Homage To

“ What are these humans doing? Dancing. Many humans on Earth exhibit periods of happiness, and one method of displaying happiness is dancing. Happiness and dancing transcend political boundaries and occur in practically every human society. Above, Matt Harding traveled through many nations on Earth, started dancing, and filmed the result. The video is perhaps a dramatic example that humans from all over planet Earth feel a common bond as part of a single species. Happiness is frequently contagious — few people are able to watch the above video without smiling.

— Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth, Astronomy Picture of the Day

“ [T]his sort of aesthetic/artsy approach to contemporary culture is increasingly the only thing that makes sense to me. Analysis is starting to feel impossible; making stories at least seems doable.

— Wax Scrawls, Nav (on Diana Kimball)

“ This week I had a chance to think about the idea of America. I also had a chance to speak with a few people about how our experiences with art, literature, music, and beautiful objects and conversations help to connect us as people. Here’s my re-mix on America.

— A Summer To-Do List — Words and Images for Our Soul, Dean Kenneth Elmore, Boston University

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“It is quite important… to let people have some idea of why you like what you like, and what your critical voice is, and what kind of biases form you, and you do that best and most honestly by writing about things as you see them.” - Interview (Anime World Order Podcast), Helen McCarthy, author of The Anime Encyclopedia

“ I kept returning to this thought: what would it do to a community to have a tradition as long and as defining as that, to know from an early age that you were, probably throughout your life, going to be woven into this incredibly rich tapestry of time, spirituality, art and craft? What would it be like to be a child growing up there, to watch your parents and grandparents learning their lines and practising their parts and building the sets and making the clothes? It must be so rich, such a powerful social binder and foundation.

— Generational Theater, Brian Eno (Long Now Blog list)

“ With music fading out of the physical medium, I think music is moving toward an era where it’s a free exchange of ideas.

— Interview, Gregg Gillis (Girl Talk)

“ This remix culture where everything is recycled is a sign of the times. Every kid uses Photoshop and every kid downloads images to manipulate them. Pretty soon audio mixing programs are going to become a lot more user-friendly and with every song that comes out there’s going to be fifth graders remixing it for fun. And that’s cool.

— Interview, Gregg Gillis (Girl Talk)

“ Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to bend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

— Skinny Legs and All (1990), Tom Robbins

“ Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning.

— What Positive Psychology Can Help You Become, Martin Seligman

“ Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work… Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music.

— Jazz Messenger, Haruki Murakami

(This is one of those hardly-ephemeral compositions I print out and stick on my wall.)

“ An egg timer can time anything—it’s my calling it an egg timer that limits it. For instance, it can be a foreplay timer to let me know when foreplay is over.

— Language Limits Us, Dan Liebert

Other notables:
Student Days
Family

“ When I focus on getting eyes, I start writing for emotional buzz. I start turning phrases just to see if I can.

— What I Want to Build, Jon Swanson

“ As he described the intricacies of his plan… he sounded not so much a sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.

— Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling, Mattathias Schwartz