Hustler of Culture
“The counterculture is always a mixture of ecstasy and depravity. “If you’re going to have a Ken Kesey, you are going to have a Charles Manson“
As seen in the book Season of the Witch by David Talbot) a great history of the 1960s and 70s in San Francisco I am currently reading. Has so many implications for how we study subcultures. Read it weeks ago am still thinking about it.
Seen here: Young man emerging from the San Francisco Pen Show. Not pictured. This beauty I bought from Tactile Turn.
One moment please…
Inspired by Matt Haughey's public posting of the RSS Feeds he subscribes to, I'm doing the same (below).
What is RSS, you ask? A method to subscribe to what your favorite websites publish and have their updates all in a single place. Think of it as DVR for the Internet, food delivery instead of pickup except for the web. Podcasts would on the same technology and concept: Subscribe once, receive forever without asking again.
RSS has been around for most of the 21st century but took a pretty big hit first when people began using Facebook and Twitter to receive regular news updates then when in 2013 when Google discontinued its free RSS product called Google Reader. At that point, anyone who still used an RSS reader and carefully pruned their feed library was probably over 30 and stubborn.
Lately though, its been making a bit of a comeback. Idea being that self-selecting your daily information diet (see: No Trump-loving-creepy-brothers-in-laws) probably means less unwilling toxicity and restless nights of non-sleep.
I'm all for this. RSS made the Internet seem both rich and manageable in my early days with it and I'm still grateful. And while not every one of your favorite web publications still have rss feeds (many newer ones which came along in the last fallow few years just didn't bother) many still do.
The more feeds we share, the more our friends and loved ones can conveniently use RSS to assemble their own rich and varied information diets free from the poison of racism, intolerance and fight-picking.
In that spirit, my entire RSS feed library taken from the great Newsblur Reader service then alphabetized is below. Take, subscribe, read, enjoy.
* items with a star are feeds custom created by me.
Feeds:
"Draw, Antonio, draw. And do not waste time"
— from a sketch/reminder Michaelangelo made to himself. Found in the draw of his desk after he died.
San Francisco, 3:10 PM, July 1, 2019
This last month was the 50th anniversary of Woodstock (1969, height/end of hippie generation, claimed-to-have-ended-Vietnam-War blah blah zzz) a subject that both fascinates me and I never need to hear another word about ever again. But thanks to Chris Molanphy and his fantastic podcast "Hit Parade" I now know a ton of stuff about it that I didn't before.
C-Molan is Slate magazine's pop critic and wisely framed the 3-day festival in his episode "We are Stardust: We are Gold-Certified" as a countdown of the acts whose careers saw the greatest chart benefit from appearing at Woodstock. In addition to all-of-this which I didn't know at all, I also learned…
The band's first album came out the following week. The rest, as they say…
"Everything worth saying has already been said. But since no one was listening, it must be said again"
Plano, TX: 4:30 PM, April 15, 2019
"Brat Pitt became a leading man by expertly working a floppy hat"