Anyone Else Think...[Episode 40]

…That Twitter is not “X” no matter what Elon wishes. X is a windowing system, a variable in mathematics, or a great LA punk band. By the time people only remember X.com as X.com, it will be an ex dot com.

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Asinine Axioms

“AI isn’t going to take your job away. Rather, a person using AI is going to take your job away.” I hate these insipid little tropes that have become the most common form of performative rabbit-pellet punditry on LinkedIn and elsewhere. It flattens a set of complex interactions that ironically, AI would hallucinate into a set of jibberish, where humans natter about incredulously into…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 118: Geoff Keezer Trio "Brilliant Corners"

I first heard Geoff when I found a copy of his album Turn up the Quiet in a cut out bin at a local record store in the early 2000s. It had some solid originals and even better standards/covers; doing Lush Life or Stompin’ at the Savoy is one thing for a jazz pianist, but throwing in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Bibo No Aozora was a curveball. It also had him in some tight company, with contributions from…

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Anyone Else Think... [Episode 39]

…that what Melania wants us all to ‘know’ (read: buy into sans any basis in reality), versus what we actually know (that she’s a plastic donkey-toy faced broodmare for a tyrannical manbaby, with all the cerebral aplomb of a dropped potato salad) is quite a delta to cross.

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 117: Jason Moran on Joan Jonas

“What can be a song? We visited acclaimed jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran at his home in Harlem to talk with him about artist Joan Jonas’ earliest performance works, “Songdelay” (1973). Filmed with a cast of performers in downtown New York near the Hudson River, the work explores how sound travels and can be distorted. To Moran, it presents many ideas of what songs can be.” The conception…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 116: Azer Gürgün - Folie à deux 

They put their own album in full on Youtube, so I won’t even pick a best track, as it’s good as a full meal of downtempo, menacing loops and haunting vocals. A comparatively young Azerbaijani producer, this evokes bits of Massive Attack, hints of 80s electronic post-punk asceticism, Bjorkian quirk, Ambersunshower soulful play, and a general polish one doesn’t always get with a debut long play.

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 115: João Barradas "Amalgamat (Outro)" Featuring Sara Serpa.

You know I generally view the only appropriate places for accordion is Zydeco, with other occasional exemptions being Klezmer and Tango. Everything else should be strictly “go to jail” threshold hits. I grew up mostly loathing Portuguese folk music employing accordion, so I feel like I can bag on it any way I like. For you Lawrence Welk fans, fight me (cause I will beat you in the face with a…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 114: Blasted Mechanism "Come With Us"

Blasted Mechanism is one of those bands I’ve never quite landed squarely with a consistent opinion on, because the combination of musical acumen, theatricality, and delivery was always swirled with a pretentious “EDM festival hipsters doing therapy and too much cosplay” vibe that has pervaded their show and compositional style since the out. Think Jamiroquai meets Skinny Puppy without the chops…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 113: Change "Change of Heart"

I am an unapologetic stan for 80’s synth-funk in all forms. There are some obvious big names in the genre, including Cameo, Klymaxx, Morris Day, and really anything that perennial The Time members Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis (aka Flyte Time) touched, including the Italian/American collective, Change. Their first lineup, while successful in Europe (and featuring some vocal talent like Jocelyn Shaw,…

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Spotted in DTSJ: A Diridon Moment

I’ve spent a fair amount of time to-ing and fro-ing from Diridon Station in DTSJ (whether it be Caltrain, VTA, the Capital Corridor or even taking the Starlight Express once) and most days the most wonderful thing about it is it’s low-key but beautiful architecture, and the fat that the whole place feels like a living part of the city, rather than staid and sterile. Once in a while though, a…

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Art: Untitled work in progress

This is from a few months ago, and I want to finish, but I’m not sure if it’s really close to done, or really far.

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Art: Sara Tavares

Cape Verdean singer and songwriter Sara Tavares first came on my radar somewhere in the early 2000s, with either Balancê or Xinti LPs, but she has a decent sized solo discography of consistent quality since, as well as collaborations with folks like Branko and Nelly Furtado. I drew this the day after her passing in November of last year (2023) in parallel pen, with intentions of filling it out,…

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Art: Being Towards Trash

Being Towards Trash is a former Redditor who used to contribute to the DrawMe and DrawMeNSFW subreddits, and I have several sketches of her from that canon of references. She tends towards almost abstracted physical positioning (not quite contortion) but this was more conventional, and I kept it quite simple and quick, using a Cretacolor monolith pencil.

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Art: Disquiet 44: a near extinguished flame that might be lurking there

Came out some time back. Disquiet is currently shaping to be a long, likely never ending series of personal explorations, as this is the 44th in the series. I’m starting to play with some new tools on the digital side, as well as pulling out some old inks and other items that have been on the shelf for a while. The series title was inspired by my love of the literary works of Fernando Pessoa, but…

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Reddit Retorts 4.10.2024

Which one…Beelzebub? Cthulu? Lamashtu? Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf? Eric, who in a family of absolute bell-ends, always works hardest to be the dumbest he can possibly be. To make the above statement when his family SPAC M&A gimmick with Truth Social (itself a total oxymoron) is bleeding money so fast, by next week it will likely be floating somewhere inside the hull of the Titantic (a fact…

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Spamway

their ads on reddit are relentless, and stupid So, the worlds most ossified MLM scheme, Amway (aka Shamway) and has had to pays dozens of millions of dollars in fines over the years in the US, Canada, India, UK and Vietnam (that I could find, and I would not be surprised if its more, as they’ve also been sued for various shady practices by everyone from the RIAA to Proctor & Gamble, so they…

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Sounds That Have Been made, EP 112: Keith LeBlanc + Malcolm X "No Sell Out"

Back in August of 2023, I had put this entry into my drafts folder (I have about 100 or so STHBM posts floating in my WordPress queue; anytime a song or artist comes to mind) and figured I would get to it once I finished an illustration I’ve had brewing for far longer, based on the Keith LeBlanc solo track Taxcider. That will have to wait, because I wanted to listen to this today. Keith LeBlanc…

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