Everything David Byrne touches is magic

The BPA featuring David Byrne (a.k.a. God) and Dizzee Rascal, in "Toe Jam"—




(Thanks, Tom. T.G.I.F., everyone.)

Kasia & I are gonna be famous

Famous for 15 minutes? Or to 15 people? Just you wait. We're already wearing sunglasses at night—

Once again, McCain is getting a little ahead of himself

That, and the ad-ops team at the Wall Street Journal clicked upload too soon:



(Thanks, Yoram.)

San Francisco meets L.A. on Treasure Island

The boys from L.A. came up for the weekend, which was organized around spending Saturday at the Treasure Island Music Festival. I barely took any photos but here are a few iPhone portraits of my partners in crime: Pedro, Tim, Trevor (who is set to be a NorCal convert by Oct. 1!), Katie, and Julia, in that order (I somehow lost the one I took of Ian)—

The real (moral) difference between liberals and conservatives

An incredible TED talk by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who has studied the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices—



You can take the morality quizzes he references here: YourMorals.org

Breakbeats meet Japanese folklore

Phillip sent over this fun music video, where duo Hifana mixes beats "against the raging waves and the stormy seas." The track is called "Wamono"—



(I can't believe it's only Tuesday.)

A scrapyard art project for my room

I'd been putting it off for a while, but I finally managed to put together one of the finishing touches to my room. I spent yesterday afternoon under the auspices of several Tecates, four quarts of bright paint, and bright sunshine in the Mission.

Essentially, the art project involved finally painting a chair I bought five months ago bright, Yves Klein blue; and making four cigar and wine boxes I bought at a scrapyard into display cases for a slew of antique toys, bones, and other assorted knick-knacks I've amassed since moving to San Francisco—

Palin, Palin, Palin!

I came back from my Burning Man daze to find out Sarah Palin—who?—had been picked to join McCain on the GOP ticket. Incredible, but the GOP has managed to put together a ticket as laughable and frightening as Bush-Cheney. On that note, a return to politics on this blog.

Last night I watched a Daily Show rerun for the first time in a very long time. I was reminded that Jon Stewart and his team are the brightest and best source for political honesty on television. Check out this piece filmed at the RNC last week that gets at Bristol Palin's... "decision" to keep her baby. It's pretty priceless—



Satire gets to the core of it in ways the mainstream media simply cannot.

In this next video, we get a better idea of just how unversed in foreign policy Palin really is. Here, she makes clear the fact that she doesn't have any idea what the Bush Doctrine, which has pretty much defined our foreign policy since that fateful day precisely 7 years ago, is—



And then Jon sent over this screenshot with the subject line, "this can't be good." It really can't—



With the odds of John McCain dying during his first or second term in office being pretty high, it's frightening to think there could really be a President Palin.

Our ambient awarenesses

A few people sent over a link to an article in the New York Times' Sunday Magazine this week aptly titled "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy." (The online title is telling, too: "I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You.")

The piece, which you've almost certainly read, speaks to the effect of web 2.0 products like Twitter (which I've never used) or Facebook's News Feed (which I'm still learning to appreciate) and status updates (which I hardly ever use but have no choice but to constantly imbibe) on the the way we interact with people online. These constant updates on the minutiae of the lives of our online social orbs leads to "incessant online contact" which social scientists call "ambient awareness."

(I'd like to interject here by noting that this week, seven separate Facebook status updates in my News Feed read something like this: "____ is contemplating her ambient awareness." Or, my favorite: "____ is updating his ambient social life.")

I found it interesting that a handful of people sent me this article. Clearly, they believe me to be a person with a robust online presence, and who thrives on ambient awareness. But in reading Clive Thompson's piece, I realized that as far as my ambient awareness goes, it's not nearly as all-encompassing as others'.

Let's review the 2.0 products I use most. This blog, in a way, is behind this time. Here I always write more than a few hundred characters, and I don't tell you what sandwich I just ate or how I feel in the morning. Believe it or not, I somewhat seriously consider the contents of each post, and I like to consider the blog a sort of compositional calisthenics for the writer in me. My other stalwart is Gchat, where I have actual e-conversations. Give-and-take is involved. I use Google Reader as well, but it's mainly just become a convenient replacement for the series of link-filled e-mails I sent before. Further, there's also a degree of give-and-take, as friends share their curated RSS feeds, too.

