Month: March 2009

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Live fusion of music, dance and painting all performed at once

Our friend Steve Cohn is an avant garde jazz artist who does really brilliant, leading edge work, sometimes right here in the New York City region. In 2007 he was in Amsterdam for a fusion performance called Mo(ve)ment Meets Musicians. My son and I just watched a video clip of the performance and love what we saw.

While Steve played Piano and Shakuhachi and Ernst Resijseger played Cello (sometimes holding it like a guitar), Benno Hübner danced. And on the wall behind them a super-large screen projects the work of two painters who are live on the scene painting while the performance takes place (Tali Farchi and Royce Deans). read more

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Phil Greenspun says fire AIG execs

One of the people whose opinions on current issues I always find compelling, is Phil Greenspun. Phil’s not afraid to look an issue in the mouth and tell us what the issue looks like to his informed eye, even if everyone else is calling it a non-issue or a gobydoggle. His insights are compelling because they’re reasoned with logic and are based on simple, verifiable facts. In a blog post yesterday Phil said

Fire the AIG management

AIG has been in the news again, this time for bleeding taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars to pay employee bonuses for a job well done in 2008. Most egregiously, the very division that bankrupted the company is sucking down $165 million in 2008 bonus. Is there some sort of contract that would require the company to pay these bonuses? The company essentially went bankrupt in the fall of 2008, though the U.S. governnment tried to avoid the actual word “bankruptcy”. When a company goes bankrupt, it doesn’t pay most of its obligations under old contracts and certainly does not pay bonuses to the employees who ran it into the ground (not for moral reasons but simply because it no longer has the cash). read more

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White people like school and superiority

From the book Stuff White People Like by a guy who became famous by mistake and says in his Authors@Google interview, “I’m a bigger jerk now than I ever was.” Christian Lander says lots more in his wickedly funny book and blog.

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week! read more