two brandenburgs (tape vs vinyl)

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I have two versions of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, both I Musici performances. The tape, released sometime in the '80s or '90s, consists of a 1965 recording that was digitally remastered and then transferred to audiocassette, on the Philips label.
The vinyl features a later performance, from the mid-'80s, also by I Musici (including some but not all of the same musicians), also on Philips, also digitally mastered, before being pressed on vinyl.
Below are mp3 rips of the same section from the fourth movement, a passage for brass and woodwinds.

I much prefer the tape version! It's punchier and quirkier. The tempo is slightly faster, and the bassoon part (I assume it's a bassoon, might be oboe) is more prominent and percussive. The vinyl version emphasizes the horns over the reeds and feels more slurry and mushy, although still very professionally played.

Tape version, 1965 performance [2.5 MB .mp3]

Vinyl version, 1985 performance [2.6 MB .mp3]

It's tempting to say the 1965 performance is better than the 1985 performance, as in more spirited and distinctively rhythmic. It's hard to say, though, when there are so many electronic aspects to the comparison (recording, mastering, pressing, media type). Simple microphone placement can drastically change classical music. At the mastering stage, certain frequencies can be accentuated or diminished. The tape version has more hiss and the higher frequencies may be adding a "brighter" sound.

suzi gablik and progress

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Art writer Suzi Gablik is probably best known for her books theorizing a pluralistic and/or socially conscious art, Has Modernism Failed? and The Reenchantment of Art.
Yet before she became poMo she was a Mo. It's still possible to find moldy copies of her 1977 tome Progress in Art, the thesis of which is that conceptualism in the manner of Sol LeWitt represented evolution in art.

A New York Times review from the '70s, archived online, characterized her book thusly:

[C]ritic and artist Suzi Gablik dares to pose the possibility -- sure to be hotly debated in art circles -- that recent art, especially serial, minimal and conceptual art, is the fruition of a millenia‐long development of the human perceptual faculties. This is, to be sure, not a simple task; but Gablik marshals some impressive arguments in favor of her hypothesis that art, like science, follows an evolutionary route from one stage of development to a higher plane of perceptual integration.

By the mid-'80s, annoyed by art world commodification and Julian Schnabel, she stopped talking about progress. It's interesting to skim the earlier book to see how deeply she imbibed that particular sugary drink before switching to one called "reenchantment." As far as I know she never critiqued her earlier ideas a la Wittgenstein, she just didn't mention them any more.

pix2pix

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htown-1pix2pixcrop

image by htown, via bogchat (sans border)

This was made with pix2pix, a web-based image processor that supposedly turns line drawings into fully-fleshed photographic renderings.
Most of the results are on par with the famous #botched_fresco_restoration in Spain.
Artists who use the pix2pix service without high expectations can get some charming results, however.
htown's image above is delicate and somewhat mysterious!

three links towards a political philosophy

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New ideas are clearly needed if your choices at the voting booth are Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. That pairing, considered inevitable by the pundit class at the outset of the 2016 primary season, resulted in the populist "FU" we are currently living through. That's not really an "idea," though, it's mostly been chaos.

What are some alternatives to neoliberalism-as-usual administered by bland technocrats? (The word neoliberalism is vague and overused but for now let's define it as the status quo of corporate faux-market-based ideas practiced by government, which has the practical effect of siphoning cash from the general public into the private sector.)

At one extreme is the right/libertarian idea of a pure government-by-market. This Ayn Randian vision is neatly dismantled in a satirical interview on the Naked Capitalism blog, "Journey into a Libertarian Future, Part I," originally posted in 2011 and reposted this week, which envisions law enforcement run along the market principles of Obamacare. Instead of government hiring cops, think insurance companies.

On the left we're seeing a raging battle between what Benjamin Studebaker, in a thoughtful post, calls "materialism" -- offering the voter actual tangible benefits such as medicare-for-all and free college -- and "idealism," which means changing voters' ideas about race and identity before any practical solutions are attempted. Studebaker makes a good case for the former, but one might wonder what his modern welfare state is going to look like. A government that relies on algorithms to administer benefits, as seen in Denmark and described in this Foreign Policy magazine article, could be hellish.

That welfare dystopia is precisely what the libertarian critique in the first link (shorn of its satire) is concerned about. But government-by-algorithm isn't really left-distributionist so much as a public-private partnership between government and Big Tech, with "algorithms" deciding whose benefits get cut off. The flaw in the Foreign Policy article is not asking who is selling this tech to Denmark. It seems unlikely that the bureaucrats have their own homegrown programmers; probably they'd be relying on Silicon Valley tech entrepeneurs, whose politics are actually neoliberal-masquerading-as-libertarian. So we're back to the Obamacare model, with algorithms rather then insurance supplied by the private sector. More information is clearly needed on how this would all work.