wakarahen / ganbaresugi

By Kenneth Goldsmith, poetryfoundation.org

Boy, am I glad that I didn’t build UbuWeb on the cloud. There were times when I actu­al­ly con­sid­ered it. I mean, it sound­ed so good: unlim­it­ed serv­er space, band­width, glob­al access, all for free. There were times over the past few…

hikosaemon:

from Japan Probe

backleftlitz:

• If you’re single and don’t want to be single anymore, you could make an online dating profile and on it try to summarize what exactly makes you a person worthy of being loved, and you could upload that one really nice picture your friend took of you for a community center photography class he ended up being unable to pay for. Your mother said “it barely even looks like you” in a complimentary tone of voice.
• If you’re seeing someone but your relationship status is ambiguous and you’d like it to be less ambiguous you could call that person and say “listen we’re not fifteen anymore and I don’t need a word to define whatever this is, but just so we’re clear, what is this?” and if they say “a university-funded research project wherein we examine the effects of small doses of kindness and affection on otherwise grotesque, unlikable individuals with drinking problems and okay but not like spectacular or particularly unique tastes in music” feel free to GChat with me about it.
• You could stream the hot new mp3 that at least one moderately popular music blog recently called “hazy and wistful” and that has serious mainstream-indie potential, so that when you hear the song playing over the opening credits of a $20 million Jonah Hill vehicle (about a mole infestation!!1) and your film-going companion begins steeling themselves for your usual whispered “I can’t believe people are still listening to this song, what is this, a 2008 Will Ferrell vehicle” you can instead subvert their expectations by simply saying “oh, I love this song,” thereby illustrating that you listen to music because it makes you happy, disregarding all the messy politics of taste in favor of a refined “I like what I like”-type attitude—i.e. still critical about what you like and why you like it, but not necessarily concerned with what that nebulous shadowy Other might think about what you like (and besides, it seems like in certain corners of the blogosphere “I like this” is the new “I hate this,” possibly because the primary audience for the early part of this decade’s hipster-ethnography fad was OTHER hipsters, who inbetween the books’ stale PBR jokes saw something of themselves and thought “I need to change”).
• You could do a couple of push-ups, depending on where you are, and whether or not you have arms.
• You could pick up smoking! If you’ve never smoked a cigarette a before you’ll nearly keel over w/ a pleasant light-headedness that for the rest of your days spent scouring the same couch ten times over for the six nickels you need for a pack you’ll be chasing after, until eventually (really within the first week or two of your sexy newfound dependence) you forget why you’re even doing it and just do it, every day, 3, 10, 26 times, until just the notion that you might, at some indefinite point, not have enough money for cigarettes will be enough to give you a minor panic attack.

hikosaemon:

from CNET News

hikosaemon:

from CNET News

doomandgloomfromthetomb:

everygreatsongever:

Here is Volume One, which explores the music that laid the groundwork for progressive rock. Tracklist below, comments to follow in the next post. Get it here.

1. Delia Derbyshire & Ron Grainer: “Dr. Who Main Title” 2:10
2. The Yardbirds: “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” 2:57
3. The Wilde…

Looks amazing — Every Great Song Ever has kicked off a big, multi-volume overview of UK prog. Don’t be afraid of the prog, people! Extensive notes, too.