3a) All out of bubblegum

 

 

 

3b) 

4a) Interzone: ManMachine

 

4a1) Interzone: ManMachine 

A black hole sun sets on gunmetal skies and an abandoned ribbon of two-lane blacktop. The looming darkness echoes with the rhythmic pounding of thundering road iron. It's the apocalypse, now. Suspended between chrome and fire, bloodlust and gasoline, speed and distance–it’s a burned-out head of a set. The ManMachine. 

4a2) Tracklist

Trouble - Snake Eyes 00:00

Suicide - Ghost Rider 03:50

Loop - Rocket USA 06:20

Head Of David - Snuff Rider M.C. 11:25

The Birthday Party - Junkyard 14:30

Butthole Surfers - Graveyard 20:15

Sonic Youth - Rain King 22:55

Painkiller - Buried Secrets 27:25

Electric Wizard - Wizard in Black 33:25

11Paranoias - Milk of Amnesia 41:20

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Shockwave City 45:15

Black Rainbows - Master Rocket Power Blast 49:10

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - A66 52:30

High Rise - Cycle Goddess 61:15

Ty Segall Band - Oh Mary 62:10

Guitar Wolf - Motorcycle Leather Boy 63:45

Boris - Laser Beam 66:10

Melvins - Honey Bucket 69:55

White Heaven - My Cold Dimention 72:40

The Gun Club - Death Party 76:30

Alan Vega - Motorcycle Explodes 80:55

4a3) Album list at Rate Your Music

4a) THE Reason the 70's Rocked

4a1) The Who "Baba O'Riley" Who's Next (1971)

4a2) A ferocious cry of freedom with the heart of a ballad, it echoes the album cover–the monolith both desecrated, and untouched by man. The profane, insane, and transcendent. The higher gods leading rock into new horizons. This is the birth cry of the starchild called RAWK. It's shadow looms even today. On everything from punk to grunge to motorik kosmische to operatic narratives. Preceding or following, all bow to "Baba O'Riley." Happy birthday. 

5a) In Which More Cowbell is Needed...

4a1) SNL - More Cowbell

4a2a) ...and in which Will Farrell gives one of his great unhinged performances, Jimmy Fallon cracks up halfway through, Horatio Sanz gives his "I'm just lucky to be here" performance, and Cristopher Walken tries to keep the whole thing going.

4a2b) Which is all to say the skit itself is not that good. The concept is hilarious, especially to classic rock fans (see next item), but what saves it is that no one can really hold it together once things really get going. SNL often operates more on charm than actual comedic chops, and this is a prime example. One that never gets old. 

4a2c) And like a true music geek, I have to point out that Bruce Dickinson's (he, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, and fencer of Olympic medalists), first production credit was in 1984, nearly ten years after Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was released. Arguably putting them in the influence seat, not the other way around. But then, you knew that. And so did whomever wrote the script. 

4a) Daily Zen

4a1)  Lee Hazlewood and Suzi Jane Hokum "Sand" The Very Special World Of Lee Hazlewood (1966)

4a2) One of the better subtle sex songs. While the metaphors may not be subtle, the intertwining vocals, the backing vocal sighs, and the rhythmic strumming produce a hypnotic simulation within the style of the time. Just another example of Lee Hazlewood's unique genius. 

This version is better than the Hazlewood/Sinatra version, recorded later. The slower tempo of Hokum's version, and her far more seductive vocals round off the Spector-ish wall of sound pop of the Sinatra version. While I love a good sitar, it feels added on, and does little to make up for the sex-stoned atmosphere of the Hokum version. 

4a) Daily Zen

 

4a1) "Raging Rumble" 

Composed By – Julien, Raphael Aletti 

Composed By [Picture of Spring] – Jack Arel, Pierre Dutour 

Remix – Count De Money 

4a2) "To start this series off, Galerie, the super left-field label from France, present a collection of remixes of the legendary Jack Arel Chappell sessions, recorded in Paris in the 60s.

["Raging Rumble"] contains elements from Picture of Spring."

Discogs 

4a3) Most of the Chappell library collection is worth listening to. But it never hurts to have a set of DJs comb through and remix the breaks into new compositions. This is one of the early examples from the first volume of a ten volume set called Nuggets, released by Universal. Any library or beats fan would be remiss in opting out. You can view the whole series at the Universal website.

 

4b1) "Crazy Flute and Happy Guitar" 

David Perian Orchestra 

Happy Music and Crazy Music, 

Luke Vibert's Further Nuggets (2002) (Listed under Roger Davy)

4b2) A nice example of the near unhinged exuberance the Chappell crew could get up to. 

