Month: June 2022

Mat Johnson Interview – Fresh Air

On feeling pressure to push through his own frustrations because of what his ancestors endured

There’s so many times when things get really dark, whether it’s on a personal or societal level, the impulse is just to give up. And I think about that when I want to give up in different ways. Like, what I’m enduring is nothing compared to what my African ancestors endured, just in the sail from West Africa to the States, just that part alone, in addition to the 100 years of violent oppression and sexual assault.

And then on my white side and the Irish side, they came here from a place where they’re being starved to death. And they managed to just come out of incredibly bleak circumstances and make it across the sea and live in poverty for a couple of generations. And thank God for the GI Bill. …

I think putting it in that context is sometimes the only thing I can do that forces me to put my own frustrations and my own feelings of nihilism in perspective, because there’s an incredible strength in that, that people who endured the worst possible things that we can imagine … were able to have enough hope. Because that’s what it is — hope that tomorrow would be better. We’re talking about people whose kids were enslaved from the moment they came out of the womb. But they still had enough faith and hope that things could get better. And if they can do it, it seems insulting and disrespectful to their legacy if I don’t try to do that.

Fresh Air

See also: Ethical Obligation to be Optimistic

Voodoo Threauxdown Tour – Red Rocks – June 28, 2022

Trombone Shorty has announced the return of his all-star Voodoo Threauxdown in 2022 for a national tour featuring an incredible mix of beloved New Orleans artists.

In addition to headliner Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, the 2022 Voodoo Threauxdown tour will feature Tank and the Bangas, Big Freedia, Cyril Neville the Uptown Ruler, and The Soul Rebels. In addition, the tour will feature a very special tribute to the foundational work of funk pioneers The Meters led by founding bassist George Porter Jr. alongside modern-day torch-bearers Dumpstaphunk.

Trombone Shorty Plots 2022 ‘Voodoo Threauxdown’ Tour Ft. Tank And The Bangas, Big Freedia, George Porter Jr., More

Fantastic show. All the artists killed it.

The Detritus is the Good Stuff – Art School in the 90’s – Philosophy of Random Pics

Even so, RISD students were grounded in the visual arts, and trained to develop an eye for subject matter, color and composition, which carried over into their personal photography, said Whitney Bedford, 45, a painter in Los Angeles who graduated in 1998 who has submitted to the feed. “It was an art school, so more than our cohorts at Brown, we were the ones with the cameras,” she said. “But there wasn’t the self-awareness of today. It was about capturing the rhythm of life, not the pose.”

…

“And don’t forget,” Mr. Atkatz said, “you didn’t even know what the damned picture was going to look like for like two weeks. You would snap 24 pictures and then you hope some of them were good. And then you’d get it back and there would be one or two good photos, and a bunch of junk.”

This explains why so many of the shots on the feed are either underexposed, overexposed or framed as if the photographer were blindfolded. But that is the spirit of the enterprise, as well as the era. “That detritus,” Mr. Atkatz said, “is the good stuff.”

Art School Looked Like a Lot of Fun In the ’90s
A homage to a predigital era has popped up, as a crowdsourced art project that lives, paradoxically, on Instagram.

See also – Auggie’s Photo Album – Smoke

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion

Spyk124
It’ll be illegal to have an abortion in about 50 percent of states in a week. Including if you were raped. This is a dark day.

Edit: as of now, it is illegal in Kentucky, Louisiana , and South Dakota

Edit 2: now illegal in Missouri

Edit 3: not all trigger laws go into effect this second. Some will take a week or a month.

Edit 4: NPR

Edit 5: some states that have a trigger are waiting for the AG or other state actor to certify the laws. Hints why not all trigger laws went into effect immediately

Edit 6:

Abortions are illegal today: Kentucky , Louisiana , Missouri Oklahoma and South Dakota.

Bans that will absolutely come in the next days and weeks as a result of trigger laws are: Idaho , Mississippi , North Dakota, Tennessee , Texas, Utah, Wyoming

Weeks or months: Alabama , West Virginia , Arizona , Florida, Georgia , Ohio, South Carolina.

