess to make sense of it now that it's about to take effect.

We've put together a quick guide to give you a sense of the new state of the Internet in the U.S.

What is the CAS?

It's an agreement between the five largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in the country and major content companies, such as music studios and record labels. It aims to cut down on illegal filesharing.

Does it directly affect me?

If you use AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, or Verizon to get online at home, then yes. It's either now part of your terms of service or it's about to be.

How does it work?

It's an automated "graduated response" system, meaning it slowly ramps up your punishments each time it thinks you're pirating files. The first two times, you just receive an email and a voicemail saying you've been caught. The third and fourth times, you're redirected to some "educational" material, and you'll have to click that you understood it. The fifth and sixth times, it gets serious: Your Internet connection can be slowed to a crawl for a few days.

Then what happens?

Then, well, you've "graduated" from the system. No more alerts. Congrats! The CAS won't hamper you any more. Except the content companies might now try to sue you as a serial pirate. And the fact that you've been cited six times already for copyright infringement will likely be used in court against you.

by Kevin Collier, Daily Dot |  Read more:
Image by Jason Reed

In Pursuit of Taste, en Masse

Americans didn’t always ask so many questions or expect so much in their quest for enjoyment. It was enough for them simply to savor a good cigar, a nice bottle of wine or a tasty morsel of cheese.

Not anymore. Driven by a relentless quest for “the best,” we increasingly see every item we place in our grocery basket or Internet shopping cart as a reflection of our discrimination and taste. We are not consumers. We have a higher calling. We are connoisseurs.

Connoisseurship has never been more popular. Long confined to the serious appreciation of high art and classical music, it is now applied to an endless cascade of pursuits. Leading publications, including The New York Times, routinely discuss the connoisseurship of coffee, cupcakes and craft beers; of cars, watches, fountain pens, lunchboxes, stereo systems and computers; of tacos, pizza, pickles, chocolate, mayonnaise, cutlery and light (yes, light, which is not to be confused with the specialized connoisseurship of lighting). And the Grateful Dead, of course.

This democratization of connoisseurship is somewhat surprising since as recently as the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s connoisseurship was a “dirty word” — considered “elitist, artificial, subjective and mostly imaginary,” said Laurence B. Kanter, chief curator of the Yale University Art Gallery. Today, it is a vital expression of how many of us we want to see, and distinguish, ourselves.

As its wide embrace opens a window onto the culture and psychology of contemporary America, it raises an intriguing question: If almost anything can be an object of connoisseurship — and if, by implication, almost anyone can be a connoisseur — does the concept still suggest the fine and rare qualities that make it so appealing?

by J. Peter Zane, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo:Narong Sangnak/European Pressphoto Agency

Two Years

[ed. It's our second anniversary! Thanks to everyone who's ever stopped by, I hope you've found something interesting to take with you. We'll try to make year three even better.]

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Nikolai Astrup Midsummer Eve Bonfire
via:

Iditarod Trails Athlete Beats Path Toward Nome

Nobody would pick Tim Hewitt out of a line up as an ultimate Alaska hard man. He is small, wiry, graying, and damn near 60 years old. Not only that, the guy doesn't even live in Alaska. His real life is as a Pennsylvania attorney. Rather, Hewitt is a visitor to the north, a throwback to those Alaskans and visitors of old who made their money in gold during the summer months and "wintered out," as they used to say, in Seattle or San Francisco or somewhere more hospitable.

Only Hewitt doesn't winter out. Hewitt summers out and comes here in winter to hike the Iditarod Trail, the whole 1,000 miles of it from the old Cook Inlet port of Knik north through the frozen heart of the 49th state to the still-thriving gold-mining community of Nome on the Bering Sea. He's already done this six times, more than any person alive. He's back for the seventh try this year.

The desolate, lonely, little-traveled Iditarod in winter offers what Hewitt considers the ultimate "vacation." Forget the howling winds of the Alaska Range or Bering Sea coast that can knock a man off his feet. Ignore the brutal, 50-degree-below-zero cold of the Interior that killed the protagonist in author Jack London's classic short story "To Build a Fire.'' Just keep moving and you'll be fine. That's Hewitt's mantra.

The man doesn't belong in this century. He would fit better in the Alaska of 1913 than that of 2013. He doesn't seem to understand that the serious Iditarod competitions of the modern day are dominated by the gas-powered, fire-breathing snowmobiles of the Iron Dog that can hit 100 mph, and Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race canines that are now more hound than husky, pulling carbon-fiber dogsleds driven by professional mushers with celebrity-size egos.

