A universe of abundant awesum

Stumbled across Duffy yesterday thanks to WERS - a great, shining, lasting hope for good music driven radio - and the wonders of Shazam's iPhone app. She's a cutie pie Welsh soul singer, and I learned from her MySpace that she is supporting Coldplay's upcoming date in Boston. Anyhow, she's agot a great, big, soulful voice and I'm liking what I've heard thus far.

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How very badass! This guy loves his doggy, big time. Click the photo of the poor wounded doggy for the story, via MSNBC.

Doing some online political ranting and need a quick quote from some politician to bolster your point? Check out Google's InQuotes for all your political quotation needs. Cool and handy little application.

I guess we're going to have a debate tonight after all, too. I'm looking forward to checking it out. This political posturing over the economy is really quite ridiculous and I hope we have a chance to hear extensively from both candidates on their understanding of the economy, what they plan to do to fix it, and all the foreign policy issues that were originally slated to be the focus of this debate.

Last weekend saw the notorious late night revelry masterminds from Minimoo, whose secret, last minute, invite only soirees harkened back to the roots of rave culture, and resurrected the lost art of the late night loft party in New York, attempt something truly magnificent with The Minitek Festival.

While many who attended had negative things to say about the festival, and its organizers likely bit off far more than they could chew with an event of that scale, I for one tip my hat to them for being the first folks I can remember to attempt to showcase electronic music on a Euro-esque festival scale in NYC. NYC has long been an important city on the map of the global techno underground, and the rise of the minimal genre, and these parties in particular, really did a lot to put NYC back on that map as a destination for appreciators of great and cutting edge dance music. This was able to stem a tide of neandertahls meatwad clubs and model-bottle culture that essentially destroyed everything that was beautiful and lovely about NYC musical nightlife.

I offer them my congratulations for what they tried to do, and by many accounts, in the face of nearly impossible circumstances, they were able to salvage some pretty amazing moments. Should they try again in the future, I will support them and hope to be able to attend. Anyone who attempts to throw even small parties in NYC knows how difficult it is, and someone had to try something like this eventually. Doing so is worthy of some praise in my opinion, as the first to try has no real model for success, and is always the easiest to criticize.

Full disclosure: I know the main organizer, Jenny, personally, and like her a lot. She's been very cool and nice to me since starting her parties and I consider her a friend, though not a really close friend.

I've downloaded and am enjoying Konrad Black's set. Perhaps you might to!

DOWNLOAD: Konrad Black live at Minitek

Look at this shameless, sad faced beggar, sitting at the table! Bad Boy!

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David Foster Wallace, a dazzlingly talented author once considered the heir apparent to post-modern greats like Thomas Pynchon and Donald Bathelme, was found dead in his home September 12. He hanged himself and his wife found him in their home in California. He was 46 years old and taught at Pomona College.

Via gawker via reluctant habits.

News stories: AP, LA Times.

I remember reading his first novel, "The Broom of the System", years ago, and recall thinking that every sentence was like its own novel. He drew comparisons to James Joyce for his pure verbal talents, and his novel "Infinite Jest" garnered a cult like following which it retains to this day and catapulted him into the literary stratosphere, when it was hailed as a Ulysses-esque masterwork. I must endeavor to read it now, in earnest.

Condolences to his wife, family, and friends. Thinking that this happened on September 12, and typing this on a gloomy, rainy Sunday is, to say the least, eerie.

Thanks to Wendy - be sure to check her out and add her to your feed, bookmarks, whatevs at We Came to Make Party - for sharing this. Originally posted via Beatportal.

Check it out here. I must confess this is too computerized for me. I guess I'm a new school old school kind of electronic music fan.

Also on the techno end of things, those of you in NYC should be checking out the Minitek Festival this weekend. They've worked hard to bring a European class music festival to NYC, and have an amazing bill of underground dance talent booked, including the above referenced Richie Hawtin, Francois K, MANDY v. Tiefschwarz, and many lesser known artists. It's a truly magnificent bill for techno fans, where you can hear some legends and industry luminaries and also check out some outstanding up & coming talent.

Tickets are available at Resident Advisor.

I'm secretly a little sad to be missing out on this. :(

Click the image for this excellent article on the "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy"

Clive Thompson (blog is here) wrote a probing and thoughtful piece in last Sunday's NYT Magazine on the concept of ambient awareness, which essentially describes a feeling of awareness that's fostered by microblogging tools like Twitter updates and Facebook news feeds; as your friends and contacts on sites publish little updates about what they are up to, you become "ambiently aware" of them.

