I bought a 1960s-era dictionary of art terms on eBay
Lately I've been buying lots (as in: large group of) of art books or random vintage books on secondhand marketplaces. This dictionary of art terms was irresistible. The collage started 9 months ago, and I decided to add to it.
Watching a Ryuchi Sakamoto performance of async, and it’s almost magical watching him work. The lightness, the near trepidation he seemed to feel when playing the pianissimo accents of the opening, as though he might land just a little too hard on one of the keys and ruin everything for a lack of sensitivity. He touches the keys, but just. A whispered note. Beautiful. The opening credits, a simple black background with his name in white, appear on screen. Soon he begins looping. And the opening, haunting keys linger as organ sounds underneath the electronic soundscape Sakamoto takes such delight in creating. Everything he does is so physical. He leans over the piano with a guitar slide, and makes the most haunting sounds.
A live performance film capturing an intimate concert by composer, pianist and music producer Ryuichi Sakamoto in New York City. The performance marked the first public unveiling of Sakamoto’s new opus, async, hailed as one of the best albums of 2017 by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.
An odd experience today, where I inadvertently triggered AWS’s Q programming assistant to refuse to answer my request and refer me to AWS’s responsible use of AI policy. This happens, sometimes, if I use profanity to vent in a moment of frustration. But this time, I had typed “oh, thanks for catching that, that was pretty dumb of me” into the prompt. I then apologized to the bot for its own misunderstanding. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I wrote, “I was talking about myself. Thank you very much, this was helpful.” The bot replied, kindly acknowledging the challenging nature of the problem I’d been trying to solve, and wished me a happy new year.
My whole life, two feelings about the progress of digital technology: first fascination, then terror—always in short succession.
