Turtle on turtle by Robert Syrett based on Greg Brown original idea circa 1980Basketball based on Damien Hirst at SFMOMAThat’s a Rose, in my hood — i took the photo
I found this green ball in the 2000 block of Bryant Street and carried it the rest of the way to Mitchell Park and used it as a stage prop and then left it there:
In this alley, roughly 60 years ago, Jerry Garcia, playing a banjo, first met Bobby Weir, to form the Grateful Dead:
The former Dana Morgan music is now a Georgian restaurant
And here, on Bryant Street in Palo Alto, California, USA, someone painted part of a bike bridge pink, which some other people believe is a tribute to the British rock band Pink Floyd:
man from Seattle who likes the Dead and was here with his son who attended Stanford baseball camp; although, actually we met in front of Coupa on Ramona, not Bryant;
Mark Weiss and unidentified companion or charge, Palo Alto, August, 2022
s mit kind, 1995 by gerhard Richter
A woman in line behind me at the café noticed my book with a faux naive cover that said “Gerhard Richter 100 pictures” and she asked if I was Gerhard.
I said no I am Mark although the register at the café had me down as “MARC “.
And yesterday‘s Plastic Alto blog post I said I was the douchebag who made $200 million by bundling music and licensing it to Ford among others .
Previously I said I was Oscar Grant; I may have said somewhere that I am George Floyd .
There’s a married woman running for city council who says she’s “queer” and I said I too was a Black lesbian until the political engagement process bleached me.
And the word “literally” could mean both “figuratively” and “literally”.
My brother the engineer has almost no ear for trope .
And my eggs are getting cold.
Melanie in the times
bw or “ZOW”
Larry Ochs and his fellow musketeers of Reeds also known as ROVA saxophone Quartet are doing a show at the art center from 4 to 5 which is closing time for the center which has not had evening hours in more than two years because of budgetary pressure caused by the pandemic. Part of the purpose of the show is to honor Joseph Zirker who died recently in Menlo Park at the ripe old age of 98. When Larry and some other confederates did a concert in 2019 I posed him and I next to one of the two Zirker monotypes his family donated to the city years ago. Terry and I bought a lesser work or a smaller from Cafe Zoe in May a month or so before Joe expired. He was a friend of mine and he died. Actually if I can add on another riff here Joe told me more than once the story of being a flute prodigy and getting to perform on radio national radio yet one of his classmates sabotaged his instrument out of spite or jealousy. Maybe I will tell thatbstory as part of the introduction to Melanie Charles who is playing on Monday at The Mitch. Melanie Charles Haitian-American-led jazz quartet Monday at The Mitch Larry Ochs and ROVA Friday at the art center early. Yet ROVA who has a guest piano player named Sol Lewitt in McDonas are also doing a show from 630 to sundown over at Lytton Plaza very near where I’m sitting. Or where Duffy and I are sitting. Digesting our eggs.
Somewhere in my correspondence with Melanie Charles I noted that she has an accent over the E or a stress on the first syllable: Mèlanie.
and1:
In this ethereal painting of the city, the German artist Gerhard Richter recreates a snapshot photograph he took of Jerusalem from his hotel room in 1995, looking towards the Christian Quarter. Discernible features of the cityscape have been all but erased in the painting, partially anonymising the city, or supplying it with a sense of timelessness.
In this ethereal painting of the city, the German artist Gerhard Richter recreates a snapshot photograph he took of Jerusalem from his hotel room in 1995, looking towards the Christian Quarter. Discernible features of the cityscape have been all but erased in the painting, partially anonymising the city, or supplying it with a sense of timelessness. Only with very close inspection is it possible to make out a lamppost or car amongst the architectural structures. By these means Richter’s rendering of Jerusalem appears simultaneously as a vision of the city from centuries ago and a bird’s eye view on the contemporary metropolis.
While the image is not a work of imagination, the ambivalent and luminescent light imbuing the painting effects a dreamlike quality in the image, perhaps alluding to the mystical and mythical status of the Holy City. Unlike some modern artists who chose to focus on the desolate quality of contemporary Jerusalem, or explore the religious and national divisions in the city, Richter’s work seems to meditate on the impossibility of visually conveying the full complicated history of the place. Instead his painting functions like a medieval visual aid for spiritual pilgrimage, evoking in its viewers a personal, individual response to the site by encouraging the exploration of their own memories and imaginings of the city, brought to the fore by his own ambivalent representation.
Only with very close inspection is it possible to make out a lamppost or car amongst the architectural structures. By these means Richter’s rendering of Jerusalem appears simultaneously as a vision of the city from centuries ago and a bird’s eye view on the contemporary metropolis.
