August 2011

Last night I was watching former Tea Party-backed Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell walk out on the Piers Morgan CNN interview show, and later was reading a series of discussions on an internet game forum in which the two same individuals take opposing views to one another in each thread – and opposing views to themselves from thread to thread, uniting only to trash someone else in a third thread … which required them to compromise their own views from before. The cantankerous political discourse of the last two decades, characterized here as ‘The Politics of No’ can be easily summed…

The depth and breadth of music featured on Saturday Night Live in its first decade is stunning – from Frank Zappa to Miles Davis to Gil Scott Heron and many more, there was seemingly no boundary the show wouldn’t cross. They proved that for sure in May of 1978 when they featured their first extraterrestrial artist – Sun Ra! Jazz musicians are now viewed as being anti-technology, but that wasn’t always so – Quincy Jones recorded the first synthesizer in 1964, Pat Metheny was a pioneer of guitar synthesizers, and in 1956 Sun Ra recorded the first electronic piano recording….