well,

i've just finished reading a nice book called "life is so good", an assisted autobiography (the last one of those I read was the miles davis autobiography ) of George Dawson, a 101-year-old black man from Texas who learned to read at the age of 98. (The book is copyright 1999, and I learned that George Dawson lived to be 103, passing in 2K1). The early part of his story obviously revolves around being a young black man in the segregated south, and it's a fascinating firsthand account, both more and less terrible than you'd imagine (a seemingly very happy family homelife contrasted with seeing one of his older friends get lyched when still a child). After that, there's a lot about him leaving home, first to work for a white family, then just to wander via passenger and freight trains (he gets around this country as well as Canada and Mexico).
Rock and Socks, George.
Anyway,
here's what's going on:
I'M TRYING TO GET ABLETON LIVE TO WORK AND MAKE MIXTAPES FOR YOU PEOPLE! and by you people i mean, my cat.
and i don't have a cat.
so for me.
but I'm interested in making nonsense mixtapes, and it's an interesting process, involving things like tremendous latency and things i've never considered like ASIO.
It's also going to cost an awful lot more money than i expected to get set up. rats!

OK, cool things I've looked at recently:
Nikki S. Lee, a born-in-korea, now in the u.s. photographer/artist/thinger who "After observing particular subcultures and ethnic groups...adopts their general style and attitude through dress, gesture, and posture, and then approaches the group in her new guise." She hangs out with hip hop heads , schoolgirls , punk rockers , old ladies , and more, then gets passerbys, or members of the group to snap a group photo of her with her friends (I'd put friends in quotes, but that would seem cynical). I've seen her work in museums, and it's fascinating. Here is a link with some of that work, along with some of her other work, including a cool series of photos called "part", which are essentially intimate moments between two people, with one of them just cut out of the frame.
She's obviously got some fixation on identity, and I read a site talking about how the eastern view of identity considers the person as less solid, and views them more as a functional component in a group of people, i.e. you are who you hang out with and how you function within that group?, something like it.

Also, one of my just-about-favorite artists, (who I've already turned my man Cosmo onto, and he's going to be the only one reading this, so it might be redundant), William Schaff .
I first got turned onto William Schaff because he did the artwork for lift your skinny fists like antennas to heaven (see header to this entry), the penultimate album by a band that will always have a special place in my heart, godspeed you black emperor.
ANYWAY, go to William Schaff's flickr site (he used to have his own, but so it goes), and check out evrything there, but I have to admint I have a particular affinity for the mail art (scroll down in the column on the right to find it).

From that site, somehow, I got linked to THIS site, one artist's attempt to subvert money, and turn us all onto Noney, in which all monetary notes are handmade and worth their "aesthetic value" in a person-to-person system of barter. Get it?

In a less highbrow artistic aside, I enjoyed Weird Al's new video for "White and Nerdy" off of his MySpace page (who knew he'd have one!).

I was linked there courtesy of my favorite website of all time, WFMU's BEWARE OF THE BLOG , which I usually read right after my email.

Ok.
I'm done.

Oh rats. I just manually typed in all of those links for this whole post, before seeing the link tool at the top. Shucks! At least I learned what a=href means.