...there's something about it that does have the feeling of finality to it. This was the conclusion of one line of reasoning ... and perhaps everything after it is secondary in some way.

E-mail newsletters seek riches in niches - Los Angeles Times

(Via AdPulp.)

Lichtfaktor: Forest set Creative Review have an interview with them, which includes some useful tips:

To get the best results you need a tripod. The exposure should be around 10-30 seconds or longer if needed. Stay in front of the camera and do your writing. Do not overexpose! Set the camera to about iso100, and close your aperture as much as possible. If there is still too much light you might have to use an nd-filter. It is always nice to integrate the surrounding into your picture. We have a collection of flashlights, biking-lights and flashing LED lights which all work with batteries so that we are mobile - and you also get nice results with fireworks and torches . There are 3 different type of lights we use: Xenon: makes a warm golden light. LED: makes a thin precise line. Cold cathode: thick line. But the best results experiment using filters and things which reflect light.

ultrahyper, Walking to the seafront

Look, no hands!

Photography discovered its inherent subject in the street The landscape photographers and the portrait photographers were in some ways more stymied because there was an enormous tradition there that they were trapped in...

The street had always been an alluring place for photographers, but to start with at least, it had proved to be elusive. Pioneer photographers could record the architecture easily enough because it kept still, but the life of the street moved too fast for the long exposure times... So the first street scenes show artfully staged setups or what look like post-apocalyptic ghost-towns. Gradually the technology caught up. Citizens evolved from blurs to all too solid flesh, but the camera's struggle to keep pace with life on the streets left a rich legacy; a visual language of blurs and grain that is unique to photography

What transpired was that major improvements had been made which impeded a like-for-like copy. What has been produced is a 2007 facsimile, looking to the past, being familiar to the viewer, yet strangely new.

If anything has changed, it’s the amount of product-driven content. This issue contained 18 pages in the front of the book that were devoted entirely to products (What’s Inside Lotrimin Ultra? Play Super Mario! Wow, Expensive Motorcycle!). Then there’s the Wish List, “a survey of the stuff we’re dying to get (and give) this holiday season,” which includes a Top Ten that lasts for 12 pages, plus 24 pages of some of the most blatant product placement I’ve ever seen in a magazine.

Is David Allen’s Getting Things Done too long winded and complicated for you? Do you find yourself spending hours on sites like Lifehacker instead of simply getting the fuck on with the things that need doing? Do you have a healthy respect for (and fear) of aging punk rock icons? Then do I have a time management system for you...

So, if someone was to say 'Hey man, Why did you make Hi-Tech Jazz?' and I described why I did it, because I did have something I was thinking of, if I was to do that I would have fucked up his vision of why he listened to it. So I learned not to describe anything and just leave it like water, clear, with no shape and no form. I think that's what people really enjoy about UR, they get to paint their own picture. We might just make the canvas for them, with the record, and in their mind they paint the picture and that's one of the reasons we sold for so long. We just went faceless, there was no reason for you to know what we look like, you just concentrate more on what the sound was. Unfortunately, people need a face all the time, and for many years I didn't give em any face. But now - internet, cell phone - people take pictures of me, the shit's all over the internet. I figure well, hopefully the people will still have some honour and honour my wish not to be seen in front of my music. I don't go in front of the music. I believe that if you put your ego in front of the music, and place it in front of the speaker, then the people trying to listen to the music can't hear your music, they just listen to your ego. So I really ask the people who do have pictures of me to be honourable and just leave me out of it, man.

There's no sense of scale, no reference to anything that we'd really be familiar with ... it's being offered to us, perhaps, as something between an artwork and a document. If it's an artwork, it's haunted by the idea of the document, and if it's a document, it's haunted by the idea of the artwork.

[A found object could] disrupt your mental state and thereby project you into another consciousness or another understanding.