Month: January 2015

  • What about the man on the street?

    From the great Morton Feldman “My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue… . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said,…

  • The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, retest, relearn cycle went from months and…

  • kadist: Javier Tellez (Venezuela) – “One Flew Over the Void,” 2005 via themistakeroom

  • The point of abstraction

    The point of abstraction Don’t let talk of “Abstract vs. Concrete” in the industry misguide you. I have been told many times, in different ways, that “the abstract” has less to do with the real world than “the concrete,” which supposedly deals with the practical, real world stuff. However, I’ve recently concluded that this is…

  • William: Tiptree’s first story that she ever published was called the “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” and in it you follow this sad little dude with a runny nose and a bad cough as he flies all over the world and gets off to feed the pigeons. It’s a very short story. By the…

  • There are two fundamental forces at work here: One is the loss of leverage, with more aspiring journalists than there are jobs and an environment in which content is becoming increasingly commoditized. The other is a shift in identity, with a generation of younger workers less familiar with unions who’ve built personal brands that they…

  • visual-poetry: by troy gua

  • cinoh: Joseph Albers

  • Difference Engine 20th anniversary edition

    mostlysignssomeportents: Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the original publication of The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s seminal cyberpunk alternate history about a Victorian England dominated by mechanical computers. I was privileged to write the introduction to this 20th Anniversary special edition, which also includes new material from Bill and Bruce…

  • b-thomas1991: Portal Amination