4a) Reprise

 

  4a1) Can "Vitamin C" Ege Bamyasi (1972)

 

4a2) 24-Carat Black "24-Carat Black (Theme)" Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth (1973) 

4a3) In a bit of a who made who mystery, this is a stunning coincidence. It is unlikely that Can made it to Dale Warren's turntable as he was putting together Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth. Was anyone outside of Europe listening to Ege Bamyasi in 1973? Even in the 70's, I would assume there was a crew of global heads that had knowledge, access, and the wherewithal to grab up the oddities coming out of Germany, and Europe at large. 

I don't know that anyone would know the "true" story. But the similarities between the two songs are enough that it would be an odd coincidence if both groups stumbled across a similar rhythm, and then built a song out of it. That is, unless there was something in the ether of a more nascent form.

4a4) DJ Food's loop of 24-Carat Black pointed me to the similarities when I mistook it for a Can sample. 

4aWTF?) Just in case someone needs a copyright defense.

4a) Daily Zen

4a) Christophe "Sunny Road to Salina" Road to Salina (1970)

4a) In Appreciation of Raymond Scott

 

4a1) Raymond Scott "Powerhouse" (Various Performers)

One of the more anarchic bits of music accompanying the antics of the Looney Tunes crew.

 

4a2) Raymond Scott Quintette "Powerhouse"

 

4b) Raymond Scott "Naked City" 

"The recording of “Naked City” featured here is a brilliant recreation of the Scott original, in sparkling sound, made by Jan Stulen, conducting the Metropole Orchestra. The Metropole Orchestra is a multiple Grammy winning jazz and pop orchestra based in the Netherlands, and is the largest full-time ensemble of its kind in the world." 

"Naked City” Music of Raymond Scott – Part One – Swing & Beyond 

4c) "Scott called his music “descriptive jazz”—his name for a novel chamber music style that drew on the propulsive drive of swing, with all the riffs and syncopation of that dance style, but with less improvisation and proclaiming a taste for extravagant, quasi-industrial sounds. It was like techno before there was techno, but with a jitterbug sensibility." 

Ted Gioia – The Secret Music Technology of Raymond Scott 

4d) RaymondScott.net

 

4e) Callithumpian Consort "For Your Eyes Only" Composed by John Zorn

4a) Reasons Why the 70's Rocked

4a1) Linda Ronstadt "Tumbling Dice" and "You're No Good," Atlanta 1977

4a2) "There are two kinds of men in this world. Those with a crush on Linda Ronstadt and those who never heard of her."

Willie Nelson

3a) Daily Zen

3a) Yoshio Okada Surfer Girl (1974)

5a) Icarus Montgolfier Wright

 

5a1) Icarus Montgolfier Wright (1962) 

5a2) Icarus is based on a story by Ray Bradbury with a script co-written by Bradbury and George Clayton Johnson. Jules Engel produced it at Format Films and actors James Whitmore and Ross Martin provide the voices. 

Cartoon Brew 

5a3) Hat tip to Caleb Mannan.

3a) Daily Zen

3a) Andreas Cellarius – Harmonia Macrocosmica

4a) So Gone, So Numb, So Long

4a) Friday Zen

 

4a) BrighterSide of Darkness "Just a Little Bit" Love Jones (1973)

3a) Alas, poor Yorick!

 

3a) Daily Zen

 

3a) Mother Mary Speaks to Me

4a) Daily Zen

3a) Happiness Is a Warm Gun

3b) The Bureau of Lost T-Shirts

 

5a) Daily Zen

5a1) Sean Connery in Zardoz (1974)

 

5a2) Zardoz (1974) Trailer, Director: John Boorman 

Zardoz is a 1974 Irish-American science fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling, and featuring Sara Kestelman. The film, Connery's second post-James Bond role—after The Offence—was shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth on a budget of US$1.57 million as it depicts a future world where a stone image called "Zardoz" instructs the "Brutals" to kill each other for eternal life. 

 5a3) Zardoz forces us into a muted state of cognitive dissonance, a background hum of confusion and disbelief that intensifies the longer we watch. How did this thing ever get made? And yet it was made. It’s right there in front of us. The images are flickering over the screen: Connery’s ponytail sways across his back; a handlebar moustache frames his grinning mouth; the BDSM gear he’s wearing is very real. Was taking on this project some grotesque fit of hubris? A senseless cry for help? Or is the man a genius? 

Why you should watch “Zardoz” at Sci-fi-o-Rama

4a) Warp Rider

 

4a1) “Ready to drop now.” 

A sonic blacklight full of warped orbits, exploding nebula, and melting suns. 

