Jerald used to walk around the streets of New York with earbuds in his ears, listening to his favorite albums and the occasional podcast.
One day, he decided that he had enough of blocking out the sounds of the living city around him and so the earbuds came out.
Continue reading → Unwanted Outside Sounds: Ten Sentence Story #159
It’s great when things go full circle in life. As an example, I enjoy frequenting a site called NYC Taper, a site created by a gentleman known by the same moniker, who goes to concerts and (with the permission of the artists) records their set, releasing it into the wild as it were on his site. He does not ask for money for this endeavor however he requests that if you download a high quality audio recording of a band that you try to visit the band’s site and support them by buying their albums or merchandise.
Continue reading → Songs Telling Stories: Music of the Fiery Furnaces
A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.
Last weekend, my mother held a reception in honor of my having gotten married. A little before the reception actually started, a good friend of my mother took what seemed like a thousand pictures of my wife and me with various other people who were there: My parents, my stepparents, my second cousin, and of course just the two of us — in countless configurations. Everything was posed as he told us where to stand and where to look and, in some cases, what to do with our arms. In contrast, the Tate Modern is now featuring an exhibit called Exposed, which is entirely filled with photographs that were taken without the subjects being aware of it at the time.
SuperGenius author Nat Hentoff asks in The Village Voice if Obama is prepared to deal with the National Security Agency’s surveillance of us all — or if he will merely go along with the rules established by the Bush Administration.
When personal privacy is lost — nay, thefted by the very government sworn to protect us — under the mask of personal protection from terrorism, those small intimacies are forever forsaken but not in freedom of the Greater Good but rather in slavery to the Broader Bad as our tiniest thoughts are dissected to determine guilt beyond the shadowy frame of reasonable checks and balances.
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