A bit of a grab-bag of things I read, and found interesting, over the last month: Unearthing The Truth, in The Economist, is about recent discoveries in Great Zimbabwe, a medieval state after which the modern country is named. It was a major regional power and the center of a complex trading network; it is …
I’ll start off this month with some music, beginning with this playlist by Jace Clayton, for ArtForum. Jace Clayton is also DJ/Rupture, and he’s probably best known for finding and promoting interesting new music from parts of the world that aren’t the United States or Europe. (I quoted from his book Uproot, about the way that digital culture is changing …
As I’ve written about here before, I am often deeply skeptical of the way we use the word “natural.” I’m thinking in particular of the way it is appended to all kinds of products (food, beauty and cleaning products, and so on) as a kind of code for safe, wholesome, and generally morally superior as …
I have a mixed bag this time around. I’ll start with this video, which isn’t really a video but a sound file with an image attached so that somebody could put it on YouTube. Because of a film I watched recently, I’ve been listening to Chinese music played on theguqin, a seven-stringed zither played seated; …
Late once again, so let’s get right to it. Song: “One Half” by Julianna Barwick A new track from Julianna Barwick’s forthcoming album, Nepenthe, due out on August 20th. Barwick’s MO is to pile layers and layers of her own vocals onto each other, generally obscuring the lyrics but creating beautiful, limpid spaces out of …