Extremes

State of the World 2012

• #154: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 13 Jan 12 06:38
  *I forgot that I wrote this thing this year. This essay for FRIEZE makes some of the points I was just trying to make, but in a more rhetorically elegant fashion.http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/twenty-years-fore-aft/*I'm kinda pleased with the way that one turned out; I was pretty much firing on all my futurist cylinders. [Read entire topic] […]
• #153: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 13 Jan 12 06:32
  "These guys would have been biding their time somewhere out of sight, since 1953"*Yeah man, the good old days, like Boris Vian reviewing the first album by Serge Gainsbourgh. Now that's a "record review." It's really a pleasure to me to read this, even in a rather ham-fisted translation of Parisian jazz lingo.http://tamtambooks- […]
• #152: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 13 Jan 12 05:51
  This is what World War III looks like:http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/industries/angry-crowd-pelts-beijing-apple-store-with-eggs-after-release-of-new-iphone-4s-delayed/2012/01/12/gIQAlMVtuP_story.html?tid=pm_pop"Angry customers and gangs of scalpers threw eggs at Apple Inc.*s Beijing store Friday after the iPhone 4S launch there was canceled due […]
• #151: From Kenny Mann (captward) Fri 13 Jan 12 02:20
  E-mail from Kenny Mann:==================================================================== "I still believed in my heart that some old guys would take the stage in one of these clubs, with some grumbling or just a lot of bar business * clanking glassware and dopey frivolities * followed by sounds from the stage that would lull the patrons into a kind o […]
• #150: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 12 Jan 12 15:50
  I experience music every day, but I don't listen to it the way I did in, say, 1970. I don't have that focus, it's background music, like I'm in my own movie. The music I hear in passing is diverse and pretty inconsistent. Fragmented. Top 40's all hip-hop (some of it very good), the local public radio station has drifted into pop and […]
• #149: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 12 Jan 12 14:31
  http://blissout.blogspot.com/2011/12/11-for-11-metronomy-english-riviera.html*That's music critic Simon Reynolds doting over the with-it obscurities that a guru of his ilk would be into these days.*I'd have to admit that "the most interesting thing in music" that I saw last year was Simon Reynold's book "Retromania," which […]
• #148: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 12 Jan 12 14:23
  Well, the Anthropophage of Hoxditch is still in the music biz and Tweeting her tousled head off.cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!>< ^ […]
• #147: Gail Williams (gail) Thu 12 Jan 12 13:29
  Are the artists themselves responsible for the faster move to the decadent form? Perhaps there is less viable social pressure against selling out by allowing bad versions of your own work to go forth? Interesting observation. [Read entire topic] […]
• #146: From Julian Bond (captward) Thu 12 Jan 12 12:24
  E-mail from Julian Bond:I'm curious if Bruce has seen anything particularly interesting in the arts and music this time around. Last year we had Anthropophagic Syncretism which turned out to be a Hipster Chanteuse transplanted from Sao Paulo to Hoxditch[1]. Anything comparable floating around in 2012?How about Lana Del Rey, apparently famous for being m […]
• #145: from Walt Dangerfield (captward) Thu 12 Jan 12 10:09
  And again:This dead media is starting to turn ripe:I noticed locally that the roadkill on the highway isn't getting picked up either. [Read entire topic] […]