The article quotes someone as saying this kind of awareness increases closeness with people, but also quoted on of the founders of Flickr as stating that she had seen a friend's child grow from birth to a year old without having visited the child. I certainly fall on that side of things and think ambient awareness increases distance, rather than closeness, by making it seem ok not to keep up with people. If you are only keeping up with their news feed or twitter, I don't think you are really keeping up, and as our number of online connections or friends increases (I just cracked my 1500th Facebook friend today), I think the distinction between who are your close friends, e.g. worthy of regular phone calls or even emails, and who are just your cyber circle of disembodied folks you kinda keep up with and kinda ignore, can blur.

The article also didn't really touch on one aspect of this that I find to be one of the most compelling points about modern online culture - the blog & Facebook generation tends to publish an idealized version of itself on the internet. Certainly, the extreme example of this is in the dating specific sites. How many people do you know who have experimented with online dating only to go on dates and say, "Yeah, [s]he didn't really look like his/her pictures." Almost everyone I know who's done the cyber dating thing can attest to this. Also, those people that I consider close and really trust, I want to share the good and the bad of my life with them on the deepest of levels; I think this is what keeps us human and makes us vital to each other's survival and, hopefully, triumph over adversity of all sorts. Granted, this has something to do with my own personality (I've never been accused of being private or less-than-blunt), but still, the all is rosy picture that's painted by this ambient awareness, to me, creates a false world that can make the downtrodden feel emotionally isolated, if they get too caught up in the cyber world, which many people do. To be fair, the article did touch upon manicuring of one's cyber persona through de-tagging unflattering Facebook photos, but I think I'm referring to something larger and deeper in scope.

A related tie in is that one can feel donwright animosity towards others on these feeds. It's easy to perceive people as boastful and arrogant if they are always putting their latest and greatest accomplishments online. Further, it's easy to simply get annoyed with people. For example, I am not in New York City right now, and I did my best to let everyone I'm in contact with in NYC know that, yet I still get a deluge of Facebook invitations to parties in NYC. A small deal, to be sure, but it certainly highlights how this disembodied medium makes it easy for people to just publish their agenda thoughtlessly, without real conmsideration of what others are up to and why. I'd hate to see that kind of behavior predominate further as more and more people whose lives are tied up daily in the post-Facebook world come of age.

While I love Facebook, Yelp, Blogging, Online News, and Message Boards, there is some kind of palpable downside to this notion of ambient awareness, for me at least. Perhaps I need to manicure my Facebook page and delet some fools! ;-) But then, they'd hate forever and consider me a jerk... onward it folds.

As any good neo-modern self publisher knows one must keep on these blogs of ours consistently! Please excuse my negligence in doing so over the past week. I've been doing a little work for a clever new wiki based, built by locals for locals guide, called Povo. I think it's a fantastic site with a great group of people (the CEO, Max Metral, is known for his work on FIrefly which was sold to Microsoft in the mid 90s), and will grow to become a dominant player in the refined web 2.0 world where user generated content will create an honest and believably transparent guide to all kinds of consumer businesses.

And Roger Federer, who I said I thought could win the US Open in my last post, went on to do just that in fine style. Nice one Roger!

And, despite suffering a heartbreaking ninth inning loss last night, the Red Sox have closed the gap against the Devil Rays and look poised to steal the AL East division title as the regular season wraps up. The Yankees, meanwhile, have slipped to fourth place; therre will be no fall baseball in the Bronx for the final season in the house that Ruth built. While I wont be shedding any tears on this point, it would've been nice to beat them on their home turf in said turf's final season.

I've also been playing loads of squash while I am staying in my folks place here in Massachusetts, and am greatful to have found such a nice group of people to be able to play with. I'm forging onward with business school application prep, too, trying to relearn High School math to bolster my GMAT score. Fun! ;-)

And of course the lovely Sarah Palin has shaken up the presidential race. Seems the polsters are sayig, at least now in the post convetion blitz, that things are neck & neck. I am so sick of the intesne coverage of this election and micro analysis of everything that I'm personally just looking forward to the debates as a hopeful return to some actual discussion about important things that the president might actually do and might actually have meaningful power over. I try not to get into too muc politics on here because one of the things I hate the most about this election is internet politics jockeys searching out useful tidbits of media heightened minutiae to use to support their well entrenched partisan beliefs (whatever side they are on) and trash the other side. Let's face it: most of the people in the country knew what aprty they'd vote for regardless of the candidate chosen before any of the discussions actually started, and the smear tactics of the online public are not intellectual or constructive, and ultimately drag the dialogue further into the partisan mud.

Oh and this picture of Gov. Palin is fake, silly fools who believed it was real need a quick edjumication in the art of the ph0t0-cH0p!:

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Now that he's bested Roger Federer in both the French Open and Wimbledon, Rafa Nadal enters the US Open as the man on top. I'm hoping Federer gets him, though; I've always loved Fed and would like to see him break the grand slams record of 14 held by Pete Sampras.

Roger thinks he can do it! So do I.