Bookmarks from June 28th through July 3rd
“What makes Piazzolla’s music so emotionally powerful is his infallible sense of harmony. I tell students over and over that the principal problem with most compositions I see is their lack of harmonic coherence. Listening to Piazzolla ought to be a model of how one cannot hope to establish an original musical voice without first having a secure and identifiable harmonic sense. Of course Piazzolla’s harmonic world is largely derived from Bach’s, with smooth, circle-of-fifths progressions moving effortlessly underneath the plangent cantilenas of his melodies. That was his special discovery—a melding of indigenous tango rhythms and melodic tropes with the contrapuntal sophistication of Bach and the edgy brutalism of early Stravinsky and Bartók.”
link: John Adams: Hell Mouth: El Tanguero
“In this Year of the Tiger 2010, there are perhaps as many boba shops filling the L.A. basin as there are intersections to hold them. I imagine container ships stacking up in San Pedro Bay bearing nothing but vacuum-sealed tapioca pearls from the food factories outside Kaohsiung, waiting to dump their payload into robotically-sealed cups of syrupy tea from Santa Monica to Ontario Mills. Taro, the starchy corm (i.e., a modified underground stem, rather than a true bulb), cultivated widely throughout eastern Asia and Oceania, is a personal bubble tea favorite–and a misnomer to boot. Rarely is there any actual tea in taro milk tea, which typically consists of taro powder, flavored and dyed a fetching lavender, sugar syrup and milk or creamer. Little culinary lies aside, I’m on a mission to source L.A.’s best taro milk tea. Below are the first five candidates. Your boba hits and misses are welcome in the comments.”
“They’re going to close you out, at some horrible level, they say, “You didn’t post the margin, we’re going to close you out,” and then what do you do? You’re going to sue them? By the time this thing wends its way through the courts, you’re out of business. And if you’re being foreclosed on by a bank, and you’re in litigation, that massively increases the probability that other banks will do the same thing to you, because they’ll be worried, and you’re caught in this vicious circle. Yeah, so, theoretically, in calm times you would look to the courts for vindication, but in difficult times the damage that’s done may be irreversible before you can get any kind of remedy.”
link: n+1: Bullies and Bankers
“LCK: I can go out on the road. I can make money. I can do what I do in its purest form without asking anybody for permission. You can’t cancel my stand-up tours. It’s impossible. There’s too many separate bosses. There is no “bosses.” I rent these theaters now. When I worked the clubs, it was very different. Pretty much you needed to please the Improvs, but if I get cancelled, I can put together a stand-up tour and go on the road and continue generating. I don’t worry that way anymore. I don’t know what it’s like to be an actor, where if your show gets cancelled, really you’re just a bum. [Laughs.] It must be really awful. You can’t go out and do a little acting, you know what I mean? If I’m not on tour, I can run down to the comedy club and do a little stand-up. If you’re an actor, you can’t go—I guess there’s forms of it.”
link: Louis C.K. | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club
“Dykstra, of course, was never a market genius. When researching our lawsuit against him (he eventually agreed to pay $200,000—but later defaulted), I uncovered emails from a stock-market analyst named Richard Suttmeier, who sent Dykstra a list of “deep-in-the-money” call picks each morning. Most of “Dykstra’s” picks came from this list. Several bloggers also figured out how these picks performed so phenomenally: He counted his winners, but endlessly rolled over his losers, in tallying his overall results.”
link: Jim Cramer – Lenny Dykstra Stock Scandal, Reports Randall Lane’s The Zeroes – The Daily Beast
“RZ: Yeah, I mean here in Los Angeles it’s tough. It’s tough to open a restaurant. When I went to San Francisco it reminded me a little bit of London. You can open anywhere and people come, a lot of neighbors come. Here you need to drive everywhere, you have the parking, it’s tough. But it’s not impossible. And I think if you can come here to Los Angeles then that’s it, you can go anywhere in the world.”
“Why is the painting-camera gap where Baldessari toils so fertile? Before the media age, when pictures meant paintings, their rarity made them powerful and astounding. Today we’re so inundated by a nonstop flood of camera images that we’re largely insensible to them. Images wash over us, like the weather, so paintings have lost their once-singular ability to galvanize. Using paintings’ historic raw materialism as a guide, Baldessari finds ways to jam the whirling camera-circuits. His best work stops us short, allowing us to see things with fresh eyes.”
link: Art review: ‘John Baldessari: Pure Beauty’ @ LACMA | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times
