Absurdism

I'm just putting this here for myself because I keep forgetting where it's from, but it's pretty obvious: Absurdism.
 
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Wild heart

From the Rolling Stone photo session.

Massacring Mozart

I think we're going to be hearing a lot more of her in 2016.

As desperation takes hold

Did not know this song could get any better.

 

A chance meeting in 1983 had David Bowie, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook chatting away over beers in the Kings Arms in Salford. “…So we were all there just having a laugh and we joked that he should come n have a jam with us, then next minute – well, it was the next day actually, but i didn’t expect he’d definitely come by – and we were in the practice rooms and we were playing Love Will Tear Us Apart and I was like, f%$k we’re playing Love Will Tear Us Apart with David Bowie singing, this is crazy. We never released it – Bowie took a recording of it, and just layered some more vocals on for fun, sent it back to me…”

Via Sonic More Music.

When shitty things happen in life, it never ceases to amaze how therapeutic art is to help stitch up wounds. Books, films, poetry, but most of all music. David left us such a great care package.

After getting over the initial shock of his death, two things bugged me:

Q: How did David stay so out of the radar? He lived in New York for christ's sake.
A: Here.

Q: Why didn't he tell us/me that he was sick?
A: Here.

So there you go.

Glass half full response: a bit of death is probably a good way to start 2016 anyway. Keeps things in perspective.

 

This remains my favourite latter-day Bowie pic ^

Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties

In Western Art History....

"oh you found us 

you found us with your guitar 

hey guys he found us and he brought his guitar with him"

I definitely know this guy.

More here.

How do you get along sir?

Favourite scene from Skins, although it's probably 10 x more hilarious when you're in the middle of the season - it's an incredibly dark episode, and then this happens:



Or maybe it's just a sentiment that resonates with me: yeah, life is a piece of shit. But then there's music. And dance. And cheese.

I re-watched the entire first season of Skins last year because I wanted to analyse the story structure. When I watched the show, I really loved how they gave each character an episode, and room to explore the depths of each character. I was determined to do that same thing with a series I'm putting together. But then the new Arrested Development happened, and it just proved how terrible that formula can be too, imho.

So what's the solution then? A big ensemble cast or something more character focused? I really like how Aziz Ansari created something in between in his 'Master of None'. There's a central group of characters, but they didn't appear in every show - because the didn't need to. Aziz talks about it more here on The New Yorker Radio.

Cover your tracks

I finally re-imported all my old music into iTunes, because a) my new iMac has 3TB of space (so sexy, I know), and b) I came to realise that some of the old music I used to collect isn't available on Spotify and Apple Music. Due to being slightly OCD with my music in the past, every album was complete, cover and all. There are truly some beautiful / intriguing / horrible covers out there. Here are some that stand out:  

You're the reason our kids are ugly

Film map

 
Dorothy's "Film Map", which melds nearly 1,000 geographically named films into an imaginary city. Below, a vertical section of the map, which also includes Miracle on 34th Street, Road to Perdition, and Field of Dreams.

Via 'Femme Fatales of Cartography', The Atlantic's CityLab

In the afterlife...

Movie from: Silly Symphony - The Skeleton Dance - 1929

If this isn't nice, what is?

Words of wisdom by Kurt Vonnegut:

My Uncle Alex Vonnegut, an insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania, taught me something very important. He said that when things are going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about very simple occasions, not great victories. Maybe drinking lemonade under a shade tree, or smelling the aroma of a bakery, or fishing, or listening to music coming from a concert hall while standing in the dark outside, or, dar I say, after a kiss. he told me it was important at such times to say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”  

Assortment

How did the north end up being at the top of the map?  Interestingly, north wasn't always north. A cartographic history of "what's up"

Even the Beatles got bad reviews. I kid you not! Find out what the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964.

Dear Graduate: don't follow your dreams! Here's the brutal truth: most people can't pay the bills by living their passion. What can we do instead? Apparently: never stop enjoying the wonder of the world, and never lose the curiosity that got you here today. A little off topic, but yeah, nice advice.

The Histomap

from Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton.

Film & Philosophy

“Film has become such an integral ingredient in our motley recipe of mass art and pop culture entertainment that we often overlook its potential for stimulating serious reflection and speculation. The visual immediacy of cinematic art appeals to our receptive curiosity in the same way that paintings and natural landscapes often captivate our perceptual and emotional attention. However, our intellectual engagement with film has been minimized more and more with the proliferation of movies that cater simply to the passive sensory networks of spectacle-obsessed viewers rather than to the active reflection of thoughtful inquirers.”

- Kevin L Stoehr

My name is?

Aristotle, oh and the shadows

When Aristotle isn't being praised as God himself, he gets beaten around a bit.  So does Plato but mainly Aristotle. Here's something interesting that I found when going through my old files:

"If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—like an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.

There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions—and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness."

- Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle, The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1963, 18

Musical history tour

Google research has created an amazing history of music timeline.  It's really fun to play around with.

Questions 67 and 68

How Literate Are You by 1918 Standards?

Woody Allen's Universe

I was feeling a little our of sorts after reading a little bit of astrophysics.  It wasn't serious, just a bit of Bill Bryson, which was surprisingly disorientating. Just feeling very small in this gigantic universe(s?).  And then I remembered Woody Allen, of all people, and this cheered me up.

Unfortunately, it won't embed here, but here's the link to YouTube, click it, click it!