L.A. Day/L.A. Night: Slideshow: Places: Design Observer

L.A. Day/L.A. Night: Slideshow: Places: Design Observer

Photographer and pilot Michael Light sores over the coastal west, snapping shots for a series of eight books. "In his photos of Los Angeles, he focused on its extremes, contrasting the land of perpetual sunlight with its deep, expansive darkness. Now Light (a fantastic name for a photographer) has collected the photos in L.A. Day/L.A. Night, a beautiful 72-page book featuring 30 images of the city captured from above."

Check it.

purse 'n boots: malibooty

purse 'n boots: malibooty: Great photography, great works of art in clothes.

Greg Laswell - Comes and Goes

A very good tune.

2011 Showcasing Acts | SXSW.com

2011 Showcasing Acts | SXSW.com

I shall satisfy my musical appetite. And other appetite.

The Head and the Heart - Down in the Valley (Live on KEXP)

Thanks Michael for passing this along! I've fallen in love with the voice and violin. Catching The Head and the Heart December 13th at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, CA. Stoked!

"Lord have mercy on my rough and rowdy days."

Sinnreich

I found Sinnreich’s argument that “the audience was born at the same time as music became a commodity” (128) to be interesting and really on-point.  In a consumer society, no longer are cultural participants producing and listening to music for reasons of social identity (as in pre-industrial societies), but instead acquiring music in order to be considered cultural participants.  This is incredibly true, especially when one thinks of how, in Facebook and MySpace profiles, music we “like” is linked up to others who enjoy the same music.  By placing that music there, and signifying that you “have” this music, play it, and listen to it, you communicate your “group affiliations and cultural attitudes.”  It’s an important musical/cultural phenomenon that I personally have not read much about, and Sinnreich’s description of this was particularly striking to me.

Barlow

In his Wired article, John Perry Barlow provides a fantastic comparison between understanding light in more than one way and understanding information in such a manner.  Just as light is understood as both a wave and a particle, information must be understood as an activity, a life form, and a relationship – and only by understanding this can one understand why information should not be chained down through burdensome intellectual property rights.  Throughout his description, I really found Barlow’s statement of, “Information is a verb, not a noun,” to be the most powerful, since that in itself could shoot down any argument that it deserves any ounce of intellectual property rights.  He writes, “Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods. It is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer.”  For me, it’s a novel way of perceiving information, yet it makes more sense than seeing it as a “thing.”