You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

by Death From Above 1979.

Great rocking out music with fat bass riffs and good rhythm section, which is basically all it is. Wire meets Sabbath.


The band, who had to change their name to avoid confusion (not to mention potential legal hassles) with the New York production team DFA, have managed to record an album that offers much more depth from such a simple arrangement than one would expect. The primary reason the album works so well is due in large part to bassist Jesse Keeler; sounding like a coke-fueled Geezer Butler channeling Fugazi, his basslines are especially nimble, his fast-picked notes coming from all over the fretboard, from extremely low, heavily distorted tones, to more mellifluous, upper-register licks, to all-out dissonant screeches. The key factor is that his performance is so versatile, you forget he's playing bass, his performance boasting the dexterity of an 80s metal virtuoso (Billy Sheehan, eat your heart out), but without all the pretension. Singer/drummer Sebastien Grainger is equally strong, providing muscular punctuation to Keeler's basslines, but at the same time, adding some variety to the proceedings with deft rhythmic changes, veering from straight-ahead punk, to disco-fused hi-hat workouts, to fabulous conga breakdowns, to the ever-reliable, much-loved cowbell.

On the Edge of Eternity

Philip K.Dick died on March 2,1982, the result of a combination of recurrent strokes accompanied by heart failure. In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis (an extensive journal he kept to explore the ramifications of 2-3-74) Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century.

www.philipkdick.com

Taxonomy

- The science, laws, or principles of classification; systematics.

The taxonomic organization of species is hierarchical. Each species belongs to a genus, each genus belongs to a family, and so on through order, class, phylum, and kingdom. Associations within the hierarchy reflect evolutionary relationships, which are deduced typically from morphological and physiological similarities between species. So, for example, species in the same genus are more closely related and more alike than species that are in different genera within the same family.

Carolus Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish botanist, devised the system of binomial nomenclature used for naming species. In this system, each species is given a two-part Latin name, formed by appending a specific epithet to the genus name. By convention, the genus name is capitalized, and both the genus name and specific epithet are italicized, for Canis familiaris or simply C. familiaris.

Modern taxonomy recognizes five kingdoms, into which the estimated five million species of the world are divided. This table presents a familiar organism from each kingdom and the names of the taxonomic groups to which it belongs.

Man's constant struggle to muzzle, pin-down understand the world.

Jim Lambie

Born, 1964, City TK, Scotland
Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland

Jim Lambie's objects and installations playfully find high-modernist forms in junk from the 1960s and '70s, the very era when "modern" became a truly mass-culture aesthetic. In his floor installation Zobop, black duct tape forms a monochrome abstraction on the floor, its pattern determined by the specific peculiarities of the gallery's architecture. Within this field, Lambie includes a series of sculptures, each of which cleverly transforms found objects into elegant abstractions. Made of chair backs, old handbags, and pieces of mirror, The Jesus and Mary Chain recalls both a plaza and the bedazzled inhabitants who might stroll there. Hanging high above, Sunbed (Tan Tropez) glows like an artificial sun; and leaning against the far wall, the Psychedelic Soul Stick playfully lauds the symbolic power of found abstraction. This unobtrusive work made from a branch wrapped with hundreds of layers of shredded record albums, photos, colored ribbons, and thread is part of a larger series in which bits collected from favorite recordings, significant photos, or beloved sweaters are transformed into a shamanistic object that possesses the combined symbolic powers of all the objects from which it is made.

http://www.themoorespace.org/JimLambie/JimLambie.html