I haven’t really managed to understand MySpace yet, despite participating. It has the benefit of attracting a whole lot of people who otherwise don’t have an internet presence, but what mystifies me is why it attracted all those people in the first place. It’s poorly designed, has too many—and too poorly targeted—advertisements (compare Last.fm), the interface is unintuitive, the features are poorly implemented (a messaging system that only retains old messages for a small amount of time, for instance), and so on. Nevertheless, social networking is obviously a domain where whichever platform attracts the most the earliest automatically wins out, and the sheer number of people there does seem to outweigh some of the many negatives. So, today I received a friend request from Found, a magazine that collects found objects, mostly notes and photographs, and publishes them in a serial, in books, and on their website (there’s also Dirty Found). There’s some lovely stuff there.
As Zbigniew Herbert said, in Nothing Special,
mr artist
builds a world
not from atoms
but from remnants
The following free online releases have been on high rotation in these parts recently. Highly recommended, especially if you have a church to play them in, and loudly.
John Hudak, Sunday, 2007.
Growing up, Sunday was always a day associated with the particular feeling of the end of something. During meals the family was together mostly: silent meetings leaning towards meditation. The TV was constantly on in the recreation room, creating a background noise that occasionally approached meaning. Homework was done on the comfy sofa in the living room, where sleep would fall around page two. When evening came, Tinkerbell would fly around the castle, ending her flight with a touch of her magic wand.
Tyler Futrell, Fabre-Garrus Josquin Study, 2006.
The Fabre-Garrus Josquin Study is a project using a recording of Josquin’s Missa Pange Lingua by Barnard Fabre-Garrus leading A Sei Voci. Excerpts are taken and the material treated as concrete sound, with abstract processes applied to them. For example, in the Angus Dei, the material is overlayed in canonic fashion against itself, and each possibility of 2, 3, and all 4 “voices” presented from densest to simplest. The Credo uses a similar process. The suggested performance of the piece is as a loop in an installation setting.
It’s true—you can earn a living as a philosopher. Starting in July, I will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester.
