MDM Broadcast - 2020

appreciating the warhol/VU silkscreen tattoo on the guy who’s teaching me to play bass

"She did not write its text, which is instead a transcript of a tape recording made by the F.B.I. of its initial questioning of Winner from June 2017."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/theater/is-this-a-room-review-reality-winner.html

Incredible scene in the Floating Piers doc (called “Walking on Water”) of Christo’s assistant trimming his boss’ eyelashes with large scissors (more like shears).

"Every album will be recorded on a cellphone, and transmitted over WhatsApp, and uploaded to Bandcamp - where it will live for one month only." 👍🏻

On latest edition of Motherboard's "Cyber" podcast, Emily Wilson talks about how people don't use the dark web in order to (only) buy illicit drugs -- people are turning to it to purchase therapeutic (not recreational) pharmaceuticals that aren't covered by their health plans. #latestagecapitalism

Here at car mechanic, June 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics, featuring Hunter & Joe.

Winona used an M3 in Winona.

google voice spam transcription #personalitydisordercannolis

If you're new to the Clearview story, this cnn video/article offers a good intro.

#latecapitalism

"She lost her first job (as a typist and comptometer operator) after taking her guitar to work and playing it during tea-breaks."

photography. leah millis, reuters, from last summer.

"There is no national registry of places where enslaved people were bought and sold."

Beautifully complicated solution for friend network of teens who masterfully obfuscate their identities and locations to thwart InstaFace. https://pca.st/z9fzxl3x

Fun to hear DHH discuss the reality of how quality content doesn't matter (because engagement won, because adtech won, enabling Facetagram's monopoly) in this wide-ranging talk with Calacanis (1hr46min):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyq_lnLK-RU&feature=youtu.be&t=6412

Still think it's weird that the man who invented my favorite frisbee as a kid (Aerobie) invented my favorite single-serving coffee device as a 40-something (Aeropress). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Adler

Loved hearing Ron Carter in the new Miles Davis doc (via American Masters) say how he turned down Miles' urgings to start playing electric bass. Carter's quote: "so I put my hat on and got in the wind."

Phenomenal to see Galen Rupp and Aliphine Tuliamuk on way to victories in US Olympic Marathon Trials today

Great to see Americans who support the President practicing social distancing and avoiding large crowds this morning in Ponte Vedra Beach. #golfculture

Hoarding & price gouging are the boldest expression of “wisdom of the market” right?

incredible

Also, while preparing to teach this week, I was happy to remember Richard Renaldi's project, which takes on new relevance, and might be a kind of balm to look at and consider in these times: https://renaldi.com/touching-strangers/#1

Our daughter named the sourdough starter "Harold" so we've got that going for us.

"Langton Street residents Lalett and Vanessa Fernandez with their son, 1980" - from Janet Delaney's SOMA 78-86 project https://www.janetdelaney.com/

I remember when this project was released I spent a lot of time reading about it but never listened until this week and I'm not necessarily glad I waited, but there is some perfection in listening to it now as everything is slowly but steadily spinning apart like the magnetized particles on these loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disintegration_Loops

"Photography Is" a 7hr-long durational reading of Mishka Henner's text

"The real enemy of writing, isn't lack of talent, it's being interrupted (by a Masterclass pre-roll ad from Joyce Carol Oates, on YouTube)" - Joyce Carol Oates

Absolutely love LaToya Ruby Frazier leaning-against the evils of big-tech during her Yale Photo Zoom talk today.

When you click the “download” button in Plexamp on iOS.

"If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso" - A Coronavirus Task Force Supercut

Poem via Gertrude Stein: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55215/if-i-told-him-a-completed-portrait-of-picasso

"...which is perhaps the first-ever album to use the echolocations of bats as compositional source material."

If the internet & social media really worked, and was measured by how quickly and efficiently these networks distributed information to a diverse community of users (rather than increasing profits for platforms through the gilded handshake of surveillance & advertising) we would have first learned of Ahmaud Arbery on February 24th.

Really appreciate how this sequence of questions from Noah Kalina's newsletter devolves, as any series of questions about anything these days rightly should.

Mubi decided it would be a good day to begin streaming one of my all-time favorites) which I’ve been thinking about all week (for some reason).

"Boss says books handled by customers will be removed to allow time for virus to die."

So much to post and repost -- instead I'll highlight this newness from rocker Bob Mould, one of the first times I've seen a high-profile example equating Christian Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism with ISIS.

