Russian Sledges

Making a new Marissa Nadler video! Graffiti Camouflage…

Welcome to the fifth series of A.V. Undercover, which doesn’t include the little detours we’ve taken into holiday and summer songs. We’re happy to be back, complete with a gussied-up studio and a new list of songs for bands to cover. (Once a song has been covered, it gets crossed off the list, so the later a band comes to our office, the fewer songs they’ll have to choose from. You know the drill.) The 2014 song list can be found right here. First up to bat are Undercover superstars Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner, better known as Wye Oak. It’s been an unofficial rule since we started Undercover that we wouldn’t have bands visit more than once, but because every performance has been so excellent, this is Wye Oak’s fourth Undercover appearance. (They’ve previously covered The Kinks, Danzig, and Brenda ...

A Canadian beer heiress hosts an international song contest to find the saddest music in the world in this otherworldly period film with an old-time cinematic look.

American in Cambridge, MA

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Designed by Oat Creative.

Luscious lavender line drawings playfully provoke perfect parallelegrams in Oat Creative's sweet and simple suite for Cambridge's Alden & Harlow.

Visit Alden & Harlow.

Research by Jonathan Riley

We’re going to keep reminding the public that the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) wasted inordinate amounts of time and money over the past few years monitoring peace activists. And by “reminding,” we mean hollering and tweeting until the damning revelations found in thousands of recently unclassified documents reach people who otherwise care solely about sports and celebrity.

Just yesterday we carried on about how BRIC operatives have watched everyone from college kids to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (when he was still a labor organizer and legislator). As noted, the documents secured by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) show such ridiculous things as cops analyzing actions in which activists were “making stilts” and “blowing bubbles.”

While poring over the reports, we also noticed several mentions of local and national musicians who performed in Dewey Square and at Occupy camps elsewhere. From local rocker Ryan Lee Crosby to David Crosby, authorities believed their bringing music to the protest warranted documentation. Since bands and artists have a platform to tell their fans about this bullshit, we combed through the files and compiled the names of those mentioned. With any luck, most of them will respond like Ryan Walsh of Hallelujah the Hills, and speak out …

“I thought Occupy was such a promising, beautiful series of events,” Walsh tells the Dig. ”On the one hand, knowing that our live set there was marked down in those reports is a real badge of honor for me (like Billy Bragg sang, “if you got a black list / i wanna be on it”) but, on the other, it does highlight the tremendous amount of misused resources that was happening at the time. Criminals meet behind closed doors, peaceful movements are transparent. Occupy was so clearly the latter that the existence of the reports themselves are embarrassing. I visited the Boston camp quite a bit. I was there the night it was shut down. I’ll never forget that time in Boston.”

In addition to sounding the alarm about constitutional concerns and wasted resources, we also figured that the targeted artists deserved due props and exposure for enduring this ordeal (you can get the new Hallelujah the Hills album here), and for being cool enough to entertain the Occupy troops. This is hardly a novel scenario; outspoken artists like Pete Seeger were spied on by the FBI for years. That doesn’t make unwarranted surveillance any less abhorrent, though, and so we sing …

Artists and musicians noted in the BRIC docs for performing at Occupy Boston …

State Radio

Ryan Lee Crosby

Tosh I

Hallelujah the Hills

The Whitehaus Family Record

Lauren Flaherty

Manasseh Israel

Cowgill

The J Kirks

Quill

Bojah and the Insurrection

Colin Leeds

Jeff Rowe

Garvy J

The Low Anthem

Melodigo and Incus

Kevin Devine and the Goddamn Band

Don Hammontree

Four Point Restraints

Mel Weoodfall from Colour

Tubby Love

Other notes on musical performances (in Boston plus at other Occupy camps) and artists from the new PCJF documents …

The announcement came the same day that David Crosby and Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, planned an acoustic performance in the park for supports and passers-by.

