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"Grow a Brain" [mp3 removed]
Update: Rewrote the intro. Better now, I think. Another update: a couple of minor changes to the percussion. Yet another update: more percussion tweaks and got rid of a pop at the end.
Photos from the exhibition "Philosophical Toys" at Apex Art, New York. From the web page:
The tactile, visual, and philosophical fuse in this exhibition, historically anchored in the "gifts" innovated in the 1830s by Friedrich Fröebel, the inventor of Kindergarten. The historical and contemporary works featured prove that if combined with visual and material pleasure, learning even the most abstract thought can be made into a wondrous experience—literally, child's play. Invited by apexart to invite two art dealers to select artists for the exhibition, Sina Najafi, Editor-in-Chief of Cabinet magazine, has invited the participation of private art dealers / writers Norman Brosterman (author, Inventing Kindergarten) and Christine & Margaret Wertheim (co-founders, The Institute For Figuring, Los Angeles). Mr. Brosterman has chosen works by Friedrich Fröebel, the crystallographer who invented Kindergarten, and a collection of unattributed 19th-century exercise books and parquetry puzzles. The Wertheims have selected works by Jeannine Mosely, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who is one of the world's most renowned paper folders, and Shea Zellweger, a self-taught logician who has devised a visual alphabet for revealing the geometry behind logic operations.All of the above images are the Fröebel, or Fröebel-related, material except the bottom one, which is one of Zellweger's drawings. The patterns in the first and fourth photos are made with thread pulled through holes in the paper. A flaw of the exhibition was too much ahistorical mixing of objects in the display cases. It's very poMo and all, but it would have been nice to know what you were looking at without having to puzzle it out, no pun intended. Brosterman's book on Fröebel got some attention a few years back for, among other things, overreaching in its thesis. The author proclaims Fröebel the true father of Modernism because so many early 20th Century artists and architects were exposed at young ages to the analytical and diagrammatic methods in his kindergarten curricula. No doubt the Kabbalists and makers of tantric symbols also got their interest in abstraction from attending his preschools. This exhibit should be of special interest to the Komputer Kraft Krowd (I include myself there) with its correlations to pixel art, weaving, needlepoint, mosaic tiles, obscure illuminati-like symbols, etc.
Chris List (aka CList) explains the GCD, or graphical compression/distortion unit he is working on for Reaktor 5, Native Instruments' user-designable software synth. Chris was a somewhat impromptu featured guest speaker at the Reaktor clinic at Sam Ash music in midtown, earlier today. He is one of the most prolific and ingenious of NI's "citizen designers"--i.e., people who contribute instruments to the shared user library and participate in Native Instrument forums but don't work for the company. I found out about his talk on the forum. In the photo, he is explaining how Reaktor's new "core" technology is allowing him to design a less CPU-intensive interface involving, among other things, the use of Bézier curves to plot sounds on an x-y grid. The underlying math of the GCD, applied at the core level, is way beyond me but the effect grabs the ear, and List explains it so clearly it almost sounds easy to make.
Also, thanks to Chris and the NI representative for answering my simple question about how to get samples out of Reaktor into other programs. You can save the individual .aiff files from Sampler/Properties/Sample Map Editor (located a few levels down inside the individual instrument) to a folder on your hard drive, or save the entire map and open it in Kontakt 2, which converts Reaktor sample maps. Awesome! I just converted the Limelight samples and can play around with them now outside Reaktor.
I originally posted this on February 16, 2004. It has been deleted and I am moving it here for...reasons bloggers will understand. The comments to the post have been moved to the comments to this post.
Oh--just noticed the art is for the people link, parked over on the left side of this page, has changed its content somewhat.
Shoutbacks--Thanks for the shouts this week from:
Tim at Travelers Diagram, whose lists of books spotted on New York subways I always enjoy, along with the other diverse and entertaining finds on his weblog, such as this story about war criminal Henry Kissinger reading about his own outrageously advanced pot belly in the New York Post. Congratulations on your wedding, Tim!
paul at dataisnature, who talked about my molecule-cum-product-box installations (been thinking about doing more of them). I look forward to perusing his archives and looking at more pieces like this one, speaking of fanciful molecular forms.