Cover illustration by Mike Hinge with Neal Adams From “...Rears Its Ugly Green Head," Heavy Metal Magazine, July 1979 

Island People - From the Sky

Faith Coloccia & Philip Jeck - Stardust

Kevin Richard Martin - Weightlessness

Sunroof - 1.4 - 18.6.19

Mugstar - Low, Slow Horizon

Expo Seventy - The Slow Death of Tomorrow

Bong - Find Your Own Gods

4a2) Warp Rider Cover

4a3) See 070421_3b 

3a) Make American Posters Great Again

 

3a) From the Library of Congress

Poster for the July 4th celebration at the DuPage County Centennial in Downers Grove, showing a firecracker.

Created / Published

Ill[inois] : Federal Art Project, WPA, [between 1936 and 1939]

3a) The Bureau of Lost T-Shirts

 

4a) Daily Zen

 

4a) Model 500 "Sound of Stereo" 1987

5a) Daily Zen

6a) Reckless

6a) Reckless by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

If you're looking for a summer read, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Reckless is excellent L.A. sun-splashed noir. Imagine Jim Rockford as a reluctantly nihilistic, down and out surf-bum rattling around in the backwash of 80's L.A. Inspired by Richard Stark's Parker, as interpreted by Darwyn Cooke, the sooty inks against muted pastels are more successful than Nicolas Winding Refn and Brubaker's L.A.-set noir, Too Old to Die Young. Summer heat coupled with the smells of sweat, cheap beer, and surf are perfectly captured in each panel and page. Skip the screen. These panels offer everything you need for a trip to the seedy underbelly of Southern California. 

5a) Captain, I think I see somethi—!

4b) EVOL Select: Savage Planet

4b) A trip around this ball o' dirt in a decades in the making crate-digging expedition.

Big Jim Sullivan - Flower Power
Telemachus - Planet Earth (feat. Mr Thing)
GRIMEZ - Womb of the Earth
Doctor Bionic - Cultural Revolution
Kalyanji & Anandji - Theme From Don
X'Lents - Psychedelia
Asha Bhosle - Yeh Mera Dil
Madlib - Piano Garden
Janko Nilovic - Underground Party
Alessandro Alessandroni - Afro Darkness
Piero Umiliani - Green Dawn
Narassa - Accavallatrice
Klauss Weiss - The Hunters
Manorexia - The Harpoon Jockey
Lilacs & Champagne - Midnight Creeper II
Sandro Brugnolini - Amofen
Madlib - Fällig
The Sumos - My Chinese Girl Likes Kung Fu Fighting
The Peter Laine Orchestra - Tiger Walk

4a) Reprise

 

4a1) Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra "Bolero on the Moon Rocks," Raumpatrouille (1966)

 

4a2) Pulp "This Is Hardcore," This Is Hardcore (1998)

3b) Mel's Record Request Reprise

3a) Birth of the Cool

 

4a) Daily Zen

4a1) Metal Fingers "Black Snake Root," Special Herbs Vol. 5 & 6

 

4a2) Boz Scaggs "Lowdown," Silk Degrees

5a) A Tale of Two Bills

 

5a1) Brain Dead (1990) trailer

5a2) Where else can you get two Bills for the price of one? Not to mention, Bud Cort and George Kennedy as a bonus gift! Although, by the end, you may have buyer's remorse. Caveat emptor!

3a) Daily Zen

3a1) The Eye of Silence Max Ernst (1943)

3a2) Ernst was one of the first artists to apply The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud to investigate his deep psyche in order to explore the source of his own creativity. The pervading artistic strategy in Max Ernst's oeuvre is to recycle visual material and combine it into new imageries. While turning inwards unto himself, Ernst was also tapping into the universal unconscious with its common dream imagery.

www.max-ernst.com

3a) See You Space Cowboy...

3a1) Art by Maarten Donders for Billy Strings.

3a2) Also see Doctor Bionic cover below

5a) Daily Zen

5a) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar vs Bruce Lee, Game Of Death (1978)

4a) Chiefdom Records

4a1) Grimez The Holy Realm

4a2) Doctor Bionic The Invisible Hand 

4a3) Excellent B-movie exotica beat instrumentals from this Cincinnati collective. Oft imitated, but rarely perfected, shadows of Doom and RZA loom over the stag film scuzz. Dark alleys full of glimmering switch blades, gold-toothed grins, and fishnet flesh―the world of the rain and slime soaked concrete jungle. The dark and dangerous world the tourists never see. Listen and thank god it's only on wax.

5a) Hip to It, Daddy-O!