Dubstep Party. A dance techno party at Dewey Square, people are asked to bring strobe lights, fog machines and balloons.

OccuPoetry at the State House. Occupy Boston Poetry group will be reading on the steps of the State House. Analyst Notes: This event is hosted by people from SEIU. OB has conducted past events in conjunction with members of SEIU.

And the follow-up: OB conducted Occupoetry at the Massachusetts State House. No known issues were reported and approx. 15 individuals were in attendance

Street Theatre Group at the Gandhi Statute in Dewey Sq.

Movie: Jimmy tingle shows his new movie American Dream at the “main stage” of Dewey Sq.

Analyst Notes: Russell Simmons is the co-founder of Def Jams record label, as well as the creator of clothing fashion line Phat Farm. Simmons is an elite figure in the hip- hop community.

 

FURTHER READING

WHY THE BPD DIDN’T THINK TAMERLAN TSARNAEV WAS A KILLER

BRIC SPIES AND TICKLE LIES

“When I took over the bar program in 2009, it was like Chinese done wrong,” Duan says. “There were beer neons on white walls and all the drinks were like cheap scorpion bowls. The food has always been authentic and good. I just felt it needed something that could elevate and complement the bold flavors. The first thing I did was implement all these authentic tiki recipes from ‘Beachbum’ Berry and Trader Vic’s. Customers weren’t responsive at first because it wasn’t what they were used to drinking at an Asian restaurant, but I just kept pushing the envelope because I knew it was good.” Instead of toning down the acid and booziness prevalent in classic tiki drinks, Duan went even further, challenging the North Shore community with his encyclopedic arsenal of pre-Prohibition cocktails and techniques he picked up as a patron at Eastern Standard, Deep Ellum, and Drink. Unlike most bartenders who build their confidence and skill set behind a more seasoned practitioner, Duan is completely self-taught. While pursuing a degree in hospitality and hotel management, Duan became fascinated by the burgeoning cocktail scene, and dedicated most of his free time pestering bartenders for insider knowledge. “I was that annoying patron at the bar asking ‘how do you do this or how do you do that?’ Guys like Hugh Fiore, Kevin Martin, and Max Toste became my mentors.”

Prooffreader graphed the distribution of letters towards the beginning, middle and end of English words, using a variety of corpora, finding both some obvious truths and some surprising ones. As soon as I saw this, I began to think of the ways that you could use it to design word games -- everything from improved Boggle dice to automated Hangman strategies to altogether new games. Read the rest

kimimisstuff:

Illustrations from Falcom’s Sorcerian manual (PC-98 version)

(1987)

Linked Jazz is a project investigating the potential of the application of Linked Open Data (LOD) technology to enhance the discovery and visibility of digital cultural heritage materials. More specifically, the project focuses on digital archives of jazz history to expose relationships between musicians and reveal their community’s network. New modes of connecting cultural data and making them searchable as a whole in a seamless discovery environment would open unprecedented opportunities to create new kinds of meaning and elicit new streams of interpretation. The goal of this project is to help uncover meaningful connections between documents and data related to the personal and professional lives of musicians who often practice in rich and diverse social networks.

Listen to Kelly Hogan and Neko Case take on sci-fi narratives from the female perspective, poking fun at the fact that the fantasy clearly revolves around the minds of teenage guys.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff admits deputies who checked on Elliot Rodger less than a month before his Isla Vista rampage knew about disturbing videos he posted online. However, they did not watch the videos.

In Rogers’ manifesto he described the incident when the police came to check on him,”I tactfully told [the police] that it was all a misunderstanding, and they finally left. If they had demanded to search my room…that would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over.”

After the welfare check, deputies decided that he was shy and not a danger to himself.

 

When the NRA has to announce that your gun activism idea is just amazingly stupid, it may be time to rethink.

