“For more than two centuries [aka, since the French Revolution] the notary has been an essential figure in French life - essential and unique, for there is nothing quite comparable in other cultures. In addition to drawing up deeds, wills, and contracts, notaries are civil servants; they collect taxes and arbitrate disputes. In Eugene Duchamp’s day there were few small-town transactions of any kind that did not involve the notary, whose authority extended to giving advice about financial investments and whose intimate knowledge of local affairs allowed him to earn a good deal more from perfectly legal real estate and other dealings than from fees for services. The notary was often a French town’s leading citizen and not infrequently its mayor as well.”

many have theorized that in the future, companies will compete to give you free video game consoles and smart phones and stuff, knowing that if theirs is the one you end up using everyday, they’ll have you locked into buying apps from them and using their service provider and they also get all yr aggregated usage data to sell to other companies who are also trying to give you things for free so that…

these days it is perhaps those that can find patterns in simultaneous media streams the fastest that are in this position. (william gibson etc. unto death)

Marcel Duchamp, who employed chance in his working method, once said: “Your chance is not the same as my chance.”

He meant that the outcome of probability events is actually an expression of the artist’s subconscious. This idea that you control what you do not control may at first seem surprising.