As time goes on, it's remarkable the kinds of jobs or workplaces that would have seemed outrageous even in a novel of post-modern fiction. While Augusta Nat'l predated this with birdnoise insertion a few years ago (not true! twas the PGA Championship!); Crowd-Noise-Insertion Producer for televised sports: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/sports/coronavirus-stadium-fans-crowd-noise.html (And a prof name-drops Baudrillard in the last paragraph.)

If you haven't seen the full clip of Joe Scarborough going-off on Facebook, Zuckerberg and Sandberg this morning, here ya go:

https://theirnames.org/

From April, 2018, still one of my favorite intersections of a real-time notification with whatever happened to be on my screen at the time.

I always want to see what it looks like when video footage and stills are being made at the same time - and compare the perspectives. I sync'd the known sources of footage of the couple from St. Louis last night, and it looks like this:

Does it have to be so North Korea? National insecurity.

the global quarantine finally delivers the bookshelf we’ve been wanting to see

https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Civil-Rights-Audit-Final-Report.pdf

Two things from the world of digital incrementalism. It's taken Reddit 15 years to support photo galleries, and they still haven't successfully solved (no one has, frankly) one of the fatal flaws of threaded discussion, when nearly every viewer of a thread asks the original poster the same question, which the original poster dutifly answers 8 separate times. (Example: 10:02PM)

Still amazed/shocked by the inability of these attention platforms to effectively innovate for their users (not their advertisers) while remaining undeniably & functionally broken.

Holzer

"I've read a lot of psychology of the slaveholding era, and the reality is that holding other human beings as slaves and then going to church and then going to work and then pretending that you are a good person and still wanting to feel like a good person, wanting to feel like you are moral and Christian and having all those things happen at the same time, it actually not just diminishes the people you oppress, it diminishes you. It actually eats away somehow at you." - https://the.ink/p/joy-reid-wants-to-give-republicans

20101011 - https://fluxprojects.org/productions/momentary-performances/

That feeling when Boogaloo Bois try to team-up with Hamas.

One of my favorite memes ever, saved to a hard drive one year ago today. Michael + John, together again.

https://theundefeated.com/features/a-pga-veterans-callous-joke-about-blackface-and-tiger-woods-turned-into-a-lesson-on-empathy/

So rare to see him have to face anything but adoring crowds.

Glad that thousands (maybe a million or so?) will be reading their first Louise Glück poem today.

Better said by Andrew Marantz https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/why-facebook-cant-fix-itself

Gibney’s latest doc “Totally Under Control” is now streamable and worth the $7 to ensure he can keep making films like this. https://youtu.be/Rz_Wrp0bwsA

One of my favorite things about trying to describe how the business model behind social media platforms is driving our clown car called America off a cliff -- is that to describe it, in a way that will be remotely understandable, you have to use metaphor.

Tristan Harris intuitively understands that, and is excellent in today's new episode of the world's most popular podcast everyone hates to love / loves to hate.

"If you have 40-50 million people who now recognize that we're living in this cannibalist system in which the economic incentive is to debase the life support system of your democracy, we can all wake up and say, 'that's stupid. Let's do something differently, let's actually change the system, let's use different platforms, let's fund different platforms -- let's regulate and contain these existing Frankensteins.'"

https://pca.st/8x6dyl5j

19 years ago this month, I bought my first domain name (and email address) with impatience over the fact that everything we did online was done while sitting in chairs. Even then, I had despair over how much of the real world we were missing, while seated.

"Pleased" to see others using the sedentary verb now to describe how addiction-platforms currently manage the algorithmically-enhanced mobile-on-the-go ebb & flow of our national conversation(s). I've been talking about people "sitting" on Instagram for years now -- it's great to see its use is catching-on to describe the thumbsucking appeal of machines smart enough to show you exactly what will keep you looking.

screenshot from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/us/trump-supporters.html

In 2008 I had an exhibition of work made on the campaign trail called “So Help Me”. Gotta wonder what the people who still belong to this group have thought about the last four years.

Just imagine how much pandemic $ YouTube is making off pre-roll ads on educational content being casted through Zoom to children in virtual classrooms. All thanks to school districts who have no influence with Google or the resources with which to grant every single teacher a YouTube Premium (ad-free) account.

I worked at this candle factory a long time ago, and the stench in my clothes was so strong it was permanent. love the covid angle, and the reply thread (pasted) with data-viz charts of amazon comments: https://twitter.com/TerriDrawsStuff/status/1331362372179554304

Looks like originality in creative naming of craft beers is still a thing.

Don't recall seeing this photo in any of the year-end "best photos of 2020" wrap-ups. Still pretty high on my list. Covid-disinfecting truck sprayer and motorcyclist. From Iran, back in March.

“there’s an RFID chip in my hand and we were just trying to get the reader working again...”

#OnlyAMatterOfTime