So, for the past couple of years I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who have visited this site, and many of them read something like this:

To: Jeffrey Morgenthaler
Subject: Web Form Submission
From: Some Loudmouth
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Message-Id: <20140412235755>
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2013 16:57:55 -0700 (PDT)

Hey Asshole

When are you going to post more? I’m tired of not getting free shit on the regular.

Well, have I got news for you: I wrote a book, and now you can see what you’ve been missing over the past two-and-a-half years while I worked on it in my free time, between running two bars and writing a weekly column for Playboy. So let me tell you a little bit about what the book is about.

Whenever I train new bartenders, the first thing I tell them is that there are three things, in equal measure, that make a great cocktail:

1. The recipe you follow.
2. The ingredients you select.
3. The technique you employ.

Now, as I see it, there are a million books out there that have been written about recipes, and the history of recipes. Slightly less so, there are books out there about spirits, liqueurs, and other ingredients. But I couldn’t think of any books that really delved into the technique of making a great cocktail. So I set out to do just that.

This is a cocktail book that doesn’t talk about booze. There’s no chapter on rum, there isn’t a chapter of tequila cocktail recipes, and there definitely aren’t a hundred something recipes of my personal creations, with glossy photos of each one. This is a book that shows you exactly how a professional bartender does every last thing pertaining to the making of a quality cocktail, from handling citrus, to exploring simple and compound syrups, to shaking, stirring, infusing, garnishing, and even using a blender in the proper way.

Throughout the text, I’ve included tips, techniques, and recipes from some of the best bartenders in the country. Folks like Jennifer Colliau, Daniel Shoemaker, Jon Santer, Todd Thrasher, Murray Stenson, Joseph Brooke, and Dale DeGroff all contributed valuable information for me to share with my readers.

The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique is available now, wherever books are sold. I hope you’ll pick up a copy.

Post from: Jeffrey Morgenthaler. Follow me on Twitter.

I Wrote a Book!

travelry:

Today I went to the cup noodle factory (& museum) in Osaka, Japan. It’s quite far out of the city, but after I read that you get to make your own cup noodle for 300¥ (£1.70/$2.90), I just had to go there. You go through the whole process of decorating a cup, adding the dry noodles, soup powder & your choice of 4 dry ingredients (I did pork, onion, garlic & narutomaki/decorative chicks). Then the cup is all sealed up (you even get to operate the machine to seal and fill it) and you pop it into an inflatable bubble bag with a red cord to take home with you!

'I Suck': How Guys Use Self-Deprecation Against You:

In one of 2011’s most-shared articles, Yashar Ali wrote about the myriad ways in which men “gaslight” women by convincing the ladies that they’re crazy and hypersensitive. “It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it,” Yashar wrote; “we continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.”

Ali uses “gaslighting” to refer to the way in which men delegitimize women’s anger. But what’s clear is that the “I’m a piece of shit” speech serves exactly the same purpose. While traditional gaslighting makes women’s anger seem irrational, this self-deprecatory wallowing makes women’s anger seem like unfair piling-on to a guy who already hates himself more than you ever could. It’s designed to force women to comfort — rather to continue to quarrel with — someone who claims to lack the emotional dexterity to continue an adult conversation.

Brandon Smyth was a refugee from the tech industry, venturing into a new career as a coffee roaster and a new hobby as a home winemaker. He started adding oak shavings to his vino, finding they intensified cherry and fruit flavors. “I began to wonder,” he recalls, “if I could do the same thing for coffee.”

Now, Smyth, head roaster at Water Avenue Coffee since 2009, places 350-pound batches of unroasted, green coffee beans in empty pinot noir barrels and lets them age for one to two months. “The seeds are like little sponges,” Smyth says. “They’ll pick up anything.” Once roasted, the finished coffee has notes of cherries, raspberries, blueberries, and deep oak.

Water Avenue ran through the first 1,000 pounds of coffee using this process in just five months, selling the vinous results at $18 for a 12-ounce bag. Like the discovery of fermentation itself (one imagines), this coffee dimension is a happy accident. “I had no idea it would be so successful,” Smyth says. “We were just goofing around.” Next up: chardonnay barrels.