Rob Myers for his post on Swarm (but there's no scanning or retouching in that work--just printing and overprinting, and cutting with an X-acto). In this interview he talks about his admiration for the conceptualist outfit Art & Language and his fondness for remixing others' work. Yet the pieces in his San Jose series and the Smileys series are quite joyful and individualistic, not just an illustration of theory--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they're their own semiotic theory in a tangible, pleasurable form. Examples from "San Jose" are below--he thinks it's his "weakest work" because it's not directly influenced by anyone else, but maybe he's just being modest or ironic. I would describe these as biomorphic tags done corporate logo style, and would like to see them in a show with Ryan McGinness and Anton Vidokle, who have also done hard-edged logo-like imagery. They're really nice:
Posting (also email) has been crimped this weekend due to a surprise outage by Comcast Cable Co. They made a long-planned switch to a new, company-owned server and told everyone about it but their customers. 48 hours with no service and they can't send an email? I was so angry I decided to switch to another cable co-- oh, right, there is no other cable company. DSL is also not available on my block, due, I'm assuming, to the rotting phone lines Verizon has been planning to fix for about 10 years. A repairman told me a few months back that in last corporate reshuffle, a several-million-dollar figure allotted for infrastructure repairs, which the company elected to postpone, exactly equaled the executive bonuses that changed hands at the closing--and hey, I believe it!
I expect a big shitstorm of self-congratulatory hype from Comcast once they get their new internet pipes in place. The fact is their content is the worst, lowest common denominator cheese. Whenever I check my webmail, their front page always has the latest celebrity news, pictures of two-headed kittens, and verbatim press releases from the White House saying how well things are going in Iraq.
"Fly by the Pool" [mp3 removed]
Abe Linkoln--full size with sound here.
jimpunk--full size here. Showing my ignorance--who is the guy in the photo?
[Answered--see comments if you too are having a shameful, momentary lapse.]
From the press release for the exhibition RHIZOME ArtBase 101* (Rhizome.org at the New Museum, June 23 - September 10, 2005): "In extreme animalz: the movie: part 1 (2005) by U.S.-based collective Paper Rad and Pittsburgh-based artist Matt Barton, .GIF files of animals, sourced through Google's Image Search, are woven into a digital tapestry that is mirrored by a surrounding cluster of mechanized stuffed animals." [And taxidermied road kill (see detail below). The blurriness in the above photo is from the animals spinning and bobbing on cams and rotors like a carnival booth in the late stages of amphetamine psychosis. The aforementioned .GIFs are on video screens mingled in among the animals. --tm]
More from the press release: "In Dot Matrix Synth (2003), American artist Paul Slocum reprogrammed a dot matrix printer so that it plays electronic notes in accordance with different printing frequencies." [Couldn't hear this over the opening crowd noise, but it was printing away when I walked up. Yes, it makes music and still prints. --tm]
*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://archive.rhizome.org:8080/exhibition/artbase101/
Rare Blog-like Personal Rant
If you're riding your bike on a public path that includes walkers, skaters, etc, and you yell out "On your left" instead of just slowing down and maneuvering around them, you are an asshole. Your barked-out command (and make no mistake, for most people who use it, it is a command--to stay put or move over) is just as likely to startle the walker you're trying to pass into swerving or going the wrong direction.
If you're in-line skating, weaving all over the path, and a biker comes up behind you and silently passes you, swinging well wide of you and you bark out the command "Call a side," you are an asshole. You are especially an asshole if the biker says, "Nah, I don't do that," and you say, "You're going to get someone killed."
If you do say that, you might hear something like "I've been riding this bike twenty years and haven't killed anyone yet. Calling a side is a control thing, I don't like it." That is, assuming the doppler effect doesn't muffle this rant, delivered in a matter of seconds as I am passing you.
Your Photoshopped Culture...on American Movie Classics
(on cable TV, that is--a service you pay for)
Easy Rider, 1969. Ending scene: Redneck in pickup truck points shotgun at motorcycle rider Dennis Hopper. Hopper responds by raising his arm and showing redneck the back of his glove. Redneck shoots Hopper and leaves him bleeding by the side of the road.
