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Excerpt of the Day: Kissinger edition

I know I know, Kissinger is evil blah blah blah. Kissinger was many things, some of them quite questionable then and certainly now, but the truth is he was also an astute observer of political behavior, and had a broad and deep understanding of the international system; while steeped in realpolitik to the point of being almost devoid of a moral compass, he also was quite incisive. He wrote the…

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Art: Disquiet 56 (desvendando-se no incerto)

The last few weeks have been deeply, disquieting. I went through some old artifacts on the peninsula and found some things I suddenly wanted to contend with, and ended up finding a path with that go forward, yet based on immense introspection and my perennial habit of abstract rumination. The sub-title is Portuguese for “unraveling into the uncertain“. Built from two painting layers involving…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 140: A-Ha, the Movie

A-Ha are mostly remembered in the US for their sole megahit, “Take On Me” but they actually charted globally for decades, sold almost 100 million units, have a Guinness Book record for one of the largest concerts in history (6 figure attendance), and…seem to be in a strange marriage of convenience with each other; they collectively barely stand each other, yet understand what their fame, and that…

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Art: The Canticle of False Hopes

It’s a thing where as I expand my various scripts & filters to generate patterns or distort images that the process of generation, distortion, shearing, merging, and in many ways play god to pixel pushing has expanded my compositional approach immensely, for both analog and digital. Often I get results that really blur the space between the two; occasionally I make it still look mostly analog,…

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Art: Imperium of Ghosts

After years of only occasionally playing around with sobel edge detection operations in my art, I’m finding some of the filters/scripts I’ve been mucking about with of late, are starting to produce useful results. In this case, using various configurations of them on portions of the two base paintings I scanned to start this (one, acrylics on hardboard, and the other various inks on watercolor…

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Art: Disquiet 55 (Olissipo)

I had started working on something that was getting progressively more gobshite, and it was frustrating, because so many times before, sessions like that often take a hard turn into something that actually works. I had given up, as it wasn’t. Until it sort of was, the next day. I took one layer out of that work that was mostly various inks (and IIRC some water soluble colored pencil) on…

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The Trump Administration Is a NatSec Nightmare, by their own Admission

So, I’ve just read a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg (Editor of The Atlantic and by historical standards, a Neo-con Republican of Reagan era bona fides) called The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans, and when I started reading I thought it would end in a Project Veritas grade bit of disinfo op clownery. But after a full read, it appears to be real. Basically a chunk of the Trump…

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Art:  gone by sin too slowly

This was one of those things that was developing from a set of recent experiments with variations of my process of painting on various media, then scanning them in and torqueing them into something clearly borne of, yet entirely divorced from said sources.In this case I found a few new tricks in some old software toys for generating geometric forms, which then get pushed and pulled into the mix;…

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Nathan Oliveira At the Triton

A big personal influence on me is Nathan Oliveira; somewhere in my late teens I grew interested in Portuguese artists, but mostly found authors (e.g. Fernando Pessoa and E��a de Queiroz) and musicians (Radio Macau, Carlos Paredes) but outside of Paula Rego, there just wasn’t a lot I could find about visual artists in the pre-internet libraries in my neighborhood.Then I found Nathan Oliveira (along…

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Sounds That have Been made, EP 139: Kelela "Furry Sings The Blues"

Joni Mitchell is one of my favorite singer-songwriters, and part of that is because, much like Stevie Wonder, her phrasing and compositional approach is very accessible, but weirdly inscrutable; complex chord changes and voicings, and an often verbose, stream of consciousness vocal cadence that flows smoothly but follows it’s own essential logic. Covers of Joni usually leave me pretty damn cold,…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 138: Blue Yonder "Indigo"

A deep in the dust bit of alt-AOR from the late 80s, that never charted anywhere that I can tell, but still sounds great. It’s one of those weirdly chronically listenable things that just works, even though it’s both very much of it’s time and in many ways (for folks that aren’t 80s tune-nerds), somewhat non-descript. It could fit between Holly Knight and Missing Persons and The Motels and Mr.…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 137: Jughead "Halfway Home to Elvis"

I picked up the sole Jughead album from the early 2000s purely on the fact that Ty Tabor was involved. A musical polymath who has been largely under the radar for the last 40 years, but has been an influence on everyone from Pantera and Queensryche, to Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins. A lot of this is because of his unique mix of crystalline melody (which has a big Beatle-esque…

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If You Voted for Trump, You're NOT Allowed to Act SURPRISED!

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 136: Nieuwe Gein "Nieuwegein"

It’s raw, mostly instrumental, and weirdly arresting post-punk pop-prog…something. The guitars sound inspired by 80s King Crimson, Talking Heads, and early A Certain Ratio, but the compositions veer often into No-Wave territory not unlike James Chance. What little vocals exist, are often barked phrases in stentorian Dutch (the band is from the Netherlands after all) and I can find nearly zero…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 135: Butterfly Bones "Heart"

…or just the heart emoji. But whatever. This SF-based indie/electro-pop outfit didn’t last very long (and of which next to bupkes is known), but did manage to get an EP or two worth of material out into the series of tubes, and this is still my favorite, 15 years on.

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Because @wrothstudio asked...and I'm not one to not fulfill a reasonable ask.

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Flexible Strategies

…is a great instrumental cut from The Police, it’s a less-so great service from a fintech firm. Not only am I letting “this exclusive offer” expire, I unsubscribed from your marketing list (which I know I didn’t subscribe to; the only hypothesis I have on that is you have an agreement with the software used for managing tenants/service requests in my building) Were given my email from my…