Hewitt seems to have no ego, though he should. Last year he accomplished a feat unimaginable in the world of human-powered endurance competitions. He led the Iditarod Trail Invitational race for about 200 miles to the crest of the Alaska Range. The Invitational is an event open to anyone and any machine powered by human muscles. Like Hewitt, it is a throwback to days when people competed in sport for the sheer joy of competition, not for the money, nor even for the glory.

The Invitational offers no cash prize, and there is little fame attached to success outside the small world of extreme endurance athletes. Who knows, for instance, that Hewitt set a foot-racing record for the Iditarod on the fifth of his six trips up the trail?

He made it to Nome in 20 days, 7 hours and 17 minutes in 2011. That is a little more than seven hours faster than the time it took the dog team of the late Carl Huntington, the only musher in history to win both the Iditarod and Fur Rendezvous World Championship sprint race, to reach the finish line during his victorious Iditarod of 1974.

by Craig Medred, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Photo: Craig Medred

Gordon Parks
via:

Jonathan Lichtfeld
via:

I'm a Shut-in. This is My Story.

[ed. Once in a while something really amazing comes completely out of left field. Like this. There's an extraordinarily talented writer at work here.]

For five years I have been a recluse. I don't leave the house for months at a time1. I venture out into the world only when it is necessary to maintain my isolation. I'm not agoraphobic, I'm not depressed, and I'm not insane 2. I simply don't socialize.

There are a lot of names for people like me. We are called shut-ins, hermits, recluses and so on. These words mean different things depending on what media you have been exposed to. To some, a hermit is a monastic human living high in the Himalayas connecting with his inner self through meditation and isolation. Some picture a crazy, bearded, old fellow, cooking up whiskey deep in the Appalachian wilderness. Some picture a Howard Hughes type, they imagine man that harvests his fignernails and wears tinfoil hats to keep the aliens out.

Preconceptions are a difficult thing to overcome. The meanings we assume of words are our biggest obstacle to communication. Instead of fighting an uphill battle against meanings, let us leave the words we know behind and introduce a new one.

Hikikomori is a Japanese word which means "pulling inward". It has been used as a label to describe an emerging phenomenon in Japan, that of adolescents withdrawing from the world. We aren't going to stick to any hard definitions of hikikimori. Instead, we are going to use it only as a convenient placeholder to refer to a spectrum of individuals similar to, but not necessarily, like me.

The label will be used as a tool in uncovering meaning, it wont be the meaning; meaning is not a label. Set aside any biases, hold back any prejudices and save judgment for later. We can always figure out how to flame me later. Complimentary rocks and pitchforks will be provided next to the comment section.

You don't just get up one day and say "Fuck it, people suck. I'm not going out anymore". It's not that you cant do that, believe me, there are people that can and do, it's just that the world wont let you. If you just quit the world immediately, without any warning, then the world freaks out; a million text messages will be sent, cops will be called to check on you, interventions will be held, walruses will be dispatched on rescue scooters. Well not that last one, but I have to keep you, the reader, on your toes. (...)

I have never emotionally imploded but I imagine it's much like a Californication episode or one of those coming of age novels where the depressed protagonist loves that girl but that girl doesn't love him so he like is all sad about unrequited love so he gets really down and does something stupid like take a lot of pills and try to ride his bike 4 and then through a series of unlikely events he meets this manic pixie dream girl let's call her Sam and she is like all kinds of adorkable and she has them anime eyes and she has this friend Garry that is a little bit Autistic and he thinks the whole world is actually just a run-on story on a collision course with a period and if they don't act exactly like the teenager writing style trope they will all die and the protagonist is taught how to live and falls in love and they.

The point is that you cant just up and quit the world. To leave the world completely one has to cut ties slowly and steadily. You have to tug, warp, twist and tear at your connections until they're stressed enough to break. It takes systematic and conscious effort to leave the world.

It takes a "special" type of person to be willing to be push everything and everyone away until nothing is left. To understand how I became such a "special" person, we have to start at my beginning. This is the story of how I faded from the world.

by K-2052 |  Read more:

h/t Longreads

Nan Goldin, Shape Shifting 2, 2010.
via:

Marc Ribot Y Los Cubanos Postizos

Patti Smith: Just Kids

[ed. Just finishing this and it's very good. I wasn't much interested when it first came out (not that much of a PS fan) but I picked up a copy at the used bookstore and realized it's as much about Robert Mapplethorpe as it is Patti Smith - as the review says, a twofer. Leaves you with the sense of a uniquely complex and loving relationship.]

