"DJing seemed to be all about doing something fresh -- whatever you do, twist it . . ."
-- Eric San

Seeing Kid Koala last night at Lee's Palace made for an interesting contrast to my most recent excuse for grumbling. Watching this stocky Asian guy with mop hair sweat bullets as he worked four turntables for nearly two hours was something to behold ( Read more... )

( sour grapes fermented to acidic whine )

"One day I was talking casually with Claude Shannon, and he described to me in a few words the system a worker outside of the Bell Laboratories had devised. I didn't pay much attention while he was talking, but something of what he had said stayed with me. Then, later in the day, I saw certain advantages of this new system. The next day I went to ( Read more... )

"He knows that almost all of his best ideas come to him when his thinking has stopped. He may have struggled and struggled to understand a problem in terms of old ways of thinking, only to find it impossible. But when thought stops from exhaustion, the mind is open to see the problem as it is -- not as it is verbalized -- and at once it is ( Read more... )

"We realise today more and more how long and tortuous is the road from 'perception' to 'expression'. The original genius who paints 'what he sees' and creates new forms out of nothing is a Romantic myth. Even the greatest artist -- and he more than others -- needs an idiom to work in. Only tradition, such as he finds it, can provide him with the ( Read more... )

". . . boldness alone is not yet exploration unless it is coupled with a critical sense. . . . the more we learn to look at the individual and particular work of art as the work of skilled hands and great minds in response to concrete demands, the more we shall teach authority that what the artist needs is not more myth or more propaganda, but ( Read more... )