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1. 

   Radiohead /\ Remix /\ Reckoner

   10.01.2008

   592 Remixes and counting

   After the overwhelming response to the Nude Remix Project, Radiohead, iTunes and Garageband are teaming up again giving you the opportunity to remix "Reckoner", another track from the band's latest album "In Rainbows". To make remixing easy, the separate 'stems'* from the song are available to purchase from iTunes _here_. The 'stems' available are bass, lead vocals, backing vocals, guitar, piano/strings and drums. All six stems are available to buy for the price of a single track. You can mix them in any way you like, either by adding your own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts. If you purchase the 'stems' from iTunes during the two weeks they're available, you'll be sent an access code to a GarageBand file ready to open in GarageBand or Logic. However, you don't need GarageBand to do a remix, all the stems are in iTunes Plus format and compatible with several music software platforms. The GarageBand file will be emailed before October 8th. Finished mixes can be uploaded _here_ where the public will listen and vote for their favourite remix (submissions end October 23rd). You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be counted as 'mix votes' back on radioheadremix.com. Radiohead will listen to the best remixes. *'stems' are the component parts of the song. If you have any questions / need some help please click here. For full terms and conditions, click here.
2. Break Free from the Tyranny of the Clock

   Why should you change things? Because the clock is meaningless — we follow it without really realizing why. We follow it because we’ve been raised to believe we should, and because those who control us (bosses, corporations, schools, etc.) set schedules we must follow. The clock, then, is a means to control us — and that, in my book, is as good a reason to break free from it as any.

   For tens of thousands of years, human beings didn’t have clocks. They lived, amazingly, by the sun and the moon and seasons and the needs and rhythms of their bodies. The clock is a very very recent invention, and even more recent is our modern society’s slavish adherence to the dictatorship of the clock. Only very recently have we been forced to work from 8 to 5, and to go to school and follow a very rigid class schedule. Only very recently have we become obsessed with tracking and making use of every minute, so that we have things to do when we’re waiting for other things to happen. Only recently did we begin to lose our humanity, begin to lose the art of conversation and the art of listening to our bodies, begin to lose sight of what’s really important and begin to become robots. I’m as guilty as anyone else, but as I simply my life I begin to question the culture that surrounds me and wonder why it is that I feel so pressured to do things so quickly, by a timeline or schedule set by others, to be so productive when what I really want is to be happy. Have you ever felt that way? I know I’m not alone. I have a solution, and it’s not original I’m sure but it surely isn’t as common as it should be: break free from the clock. Get in touch with the rhythms of life, of your body and of nature. Be more relaxed and reject the notion that time rules us. The Benefits of Being Free of Clockhood Now, I’m not saying that we should throw our clocks and watches away (though I don’t own a watch) … I’m not saying we should all quit our jobs and go live in the woods. I know that my reality is different from most people, as I’m my own boss — but ask yourself, is it possible for you to be your own boss? And if not, is it possible at least to find a job where you can set your own schedule? For many people, it is possible. For others, you won’t be able to live all the tenets of this manifesto, but you can change smaller things, here and there. Article continues here. Reblog via Zen Habits | hat tip Jakob Lodwick
3. There's an underground economy of boosted books. These values are commonly understood and roundly agreed upon through word of mouth, and the values always seem to be true. Once, a scruffy, large man approached me, holding a folded-up piece of paper. "Do you have any Buck?" He paused and looked at the piece of paper. "Any books by Buckorsick?" I suspected that he meant Bukowski, but I played dumb, and asked to see the piece of paper he was holding. It was written in crisp handwriting that clearly didn't belong to him, and it read: 1. Charles Bukowski 2. Jim Thompson 3. Philip K. Dick 4. William S. Burroughs 5. Any Graphic Novel

   This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books. Its origins still mystify me..

