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Current listening: “My Finest Work Yet” by Andrew Bird

Currently listening to My Finest Work Yet (2019) by Andrew Bird. “Bloodless” is particularly on the nose.

Well, the best lack all conviction
And the worst keep sharpening their claws
They’re peddling in their dark fictions
While what’s left of us
Well, we just hem and we haw

And it’s so damn slinky, catchy.

LP from Loma Vista Records | Apple Music | Spotify

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Thoughts on LAMP vs JAMstack content management systems

Chris Coyier recently published a CSS-Tricks post titled “WordPress and Jamstack”. It’s a great rundown of the pros and cons, and I’m in agreement on the whole.

The most important point for my own use cases is from the section titled “CMS and End User UX”.

Sometimes, we developers are building sites just for us (I do more than my fair share of that), but I’d say developers are mostly building sites for other people. So the most important question is: am I building something that is empowering for the people I’m building it for?

I really enjoy working on JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup) sites, the dev environment can be spectacular. It’s wonderful to not worry about deployment, HTTPS, caching. BUT. I haven’t yet found a JAMstack content management system (CMS) that I love, so it’s not something I feel super comfortable reaching for in the majority of my client work.

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“the mystic mouth / leaves me so defted” 

sweet love, sweet love
love

my throat is gurgling
the mystic mouth
leaves me so defted
defted

my throat is gurgling
the mystic mouth
leaves me so defted

and the deep black nightingale
turned willowy

and the deep black nightingale
turned willowy

by love’s tossed treatment
berefted

The lyrics to John Cage’s “Four Walls: Act I, Scene VII”. I couldn’t find the lyrics many places online, so here they are.

Been listening to Symbol by Susumu Yokota a lot recently, finally took the time to look up a few of the songs he sampled. The voice in “music from the lake surface” is particularly haunting and weird, turns out it’s this piece.

“Four Walls” premiered in Steamboat Springs, CO in 1944, and this particular piece was originally sung by Julie Harris. The lyrics are a poem by Merce Cunningham.

I wonder which recording he sampled… It’s my favorite that I’ve heard so far, am not that in to many of others I’ve heard. Though I do think that the version from the 1989 album by Richard Bunger and Jay Clayton is pretty good (Apple Music, Spotify).

Related: I purchased John Cage: A Mycological Foray published by Atelier Editions a while back and it’s gorgeous. I really should send the postcards inside, but I’ll probably hang on to them. Need more pleasurable things to look at during the day-to-day right now.

Related to related: Listen to Mushroom Haiku, excerpt from Silence (1972/69) on UbuWeb. Browse the rest of Ubu’s John Cage artefacts.

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Link: Cyberfeminism Index

Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index is now online. From the New Museum’s First Look:

In Seu’s telling, the term “cyberfeminism,” which came into usage in the early 1990s, “was meant as an oxymoron or provocation, a critique of the cyberbabes and fembots that stocked the sci-fi landscapes of the 1980s.” As a provocation, the term has certainly succeeded: over decades, it has brought feminisms and technologies into conflict and conversation, while the term itself has been contested, reimagined, debunked, and expanded. Cyberfeminism Index does not attempt to resolve these contradictions, but to honor the multiplicity of practices that might be gathered under this imperfect umbrella, particularly making efforts to center non-Western and nonbinary approaches.

Commissioned by Rhizome, developed by Angeline Meitzler. On larger screens, you can click the items to curate and download your own selection. Check it out.

cyberfeminismindex.com

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NOW v3: Adjusting to US life, fires in CA, poll worker training

Another Now page update. Contents below for posterity.

We’ve been in SF 🌉 for four and a half months now. The first month or so was strange but it was beautiful in the city, we went for a huge walk and I went swimming in the Pacific 🌊 for the first time in probably a decade. Then the Bay had an intense dry lightning storm and the fires 🔥 started. We started checking PurpleAir every day, and on 9 September it was if the sun never came up, like we were stuck in Blade Runner 2049. Have very rarely been able to meet up with old friends between the pandemic 🦠 and the air quality 🌫. But it will get better at some point.

We got a used car 🚗 about a month ago. I’ve learned more than I ever expected about cars and can recommend a great mechanic in SF. Now that we’ve got a car, we’re spending a lot of time at my family’s place in Nevada to escape the smoke and be a bit more active in general. We’re incredibly lucky to be able to spend some time out of a city. It’s pretty interesting to experience both SF 🟦 and rural NV 🟥 politics and pandemic approaches in the run up to the November election. In SF it’s considered super rude (and borderline illegal) not to wear a mask around others at all times. In NV, it’s considered very rude to wear masks around others unless you’re in a store. The contrasts are… stark.

Speaking of the election, I’ll be a poll worker 🗳 in SF on November 3rd. Just finished my poll worker training last week. It will probably be equal parts exhausting and fascinating. I’m thankful that I don’t live in a swing state considering how dicey everything feels.

Work-wise 👩🏻‍💻 I’m currently: helping out long-term collaborators Corridor8 with some website improvements; rebuilding a website for NY-based visual artist reps Camera Club 📷; developing a bilingual website designed by John Morgan studio for a London-based gallery 🖼; developing a new website for Gort Scott Architects designed by Polimekanos; collaborating with Bec Worth on the WIP 🚧 open-source WordPress theme that powers this website; and consulting with a few orgs and individuals in North America and Europe 🇪🇺.

The most recent sites I’ve developed are the Open-weather 🛰 site with Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer, the new Open School East ✏️ site designed by Sam Baldwin, and “Eternal Return” designed by Jules Estèves for artist Elizabeth Peyton. Read a little bit about “Eternal Return” in the New Yorker.

I’m still settling in to life in the US, but I’m very open to new projects and particularly teaching / talking opportunities. Get in touch if you’d like to learn or work together.

Limited free time is currently taken up by: walking and foraging 🍄; working harder on how I confront obvious and not-so-obvious racism in myself and others; catching up with distant friends on FaceTime and Signal; figuring out how to make friends in a new place during a pandemic 🤷🏻‍♀️; contributing to the Feminist Open Source Investigations Group; cooking, baking, making drinks; remotely contributing to the choral collective Musarc 🎵; and finding a new choir in the Bay Area.