Citizens know the deep rules of their society by intuition and habit and become expressly conscious of those rules only when the order they secure is disintegrating. (Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers p11-12)

Here's a photo I took at a Walkmen show in D.C. last year. The Walkmen's last record was pretty good, but better live and in the front row. Did you know that almost every venue has two sound mixes, one that plays out of the speakers toward the band, and one that plays out into the audience? That's why when most singers request something like "more reverb" they are talking about the mix facing the stage and the audience can't hear a difference.

Unrelated: creating "protected" .pdf files that text cannot be cut from is pure malevolence. Trust your readers and don't do that.

Unrelated: early spring weather is great for The Descendents and Big Star. Loud.


Unrelated: a good post from PTP.

ART SALE

Download the 2010 brochure "ASCII RUGS" for free here: http://www.mediafire.com/?jdzx5qtk98r3ux6

Let's all make rugs

Click to view

When I came to print the negative an odd thing struck my eye. Something, standing in the cross-street and invisible to me, was reflected in a factory window and then reflected once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door. It was only a tiny detail. Since then, I have enlarged the negative enormously. The grain of the film all but obliterates the features of the image. It is obscure. By any possible reckoning it is hopelessly ambiguous. Nevertheless, what I believe I see recorded in that speck of film fills me with such fear, such utter dread and loathing that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph. Here it is! Look at it! Do you see what I see?

-Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia)

To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's 'radiant,' and a spring not quite a spring unless it is 'limpid.' Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.

Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he'd drowned himself in work, Japanese-style, like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then, in the month of May, he killed himself. They say he could not stand to hear the word 'spring.'

-Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

"Freud remained deeply suspicious of philosophers and their speculations. Fond of repeating his conviction that psychoanalysis has little to learn from philosophy, he more than once compared philosophical systems to the delusions of paranoiacs and suggested that the primary impact of psychoanalysis on philosophy might consist in affording new insight into the personal quirks that motivate philosophical theory-building. The most common error of philosophers, he thought, is their restriction of the sphere of the mental life to conscious activity. But equally questionable is their tendency to project for themselves a seamless account of reality, their penchant for 'clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe that is without gaps and is coherent' (SE, 22:160). Among Freud's favorite quotations was Heine's derisive caricature of the philosopher: 'With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe' (SE, 22:161)."

-Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher p. 283

(Illustration: Magritte, Philosopher's Lamp)