Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in... See more
Mark Manson Quotes (Author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck)
On a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was talking about reading Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence early on and how unconcerned he is now with being new or original. He recalled a speech he heard by Brian Eno about his early ambient work:
It’s hard to explain, but it was very easy to be new at that... See more
Article
making-meaning and
We celebrate the fact that most artists today have a huge portion of humankind’s output at their fingertips at any given moment, but we rarely think about the fact that exposure and abundance can also become a paralytic. Eno said he wanted to hear a certain kind of music, so he had to invent it for himself. Who feels the need to make new music, when you can almost always call up music that is completely new to your ears?
Sometimes when I watch my 8-year-old making music, I note how unencumbered he is by musical history and how free he is of any need to be original. He is happy, for now, to make music that is a parody of what he’s heard, and in the parodying, he comes up with his own thing. It’s new to him and that’s what’s important.
In fact, this is the great gift of children: everything is new to them, and so it can become new to you, if you let it.
Practically speaking, desktop experiences represent a past when the online world was driven from workstations, less devices , and intended to be curated, not consumed. So, as you might piece together your day again after 20 minutes needlessly refreshing a feed, let's remember what it felt like when we were surfing the internet, as opposed to it... See more
Dirt: Desktop was the place
Desktop was the place
Looking back through Bliss-colored glasses.
Patrick McKemey on the lost joys of the desktop internet.
dirt.fyi email
1/30/24
The Beasties were the ultimate curators and culture merchants, although they never perverted their creative universe with gross buzzwords like that.
Between their genre-smashing albums, their iconic videos, their fashion exploits like X-Large, and their magazine Grand Royal , you could say that they were running a “lifestyle brand” of sorts.
The... See more
Between their genre-smashing albums, their iconic videos, their fashion exploits like X-Large, and their magazine Grand Royal , you could say that they were running a “lifestyle brand” of sorts.
The... See more
The Beastie Boys Edition
In the artist of all kinds, I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.
Caleb Crain • On Not Being Found
D.W. Winnicott
KRF : How do you define taste?
BD : Taste is the natural tendency to filter, mix and recombine the like and the unlike to approximate sublimity.
BD : Taste is the natural tendency to filter, mix and recombine the like and the unlike to approximate sublimity.
The Taste Report™: Ben Dietz
Educated people feel a duty to know these trends as part of cultural literacy. They don't buy Labubus, yet they join the "we" and descend into introspective angst about what Labubus mean for the state of "our" collective psychology.
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more
The New Yorker Roundup
culture-2526 and
My optimistic take is that the faux-culture ecosystem will drive more people towards small-scale, humanistic culture. But this brings us back to the “we” from Chayka’s piece. The vast majority of people on earth are going to drown in a lukewarm bath of AI gruel, and there is probably no effective means of mass resistance on their behalf. The... See more
The New Yorker Roundup
taste and