Mandate, my ass
Gil Scott-Heron said it decades ago.
The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia They want to go back as far as they can-- Even if it's only as far as last week Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards
Again, again, again
I bought a 1960s-era dictionary of art terms on eBay
Lately I've been buying lots (as in: large group of) of art books or random vintage books on secondhand marketplaces. This dictionary of art terms was irresistible. The collage started 9 months ago, and I decided to add to it.
Watching a Ryuchi Sakamoto performance of async, and it’s almost magical watching him work. The lightness, the near trepidation he seemed to feel when playing the pianissimo accents of the opening, as though he might land just a little too hard on one of the keys and ruin everything for a lack of sensitivity. He touches the keys, but just. A whispered note. Beautiful. The opening credits, a simple black background with his name in white, appear on screen. Soon he begins looping. And the opening, haunting keys linger as organ sounds underneath the electronic soundscape Sakamoto takes such delight in creating. Everything he does is so physical. He leans over the piano with a guitar slide, and makes the most haunting sounds.
An odd experience today, where I inadvertently triggered AWS’s Q programming assistant to refuse to answer my request and refer me to AWS’s responsible use of AI policy. This happens, sometimes, if I use profanity to vent in a moment of frustration. But this time, I had typed “oh, thanks for catching that, that was pretty dumb of me” into the prompt. I then apologized to the bot for its own misunderstanding. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I wrote, “I was talking about myself. Thank you very much, this was helpful.” The bot replied, kindly acknowledging the challenging nature of the problem I’d been trying to solve, and wished me a happy new year.