Apart from a certain shared apprehension of immortality — complacent in one case, but endearingly gingerly in the other — the skinny 28-year-old on the cover of Patti Smith’s seismic 1975 album, “Horses,” doesn’t look much at all like Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. But because the shutterbug was Robert Mapplethorpe, who was soon to become fairly legendary himself, that exquisite photograph of Smith on the brink of fame is as close as New York’s 1970s avant-garde ever came to a comparable twofer. The mythmaking bonus is that the latter-day duo were much more genuinely kindred spirits.

Born weeks apart in 1946, Smith and Mapple­thorpe played Mutt and Jeff from their first meeting in 1967 through his death from AIDS more than 20 years later. They were lovers as well until he came out of the closet with more anguish than anyone familiar with his bold later career as gay sexuality’s answer to Mathew Brady (and Jesse Helms’s N.E.A. nemesis) is likely to find credible. Yet his Catholic upbringing had been conservative enough that he and Smith had to fake being married for his parents’ sake during their liaison.

Though Smith moved on to other partners, including the playwright Sam Shepard and the Blue Oyster Cult keyboardist-guitarist Allen Lanier, her attachment to Mapplethorpe didn’t wane. After years of mimicking her betters at poetry, she found her calling — “Three chords merged with the power of the word,” to quote the memorable slogan she came up with — at around the same time he quit mimicking his betters at bricolage to turn photographer full time. “Patti, you got famous before me,” he half-moped and half-teased when “Because the Night,” her only genuine hit single, went Top 20 in 1978. Even so, his “before” turned out to be prescient. (...)

No nostalgist about her formative years, Smith makes us feel the pinched prospects that led her to ditch New Jersey for a vagabond life in Manhattan. Her mother’s parting gift was a waitress’s uniform: “You’ll never make it as a waitress, but I’ll stake you anyway.” That prediction came true, but Smith did better — dressed as “Anna Karina in ‘Bande à Part,’ ” a uniform of another sort — clerking at Scribner’s bookstore. That job left Mapplethorpe free to doodle while she earned their keep, which she didn’t mind. “My temperament was sturdier,” she explains, something her descriptions of his moues confirm. Even when they were poor and unknown, he spent more time deciding which outfit to wear than some of us do on our taxes.

Soon they were ensconced at “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone”: the Chelsea Hotel, home to a now fabled gallery of eccentrics and luminaries that included Harry Smith, the compiler of “The Anthology of American Folk Music” and the subject of some of her most affectionately exasperated reminiscences. For respite, there was Coney Island, where a coffee shack gives Smith one of her best time-capsule moments: “Pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register.” That “and the astronauts” is so perfect you wouldn’t be sure whether to give her more credit for remembering it or inventing it.

Valhalla for them both was the back room at Max’s Kansas City, where Andy Warhol, Mapplethorpe’s idol, once held court. By the time they reached the sanctum, though, Warhol was in seclusion after his shooting by Valerie Solanas in 1968, leaving would-be courtiers and Factory hopefuls “auditioning for a phantom.” Smith also wasn’t as smitten as Mapple­thorpe with Warhol’s sensibility: “I hated the soup and felt little for the can,” she says flatly, leaving us not only chortling at her terseness but marveling at the distinction. Yet Pop Art’s Wizard of Oz looms over “Just Kids” even in absentia, culminating in a lovely image of a Manhattan snowfall — as “white and fleeting as Warhol’s hair” — on the night of his death.

Inevitably, celebrity cameos abound. They range from Smith’s brief encounter with Salvador Dalí — “Just another day at the Chelsea,” she sighs — to her vivid sketch of the young Sam Shepard, with whom she collaborated on the play “Cowboy Mouth.” Among the most charming vignettes is her attempted pickup in an automat (“a real Tex Avery eatery”) by Allen Ginsberg, who buys the impoverished Smith a sandwich under the impression she’s an unusually striking boy. The androgynous and bony look she was to make so charismatic with Mapplethorpe’s help down the road apparently confused others as well: “You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian,” one wit complains. “What do you actually do?”

by Tom Carson, NY Times |  Read more:
Photos: Just Kids, Patti Smith

David Lynch Is Back … as a Guru of Transcendental Meditation

Inside David Lynch’s bunker of a studio in Los Angeles, a small crowd of happy people gathered on a late summer morning to meditate and learn about the nature of consciousness. The dozen or so young actors and musicians and others were recent initiates of Transcendental Meditation, a trademarked form of relaxation that involves sitting quietly and saying a mantra to yourself for 20 minutes twice a day. T.M. initiation — a multiday instruction program that includes the bestowing of a secret personalized mantra — costs, on average, $1,000. But those gathered had been initiated as a gift of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Through its work, Lynch, who has been practicing T.M. for 40 years, hopes to teach meditation to the world and, as a result, create world peace.  (...)

