"Is there a way to make music that includes... cars honking, trains going past, buses grinding gears, people shouting in the streets?"

"We’d been reading ‘Silence,’ by John Cage, and that was the last key really. Chairs scraping can now be the music; what do we want to include? No drummer, because music is so quickly fixed and made traditional and acceptable by the four-four-drum pan of the rock music. Then why do you need to know how to play? What is an instrument? Something that makes a noise, amplified or not. We don’t need to know how to play. What’s around? What can we use, in the spirit of a Duchamp readymade?... [Cossi Fan Tutti] didn’t like electric guitar, because it was too heavy, so we got an electric saw and sawed off the bits we didn’t like. I didn’t really like the trying to learn where to put my fingers, and it wasn’t necessary for our purposes. Another member, Sleazy, who was Peter Christopherson, was really into William Burroughs, so he said, 'I’d really like to involve cutups, with a tape recorder.' He altered walkman tape recorders so when you played a cassette you could hear both sides at the same time..... Chris built synthesizers. Nobody was using them in England. We said, 'That’s great—it’s very anti-rock.'... Industrial music for industrial people.... And little did we know it would become a global phenomena—from that tiny space and four people who couldn’t play.... We had a big digital clock onstage, and we played only an hour; we were clocking on and off.... We had wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people."

From "Industrial Music for Industrial People: The Singular Legacy of Genesis P-Orridge" (in The New Yorker)(and here's where we talked about the NYT obituary for P-Orridge).

"These weeks of confinement can be seen also, it seems to me, as weeks of a national retreat, a chance to reset and rethink our lives, to ponder their fragility."

"I learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus. We will all die one day, and we will almost all get sick at some point in our lives; none of this makes sense on its own (especially the dying part). The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what you can’t."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "How to Survive a Plague" (New York Magazine).

"David Lat is in critical condition and has been has been put on a ventilator at NYU Langone Hospital in Manhattan, where his fight with the coronavirus has taken a turn for the worse..."

"... according to his husband, Zachary Baron Shemtob.... Asked if the doctors had talked about or know Lat’s prognosis, Shemtob responded, 'It’s a bit much for me right now.... I just want to folks to know that he is so strong; he is hanging in there, and we are praying he’ll recover.... Any thoughts or prayers people have are much appreciated... Please be vigilant and careful as possible....It’s really important to get that message'...."

Law.com reports.

Very sad!