"Dad, why did that man shoot that man?"
"Well, Molly, when the movie originally ran, and was seen by millions, and shaped a generation, the biker 'flipped the bone' at the trucker."
"Dad, what's 'flipped the bone'?" [etc]
Visit part one of "Your Photoshopped Culture...on American Movie Classics," to learn how 'ratfucking,' the word that shocked the nation when revealed to be spoken (and practiced) by the President's Men back in the '70s, was changed to "ratting" to protect a tender cable audience.
Due to self-imposed guidelines the location where this drawing was made cannot be divulged. It is not a place where pictures like this are pinned up within eyeballing distance, waiting to be drawn. It is not a place where all the artist has to work with are the programs on the computer, and a mouse. It is not a place with stretches of downtime. The originator of this photo-image is probably related to originator of the famous, cool photo "String of Puppies."
[update: atom added later]
This is a piece from 2003 called Swarm (53 1/2" X 41 1/2"). Just getting around to scanning the transparency [taken by Bill Orcutt!]. A larger version is here. Photos showing how it was made are here. It's all drawn with MSPaintbrush and run through the printer multiple times. A detail (flipped vertically) of one of the overlaid drawings is below:
More on the egregious Kim's video raid. Bloggy sums it up thus:
And by the way, the next time the NYPD complains about their pay, suggest that their corporate bosses should kick in some money. I guess the War on Terror is under control if they have time to raid Kim's Video looking for mix CDs, and bring along a "representative" of the Recording Industry Association of America to help them round up and arrest five people working at Kim's. They kept them all in jail overnight.The Village Voice has a good follow-up report on this scandal. Apparently the cops were picking out employees at random to arrest, an MPAA thug may also have tagged along, and it was so poorly planned the cops didn't even know that Kim's has more than one store.
Miscellaneous:
Speaking of self-referential artmaking, Jack Masters figured out the right thing to do with Artpad, the creative website with the most onerous terms and conditions you will ever involuntarily agree to just by drawing a pitcher.
Michael Bell-Smith has been cast in an amazing one-act ballet, as a slow moving robot that looks like a cross between Big Bird and a toothbrush.
Travis Hallenbeck (and a bunch of other people on delicio.us) posted the page of a cassette dj with exquisite gear made of particle board.
Paul Slocum has updated his Loopcart ROM, a tracker program for the Atari 2600. Click to load an .mp3 example here. I like the way it starts out videogamy and gets more syncopated and weird.
Spraycan (MSPaintbrush drawing)
"Hello Down There" [mp3 removed]. Short atmospheric percussion piece with burbly but slightly ominous synthesizer. Not techno.
...but the same instrumentation. I've been picking up more software synths and samplers and am especially fascinated by drumkits--collections of samples but also live synthesis. This is where my lo-fi religion with regard to software breaks down. I really don't care about the creative potential of Photoshop, I mainly use it to resize things and tweak photos. In the visual realm I'm perfectly happy to try to do complicated things with older, simpler programs. But with music, I'm just blown away with how the tools have evolved. I think maybe my aspiration is to try to do simple (or minimal) things with these CPU-hogs, to just isolate the textures and groove on them.
...it kind of lost steam toward the end so added a few more sounds.
"Perhaps it is an American trait to respond with swift and overwhelming force when dealing with any perceived threat, but it would benefit us all if we attempt to understand those who 'threatened' us, encourage them to further explain their opinions and engage them in active, healthy and civil discussion. Shock & Awe clearly doesn't work. One of the beautiful things about this discussion group is the rigorous critical discourse generated by the diversity of its participants. If the guests choose to respond by dropping out or engaging in pissing contests or calling participants 'cunts'...well, there's always next month. It would be terrible if people felt unable to express sincere opinions here, for fear of offending or whatever. Artists censor themselves too often anyway, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all." (text from a recent listserv discussion added because I needed some filler to separate the graphics in this and the previous post)
[update - and no, I did not write this, I was on the, um, receiving end]
Win $1000 for your webpage! Contest rules are here. Contestants submit the URL of their personal website and in September a $1000 prize is awarded for the best. The site can be a fixed page or a blog, and must be in either text or Flash (what does that leave out?). The jury consists of Emma Davidson, Olia Lialina, Kerstin von Locquenghien, Mouchette, and Vika. Olia wrote that great article about the early vernacular web I discussed a while back, and Emma dj'd at the Bent Festival I still plan to post pictures from. "The site, time and the form of the award ceremony are open and will depend on the location of the winner and the political situation this summer." Some examples of the kinds of submissions that are coming in are here (that's the 1000$ contest page for 2005, which you go to if you skip the amusing Alpine intro).
