Album cover for George Benson’s The Other Side of Abbey Road.
11/08/2009
11/08/2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Hubert Laws - “Moment’s Notice”. Laying down the law, here’s some jazz flute, for your inner Ron Burgundy, ripping through the Coltrane changes.
(Plays: 31)
11/08/2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Interview with John Coltrane in Stockholm Sweden circa 1960 where he gives a valuable lesson on the iteration of ideas in parallel in the eternal search for a more lyrical line. The nod to Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon made me smile.
(Plays: 58)
11/08/2009
“ Against the backdrop of the evolution of media and its powerful gathering of news material and data, all of the world’s happenings are trimmed like a lawn by a mower, with fragments of information flying about from place to place through the media as grass flies through the air. These broken pieces of information adhere to our tofu-like brain like spices sprinkled so thickly that they obscure the entire surface. For a moment, this makes us think we’re quite knowledgeable, but information tacked on the surface of the brain doesn’t amount to much when you add it all together. „
Kenya Hara, Art Director for MUJI, on information dissemination in Designing Design. [Thanks for book and wine tip Dave. Book review with above quote here.]
It is interesting to relate this sentiment to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of a low-information diet, reserving your brain for higher order functions than storing what amounts to rubbish by and large (according to him, you’ll learn whatever news is important by speaking with people at parties via verbal gossip). However, from the perspective of the digital information professional, the apparent chaos surrounding information dissemination is not random, much like looking at beehive or a crowded intersection in New York or Shanghai, over time, there is an order, a flow, a rhythm and a harmony. Information isn’t broken, it is imperfect by design. There is a simplicity in the abstraction that captures the nuanced way information goes from atomic to ubiquitous, from valuable to valueless, from sticky to externalized, from profane to mundane. Information has nature, a food chain, a cycle of death and rebirth, beautiful disasters, seismic shifts, and yet has a stillness when observed as a landscape obscuring us from the dynamic details. The goal is to become one with this nature.
11/08/2009
11/07/2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Lebron Brothers - “Boogaloo Lebron”. Don’t act like you’re not thinking about it too.
(Plays: 61)
11/06/2009
“
1991: “hey, you know what would be great. I’m going to create a software tool to allow people to meet people! Let’s get programming!”
18 years later.
2009: “hey, you know what would be great? I’m going to purchase this other person’s software and create a website to link people of one tiny niche with each other, and then i’m going to “advise” other companies on how to get people to meet other people! It’s a complex skill!”
18 years along projected course.
2027: “Me person. You person. We meet. Duuurrrrrr.”
…
2059: [Old man sits alone in a small, dark room, his face lit by the iridescent glow of a computer screen]
“It’s just you and me, my precioussssss.”
„Pope John Peeps II gives some funny comments on the evolution of social media on Gawker.
11/06/2009
Jon Ronson, author of Men Who Stare At Goats, offers a guarantee on his book.
11/06/2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Ramsey Lewis - “Living For The City” (Stevie Wonder Cover). It’s cover Friday and I realized I have enough Stevie Wonder covers to post on Friday’s for years. Deep crates. Don’t sleep on Ramsey Lewis’ and EW&F’s live version of “Sun Goddess”.
(Plays: 31)
11/06/2009
“ I was in Korea last week with a collection of suit-wearing hotshots. On a panel sat Takatoshi Kato, IMF Deputy Managing Director. Before the discussion he gave us a powerpoint lecture showing the IMF projections for 2010, 2011, …, 2014. I could not control myself and got into a state of rage. I told the audience that the next time someone from the IMF shows you projections for some dates in the future, to show us what they PROJECTED for 2008 and 2009 in 2004, 2005, …, and 2007. They would then verify that Mr. Takatoshi and his colleagues provide a prime illustration to the “expert problem”: they serve as experts while offering the scientific reliability of astrologers. Anyone relying on them is a turkey. „
