‘Billie Jean’ was the first video by a black artist to air on MTV (1983). Here he is performing it on stage from ‘Motown 25 Yesterday, Today, Forever (1985).
He said that the only time he was ever truly happy was when he was performing on stage. This is his state of grace. His gift to us all. Michael Jackson RIP.
Reading about the unfolding credit crunch, a name which now seems rather quaint given the burgeoning catastrophe throughout world markets and personal finances, has been rather like rubbernecking a car crash around the corner, only to realise too late that the car in front has slammed it’s brakes on and you’re about to plough into it. As the consequences of the crisis in financial markets trickle down into everybody’s lives (”trickle down economics” never before contained such bitter irony), it seems an appropriate time to survey some of the more readable and enlightening articles about the crisis, while taking a look at what happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen in the future.
In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.
An excerpt from the introduction to Leonardo da Vinci’s published notebooks, available at the Project Gutenberg website.
Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing – since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme – I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing for himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.
Sven Birkets writes in The Atlantic about his fear that the Amazon Kindle will mean the end of the “deep” contextualisation that physical books give – libraries, book shops, history.
What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs. Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience. But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself. There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake. However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.
What if what we see when we feel can be heard?
Is this what is meant when we say that music touches us or that a painting moves us? LoveHowlMuse was formed by such questions.
Founded on the principles of cross-fertilization, LoveHowlMuse works with London-based artists and musicians who draw from the fertile grounds of punk and street culture, documentary filmmaking, junk stores, artist's studios, recording studios, film sets, wine cellars, archives, laboratories, observatories, lavatories, forces of nature and appetite.
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