5a1) Vera-Ellen and Gene Kelly in Words and Music (1948)

 

5a2) Original Theatrical Trailer

5a3) Full Dance Sequence from Slaughter on 10th Avenue, Words and Music (1948)

4a) Emancipation

4a) Take Five (x2): Emancipation
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
Nina Simone - Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair
Aretha Franklin - Young, Gifted And Black
Roberta Flack - Bridge Over Troubled Water
Alice Coltrane - Going Home
Sonny Sharrock - Black Woman
Gil Scott-Heron - Comment #1
Eugene McDaniels - Love Letter To America
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Old Rugged Cross
Last Poets - Panther

7a) To #1 Dads Everywhere

7a) I don't know how official these rankings really are...

3b) Pick Your King

 

4a) (R)eternal

4a1) 3 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Forbidden Planet's Alien Krell Machines 

3a) Daily Zensunni

3a) Edited, as found on Reddit

3a) Daily Zen

3a1) GIF of GIFs

3a2) The 88x31 GIF Collection

4a) Daily Zen

4a1) Magical Mystery Mix – 60s & 70s Soul Music Mix - "Extra Selected" - by Dirty Art Club

 

4a2) Brighter Side of Darkness - I Owe You Love

Standout track at 14:32. I hesitate to cut in because the mix is the thing, but this is so good it deserves it's own entry. Thanks to MMM and DAC for the introduction. 

6a) Parents

 

6a1a) Peanuts – April 17, 1973

6a1b) Full context: Peanuts April 1973 at Fandom

6a2) Charlie Brown's [hapless] baseball team at Fandom

6a3) All I ever needed to know about life I read in a Peanuts strip. Well, until I watched Seinfeld. Two great existentialist comedies that reveal profound truths about the absurd condition of modern humans.

I suppose it is not entirely surprising that the final panel has stuck in my head since my first reading...um, quite a while ago. If human life is absurd, what could be more absurd to a child than parents? Worse even, a group of parents. 

Maybe it's stretching fault laying a bit to say the world's ills could be laid to a group of parents getting together. But as another Mother's Day has passed, and a Father's is in the offing, an act of of compassion in the awareness that children grow to be parents, grandparents, and if they are lucky, great-grandparents. 

Just one more absurdity in this experience of irony we call human life.  

6a) Daily Zen

5a1a) Jack Kirby – Silver Surfer

5a1b) Fantastic Four #50 (1961) at Marvel

5a1c) The Greatest Silver Surfer Stories Ever Told! at CBR

5a2) 100 by Jack Kirby at Biblioklept

3a) The Future of Popular Music?

3a) Here’s a free business idea for you: Start a universal registry of NFT music owners’ names, preserved for eternity on blockchain, but updated with each change of ownership—and give free shares to record labels and star musicians who sign up as participants. The musicians and labels still retain all their intellectual property rights, but you’ve given them some sizzle to sell along with their stakes. And each of them receives partial ownership in the registry business for free, just by joining—so their participation is a no-brainer. It’s like the “name a star” registry, but with the kinds of stars that really matter.

Not only is the NFT owner recognized on this proposed blockchain, but the entire lineage, including every previous owner—traced back to original seller (or recording artist)—is preserved as well. Now Jeff Bezos can point proudly to an entire family tree tracing his ownership in Kind of Blue back to Miles Davis himself. That’s an NFT proposition to make billionaires salivate like Pavlovian poodles in a belfry. 

Ted Gioia – Would You Buy Shares in Your Favorite Musician?

3a) Savage

 

5a) Daily Zen

5a) Ned Beatty Network (1976)

1a) Paths of Survival

1a1) 1. Cases are no longer falling

The news about Covid-19 has been mostly positive in the U.S. over recent months. The vaccines continue to work well against every variant, and the number of Americans who have gotten a shot continues to rise.

But the U.S. still faces two problems. First, the pace of vaccinations has slowed, and a substantial share of Americans — close to one third — remains hesitant about getting a shot. These unvaccinated Americans will remain vulnerable to Covid outbreaks and to serious symptoms, or even death.

Second, the Delta variant — which appears to be both more contagious and more severe than earlier versions of the virus — is spreading rapidly within the U.S., after having first been identified in India. It now accounts for about 10 percent of cases, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. commissioner.

Many experts are concerned that cases will eventually start to rise as Delta becomes the dominant form of the virus. “We are vulnerable,” Dr. Kavita Patel of the Brookings Institution told Yahoo News. On Twitter yesterday, Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote: “I’ll now bet we’ll see significant (incl. many hospitalizations/deaths) surges this fall in low-vaccine populations due to combo of seasonality, Delta’s nastiness, & ‘back to normal’ behavior.”

