more often than not someone answers
crimes committed in empty pools
i told melancholy it should guide me
I fought a duel against the rules


Isa Genzken, Basic Research, 1989

* Nice Breeze are playing our first show at CD Cellar in Arlington, VA (2607 Wilson Blvd.) Saturday August 3 2013 with Harness Flux and Kitchen Noise. 7pm

* This essay If Our Goal is Simply to Preserve Our Current Reality Why Pursue It is worth a read. It concludes:

At the end of the Chronicle of Higher Education article Thrun is quoted saying:

"I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill … and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland."

The clock is ticking.

The arts and culture sector in the US needs to be reformed.

Just because the arts have been an elitist form of entertainment as long as most of us can remember is no excuse for that to continue to be our story in the future.

Just because we have wrongly and self-servingly bought into and sold to others the idea that to be ‘talented’ you had to be a ‘professional’ and to make ‘art’ you had to be a ‘nonprofit’ doesn’t mean we need to continue to make the same mistake.

We got it wrong the first time.

If our goal for the next century is to hold onto our marginalized position and maintain our minuscule reach—rather than being part of the cultural zeitgeist, actively addressing the social inequities in our country, and reaching exponentially greater numbers of people— then our goal is not only too small, I would suggest that it may not merit the vast amounts of time, money, or enthusiasm we would require from talented staffers and artists, governments, foundations, corporations, and private individuals to achieve it.

Let’s be Finland. Let’s pursue Wonderland.

* Check out the book cover archive.

* "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- bertrand russell