dealership

wednesday, september 26 (01)   [link]

jane:  Interesting article over at Salon about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and the shape of indie rock in the late 80's and early 90's. It's long, and I haven't finished reading it yet, but this paragraph stood out:

But the thing that drove Kurt Cobain, and the other indie bands, was a dream about pop. Money entered into the equation, of course, and why not? But something else was going on as well. As the 1980s went on, you could feel an interest building in something. It wasn't interest in a new type of music, exactly. But there was an odd sense of a thirst for something ... different. If you were one of these musicians, you could smell that need, and suddenly visualize yourself in a different world, one where kids everywhere jammed to your music, their hearts feeling that they would burst.

What do you think? Why do you make music? Why do you consume it? What are you looking for? What do you find?

wednesday, september 19 (01)   [link]

jane:  Ever wonder why we're driven to make or consume art? Or why little kids seem to have a natural affinity for singing, dancing, playing with crayons? There's a really interesting article in Lingua Franca profiling a researcher whose life mission has been studying the links between biology and making art.


an excerpt:

It's difficult to discuss [Dissanayake's] first book, What Is Art For? (1988), without reference to her other two, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992) and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000). The three are not so much distinct works as snapshots of a single theory at different stages of development. That theory starts with a striking set of observations.


First, the arts appear to be universal. No one has found a culture that lacks them. Second, they consume a large portion of available resources. Among the Owerri in Nigeria, for example, the artists who build and paint ceremonial mbari houses are exempted for up to two years from the workload normally expected of healthy adults. Third, the arts give pleasure. Our internal motivational systems reward us for making and appreciating the arts the same way they reward us for having sex, spending time with friends, and eating nutritious food: The experiences feel good. And fourth, young children engage in the arts almost spontaneously. With only gentle encouragement, children will sing, move to music, make believe, scribble, and play with words. Together, these four facts suggest to Dissanayake that natural selection long ago rendered the arts a standard component of human behavior.

wednesday, september 12 (01)   [link]

jane:  For those of you in the Bay Area who are so inclined, there is a meeting tonight in Oakland to organize a protest against racism and war hysteria. It starts at 7 pm. 19th and Harrison. For more details, visit http://sf.indymedia.org/display.php?id=103955

tuesday, september 4 (01)   [link]

jane:  ooh, pretty pictures, chrisw. thanks to all of you who came, it was a really fun show. i admit i was a little bewildered when we first walked in to Dave's Dance Place... maybe the poster advertising a Jazzercise class was the culprit. but everything turned out well.


now, all you contest winners we owe free cds to (as a result of the KALX Live show): we have your names and addresses and you WILL be hearing from us! ha ha... but seriously, we'll be shipping them this week. so congratulations to Francis Youn, Jason Anderson, Elbert Chang (of the band Clarendon), and Kent Long. also, to those who are trying to find recordings of the show - good luck! and of course we don't mind files being traded, downloaded, swapped, etc. jeez, if it wasn't for peer-2-peer, we wouldn't be here. and i mean not just in the file-sharing sense but also in the community sense.


in the vein, if other people have photos of this show or other shows they'd like to share, we'd be interested in posting them/linking to them... thanks!

sunday, september 2 (01)   [link]

chrisw:  [Warning! Pics = Long load via modem.] So...Dave's Dance Place, eh? How was it? Hmmm...well image=1000 words so...