general

"And Rei will pilot Unit 01."
"Oh God, not again."

We've had a hacker 23rd Psalm ("lead us not to FORTRAN but deliver us from COBOL," etc) and a L33tspeak 23rd Psalm ("he l3ad3th me b3side the st1ll w4ters & chill3th my s0ul," etc).
Now we have The Social Media Psalm, written in plain English but with all the overlaps, false starts, inconsistencies, and communication gaps we have come to know and love in our online networking tools.
(Co-written on dump.fm with Duncan Alexander and posted to his blog.)

[post removed - I turned a non-meme into a weak meme and am feeling bad for helping]

Update: or rather, turned a forced meme into a net art forced meme.

Update 2: or rather, turned a net art forced meme into a slightly more widely circulated net art forced meme.

Interesting post on Slate about the Lennon McCartney songwriting partnership (hat tip MM). This anecdote begins the piece (no source is given):

John and Paul did balance and complement each other magnificently, and we can pile example on example. When they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There," Paul offered this opening verse:

She was just seventeen
Never been a beauty queen

"You're joking about that line," John shot back, "aren't you?" He offered this revision:

She was just seventeen
You know what I mean

There it is: Innocence meets sin—an inviting, simple image takes a lusty, poetic leap.

Also, snotty meets friendly. The article has another story about Lennon breaking a washboard over the head of a band member (pre-Beatles) who announced he wanted to leave the group. The Slate piece avoids the sadomasochistic aspects of the MacLen equation--it's more about "friendly competition."

Not that John did anything that violent to Paul (that we know of), but the question remains: "Is improving your art worth having a washboard broken over your head?"

After a lengthy discussion of the limits of language in describing a classic of dark ambient music on the Disquiet blog, was somewhat humbled by this statement, in an essay comparing people who want to believe 20th Century music is a conspiracy to people who want to believe the moon landings were faked:

This is not to say that you're crazy if you find atonal modernism incomprehensible. (Unless you also believe that the moon landing was a hoax: then you are crazy.) But the persistence of the argument that it ought to be comprehensible is coming from the same place. It's why that whole twelve-tone music as Nazi espionage code hoax from a while back was so spot-on funny. It's why the reaction against the new—which, in the Romantic era, most often was couched in terms of compositional incompetence—is now more likely to introduce an emperor's-new-clothes aspect. It's why criticism of the complex and the complicated is so often laced with accusations of deliberate obfuscation: if it can't be completely grasped, it must be a con.

It is a con. But only because all music is a con. Music is constantly conning us into mind-bogglingly vivid emotional reactions even though it's communicating practically nothing at all, qualifying as a language-game only on terms so rudimentary as to be a caricature. It presents us with timbres and pitches and rhythms that we turn around and project whole worlds onto, worlds so intricate that we can't even fully map them. It's all impossible to grasp—and it's all true, as true as you want or need it to be. The difference between music and the historical, contingent world it exists in is this: if music seems to be trying to sell you a bridge to the moon, then somewhere, there's a bridge to the moon to be had. You might not want to bother looking for it. That doesn't mean the rest of us can't.

Humbled because the author makes it seem so obvious. Perhaps we could say that all music defeats language but some defeats it more than other. Hat tip avianism - and be sure to check out the link in the quoted passage to the Schoenberg-as-Nazi-code satire - really well done dry humor relevant to the whole frustrating cats discussion. (Frustrating because arguments have to keep being reasserted - like whack-a-mole with 12-tone cats.)