Pandora’s Box

Charlie 

Thanks to a recommendation from my friend Joanna, I’ve been frequenting this amazing music site.  The design and aesthetics are fabulous, but the format and content are most remarkable.  You simply type in an artist, band, or song, and Pandora automatically compiles a playlist based on the characteristics of your particular request.  Better yet, Pandora provides information about each song, album, and artist so you can read up on expert reviews, artist bios, and musical histories.  The playlists are incredibly eclectic, drawing from a plethora of artists and genres.  You’ll find almost anything you desire and hear tunes from artists you’ve never encountered. 

I listen to it constantly and continually discover new artists and sounds.   Best of all, its free! 

A Few Links…

…for your enjoyment!

 1) Extremely rare Roy Buchanan.  Prepare to be blown away. 

 2) From his ironic home base at Murky Coffee, the always lucid, expresso infused Chris W.

3) New GMU guru Pete Lesson on anarchy and pirates, dominoes, and revolutions.

Paintjam Dan Dunn

Charlie 

The most amazing thing I’ve seen today.  Thanks to Dan’s amazing creativity and the wonders of emergent information and decentralized knowledge and the connective fabric of the web!!!  All just a click away.

2007 Rocks. 

They Made the Revolution…

 Charlie

 Continuing the reggae theme (rest assured, it will remain a continual, and fundamentally important thread), here’s an excerpt from a fascinating Wired article:

“Because American stations could be picked up by Jamaican radios, citizens of the island nation were exposed to American pop music, R&B and the sounds of the British Invasion. As a result, many of Trojan’s most enduring tracks are Western standards or classics fed through the bouncy riddim of Jamaica’s cultural filter. From BB Seaton’s stunning cover of Gershwin’s “Summertime” to The Israelites’ upgrade of The Beatles’ “Come Together,” reggae artists have interpreted mainstream music in fascinating new ways.”

Long before the digital age, reggae artists displayed a unique penchant for splicing, dicing, and remixing seemingly oppositional tunes, breeding new creative life into established forms.  Their work delivers great insight into the workings of emergent order.  Unpredictable, even oppositional ideas meld into one another, things unimagined become tangible.  Behold the dynamism of the mind. 

Art and Economic Freedom

Sandeep Prakash
Humans seem to be hard-wired for continually cogitating about things which words seem wholly insufficient to seize and capture: moods, randomness, suffering, love, god. We sing songs, write poems, tell jokes, and scribble wild fantasies in marginalia. Some of us are able to broadcast our idiosyncratic art with great success. Creative expression holds a notable position in my CL arsenal of economic encomia. Not, you gasp cynically, Supply and Demand?

It’s hard for me to imagine a bare-chested Robert Plant sensually recalling a Californian peregrination without marveling at the rapid and tremendous specialization most humans have been afforded in recent times. It is because great productive processes were unleashed that Plant and his bunch were free to choose how they should go about their lives. They didn’t have the sorry-no-choice, quotidian-subsistence-travails-till-ya-die that were not too long ago the rule for human existence.

Sadly, too much of the world is mired in a poverty that we in wealthy countries cannot easily comprehend. One way I relate to people the marvels of ‘grown’ orders and free societies: ask them to think about rock music or romance novels or couture garment adverts in the The New Yorker. How unbelievably productive our society must be to leave free so much time and effort for one to broadcast their creative expressions. We realize how much we take for granted when we consider that poor societies whose enchoate division of labor results in miserably unproductive processes. This not only means people have to make their own pins and farm their uncertain meals, but that so much of their time is spent toiling on survival that creative expression (let alone its broadcast and efficacy) is dismissed to the rare periphery of humanity.