"Waiting for Stevie to get ready, I ponder the question, what would life be like without music and comedy? Or without Nicks and Henley???"
Recommended: Saving's live blogging of a recent Don Henley/Stevie Nicks show. I tried excerpting more from it but couldn't do it justice, you really need to read the whole thing. Good reporting, with the tone constantly shifting from funny to reverent to thoughtful to smartass. OK, one more excerpt: "Holy shit girls are totally screaming! They love Don Henley so much!"
A post here a few weeks ago mentioned Justin Samson (at John Connelly Presents through Saturday June 18) and went off about hippies in the art world. This was rather ignoring the sci fi/surrealist element, which tips the work more into the culture surfing category from the "makin it real" category, although there is still all that sewing, and those God's Eyes. Images from the show:
The Sturtevant show closing Jun 18 (Sat)--Perry Rubenstein, 23rd St, north side, near 10th ave--is unbelievable. Note-perfect recreations of signature Duchamp works (stool wheel, urinal, bottle rack, snow shovel and many less famous ones), coal sacks on ceiling, films of rotoreliefs projected on wall--all very low, dark lighting, a slightly musty antique feel--exactly what a show of historical Duchamp works would look like, although scholar-devotees like Arturo Schwarz could probably find discrepancies and anachronisms. These recreations were made by Sturtevant over the period from the late '60s to the early '90s. Amazing! Did NOT deserve the sneering review from Ken Johnson in the Times ("they love her in Europe"). Sturtevant stayed on the straight appropriation track where Sherrie Levine went astray with exquisite craftsmanship for the collector tribe and hoky bombast (gold plated urinals, etc).
Connections among Vernor Vinge's sf novel A Deepness in the Sky, the film Jean de Florette, and Joe Sacco's graphic novel/documentary Safe Area Gorazde, for anyone else who was wondering: In Deepness the podmaster (bad guy) has a limited amount of water, organic chemicals, and human laborers in his space hideout, so he must fastidiously conserve all these elements as he waits out several decades for the planetbound alien culture to mature and become ripe for exploitation. In Florette the Depardieu character fights like a Trojan to save a business that is carefully and scientifically worked out but dying for lack of water. In Gorazde, the Bosnian Muslims hoard food and equipment, rotate military duty, and rig generators on rafts in the river so they can have electricity, all for a semblance of a decent life in a city under siege. The common thread is players improvising like mad in the face of scarce resources and a ticking clock. That's more of a plot arc than a theme in the sense of "innovation is good and ennobles mankind." If the podmaster had been successful a race would have been enslaved, and in the other two examples people "did what they felt they had to do" in the face of conscious or institutional villainy, so not sure if there are any uplifiting conclusions of the Heritage Foundation persuasion to be reached. Not that anyone said that.
review (half-assed attempt to come to terms with this movie) here.
Open letter to Joe (the weblog vacuums all content):
Dear Joe,*see also Joe Sacco's graphic novel/documentary Safe Area Gorazde
I missed the vertexList opening--were you here?
Finished the 2nd Vernor Vinge book [A Deepness in the Sky]. I liked it better I think [than A Fire Upon the Deep]. It seemed more grounded in realistic physics, as opposed to zipping hither and thither through some new kind of spacetime.
Vinge's very influenced by Larry Niven (and Niven & Pournelle). Niven's (early) Known Space books and N&P's Mote in God's Eye are recommended if you haven't read them.
I like "innovation in the face of scarce resources" stories (Jean de Florette is one of my favorite movies*). In this one, the grinding wait followed by very rapid action--that's probably how it would be in space.
Another thing I really liked was that the fairy story quality of the stuff that happened among the aliens was explained as something filtered through the translator's memories and attempts to find correlations for human readers/hearers. That meta level was missing from the first book.
