another attempt at social engineering

Or not.

Friday the 7th @ 7:45 EST there'll be a live reading from The Failure, a new novel by James Greer, here.

Will post now to ensure 4 days and 15 minutes of relevance.

sci-fi avatars & voices etched in chocolate

Respectively . . .

The Music of Sound

FABULON

And from what passes these days for a mad scientist's lair, analog video synthesis and tube-derived tomfoolery on Deviant Synth.

solitude & the inverted fedora

I'm Learning To Share speaks volumes on Jughead's hat.

Yes, Jughead of Archie comics fame. It's like a doctoral thesis on American Studies in a tasty Flintstones chewable.

the music of sound posts the coolest article ever on The End of Solitude. Recommended, as in very.

If that sounds like no fun, FABULON will show what your friends really think of you no matter how much you text them.

In any case, whatever your state of popularity, please consider doing this:

Stand up and walk away from your computer and go outside somewhere where the birds vastly outnumber the people. Phones and iPods off, just you alone with whatever's happening.

profit to the people

Maybe I watched way too many episodes of Kung Fu.

Or I just love heavy-handed irony and Chinese classical music way too much to worry about the trade & diplomatic repercussions of a FM radio station riffing on the Cultural Revolution.

But here it is: Kung Pao 100.5 FM ditching the previous rock format for Chinese classical music.

Give it a listen and you'll find it replete with goofy gong-bashing segues and giveaways like the Kung Pao Cash Cow.

And DJs intoning nonsense like "Kung Pao 100.5 FM--Listen every now and Zen."

Or "Made in China--exclusively for Hampton Roads."

The station website likewise pours it on with hooks like the People's Party and the Insurgent Club.

Not to mention the soon-to-be-popular Take Your Bills And Divide Them Among The Community contest: "Send us your paycheck and listen for your name to get some of it back."

Things gets a bit broad now & then, like when the Station Manager alludes to drinking sake. (Eh, um, dude, sake's a Japanese beverage, do your market research.) And sometimes we're hanging with Cuban DJ 'Che or Suon Pheakdei, the Cambodian Ryan Seacrest.

But it's all for laughs (& well, for me, the music).

And no Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's moments quite yet.

The station's slogan is: You Will Listen. And indeed you may.

Expect to see many drive-time listeners down in the Old Dominion clutching their Little Red Books.

Many thanks to the Daily Press article for the heads up.

what is our gamelan?

With a new president, our new president now sworn in, there are all sorts of questions and notions going forward.

My meme to offer rides the back of the previous post:

What is our gamelan?

Or, if you prefer, your gamelan, or mine?

(Again, leave it to Wikipedia to provide the contextual details.)

I'm still guessing as to mine, but the notion overall is:

Where for anyone does the creativity of one join in with and foment the creativity of many? Where does anyone go again and again, day-to-day or whenever possible, to offer the fruits of who she or he is to comprise an even broader harvest?

This is humbly presented as an organizing question, something that may lack any one clear or definite answer but will present any number of operative principles or best next actions.

The metaphor means to offer both community and play, structure and variation.

With the let's get together and work things out themes of late, we may want to whistle while we work. Or work as we whistle.

The whistling itself maybe being the work. The play that moves us forward.