While the image is not a work of imagination, the ambivalent and luminescent light imbuing the painting effects a dreamlike quality in the image, perhaps alluding to the mystical and mythical status of the Holy City. Unlike some modern artists who chose to focus on the desolate quality of contemporary Jerusalem, or explore the religious and national divisions in the city, Richter’s work seems to meditate on the impossibility of visually conveying the full complicated history of the place. Instead his painting functions like a medieval visual aid for spiritual pilgrimage, evoking in its viewers a personal, individual response to the site by encouraging the exploration of their own memories and imaginings of the city, brought to the fore by his own ambivalent representation.
Something here this morning also reminds me of my fellow Gunn graduate Nina Khatchadorian and her portraits of herself as a Flemish woman from for centuries before.
Pandora stole music files from thousands of bands and musicians, packaged it, sold it to Ford for millions. The founder Tim Westergren was keyboardist in Yellowwood Junction and other projects. He appears September 9 at The Guild. In a related matter, the Winkelvoss Brothers — co-founders of Facebook — played in a nightclub in Berkeley last month: vanity projects.
I’m a critic of Silicon Valley as a whole, so something that hits as close to home as streaming services I find especially offensive.
Pandora launched its personalized radio service in the second half of 2005 paying a per performance rate of $0.000762 each time a song was played. (Hayes, 2021)
Despite its growth and the excitement it was generating, Pandora spent its first several years struggling to keep the lights on. It had publicly warned of pulling the plug. It was paying artists according to the law — which wasn’t a given in the early days of digital music — but it didn’t think it could afford to have the rates double or triple.
My point is that like Napster Pandora started by file-sharing music on a large scale. Then over time as they became subject to the consent decree, they reimburse labels, artists and composers the legal rate — which made Tim a millionaire of quasi-billionaire but still leaves most musicians struggling.
“We should have done what Spotify did and ate a pound of flesh to get the industry on our side, then expanded the scope of the product and then really gone global and become an all-you-can-eat service,” said Westergren.
In the end, musical artists continue to be the ones dealt the bad hand. Spotify pays major labels huge financial sums and upfront guarantees while it’s estimated that most artists will see payments of between $0.003 and $0.006 per song play.
Pandora still remains an active player in the music streaming space and counted 58.5 million monthly active listeners at the end of 2020. Depending on which music listener you ask, Pandora is a fond memory of digital music coming into its own, or its radio service may still be a vital part of their passive listening experience. Attention wise, however, Pandora is being left behind as Spotify and Apple Music push faster and further into on-demand streaming, sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
I mean “stole” in the sense of getting a great bargain or getting the much better benefit of the bargain that the thousands of musicians do or did.
A billionaire can sue a non-billionaire for saying the sky is not blue enough. So I am sticking my neck out here. Its possible that Tim is a donor to The Guild theatre, which was built with $30m in donations from people a lot like him.
I actually think the algorithm or genomes work as well as randomly picking the next song in the cycle.
and: In July 2013, David Lowery, the frontman of the rock bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, wrote an article criticizing Pandora’s royalty rate for Cracker’s song “Low“, which was streamed over one million times. According to his BMI royalty statement, Lowery earned only $16.89 for his 40 percent stake in the song.[80]
The new library is open five of seven days and a total of 45 hours per week. But why shouldn’t it be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days per week or 77 possible hours?
By my reckoning it’s open 45 of 77 hours which is more like four not five days a week . The system as a whole is open something like 3 of 7 days per week by my math.
Yet there are billions and trillions worth of corporate capital that we are afraid to tax . Amazon and Tesla and Ford, on down to whatever the names of the unicorns are. (there are 16, start ups with enough investment to be valued and traded at $1 billion each or more). And let’s tax VC transactions one dollar per thousand which would still amount to couple million dollars per year.
Remind me what it costs in of thousands of dollars per hour to keep open a library. I presume it is more than the $20 an hour our staff makes. There is something in a local paper that said we are being asked to cap the tax at one million even for the largest corporations, the wealthiest. I suggest, rather, that we only tax the hundred biggest corporations or most wealthy and tax them an average of $1 million each. To get up to something like $100 million per year. Current leadership is targeting $10-$15 million which is somewhat pathetic and certainly disappointing.
And I think flawed from the start for not starting by investigating and announcing why we don’t have a business tax and everyone else does.
To my mind taxing these 100 corporations only $10 million and not $100 million is giving them a gift of $80 million per year or continuing our tax holiday for billionaires centibillionaires and trillionaires.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 