Why is @newyorker.com denying me a pithy @susanorlean.bsky.social's original subheadline offering AI slop instead? Also, the article was published on September 27, 1999 not September 20. AI-slopped date perhaps?

Behold the countercultural origins of dating apps: "Gay power has now made available an IBM 360 computer dating service specially designed for gay people for the exclusive use of the homosexual community"/"The first COMPUDATE PARTY. Computer-type date matching, a happening, music, dancing" EVO, 1968

Cool! Photo on T-shirt is from 1969 and the friend, engineer Ed "Tex" Krusheski, was around in the late 1960s-early 1970s. FMU was at a clapboard Old Yellow house until 1972 then moved to the brick Froeburg Hall, so the T-shirt was probably from 1973-74. Possibly the first FMU T-shirt ever!

Under state socialism, estrada, aka pop music, was a state-sanctioned & state-managed phenomenon. Therefore, capitalism is not a necessary precondition for pop music to exist, whatever Western-centric accounts may claim.

Journal of Sonic Studies CFP on sound and radical organizing. www.researchcatalogue.net/view/558606/...

I sincerely hope people will pay attention to @carlzoilus.bsky.social's call for pop politics to incorporate support for "more-underground, noncommercial culture" and criticism of big tech.

As Gabriel Kahane pointed out recently, musicians and genres move across the lowbrow/highbrow, commercial/not-for-profit divide. Any reasonable critic or scholar would agree. And yet, analytically, poptimism erects a border wall of disdain between the two spheres.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The Fugs & the Hamilton Face Band performing at the @wfmu.bsky.social benefit at Café Au Go Go in November 1968. Photographer Danny Cornyetz worked for WBAI at the time. Haven't seen these until now.

RIP Jonathan Sterne, a great intellectual, collaborator, and friend. He enjoyed life and loved writing books. He will be missed by so many.