Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing →

"To dig deeper into how music engages the brain’s reward system, we designed a study to mimic online music purchasing. Our goal was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it.

We used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our listeners’ preferences, which turned out to be indie and electronic music, matching Montreal’s hip music scene. And we found that neural activity within the striatum — the reward-related structure — was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend.”

"The Prism, Privacy in an age of Publicity" - Jill Lepore (The New Yorker, June 24, 2013) →

The A.C.L.U., which last week filed a suit against the Obama Administration, has called the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, Prism, a “gross infringement” of the “right to privacy.” The Obama Administration has defended both the program and the fact that its existence has been kept secret. As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late.

"One aspect of this story that Congress is unlikely to concern itself with is the relationship, in the twenty-first century, between privacy and publicity. In the twentieth century, the golden age of public relations, publicity, meaning the attention of the press, came to be something that many private citizens sought out and even paid for. This has led, in our own time, to the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection—ciphers of numbers and letters—so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose… There is no longer a public self, even a rhetorical one. There are only lots of people protecting their privacy, while watching themselves, and one another, refracted, endlessly, through a prism of absurd design."

Pure Bathing Culture - “Pendulum”

Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower: 'I do not expect to see home again' →

"That the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians…We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.”

When people tell you that East LA has “gentrified,” this is what they mean.

Strfkr - “Atlantis”

Excerpt from “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory” by Norman M. Klein

"I am not implying that L.A.’s neighborhoods have no public record at all; quite the contrary. The photo archives of vernacular Los Angeles are indeed gigantic, running into millions of images. … However, these cannot compete with hundreds of movie melodramas where downtown is a backdrop. … Some locations are simply easier to transfigure than others, for heavy equipment to be positioned, or cheaper to rent; and they therefore figure more powerfully in the public record, while others never appear. Indeed, Los Angeles remains the most photographed and least remembered city in the world."

http://guides.latimes.com/literary-la/

(LA Times) UCLA wants more than Ben Howland could deliver—and it's entitled to →

“He is a great coach. But in the end, for UCLA, he was not good enough. Period. To argue that point would be to argue that Bruins basketball should settle, which would be like arguing that Wooden’s pyramid should flatten.”

Philip K. Dick - "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)"

“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

Francis Steen - MIT CMS Colloquium →

"The news takes the individual events that take place in the world and situates them in this ‘state spaces’ of what is valuable and what is possible. What I mean by this is that we have some idea of ‘preferred outcomes’ - where we’d like society to go, what outcomes I’d like for myself, what I’d like for my community and for the whole greater society.

Then we have a whole series of possible sets of events. Even what is possible is in a sense still socially contingent, in the sense that your own conception of what your society could produce is still an implicit frame. Clearly the real possibility space of human societies are vast. Within the space of the possible, each point in this possibility space represents one particular state of the world. From this, you can look at actions as trajectories within these spaces, trajectories in the sense that they move from one possible state of the world to another. Whenever you act, you change the world, you modify history.”

… “Question is - Why can’t the news just tell us what happened? The news does a lot more work than that, It assembles a narrative.

It’s through narratives that humans figure out how to intervene in the world and change the future. It’s through narratives that humans gain control and we expect television to give us those narratives. It’s how we are in a sense empowered to take power of our own destiny, of our own culture.”

… “What happens is that the focus of the news slowly moves away from presenting evidence, explaining what happened, and accounting for the evidence, to basically saying ‘what could we have done?’ 

Massive amounts of news coverage is about what never happened. It’s in the realm of the possible. Part of what I’m suggesting is that as a society, what we really care about is the possible, that’s more important that the fact and more fundamental than the fact.”

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Scottish Referendum 2014 →

In August of 2014, the Scottish people will vote on a referendum that could make Scotland an independent nation.

Sun Kil Moon - “Pancho Villa.”

Jogging in the sunshine music for me today.

Here’s one way to recycle wine bottles! (Or beer bottles… or whiskey … or rum…)

Welsh booth boxing, Carl Mydans, 1955.

Watched the film “Jeremiah Johnson” this weekend. I’ve always thought the idea of living on the 19th century frontier was poetic, but this changed my impression most definitely. 

my-ear-trumpet:

James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince of Wales, by Alexis Simon Belle. (c. 1712)

There’ll Never Be Peace Till Jamie Comes Hame

By yon Castle wa’, at the close of the day,
I heard a man sing, though his head it was gray;
And as he was singing, the tears down came –
There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

The Church is in ruins, the State is in jars,
Delusions, oppressions, and murderous wars;
We dare na weel say’t, but we ken wha’s to blame –
There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

My seven braw sons for Jamie drew sword,
But now I greet round their green beds in the yird;
It brak the sweet heart o’ my faithfu’ auld dame –
There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

Now life is a burden that bows me down,
Sin’ I tint my bairns, and he tint his crown;
But till my last moments my words are the same –
There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

– Robert Burns.
(image and poem from Eccentric Bliss)

"Leaves of Grass" - Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass: The First 1855 Edition by Walt Whitman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I feel richer today having finished this piece of great American prose. The historians, the critics are all correct, this is a masterpiece.

Whitman opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the American experiment, but of all things great and small, and to those things that lie between the greatest and smallest. It is poetic without a doubt, but also very personal. This I was surprised by, but affected all the more.

I would have loved to have read this in 1855, but I think it is just as provoking today and probably will be for centuries.

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"Blood Meridian" - Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

La danse macabre - an artistic genre of late medieval allegory on the universality of death. I blame a French lit class that I took in college for leading me to make this immediate connection upon finishing this book, but doing so helps me to quantify the incredible intensity of both gruesome narrative and philosophical commentary that somehow condensed itself into less than 350 pages. After reading both Blood Meridian and The Road , I have begun to develop a fascination with McCarthy’s ability to tell so much in his omission of unnecessary facts, his omission of distracting detail and his inclusion of only the most relevant and impacting elements, and the most meaningful thoughts to convey an even more illuminating truth. This was a difficult read, because of the subject matter, but I will confess, it was worth it.

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"What is it that you want Mary? Do you want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso ‘round it and pull it down." — George Bailey, "It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)." 

One day…

"… We are increasingly in landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap." - Clay Shirky

"1. The internet is the first medium in history that have native support for groups and conversations at the same time… the internet gives us the many to many pattern. For the first time, the internet is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations.

2. It also becomes the motive carriage for all kinds of media. That means that every medium is right next door to every other type of media. The internet is therefore less a source of information than a site of coordination.

3. Members of the former audience can now be producers and not just consumers.”