This evaluation of quality is not limited to well-designed home products, one can see it in the level of innovation in the arts and music and anything that requires some modicum of design sensibility. We've now even proven beyond any doubt that we are completely and totally inept at fighting wars. Is it any wonder that the world is getting its money the hell out of our banks?

What I'm saying isn't startling news. We seem quite happy with our lagging technology, crumbling infrastructure, and general disinterest in things outside of our borders.

You are free to make any sound of any volume at any time.

If someone makes a loud noise, make a soft noise until they stop.

If someone makes a soft noise, make an even softer noise.

If someone is being boring, reframe the exchange.

Make the sound that you least expected to yourself to make.

(Explanatory note on Michiko's Life: This episodic story is an on-going outlet for my inner Tokyo-ite: an idealized super-modern, sleek, intelligent, and perpetually in motion sophisticate who participates in a highly secret government operation that astoundingly benefits the population despite popular cynicsm. Michiko questions herself mercilessly but only on those occasions which truly require it. She is the ultimate non-neurotic).

Sexual Peak Time Reduction in Sector 577 was one of Michiko's least favorite duties as Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion. But implicit in paragraph 3579C, the one hated by all those left-wing rioters, is the mandate for civilian tranquility. Since Edo it has been known that prolongation of stimulation is indubitably the most significant reducer of violence. With the invention of the Thompson Web it became possible to realize this en masse. How anyone could protest this was beyond her. Her lifelong work, since her first days in BureauComm, has been training as the invisible hand, overseer of the daily maintenance of that hairline between desire and satiation. Tactile realization of communal longing through the Thompson Web was simply the culmination of the upper classes' goal for civilian docility.

A tiny shock ran from finger to brain, her skin pinched as the tendrils gripped her hand a little more tightly than usual. Translating the prickly paradox of push and pull to the tricky minutiae of movement which triggered the Thompson Web was exhausting. Every tendon's vibration becoming physical realization in Sector 577. Such responsibility was integral to her sense of self-worth. The requirement of anonymity gave her the air of apparition.

(for previous episodes, go here).

via the standing room.

1) Every paragraph is a small literary forest fire.
2) We live a 1/2 step away from the "state of nature."
3) Anytime we emote some self-aggrandizing grunt about how we are civilized, it is, in fact, self-delusional.
4) In the world of the first one hundred pages of Greed, heterosexual men are sperm-generating relay pumps with little capacity for empathy. Women are hyper-empathetic creatures who will disgrace themselves for the chance to be lubricated by men.
5) The book's first one hundred page's stance on gay people is unclear. Some kind of glitch in the genetic replicating machine maybe?
6) Humans are reprehensible creatures but we definitely are interesting, tantalizing, and frustrating to ourselves and others throughout the weird unfolding of our lives.
7) These first six points are too literal a reading. She short-circuits them all through an intense self-awareness, constantly injecting the writer's (is it really her?) confusion about motivations and perspective. The nearly musically rhythmic way in which she pulls it off is exquisite.

Click through for more by Erik Visser.

A.C.'s suit is so much like something a character in Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends would wear.

A: There's nothing worse than people who deliberately bore, and just think you should take them as they are, warts and all. That's the ultimate arrogance.

B: [...]There's an element of service in self-mediation that gets conveniently ignored by those sitting in the back of the room with crossed arms.

Yesterday (day): put the final touches on the electronics necessary to sonify the lovely box instrument developed by Kunsole's Deric Carner to be played live at the Bridge Art Fair in New York this week.

Yesterday (night): Updated the software and sounds to be used in Dot Dot Knock, a sound installation currently up at Grove Street Window space, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission as part of the Kunsole residency. The updated version will be installed tonight around 5:00

I don't talk enough about this installation. I'm really proud of it. Deric and Rebecca, the two visual artists in Kunsole, designed this amazing and ghostly tableau in the gallery space, to be viewed through the window, as though you were looking into an empty pool. The lighting works best at dusk, with the images and sculptures sort of glowing lightly. My sound installation is controlled by two large pieces of blue plexiglass anchored into the brick at the front of the building. When you knock on the slices, the sounds reactively morph and rhythhmicize. The official version:

Working with three generalized catalogs of sound, text, avant-pop compositions, and electro-percussion, Dot Dot Knock reacts to knocking in different ways. It pulls from its archive at will, depending on where one knocks and what mood it is in at the moment. Knocking on the left top slice results in chopped up text, sometimes understandable, other times not. Knocking on the bottom right hand slice produces hesitant percussive riffs. The installation sometimes stutters, occasionally lectures, once-in-a-while shouts and other times won't answer at all.

And it's very loud, very present, you can hear it blocks away! You know something's happening ahead but you're not quite sure what.

The whole project is a kind of exploration of emptiness, references that point in all directions at once but never quite hit their mark, made from semantically vertiginous alters. Come check it out!

Further info.

In this place, full of braininess, why is so much of the art and music messy? Of course, there are exceptions. But the overall feel of the scene is messy. I'm fine with messy, I love messy. But sometimes I need something pointed, sharp, and cold. Is it part of the refugee effect in this city: the sharp ones have escaped their sado-masochistic educations to come here to be a little sloppy for a change? Is this sloppiness in fact an enlightened approach? A post-academic intuitiveness that can only happen after advanced studies in late 20th century French philosophy?

Maybe. I don't know.

Link via glitchslaptko.