+++ Rating schema +++

½ Avoid at all costs.
* Irredeemable.
*½ Advil needed.
** Life's too short as it is.
**½ Nobody wants to be a C student.
*** Recommended -- if you like the artist.
***½ Solid release.
**** A year-end favorite.
****½ Redoubtable.
***** Inestimable.


Vision without execution is hallucination. - Thomas Edison

[A]ll this hand-wringing about elitism and shutting down avenues for hard-working MS Painters to get their laptop grindcore out is insulting to most users' intelligence. - SilentMike

isn't there a rule that once a jazz musician has been compared to a nazi war criminal, the thread is over? - rachelc

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking. - John Maynard Keynes

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. - Joseph Joubert

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. - Christopher Morley

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely. - Lorraine Hansberry

Art is science made clear. - Jean Cocteau

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. - Herbert Alexander Simon

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? - T. S. Eliot

Silence is nearly impossible today; it's something precious that is very difficult to find anywhere. [...] Can you imagine what the silence must have been like in the Middle Ages? Leaving a town or city, within a few steps you could find silence, or natural sounds, which are marvelous: songs of birds, of cicadas, or the murmur of the rain. We have lost this in our time. There is an infernal instrument that really could have been invented by the devil or by an enemy of mankind: the electric guitar. - Luis Bunuel

Ambiguity is a part of my nature because it breaks with immutable preconceived ideas. Where is Truth? Truth is a myth. [...] Besides, I am working in cinema, which is a machine that manufactures miracles. - Luis Bunuel

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. -Joyce Carol Oates

"Most people in their daily lives are pretty reasonable. A lot of people that end up being in bands give themselves license to act like assholes because they're involved in music. If they didn't see the music world as separate from the real world, most people would continue to behave honorably in their interactions with the music scene. [...] There's a perversion of normal ethical standards, indulged and encouraged by a music industry that feels more important the more it is removed from regular life." -Steve Albini, somewhat ironically.