David Leondhart

1a2) From the viruses are weird column: the Delta variant is more communicable. OK. Understandable. Your hosts begin to smarten up and it's harder to spread. But why is it more virulent? Is it a byproduct of being more communicable? The best strategy would seem to be highly communicable, but mild. Like the common cold. That way, you can develop a symbiotic relationship instead of encouraging eradication. But then, with modern humans as disorganized as they are, maybe riding it out as long as you can is optimal. If you were aware you were coming to the end of your survival path, you might just start using cannon fodder to overwhelm progressing defenses. 

To be clear, I am not assigning agency to the COVID virus. More musing on how selection works to send a form of life down a path of hypothetical survival. The strategy might be, mutate and evolve and whatever strategy makes it the furthest is good enough.

Temporally, generation upon generation of the virus could survive over a short period of years, but long enough to form into a more symbiotic form of life. A compression of the life cycle to assume a form that manages to survive. Gut bacteria might have started in such a way. Kind of fascinating to think about despite the human suffering caused.

2a) Towards a Better Antilibrary

2a1) "I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

Sherlock Holmes A Study in Scarlet

2a2a) The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Brain Pickings – Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

2a2b) Farnam Street – The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important

3a) Tee Rex

 

4a) Heavy Medal

4a1) Take Five: Heart of Thunder

An adrenaline pumping short stack of heavy medal motivation. For those who dare with hearts of thunder to go beyond, I salute you.

4a2) I but follow the masters. In this case, Hollywood Steve Huey at the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast.

There’s a fanfare of synthesizers, typically, that open the song to warm up the listener for the battle at hand. The meat? Hard-driving rhythms, a rough-and-ready guitar, and a vocalist who can hit the high registers. Lyrics are filled with metaphors: things are always on fire and people are on the edge.

 
Beyond Yacht Rock – Heavy Medal 

4a3) John Farnham "Break the Ice" from Rad (1986)

5a) Daily Zen

 

5a1a) "The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic." 

Arthur C. Clarke on the future, BBC Horizons 1964

5a1b) The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul. Within the hours of 9 to 5 (but let’s be real, it’s more than that), they expect to own the time, attention and energy of that person. The nebulous badge of “full-time” brings with it a level of ownership of the person - they cannot go elsewhere, what they create is yours, on some level they are yours, because you have deigned them worthy of a salary and benefits and whatever other crumbs you pass their way. In return, you expect them to dedicate their existence to you - on levels of dramatic ranging from “I need to see you in the office” to “I want to make sure I can text you at 10PM and badger you about some shit that bothers me.”

Ed Z – The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains

5a1c) "Um...I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow...

5a1c) It is both baffling and banal that Clarke's prediction has not fully been realized due to social memes that appeared during the Industrial Revolution. But before we head too far down the path of humans frustrating foibles, here are some additional areas of nascent technology that imagine greater. What will the next five decades look like?

5a2) All the World's Data in DNA | Dina Zielinski | TEDxVienna

5a3) Quantum Computers, Explained With Quantum Physics

5a) Daily Zen

 

5a1) Major Kong Rides the Bomb

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) Director: Stanley Kubrick

 

5a2) We'll meet again...

5a3) Why so serious...?

5a) Wrapped in Plastic

5a1a) Twin Peaks - Laura Palmer, Portishead "Roads"

5a1b) 

Storm in the morning light

I feel, no more can I say

Frozen to myself

I got nobody on my side

And surely that ain't right

Surely that ain't right

5a2a) Mashed in Plastic: The David Lynch mashup album trailer

5a2b) 

1. The Voice of Love is Crying - [Colatron]

2. Blue Rigby - [Wax Audio]

3. Twin Hearts - [Colatron]

4. Heaven's Drive-In - [Phil RetroSpector]

5. Tori's Deranged - [Wax Audio]

6. Something Stupid This Way Comes - [G3RSt]

7. I'll Be There in Twin Peaks - [Colatron]

8. The Pink Jack - [Wax Audio]

9. Lauren's Opus - [The Reborn Identity]

10. Frank's Here - [The Who Boys]

11. The Elephant Connection - [The Reborn Identity]

12. I've Told Every Little Pumpkin - [ToToM]

13. Violent at Heart - [The Reborn Identity]

14. Don't Go All Wicked on Me - [Neiltomo]

15. Eraserhead Serenade - [RIAA]

16. Velvet Dreams - [Voicedude]

17. In My Twin Life - [Phil RetroSpector]

18. This is David Lynch - [Neiltomo]

Mashed in Plastic YouTube Playlist

5a2c) Colatron article on the creation of Mashed in Plastic

5a3) Albums containing Twin Peaks samples – a list by WhiteBlur2 at RYM

5a4) It all started here. It's still hard to believe that it made it to network television at all. Maybe even more unbelievable is the pressure on Lynch to solve the mystery and move on. It's still one of the most accurate portraits of how grief affects a community. Near madness matched by a numbing of experiential reality in response to its rupture. The black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium was the message. And maybe in the end, the medium won. But there for a bit, Lynch stretched it to its breaking point and gave us a frame into a world that would become all too familiar. The punctuated equilibrium of precarious confidence in security. A world wrapped in plastic. 