   I asked the man whether he preferred Bukowski's Pulp to his Women, as I did, and whether his favorite Thompson book was The Getaway or The Killer Inside Me. First the book chatter made him nervous, but then it made him angry... Continue reading Flying Off the Shelves by Paul Constant | via The Stranger Any booksellers reading this?  I'm curious about the how the lists might compare from store to store, city to city... Not surprised Buk is at the top of this one, however.  But where is Hoffman?  Surprising omission.

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via Quipsologies

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1. Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes "the most sign-packed surface in the universe." Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner's experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious. via National Post
2. The Vertical Farm Project, led by Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University, aims to deal with the problem of feeding the growing world population. The idea is to build vertical indoor farming structures within urban centers.

   The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world's urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production).

   We must have a solution for the future and the Vertical Farm Project has many good ideas. And as they point out, "we cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on earth." via mspencr | vertical farm project
   
3. Illustrator Christoph Niemann blogs, with quirky napkin illustrations, about a passion we all share: coffee . via NYT| Quipsologies

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1. "She had enormous energy and she was a really feisty person. And I think you see that in the way she made her poetry work, in very spare tight verse. And she not only found a readership for her verse novels, she found a very large readership," Malouf said.

   The Australian arts community is mourning the unexpected loss of one its true originals, the writer and poet Dorothy Porter, who died yesterday morning in Melbourne, aged 54, from complications from breast cancer. Porter is best known for her verse novels, among them The Monkey's Mask a thriller about a lesbian detective, published in 1994. It won the National Book Council's Poetry Prize in 1995 and was shortlisted for several other literary awards, before being published in the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany. A film version, directed by Samantha Lang and starring Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis, was released in Australia in 2001. Her verse novels What A Piece Work (1999), and Wild Surmise (2003) were shortlisted for Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. Porter's most recent publication was El Dorado, her fifth verse novel, about a serial child killer. It was nominated for several awards including the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2007, and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards. "She had such a vitality and a grasp of life," said David Malouf, who remembers teaching Porter at Sydney University when she was a first-year student. "She had enormous energy and she was a really feisty person. And I think you see that in the way she made her poetry work, in very spare tight verse. And she not only found a readership for her verse novels, she found a very large readership," Malouf said. "It's just very sad, and I think there'll be a lot of people out there who admire her, and are fond of her and will miss her very much." Porter, whose talents as a writer found many outlets, including fiction for young adults and libretti for chamber opera, was collaborating on a rock opera called January with Tim Finn at the time of her passing. "I was extremely shocked and saddened," Finn said. "We heard this morning. We knew she was ill but we didn't how ill. She was a very real person, with no bullshit, and this raw honesty. You would want to meet her on that level. Her work was streetwise and sensuous. She could write with heightened language, and never be waffly or precious, and there was always the unexpected image. She was a really great writer." via The Sydney Morning Herald | Matthew Buchanan Dorothy Porter Porter at Poetry International Web Australian Humanities Review
   

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via Eyewear

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1. "The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?" ('Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In)
2. $100,000 lifetime achievement award is one of largest to poets Published on Apr 30, 2008 - 9:09:15 AM By: Poetry Foundation

   The selection of Gary Snyder as this year's winner of the Lilly Prize does honor to the tradition of excellence and importance that the prize has stood for since it was established over 20 years ago," said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.

   CHICAGO, April 29, 2008 -- Poet Gary Snyder is the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the award is one of the most prestigious given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation's largest literary awards. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, made the announcement today. The prize will be presented at an evening ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Thursday, May 29. In announcing the award, Wiman said: "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation." Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder began writing in the 1950s as a member,with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, of the Beat movement. For most of the 1960s he lived in Japan and studied formally in a Zen monastery. Blending physical reality-precise observations of nature-with insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism, Snyder has explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose. The judges issued the following statement in making the selection: "Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there's no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we've been reading Robert Frost." Snyder is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations. His poetry collections include Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, The Back Country, Regarding Wave, No Nature, Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Danger on Peaks. His essays are collected in Earth House Hold, The Real Work, A Place in Space, and Back on the Fire. A committed environmental activist who has received the John Hay Award for Nature Writing, Snyder has also been recognized for his contributions to the theory and practice of Buddhism. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, and lives in northern California.
3. What does poetry have to do with the serious financial havoc the world has been enduring? Does anyone have time to consider a confection of art — spun from the imagination — while we face the chilling reality of lost homes, tattered businesses, or a compromised future? "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." We seem to be able to do so little against the loss and fear and panic. Yet poetry’s realm is precisely here — in the emotional center, where desire and terror and hope and dread converge without easy answers. Continue Reading | via Poets.org

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Read the rest of the piece.

