Harry Patton, old time cowboy with the Three Block outfit, fiddling before an open fireplace, 1908. Photo by: Erwin E. Smith
it’s getting colder…
(Source: frontierjustice, via richardmanuel)
This is mindblowing from a wide variety of perspectives, so I’ll just pick one:
Remember when Kickstarter hit 1MM backers a couple of months ago, and it was pointed by (first by @garychou, I believe) that the money pledged by Kickstarter backers was approaching 65% of the NEA’s annual budget?
Well consider this: the Sundance Institute itself received NEA grants totaling $180,000 in 2011. The 14 Kickstarter-supported films appearing at Sundance received more than $370,000 from Kickstarter backers in 2011.
It’s not an apples-to-anything comparison, but it’s incredible nonetheless.
(Source: david, via fred-wilson)
excerpt from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (via emmakempsell)
There was a period of a couple of years where all I did was read this book
(via newspeedwayboogie)
(via newspeedwayboogie)
We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.
Author Joan Didion, November 1970
Excerpts from The White Album
Copyright 1979 Joan Didion. Published by Simon & Schuster. Used without permission.Chapter IV SoujournsIn the Islands1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together. My husband is here, and our daughter, age three. She is blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach. She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.
The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action. My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair. In the absense of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.You will perceive that such a view of the world presents difficulties. I have trouble making certain connections. I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems increasingly beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure. I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic, holding always before me the examples of Axel Heyst in Victory and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms and a few dozen others like them, believing as they did that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience. I still believe that, but I have trouble reconciling salvation with those ignorant armies camped in my mind. I could indulge here in a little idle generalization, could lay off my own state of profound emotional shock on the larger cultural breakdown, could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would be just one more stylish shell game. I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old-fashioned bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.
Fugazi - And The Same (live, 1993)
Each one gets different facets of the band, but I think that this recording captures something essential about Fugazi in the same way that the incredible 1988 video of Waiting Room does.
They stop the song to call out someone starting a fight on the floor, then roll right back into it. I want to use words like “soaring” and “epic” to describe the chorus here. One could argue that the “post-hardcore” label emerged because “hardcore” is nowhere close to big enough to contain what bands like Fugazi did.
As a historical note, this is from the 1993 run at the Roseland in New York where the band reportedly turned down a ten million dollar offer to sign with Atlantic Records.
Wow