5a5) See 060621_4a

4a) Daily Zen

 

4a1) VH1 Behind the Music: Def Leppard

4a2) One of my favorite episodes of BtM. This is a later cut featuring updates on Def Leppard that were probably unnecessary, but most of it is still classic. 

5a) Daily Zen

5a) "Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Right, Ric?"

4a) Daily Zen

 

4a1) Montrose "Rock Candy"

 

 4a2) BulletBoys "Rock Candy"

4a3) L.A. Guns "Rock Candy"

4a) EVOL Select: Lynch Highway

4a) EVOL Select: Lynch Highway

Wild at Heart “I’m takin’ off, baby”

David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti - I'm Hurt Bad

Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, Featuring David Lynch - Dark Night Of The Soul

Dean Hurley - Night Electricity Theme

Lost Highway “We’ve met before”

Chrysta Bell & David Lynch - All the Things

Wax Audio - The Pink Jack

Portishead - Roads

Twin Peaks “There will be an announcement”

David Lynch - Imaginary Girl

Roy Orbison - In Dreams

Blue Velvet “Let’s hit the fuckin’ road”

Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch - Mysteries of Love (Instrumental)

Julee Cruise - Mysteries of Love

Chromatics - Blue Girl (Dean Hurley Remix)

Angelo Badalamenti - Into The Night

Jocelyn Montgomery with David Lynch - Sapientie

Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch - Diner

Mulholland Drive “Someone’s in trouble”

Angelo Badalamenti & Jimmy Scott - Sycamore Trees

Xiu Xiu - Dance of the Dream Man

Fantômas - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Zola Jesus - Lady In The Radiator

Noise interludes from Eraserhead

5a) Daily Zen

5a1) The Six Million Dollar Workout

5a2) Frank Gifford guest stars on The Six Million Dollar Man, S04E07 – The Bionic Boy (1976)

5a3) Giff whiff gif

"That's one of the finest moves anyone has ever put on me."

8a) Oh, the Humanity

 

8a1a) Super Mario Bros: The Human Limit

8a1b) A fascinating look into community problem solving. 

A player community spread across the internet has a puzzle to solve. At first only the best compete. But it ignites imagination among others. As a result, more efficient and quicker solutions are teased out. By both designing and using digital tracking tools, they find where they need to improve physical coordination to solve the human limit. In the end, the player community reduces nearly every movement to maximum efficiency, approaching the once impossible human limit. Given the evolution from definition to efficient action, we can assume there will be more to tell. 

       

This is more than just a speed-run solution. It is humans doing what they’ve always done best. Using technological apparatuses to work together to solve problems. While this particular story is focused on speed-running Super Mario Bros, this player community shows us at our best–the best of the human community in the miniature and specific.

2a) Daily Zen

 2a1) These are the tape recordings of Richard Feynman's 1961-64 Caltech Introductory Physics lectures, which form the basis of the book The Feynman Lectures on Physics. The original recordings were made on 1/4" reel-to-reel tapes, now preserved in Caltech's Archive. In 2010 the entire collection was digitized by media preservationist George Blood, at a sampling rate of 96 kHz with 24-bit samples, PCM-encoded in tiff files about 2 GB each in size. For this online publication we are serving more compact versions, downsampled to 48 kHz with 16-bit samples, reencoded as AAC-HE (mp4) and Opus (ogg) at a data rate of 48 kbps.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Audio Collection at Caltech.edu

8c) Force for Change

8c1) AMC said on Thursday that it did not know "how long these dynamics will last.
        "Under the circumstances, we caution you against investing in our Class A common stock, unless you are prepared to incur the risk of losing all or a substantial portion of your investment," it said.
        Analysts have also warned that the stock may be overvalued due to the rise of streaming and competition from other entertainment companies.
        David Trainer, chief executive of investment research firm New Constructs, said: "AMC's business was trending in the wrong direction even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic... We think AMC's stock is worth $0 per share, given its weak earnings, dilution from recent stock offerings and mountain of debt."
Despite that, AMC has been among the biggest winners from a spike of interest in meme stocks, fuelled in part by a new generation of social media-centric small traders.
        On Wednesday, #AMCstock was trending on Twitter in the US as investors discussed their holdings and the share price nearly doubled.
        The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler said at a hearing last month that it will report on issues around volatile "meme" stocks this summer.
He said that although online forums such as Reddit can serve as a "real community", he is concerned about "the risks that nefarious actors may try to send signals to manipulate the market".

