Posts

Showing posts from 2014

Loose Ends 2014

Late in 2014 my iPad Flipboard app was updated.  Flipboard bought Zite , much to my dismay, earlier this year.  Zite is still a useful, somewhat intelligent, search and filtering engine for online content to your specifications.  But, it is a slowly dying app as well.  Now, Flipboard has incorporated some of Zite's vast topic catagorization capability and can filter online content for you quickly.  As a result of this I stopped emailing articles to my email account, as I used to do, and instead "flip" content into my several Flipboard magazines. You can read my magazines without the Flipboard app but they are formatted for that app so the page might look funky. My magazines are... Notice Magazine Notice: Space Notice: Climate Change Notice: The Police State Sex and Intimacy The last is by far the most popular.  I have the most followers there and over 6,800 page flips, so a lot of viewers to that particular topic.  Sex.  Go figure. Then there is a catch-all

Christmas Dwarf Shakers

Image

The Wall: 35 Years Later

Image
Some animation from the film  Pink Floyd The Wall.  1982. So ya Thought ya Might like to  go to the show. To feel the warm thrill of confusion That space cadet glow. Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine? Is this not what you expected to see? If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise. In September 1977, as I was beginning my college journey, the members of Pink Floyd discovered to their chagrin that they had lost the majority of the vast wealth they had accumulated off their recent highly successful albums and subsequent live tours.  They had hired a financial affairs firm that horribly mismanaged their money in all sorts of bad venture capital investments.  Eventually the firm went broke.  With only a fraction of their previous fortunes still intact Pink Floyd needed to do something.  Something big.  The only band mate with any big ideas at the time was Roger Waters . "The scale of Wat

The Aesthetics of Friedrich Nietzsche

I keep on-going research on a variety of subjects, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche especially, since I devote another blog to him .  In 2014 I purchased a newly published academic work entitled Nietzsche on Art & Life .  Art, as my many posts on the subject attest, is held in high esteem by me intimately.  I can not bring it into sharp focus yet, but there is something about Art that is sacred to me and is connected to my existence. Nietzsche's philosophy is rooted in the subject of Art (among other major subjects) and this new book attempts to shed insight into Nietzsche's application of Art to human life. Eleven diverse essays grace the pages of this book. Each offers a perspective either slightly or significantly different from the others.  Generally, however, it is agreed that Nietzsche's views on Art and aesthetics changed significantly over the course of his life.  Early on with The Birth of Tragedy he was under the influence of Schopenhauer  and Wagne

The Endless River is (Likely) the End of Pink Floyd

Image
Proof of Purchase.  A handsome package. Pink Floyd is my all-time favorite rock band.  I have blogged about, among other Floydian things, their final set  in 2005 and about their final bow  in 2011. Now comes their final studio album (as Pink Floyd). The Endless River is almost 55 minutes of mostly wordless musical conversations, jam sessions taken from many hours of recordings unused in the band's excellent 1994 record The Division Bell .  David Gilmour and Nick Mason revisited this material which heavily features the keyboard work of Rick Wright who died in 2008.   Roger Waters , the driving force, lyricist, and visionary behind the band's best works, quit in 1985.  Earlier this year the two last men standing in Pink Floyd went back into the studio, sifted through the unused recordings, picking the best parts of what were at the time (in late-1993) hours of improvised musical doodles created while laying down more established songs for The Division Bell .

Neil Young: Storytone

Neil Young has had another busy year both as a performing artist and personally.  Earlier this year he released an album of covers he recorded in Jack White's special "phone booth" studio .  It was intended as an experiment for the fidelity of vinyl sound.  The recordings themselves were not that appealing to me and I will add this one to my Neil collection at a later date when I can get the CD cheaply.  Then Neil left his wife, Pegi, apparently for Daryl Hannah . This motivated long-time band mate David Crosby to critique Neil's new relationship on Twitter.  Crosby has difficulty keeping his mouth shut at times and his comments pissed Neil off. Even Graham Nash, a lifetime collaborator with Crosby, called the comments "inappropriate."  But Neil went a bit too far, according to Nash, on his side of things and declared during a performance that CSNY would never play music again .  Nash thinks that it would be tragic for the musicians not to continue