Best, Tom
You may have read about the bust at Kim's video recently. Apparently our old friend RIAA, the music copyright KGB, was behind the raid, because Kim's was selling....(prepare to be shocked and horrified to the depths of your soul)...mixtapes! (or CDs, whatever). From the MTV story:
The raid is just the latest offensive [excellent word choice] in the RIAA's battle against the growing trend of pirated music sales through small, established businesses. While traditional physical goods or "commercial" piracy previously required large and expensive facilities to produce massive numbers of illegal tapes and CDs, some retailers now possess the potential to yield lucrative returns with only a minimal investment of space and capital, Buckles said.Teenagers, grandmothers, corner video stores... The bravery and ultimate value to society of this organization can not be overstated. And to New York's finest, who helped them shake down, I mean deter, a local business: way to fight crime!
According to the RIAA's Web site, because several retailers — including the owners of convenience stores, liquor stores or corner markets — are attempting "to make a quick buck by reselling illegal CDs, or, in some cases, manufacturing counterfeit CDs themselves," [and because, frankly, they're easy to catch and intimidate] the RIAA has adopted an "aggressive 'zero tolerance' approach to retailers engaged in this activity."
A similar raid late last month in the Albany, Schenectady and Troy areas of Upstate New York resulted in 11 arrests, the seizure of 3,400 illicit CD-Rs and more than $54,000.
"Dude, You Rule" [mp3 removed]. Fortunately I have RIAA protecting me so you will never hear this on a mixtape. Oh, I don't, because I'm too "small"? Well, God bless them anyway for their efforts to stamp out creativity, I mean "piracy."
The New York Times slips the Downing Street Memo into its back pages in the form of a Frank Rich column. I don't really like him--his way of massaging the week's news into a single jocular story line is clever but ultimately toothless. If the column had any meaning, the Times would fire Judith Miller, the reporter who printed the WMD lies from the Iraqi exiles, fire the editors who approved her stories, and go front-page aggressive with Downing Street and other hard evidence that Bush committed impeachable offenses. I mean, the President's not popular any more, his numbers are the 40s, so what's to lose? Anyway, here's an excerpt from Rich's "tough" column. Nice to read, but big whoop.
The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including the Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar WMD hype [uh, how about "spoonfeeding its prewar hype to the public"?], new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by the London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.Yeah, well, you ought to know. Actually Rich isn't a lapdog, more like a court jester. It should also be said that the MSB (mainstream bloggers like Atrios, Gilliard, and the ever-boring Kevin Drum) also passed on giving the Downing Street Memo big play. I think it's different from the Clarke revelations, et al, because no one has a bone to pick or a book to sell. It simply states the facts from that time period.
This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished.
wormy animation - pencil test 2. still a few kinks to work out, but getting there. yes, it looks fuzzy in safari enlarged like this--the designers of that product never anticipated that a sharply pixelated look might be considered good.
Chris Ashley, GIF of excellent HTML piece removed from website in January 2005
Frank Q. Jones, Drawers, .GIF image
Frank Q. Jones, Mic, .GIF image
Paper Rad, image from Foxy Production online exhibition announcement last year.
Frank Q. Jones, Lifescan, GIF image. According to this web page, a show of this and other striking images listed on the page is being held this month at Woods Memorial Library, Barre, MA. No idea how they are presented--printed and hanging on the wall, on a computer screen, or what. Guess I need to email and find out. (via Cory A.) (Update:They're printed out.)
The Best Movies I've Seen This Year
Napoleon Dynamite (just catching up to this on DVD). In this movie set in what looks like a remote exurb of Denver, everyone seems to have a mild case of autism. Especially the eponymous teenaged hero, who has a weird and thoroughly convincing way of turning his head to one side and saying "Gosh!" (or "Uggh!", or "Idiot!") whenever something happens he doesn't like. His brother Kip, a bespectacled, epicine man in his 30s who sits on the couch a lot, is similarly disengaged from reality--or at least you think so until his chatroom "soul mate," a fantasy femme from the depths of R. Crumb's libido, shows up. Napoleon's best friend Pedro also seems among the walking dead, yet manages to spout good advice about girls fairly regularly. This movie is the good twin of Welcome to the Dollhouse. Just as dark, but with a veneer of wholesomeness that is not ironic, but rather more like the zombie-like state of denial most of us live in. The essential depravity of small town America ca. 2004 appears in occasional lecherous glances by authority figures towards the high school females, a brief but frightening scene inside a factory farm (chickens), and the simple tragedy of characters living in the past or going nowhere. But everything is kept light and funny. One has to fill in the blanks of the backward-looking, wised-up urbanity making the movie work.