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1. There's an underground economy of boosted books. These values are commonly understood and roundly agreed upon through word of mouth, and the values always seem to be true. Once, a scruffy, large man approached me, holding a folded-up piece of paper. "Do you have any Buck?" He paused and looked at the piece of paper. "Any books by Buckorsick?" I suspected that he meant Bukowski, but I played dumb, and asked to see the piece of paper he was holding. It was written in crisp handwriting that clearly didn't belong to him, and it read: 1. Charles Bukowski 2. Jim Thompson 3. Philip K. Dick 4. William S. Burroughs 5. Any Graphic Novel

   This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books. Its origins still mystify me..

   I asked the man whether he preferred Bukowski's Pulp to his Women, as I did, and whether his favorite Thompson book was The Getaway or The Killer Inside Me. First the book chatter made him nervous, but then it made him angry... Continue reading Flying Off the Shelves by Paul Constant | via The Stranger Any booksellers reading this?  I'm curious about the how the lists might compare from store to store, city to city... Not surprised Buk is at the top of this one, however.  But where is Hoffman?  Surprising omission.
2. In a technological advance that opens up new possibilities in the fields of robotics and wearable computing, researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a stretchable, rubbery material that conducts electricity and can be incorporated into electronic devices. via Pink Tentacle | Read On
3. The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that's just fine with me. While they're laughing, I'm learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought - 140 characters at a time...[Continue reading here.] via What's Next | B.L. Ochman The above is from B.L. Ochman's business blog, but I'm posting here with the hope that those who aren't in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like.  I've taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service.  Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some).  Highly recommended.

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Horace reports that the 5th century Athenian poet Cratinus, in a light-hearted defense of his famed intemperance, declared, “No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by water drinkers.” Cratinus wasn’t entirely kidding: Legend says he died of grief upon seeing a full cask of wine break into pieces. And writers of subsequent ages have taken his sentiment to heart. Wherever you find the pen-and-ink set, drink is an emblem of vivacity and wit, at times regarded with semireligious reverence. (Continue reading at latimes.com)

via L.A. Times | Joseph Tartakovsky 

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1. Graffiti, as it has evolved in the last 30 years or so, is not living up to its potential. Instead of aggressively reproducing its own internal code like a machine that has gone out of control and keeps banging its head into the same wall over and over again, the graffiti community should break out of its current deadlock. If graffiti would leave behind the world of custom, convention and fashion and entered a modus operandi in which graffiti was about language first it would be an entire different game and likely much more exciting. The current arsenal of styles, forms and images used by graffiti writers is a limited one. By opening up the frontiers of possibility, by incorporating models and thoughts from all ages, graffiti writers could be entering a field where there is much to discover. Their private graf language would no longer be marginalized and stereotyped by the conservative way things are supposed to be done. In order to achieve this graffiti would need to start communicating with people from outside the scene again, doing so in a smart way and on its own terms. (via  Graffiti and the Obelisk)
2. What wine can tell us about the nature of reality. Scientists at Cal-Tech and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.  (Continue reading at Boston.com) via Boston Globe | Jonah Lehrer 
3. "One of the big things that caught my attention was after he moved to Nashville in the '60s, he and another Texan, Waylon Jennings, eventually told the Nashville people to go to hell, and they left," says Sample, who will join Nelson in performances of the "American Classic" material in Chicago on Sept. 27 and 28 for a PBS special to air in the fall. (Willie Nelson in Jazz Country, L.A. Times)

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