This LibGuide was created to honor one of the Ernst Mayr Library (MCZ)'s most valuable staff members, April Mullins, on the occasion of her marriage.

The three-fingered salute has become a gesture of solidarity and defiance for the protesters in Bangkok, just as it is in Panem

Whenever films are accused of inspiring copycat behaviour, it is invariably bad news: Death Wish, Child's Play and Natural Born Killers are among those that have taken their turn as Exhibit A in the media when the time has come to apportion blame for some tragedy or atrocity. (Even a film as apparently innocuous as Bad Neighbours was cited by a US critic last week as a possible catalyst for the murders carried out by Elliot Rodger.) So it is something of an anomaly and a relief to find that reports of Hunger Games-inspired activity in Thailand do not refer to that country's adolescents being forced to participate in televised fights to the death.

Continue reading...

We host interactive lectures in the spring and fall. Our spring seminars are in Cambridge on Harvard’s main campus, and our fall seminars are in Boston at Harvard Medical School. During our fall lectures, teams of three PhD students present current information and ongoing research on a given topic at each lecture, pausing for questions throughout. In our spring seminar series (2012), an individual PhD student will present his or her recent work, going into detail about the experiments that led to new conclusions. Our seminars are open to audience members of any age, though a high school level of science education would be beneficial.

Gay marriage now legal across Illinois KSDK Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn says the state is now "on the right side of history," as gay marriage becomes legal. Loading… Post to Facebook. Gay marriage now legal across Illinois Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn says the state is now "on the right side of history," as gay ... and more »

seventhsons:

where the fuck is she i am like balls deep in aliens right now

VIENNA — Party-goers dressed in little more than body paint rubbed shoulders with men in tuxedoes and cross-dressers in wild costumes on Saturday, transforming Vienna’s City Hall into a fantasy land. But in the end, Conchita Wurst stole the show. The occasion, Europe’s biggest charity event, was serious: raising money for AIDS research. But as […]

Brazilian installation artist Henrique Oliveira has recently unveiled his newest work – a giant system of wooden tunnels that wind throughout a large room at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade in São Paulo, Brazil. The elaborate tunnels were build using a colossal metal carcass and inexpensive, repurposed pieces of wood found at construction sites.

This organic installation is called “Transarquitetônica” and looks like a huge root system reclaiming the space our civilization took from it ages ago.The pieces of wood it is composed of also seem to take back their original organic form. But the effect is even deeper and more overwhelming when inside the tunnel – it could be the setting of the most magical and adventurous of fairy tales.

The art piece will be available to explore at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea  through the end of November 2014.

More info: Website | Museum (h/t: thisiscolossal)

Interview With Henrique Oliveira:

Related posts:

1. Scrap Wood Turned Into Stunning Sculptures
2. Astronomical Watch Accurately Shows The Solar System’s Movements On Your Wrist
3. Cat Transit System Installed In a Home Office

Artist Builds A Giant Root System That You Can Explore From The Inside originally appeared on DeMilked on June 2, 2014.

wkdart:

Someone’s taking animal crossing a little too seriously

The otters are given the choice to play the keyboard or just sit back and enjoy the show—engaging their sight, touch, and hearing senses.

Japanese musicians have always held a special place in their hearts for American music, and rock & roll has made a particularly large impact on their homegrown music scene, but one of the elements commonly associated with the rock scene is totally taboo in Japan- the drugs.

The psychedelic music scene in North America and Europe was full of experimentation with drugs, but Japanese psych bands couldn’t let it all hang out like the American bands they were emulating, and their sound was heavily formulated, and policed, by the record companies.

This fascinating collection of Japanese psychedelic album covers, coupled with tons of interesting facts about this niche music scene, will help expand your mind on the subject without any lingering side effects...

-Via Boing Boing