(Bonus soundbites: Hear Napoleon say "Do the chickens have large talons?" and other lines here.)
The Layer Cake (still in theaters). Violent movie in the scruffy cockney gangster genre along with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, with a generous helping of Sexy Beast providing a slightly wistful, thoughtful mood. Many funny/macabre moments, and Michael Gambon never better as an aging criminal who's reached the upper echelons of respectable society but still talks like a stevedore when it suits him. He is ultra-cool. I liked the contrast between the lowlife, pill-pushing arena--especially disturbing was the bloodless efficiency of the ecstasy factory, with its Serbian assassin-for-hire a phone call away--and the "legitimate" capitalist world of exclusive country clubs, high rise developments, and book-filled libraries. These are not Tony Montanas flaunting their new wealth with 80s disco tackiness and a chained tiger by the pool, but smoothies who know how to eat, drink and decorate.
Henry Warwick emails the empyre list today, an online discussion forum where I am an invited but AWOL panelist, with some questions for the panelists, the majority of whom are also AWOL. I guess I could be accused of raiding empyre for content, but this is all public record--read on and see what you think. He writes:
I would like to see some greater sense of critical analysis in theI think I can handle this query, with reference to my work-in-progress "Wormy Animation":
discussion here regarding what is the artistic use of the blog vs.
"other" uses (online diaries, etc.) Also, a discussion of the
(un)conscious underpinnings of this art (dependence on fossil fuels,
resource extraction, geography as a class "formant", integration of
technology as a social object, etc.) and how these issues are expressed
or repressed in the works of the artists presented.
1. It's diaristic in that it's a pencil test of a longer work and I'm uploading frames as I make them. The GIF is art, though, not a diary. The finished GIF will be the finished art but by posting the pencil test I'm making it available for discussion as art (I don't expect a lot of discussion, to be honest, especially from the empyre-rs, who were speechless on 3/4 of the panelists' art).
2. The supposed excessive burning of fossil fuels vis a vis Internet use was a petroleum industry canard from the late '90s. In any case, I feel whatever I burn blogging is far, far outweighed by not driving a car.
3. "Wormy Animation" has much to say, I feel, on the subject of geography as a class "formant." (My best high school term paper lead sentence.) Growing up in Midland, Texas, having a college education, and living in NY for many years I am far more prone to make noodly art that displays, nay, revels in a bourgeois lack of concern for the oppressed. At the same time, the amorphous blobs, supposedly sublime objects beyond the reach of history, intertwine fecally as if yearning for the primal mud of the real, the invigorated soil of the peasant classes, which in Midland isn't so vigorous (it's in the desert) and depends heavily on pumping the aquifer dry. The underground water has much naturally occurring fluoride which is benign, healthy even, but has the unfortunate side effect of staining the locals' teeth yellow (including mine, a little bit--dentists have been trying to sell me on "bonding").
4. Integration of technology as a social object. Yeah.
5. "How these issues are expressed or repressed in the works of the artists presented." Well, as the artist I think I am very qualified to talk about what I am repressing in my work. See answers 2 and 3.
pencil test
Downing Street Memo... Downing Street Memo... Downing Street Memo...
The Downing Street Memo Story Won't DieThat's grounds for impeachment right there. Please link to this story, pass it around. The US press tried to bury it for Bush--they love him because he gives them scoops, and cute nicknames, and stuff.
By Jefferson Morley, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer, Tuesday, June 7, 2005; 9:18 AM
More than a month after its publication, the so-called Downing Street Memo remains among the top 10 most viewed articles on The Times of London site.
