(screensnap taken while sightseeing on google earth)

Confessions of a cut & paste artist (Gibson on Burroughs):

"But I already knew that word processing was another of God's little toys, and that the scissors and paste pot were always there for me, on the desktop of my Apple IIc. Burroughs' methods, which had also worked for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard, were built into the technology through which I now composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data."

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Is this the Japanese shopping channel equivalent of Wayne's World?

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The rise of Rio's ghetto sound: Baile funk.

"At the top of a narrow, pitch-black staircase, Johnny has built his own studio: a secondhand computer, a microphone and an old speaker. Most baile funk records are initially recorded in places like this. Johnny has taught himself to make crude cut-and-pastes samples using basic pirated software: Songs are constructed like a sequence of jingles, with shouted lyrics above the heavy samba drum sound of the tamborzão. Even in DJ Marlboro’s studio, which is the best-equipped, the songs have an underproduced, disposable quality. For Marlboro, they’d have to: In 16 years, he’s recorded almost 3,000 songs."

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Two iconic figures. Life and literature. Difference and death. Work and the world. Two quotes:

"You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle... Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

(Steve Jobs)

"We didn't get to know the world through a newswire but through a novel, an essay or a poem. And this made us very different."

(Subcomandante Marcos)

The mapping the human brain project provides some stunning visuals of the galaxies that make up the mind. But as I browse these incredible images my synapses keep firing a question about: how can something so vast, so intricate, so beautiful be embedded in so many idiots?

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Soundbites from the dark age in the words of the American Taliban.

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(image sourced here)

From the Dynamic City Foundation:

"The 2005 installation Beijing Boom Tower (BBT) presents a model showing 6 hectares of the capital in 2020. The design of the block underlines the conflicting desires of the modern metropolis: its boom demand for urban space, and its consequent suffocation. BBT is the product of suburban-feel living at 10 times Manhattan density.

5000 duplex apartments are stacked to form an integrated environment. Full-scale parking, retail and amenities systems are laid on. A privacy gradient acknowledges the increasing reality of a competitive housing market seeking privatisation and exclusivity. BBT presents an extreme architecture of networks, bridges, escalators, highways and towers; a continuous system that reunites the segregated Chinese society within one vertical neighbourhood."

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