AMC cinema chain issues warning to small investors at BBC News

8c2a) Follow Matt Levine at Bloomberg for humorous and informative analysis on financial markets, but specifically the recent spate of meme stocks and the cult of Elon Musk.

8c2b) but I do feel like a healthy dose of nonsense is what is needed here. The way to understand AMC is to abandon your conscious mind for a while and just float on a sea of vague associations. How boring to apply traditional notions of corporate finance or supply and demand to AMC. AMC is a new thing.

Matt Levine - Money Stuff at Bloomberg

8c2c) Bitcoin Slips After Musk Tweets Broken-Heart Emoji for Token

8c3) Even when cultural change happens swiftly, it's hard to be aware of what is actually changing and how it will affect the future. In some ways, the future ends up becoming subtly weirder than could be imagined in the present. 

        Um...but the idea that were living in some sort of science fiction scenario is becoming more salient

        Yes. It's a bit of a cliche to claim the future is happening in our time. Not much different than wearing a sandwich board declaring the end is near. But it seems as if the COVID pandemic produced forces that superheated the rate of change. 

        The internet has been a latent agent for change since its widely adopted use. In actuality, it hasn't done much more than prove Marshall McLuhan's point that the medium is the message. In the sense that there wasn't much more there than what appeared on the surface–a grand web of mutual communication, full of humans being human. 

        Yes. It has changed our cultural reality in some subtle and also not so subtle ways. But now it's getting truly weird. 

        The Occupy Wall Street movement did not accomplish much more than giving some bored kids a vacation from reality. Granted, I am being reductionist. But take meme stocks as an example. Even if concentrated in a few isolated firms, they are driving financial markets. 

        Value is a concept of socially constructed belief. It's utility is based on what we believe that utility might be. The best tool for the job also requires an awareness of how to use the tool with efficiency and skill. Otherwise, it's just an inert artifact. 

        For benefit or detriment, the people have discovered the power of the internet. File sharing, black hat hacking, 4Chan, QAnon, all these were arguably pranks. Children playing in the shallows. But from potentially terrifying ransomware hacks to the populist uprising of r/WallStreetBets, the pandemic seemingly produced enough time and boredom to turn the internet into a true force for change. 

        Force for change. How often that phrase, or something like it, is used as a beacon of hope. An indicator that this place we are in won't last forever. that the future is brighter. I tend to think so. But we should also be careful what we wish for. The ripples of the pandemic have only begun to show. 

8b) Thing or Device?

8b1) Twitter announced on Thursday the launch of Twitter Blue, the company’s first subscription service designed for power users willing to pay a monthly fee for exclusive features.
        Twitter Blue users will get an Undo Tweet feature that allows them to set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to take back a tweet if it needs to be fixed. The feature is not quite an edit button, a feature often requested by users, but it will allow subscribers to preview what their tweets look like and adjust them before they’re published. 

Twitter launches its first subscription service at CNBC

8b2) For Borgmann, a device is a thing that is used as a means to an end. Therefore, a device is seen as "the compound of commodity and machinery" while "the distinctive pattern of division and connection of its components is the device paradigm. This term is meant to signify or distinguish between technological devices and "focal things and practices," which matter to people in their everyday affairs.
        A focal thing is something of ultimate concern and significance, which may be masked by the device paradigm, and must be preserved by its intimate connection with practice. Borgmann used the case of wine to explain this. He cited that the focal thing in winemaking involves the implements used to produce wine. Wine becomes a device when it employs technology and machinery not merely to produce wine but obtain specific qualities such as grapey, smooth, light, and fruity flavors or clean and clear appearance.
        As technological devices increase the availability of a commodity or service, they also push these devices into the background where people do not pay attention to their destructive tendencies. For example, the technology of central heating means that warmth is readily available and family members can retreat into the solitude of their rooms instead of working to chop wood or stoke the fires. Social interaction is reduced and the family struggles to find activities that enable such nurturing and care for each other. The ubiquitous nature of information technology also makes it an important example of device paradigm.

Device paradigm at Wikipedia

8b3) See 060321_2b

8a) What the Bene Gesserit knew–memes rule.