States with no incest or rape exceptions: Kentucky ,Louisiana , Missouri, South Dakota, Tennessee,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html -provided by u/supaZT

Eye Color in Literature, Significance of, Semiotic Meaning

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes, there’s so little choice . . .
Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty.
Her eyes are black: passion and depth.
Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy.
Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense.
Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes

Quote found in book:
What We See When We Read
Peter Mendelsund
A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.

Desultory Kierkegaard Quotes

No one teaches joy better than one who is joyful oneself.

Indeterminableness is the basis of dizziness … Therefore the remedy for dizziness is limitation; and in the spiritual sense all discipline is limitation.

The Omniscient One does not find out anything about the person confessing, but instead the person confessing finds out something about himself.

It is a slow death to let oneself be trampled to death by geese, and to let oneself be worn to death by envy is also a slow way of dying.

To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.

The Quotable Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard

Rolling Stones Setlist – Milan, June 21, 2022

Via @RollingStones on twitter. They do this for most shows I think. Ronnie Wood does the art.

Deeper cuts I had to look up (notes via Wikipedia):
Out of Time

“Out of Time” is a song by the Rolling Stones, first released on their 1966 album Aftermath (UK version). The most commercially successful version of the song was by Chris Farlowe, an English solo artist. Farlowe’s single, produced by Mick Jagger, peaked at number one in the UK Singles Chart on 28 July 1966 and stayed at the top for one week.[1] A shorter alternative mix of the Rolling Stones’ recording was released in the US in 1967 on the album Flowers. A third version featuring Jagger’s lead vocal and the orchestration and backing vocals from Farlowe’s cover version (plus a new female backing vocal) was released on the 1975 rarities album Metamorphosis and as a single.

The song was never performed live by the Stones until June 2022.[2]

Ghost Town

“Living in a Ghost Town” is a song by English rock band the Rolling Stones. The song was recorded during sessions of the Rolling Stones in 2019, ultimately being finished the following year. The track is reggae-influenced and features lyrics and a music video that reference the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released as a digital download and streaming single on 23 April 2020, through Polydor Records. The song was the Rolling Stones’ first single in four years and the first original material from the band since “Doom and Gloom” and “One More Shot” in 2012. It received generally positive reviews from music critics and was a commercial success, appearing on over a dozen sales and streaming charts.

Connection

“Connection” is a song by the English rock and roll band the Rolling Stones, featured on their 1967 album Between the Buttons. It was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (but mostly Richards), features vocals by both and is said to be about the long hours the band spent in airports. The lyrics contain much rhyming based on the word connection. The lyrics also reflect the pressures the band was under by 1967:

My bags they get a very close inspection, I wonder why it is that they suspect ’em, They’re dying to add me to their collection, And I don’t know, If they’ll let me go

Work Related Dreams, Hypnagogia, Tetris Effect, Example of

Most of the commercials we produced were thirty- and sixty-second spots for products like Maxwell House Coffee, Vicks Vaporub, Ajax (bum-bum, the foaming cleanser), Colgate Dental Cream, and other household products. Technically speaking, these early ads were the simplest work imaginable. There’s a dancing coffee pot or some such thing with a jingle about Maxwell House exploding flavor buds; cut to a man tasting a steaming cup of coffee while his lovely, crisp wife looks on expectantly; cut to the best take of his reaction (“Hmm, that’s delicious!”); cut to the sign-off; and you’re through. But nothing is ever that simple in the advertising business.
…
This kind of work was all right for a week or two. It had its curiosities. But after a few months at Tempo, I was morose and close to broken, for I knew I was using almost none of the skills that had landed me the job in the first place. At night bad dreams about exploding flavor buds and foaming cleansers with catchy jingles and forced smiles began to bother me. In the one nightmare I still recall, I was stuffed into a Maxwell House jar and exploded into ten thousand pieces when they poured the boiling water on me.

When The Shooting Stops … The Cutting Begins 
Ralph Rosenblum, Robert Karen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia