N in Central Park.
The performance connected me deeply to past memories, evoking kindred forms of indescribable emotion. I was reminded of what I found as a child to be the most profound experience possible – watching the sunset in isolation on the beach. Waiting in the decaying light to be the only body left on the long stretch of sand, I would revel in the cascading shivers that would crawl down my back as water evaporated from my skin and I wrapped myself more tightly in a towel. Facing the sublime extension of the sea, I remember becoming enveloped in a comforting and serene form of abstract loneliness, an empowering type of isolation devoid of any tinge of yearning or melancholy.
— Matthew Walker, William Basinski’s Vivian and Ondine
Elevator up to mysterious warehouse show.
If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.
— Steven Pinker, Mind Over Mass Media
In truth, our belief that the market could fund new music was always as illusory; European touring, heavily state subsidized, has been the real economic motor of experimental jazz/new music for decades, the light at the end of the tunnel of months of scarce and/or poorly paid NYC gigs. The fact that access to Europe was easier and cheaper for NYC musicians than for their LA counterparts is an important factor in the historical productivity of the NYC new music scene as compared with the West Coast.
— Marc Ribot, The Care and Feeding of a Musical Margin
Walking home at midnight, I saw these roses poking through my neighbor’s fence.
As it now functions, [Wikileaks] is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to ‘another country that has some beneficial laws,’ Assange told me, where they are removed at ‘end-point machines’ and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks ‘do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.’ The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through ‘virtual tunnels’ that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but ‘this is vastly more secure than any banking network.’
— The New Yorker, No Secrets
Whatsoever of it has flown away is past.
Whatsoever remains is future.
— Augustine, Confessions XI
The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device.
That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture.
— Verlyn Klinkenborg, Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader
I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it.
— Boyd Rice, quoted in Noise/Music: A History
This is the personal site of Chad Mazzola, a designer by profession, living in Cambridge, MA. You may be interested in browsing the archives, or visiting a random entry.
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