8a1) In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.
        After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a "special evolutionary transition" in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.
        Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.
        Culture is a stronger mechanism of adaptation for a couple of reasons, Waring says. It's faster: gene transfer occurs only once a generation, while cultural practices can be rapidly learned and frequently updated. Culture is also more flexible than genes: gene transfer is rigid and limited to the genetic information of two parents, while cultural transmission is based on flexible human learning and effectively unlimited with the ability to make use of information from peers and experts far beyond parents. As a result, cultural evolution is a stronger type of adaptation than old genetics. 

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics at Pys.org

8a2) A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.

The Coda

Frank Herbert – Chapterhouse Dune

8a3) See 060321_2a2

4a) Daily Zen

 

4a1) Cowboy Bebop OST Mix

4a2) Much more on Yoko Kanno, the mastermind behind Cowboy Bebop's varied and multicolored sound

In Watanabe, Kanno had finally found a director who was arguably as interested in the way anime sounded as she was. For Watanabe Bebop was a world filled with Jazz and Blues and though this was a world with which Kanno herself was initially unfamiliar, her willingness to see music as an open language, rather than as something to be viewed through the perspectives of genre, meant it was a world she was happy to embrace. 

 

John Bull – Yoko Kanno: The Greatest Composer You’ve Never Heard Of 

4a3) See you space cowboy...

7a) Aha!

 

7a1a) Costanza - George (vaporwave mixtape)

7a1b) "What's the deal with vaporwave, it's like you bring music from another generation and then slow it down, add some kicks. Boom you got vapor-wave!" -Seinfeld (maybe?)

jSplat16 form the comments

7a1c) At Bandcamp

7a2a) It's a big salad chock full of bouncing beats. A quirky bald man of a mix even Marisa Tomei could love. It's not manure–it's mah-newer. 

"When you consider the choices, manure is actually pretty refreshing."

7a2b) Thanks to friend Crispin for the heads up. 

2b)060321_2a2 Counterpoint

 2b1) The progress of technology, says Borgmann, is driving us further into what he calls “the device paradigm”. The point of a device lies solely in its output — what he calls its commodity. The commodity of central heating is warmth. The commodity of a car is transportation. And unlike a thing, a device gives its users that commodity disconnected from the process of its creation. Frozen food lets you have a meal without cooking it for yourself. Central heating lets you have warmth without fussing around with a wood stove. A device is a kind of shortcut to its commodity. And if we think that all we really want is that commodity — then we want the device to hide from us all the mechanisms by which it creates those commodities. We want the process shoved out of sight, excised from our lives. So we make better devices, that give us faster access to what we think we want. They are better, from our perspective, because they further disentangle the commodity from all these other burdensome elements.
        Of course, the key is that we only think these other elements are burdensome. But these burdensome elements also drive us into the complex world, says Borgmann. They drive us into social relationships, into activity, into a rich and sensuous experience of the detailed world. Devices divest us of that. They give us only the thing that we thought we had wanted. But that’s good only if we know exactly what’s good for us.

C. Thi Nguyen – What Zoom Removes

2b2) Even though on some level Nguyen takes a more pessimistic view of the technological apparatus that is a hallmark of human life than Deutsch does below, they largely agree on the ability of humans to think beyond their tools. 

        The great joke of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that the zero-gravity toilet has a complicated list of instructions. Humanity has escaped their terrestrial cradle, only to be trapped by the most basic biological function. 

        But this is also Deutsch's point. 

        Utopia is monotony. Life without change is monotony. Creativity is flattened and the horizon of change stretches beyond the human lifetime. But life itself, the memetic and biological concept carries and integrates change. Creating layers of complexity forming and reforming its environment to its purpose. Change quickens and is controlled. Unintended consequences abound, but are eventually bound.  Creating more unintended consequences and contributing to the cycle of change. Making each new (r)evolutionary act yet another opportunity to stave off monotony.

        Zoom is a but a blip in technological history. Certainly not in Nguyen's life. But Nguyen is also offered a chance to use that most human skill, reflection. And pass it on to us. In the end, he has changed the consideration of the device allowing him to continue to use the device without allowing the device to use him. 

        Deutsch says that "Humans are not playthings of cosmic forces. We are users of cosmic forces." As Deutsch appears "in person" by remote at TED, as Nguyen teaches "in person" on Zoom, our reality changes. Explanatory information is passed on, offering us all an opportunity to control cosmic forces. 

 

Things spread their tendrils through our lives, they reshape our interactions and procedures in a thousand countless ways.

And isn't that the wonder of being human. 

.