Near a window that looked out onto the Hollywood Hills, a large, framed, pastel poster was set up. Standing beside it was Lynn Kaplan, a dark-haired, energetic woman who works for Lynch’s foundation, which is based in Manhattan. Kaplan had assembled this group of young talent and personally initiated each one with their own mantra. “This is where the mantra comes from,” Kaplan explained, gesturing toward the evolutionary pictogram of Indian men radiating light. At the base stood a small man in a white robe, his hands clasped. This was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, she said, the late founder of the T.M. movement and Lynch’s guru. Beneath him floated a pastel world, glowing.

Word came that Lynch was on his way down, and the crowd shuffled over to his in-house recording studio and screening room, settling into built-in, modern easy chairs. Lynch slunk in through a side door, casting a leery eye up at his audience. He took a seat near the wall, looking uncomfortable. Everyone fell silent. Lynch was stylishly rumpled. His frame was lean and his hair was pomaded loosely into a mature faux-hawk. He wore faded khaki pants that bloused over a worn leather belt. In the breast pocket of his white dress shirt, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes was at the ready. Lynch is a notorious creature of habit: he spent seven years drinking the same chocolate milkshake at the same time every day from Bob’s Big Boy in L.A., because he thought it affected his creative process; and part of his persona is his uniform approach to dress. That day, a yellow watch gave a flash of color.

Lynch, 67, has the plain-spoken demeanor of an old cowboy actor, a posture that masks a lifelong fear of public speaking. When his quietness got uncomfortable, Kaplan announced the start of a short meditation. For 10 minutes, the soundproofed room was dead silent. When it was over, Lynch stood up, refreshed. “So, do you guys have any questions?” he asked.

Kat Dennings’s boyfriend raised his hand and asked how he started meditation. Lynch made a funny face — he has answered this question a hundred times, all over the world. “I started here in Los Angeles on July 1, around 11 o’clock in the morning, a beautiful Saturday sunny day in 1973.” The group laughed at his exactness. “It was just yesterday,” he said softly. He continued: “I always tell the same story. The Beatles were over with Maharishi in India and lots of people were getting hip to Transcendental Meditation and different kinds of meditation, and I thought it was real baloney.” There was a knowing murmur — those in the audience had once had their doubts, too. “I thought I would become a raisin-and-nut eater, and I just wanted to work. And then all of a sudden, I heard this phrase, ‘True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.’ And this phrase had a ring of truth.”

by Claire Hoffman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: David Lynch

Leonardo Cremonini

via:

What Marriage is For

On Thursday, Theodore Olson and David Boies, the Odd Couple of lawyers who have brought the constitutionality of same-sex-marriage bans before the Supreme Court, filed a brief that previews the arguments they will present to the Justices on March 26th. The most powerful rhetorical move they make in it—and it’s about time—is to flip the main argument against same-sex marriage on its head. Opponents, including the lawyers for California’s 2008 ban on gay marriage, Proposition 8, contend that allowing gays and lesbians to marry redefines marriage. But Olson and Boies argue that by rooting the meaning of marriage so firmly in procreation it’s in fact their opponents who are doing the redefining: they who have proposed “a cramped definition of marriage as a utilitarian incentive devised by and put into service by the state—society’s way of channeling heterosexual potential parents into ‘responsible procreation.’ ” For most Americans—and though the brief doesn’t offer data for this, it rings true—marriage is about throwing your lot in with someone you love and building a publically acknowledged family, with or without children. It has less to do with the state’s interests in promoting childbearing—a touchstone to which the Prop. 8 defenders return again and again—than it does with individual lives and the pursuit of happiness.  (...)

Virtually no one objects to people past reproductive age marrying, let alone infertile people or those who simply choose not to have children. Indeed, as Olson and Boies point out, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of married couples not to procreate—in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that found a “right to marital privacy” included access to birth control. The Court has upheld the right of incarcerated people to marry even when they would not be allowed conjugal visits, explicitly endorsing uses and virtues of marriage beyond the reproductive. These are hard precedents to get around if you are basing much of your argument, as the proponents of Prop. 8 seem to be doing, on the definition of marriage as a child-producing institution for heterosexual couples.

by Margaret Talbot, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Michael Buckner/Getty