Arthur Josephson is a Melbourne-based leadership development manager, with global experience at the cutting edge of learning and organisational change. This is his personal blog and learning record.
// July 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
XKCD understands. Blogging to return when things get way more/ way less normal, as they must. Until then, there is only this glimpse of a softer world…
// June 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
Reckoner
You can’t take it with you
Dancing for your pleasure
You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all you
all human beings
Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
all human beings
- Reckoner, by Radiohead, written by Thom Yorke.
This coming Tuesday- Radiohead, Gara and Brodie. It’s like going home.
// June 20th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
I took about 10,000 words I’d written from this blog and worked it through Wordle to get this funky “word cloud” above, based on frequency of usage. Loving the dadaist juxtaposition.
Then I put the entire text of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse through and tweaked the formatting a little further to get the result below. My vote for the cover of the 90th anniversary edition.
// June 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
“I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me.
In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
- The Layers- by the late, American Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz
// June 3rd, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, World Issues
And this just feels like spinning plates
I’m living in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinning plates
Our bodies floating down the muddy river
- Like Spinning Plates by Thom Yorke of Radiohead
// June 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
Another favourite of mine from this year’s World Press Photo. These are two potraits of Afghan women from a simply beautiful collection of ten.
“Six years after the ousting of the Taliban regime, the lives of many women in Afghanistan remain unaltered. Honor killings, forced marriage, domestic violence and denial of education continue to affect women daily. These portraits of women in Kabul were made by focusing a modern digital camera onto the glass plate inside an old-fashioned Afghan box camera.”
// May 29th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Art, Music & Poetry
Tonight, I will be seeing/dancing/being in the proximity of one of my favourite electro/house groups- Booka Shade from Frankfurt. Here is something to listen to and nothing to watch, Mandarine Girl by Booka Shade.
In high school I held strong opinions denying the status of “music” to anything with an electronic beat. Punk had taken its toll- largely in the shape of sore neck muscles, large blue/purple hair and a notion that “society” was something to be yelled about. A fortuitous meeting with a jazz guitar teacher ignited a revolution in taste and within months I was listening to jazz divas and big bands. Still, electronic music seemed rather too much like the soundtrack to car racing games to be of any interest. Hip hop DJs built the bridge for me, but it wasn’t until I came to Europe, the global heart of electronic music, that I started to differentiate between genres, styles and quality, to discern what I liked and what to avoid. Now I’m fairly able to unpack the amorphous and rather hilarious genre descriptions of the electro world such as “happy hardcore”, “goa trance” and “intelligent drum-and-bass”. But there is one style that forms my nemesis, a style that has risen to immense popularity during my time in Amsterdam such that it is almost unavoidable on any given evening, a style known by its adherents and dark practitioners as “minimal techno”.
To understand the travesty that is minimal techno, I have to take you back to the very beginnings of techno. And here’s the catch, like veritably all modern western music genres, techno was invented by African-Americans! I hear minds being blown world-wide. Techno, seemingly pretty much the whitest music there is, looks largely designed for people who cant handle too many complications in their rhythm section. But travel back with me to Detroit in the pivotal year of 1980. Detroit had largely avoided the disco fad of the 70′s but kept strong connections to Funk and Soul. Of course the big news in Detroit and everywhere else in 1980 was the coming computer revolution. And damn, a funk band leader don’t need no degree from MIT to talk about “funk technology”. A common view emerged that in the near future we would be typing on computers (possibly in space), wearing computers (possible in flouro colours) and listening to “computer music” (possibly in devices made by a computer company). Mix this funk-futurism with the emergent sounds of European synth-pop (Kraftwerk etc) and “computer music” of the future was only steps away. As Derrick May described, the sound of techno was “…like Detroit… a complete mistake, it’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”
Now, minimal techno has nothing at all to do with George Clinton, despite being his estranged progeny. It is a repetitive melee of tiny bits and beats with no tempo progression, melody or build whatsoever. It is fau “arty” background music for imperceptibly nodding one’s head to in elevators. There is no funk, no feeling in minimal techno, a music so stripped down that it tires the ears and bores the soul. Were George alive today (and he is) he would surely declare that minimal is all foreplay and no sex… A Maladaptive Melody… The Defunctive Funk.
// May 1st, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
We wait; cold, damp, shrouded in the feeble greying light as color leaches from our skies, our streets and our souls. For long months it goes but this way. Winter passes in name alone, as Spring and Autumn offer no sign of release. Atlantic gales chill our very bones and mock the rare flashes of once pink skin. Those of us from southern climes reach for strong drink and palliatives to fight off insensible complaints.
Then BAMN, just as hopes were being crushed and curses reached the windswept boughs, the Amsterdam Magnificence Engine fires up and turns on this-
// April 22nd, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry
Drifting - composed and played by Andy McKee
Myspace, Label: Candyrat
(link via bloggingheadstv)
For the those who think their “oh my god, utter guitar genius” level cannot go any higher, prepare to realize your former belief system was ruinously corrupted. Welcoming Mr. John Butler.
Ocean - composed and played by John Butler
Tour Dates
(thanks Westy!)
// April 21st, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Art, Music & Poetry
I visited an Amsterdam design studio last week and got my aesthetic schooled by some serious pro’s. The pic above is a perfectly understated little piece;
a vase, textured in braille, with a poem about flowers.
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