My fourth and last major 2.0 product is Facebook, which I use mostly to check my inbox (where I get full-fledged notes, comprised of actual sentences) and to peruse photographs posted by my close friends (many of whom now live across the country, or, in many cases, in other countries). But in my attempts to catch up on the lives of people I know well or actively want to get to know better, I am bombarded by the latest-and-not-greatest of what's going on in my other 800-odd (!) Facebook friends' lives.

Through status updates and my diarrheal News Feed, I know that the girl I was consistently annoyed by in middle school is still depressed, over ten years later. A friend's ex-girlfriend, whom I will likely never see again, just bought an iPhone. A man in my own romantic past "can't wait for Thursday night!!!!"

Even though I only ever update my status a handful of times each year, mostly to let people know I'm "in Brazil for the week," my News Feed still tells everyone who I've befriended and which parties I'm going to. And so, like the many people Thompson interviewed, I fall into this, even if passively. I, like you, have little choice but to spread myself further and thinner to more people than ever before. It's bad in the sense that I feel flooded with useless information about people I am pretty content to never see or hear of again in my life, but it's also become the natural evolution of human contact, as far as I can tell, among my increasingly kinetic, wired generation.

This brings me to a post I meant to write many times but never did. Through Google Analytics I have a good idea of my blog's readership. (Yes, I love checking stats. As Dan says, "Blog hits are good for the soul.") You know, I get the basics, like where readers are (no surprise: most are in New York and San Francisco) and what they read (which links get clicked on). For some time now, I've come to suspect that somebody I was once close to but have since fallen out of touch with reads this blog every day. I've considered writing and saying hi, in the hopes of returning our relationship to the give-and-take that I consider (considered?) significant, or real. After all, this person cares enough to catch up on my blog on a daily basis. But then I realized that we've both made a choice to relegate our relationship to the online realm. Because we've moved on, and having the choice to only take and not give—or to waver between giving, taking or both as we see fit, in other cases—is now not only one of many norms, but also a choice I want and need.

A return to hip-hop

In early 2005, I became moderately obsessed with grime. The "Run the Road" compilation essentially became my life's soundtrack, and Lady Sovereign's "cha-CHING!" ubiquitously rang in my ears for quite some time.

Then I moved to Paris and left hip-hop behind, until very recently. I'm back to actively loving grime, nu-breaks, and nearly anything with a hip-hop infused bassline (e.g. Modeselektor's incredible show here this past Friday at The Mighty). So I wanted to share some of my essential obsessions—

• This hot mix by Squincy Jones called "Nintendub" (via Matt S.) has been my car's soundtrack for about a month now.
  
• An incredible nu-breaks mixtape put together by someone here in San Francisco (via Gordon) has been melting my desk at work on a regular basis.
  
• Also thanks to Gordon, I've fallen for the Stanton Warriors, whose breakbeats I will revel in on Oct. 18.
• I can't get enough of Nadastrom's remix of Estelle's "American Boy," which features the best blogger in the Universe, Kanye.

Finally, thanks to Alexis' mixtape, my jam du jour is this Wiley single, "Wearing My Rolex"—

Muscles might be my official happiness elixir

Four months ago, Muscles' "Ice Cream" was my happiness elixir. And today, thanks to a Pitchfork post, I was reminded that the man still is magic. Here's the original video for "The Lake"—



And then a cool video to go with the Jokers of the Scene remix—

Peaches, apples, cider & antelope in Sebastopol

This weekend I, along with thirty-odd other people, escaped to a peach orchard in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, as guests of Scratch-N-Sniff TV and the Secret Eating Society, for the Progressive Cider Party.

For a day and a half, in remarkably delicious 104-degree heat, we picked apples, slept in rows along the peach orchard, and were fed the most amazing gourmet food, as evidenced by the dinner menu in one of the photos below. Oh, and we made cider—

More Black Rock City action

I've posted photos of our journey to Burning Man here and here. Further, here are more videos of our escape—

Slavoj Zizek speaks tonight on... everything

I write this post with flourish and giddiness because I expect Slavoj Zizek's lecture at the Herbst tonight to address—in a frenetic, crazy-eyed, spittle-infused way—every aspect of culture I make tiny attempts to moderately address in my intermittently updated little blog. Here are some fun videos to whet the appetite of all those who won't be present tonight, and even those who will—

On toilets and ideology—



On love—

A clip from his amazing "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema"—

The beauty of Black Rock City

All throughout my first journey to Burning Man, I couldn't stop saying, "This is so beautiful." Here are two emblematic videos, taken at sunrise and sunset on Thursday. In the first, Camp Unitardicorn makes music; in the second, Kasia and I dance out on the deep playa. The Babylon Project art installation/tower sets the scene for both—