It's not hard to see why this remarkable document, published in The Times on May 1 (and reported in this column on May 3), continues to attract reader interest around the world, especially with British Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting Washington Tuesday.
The July 2002 memo, labeled "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY," reports the views of "C," code name for Richard Dearlove, the chief of British intelligence. Dearlove had just returned from a visit with Bush administration officials eight months before the war in Iraq began.
"Military action was now seen as inevitable," Dearlove told Blair and his senior defense policy advisers. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
A separate secret briefing paper for the meeting said Britain and the United States had to "create" conditions to justify a war.
Digby has a good post on the Supreme Court's terrible ruling today on medical marijuana:
Rehnquist, Thomas and O'Connor dissented [from the majority's holding that Federal anti-pot laws trump state laws] on the basis of states' rights, which is also consistent with their position. Kennedy swung with the majority --- he has no discernible position. The "surprise" is that Little Nino [Scalia], who is proving himself to be more and more of a straight-up whore every day, voted with Ginsberg and Stevens and the rest. Not because he agrees with the legal doctrine involved --- nothing in his judicial history would suggest that --- but because he just doesn't want people smoking pot. Or perhaps he just thinks that federal power is ducky when it's in the hands of his friends. Either way, he's intellectually bankrupt.
Pretty funny: blogger JC Christian, Patriot (ironic name) sent a sincere sounding email to a right wing group he joined called the Protest Warriors, recommending that instead of doing what they usually do--organize counter-protests against war dissenters--they should all enlist and serve in Iraq. Two people responded, a member whose gilrfriend is stationed in Kosovo and the "commander" of the Protest Warriors' Inland Empire (Spokane WA) Chapter, who begged off that he had done his service in peacetime. Fairly soon thereafter JC was outed as a "liberal troll" and deleted from the PW membership list. It's tough to be pro-War these days with more and more people suggesting that if you believe in it so much you ought to go do some actual fighting.
Currently reading a short story collection called The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002); evidently it's part of a The Ultimate... series, hence the horrible name. It has fallen to the hapless Pat Cadigan ("Queen of Cyberpunk") to assemble this material and despite a bland introduction in which she does nothing to explain the history of the movement or compare her choices, the stories are pretty good (so far--I'm about halfway through).
Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" is a natural prototype, using the now-familiar Hollywood trope of a serial killer moving from city to city (probably a lot more shocking in '54), the twist(s) being that the killer(s) are an android and his human master who have become so psychically entwined that the reader is never entirely sure who's doing the butchering. Whenever the artificial human starts to go funny he sings a tune from the turn of the last century ("Oh it's no feat to beat the heat. All reet! All reet! So jeet your seat/Be fleet be fleet/Cool and discreet/Honey...") Very creepy, but definitely all reet.
Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" initially surprises as a choice with its space opera setting, but damned if more foundations aren't being laid: in order for ships to traverse the stars, humans merge minds to combat murderous dragons lurking in the depths of planoformed spacetime, using an electronic device called a pin-set. The story hook is that the pinlighters also partner telepathically with domestic cats, who see the dragons as rats and are much more effective than humans alone at annihilating them back. I like this tale but blanch that it's basically an extended love letter from a writer to his kitty, and wish Cadigan had included Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," one of the greatest cyborg stories ever written, instead.
Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" served as the bare bones of the Gropenfuhrer vehicle Total Recall, and I mean bare bones. Typical Hollywood move, Douglas Quaid was originally Quail--so much less manly except the character is supposed to be a dweeb. James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is unreadable, marred by the breezily hip, drunk-on-the-elixir-that-was-the-60s style so prevalent in New Wave sf around '72-'73 (see also Norman Spinrad, John Brunner, RA Lafferty). Having not read Tiptree I wanted to like the story since we now know "he" is a woman, Alice Sheldon, and many were pissed off back in the day by her "deception," which is cool, but had to skip this after a page or two. By pure contrast, Wm Gibson's "Burning Chrome" hasn't aged a day since '82 and is lit'rary but much more sparingly written. Also looking forward to re-reading his "Dogfight," written with Michael Swanwick, another story about cybercowboys and the women they neglect...
tom moody - hiphop guitar (dj 8kbps remix) - from linkoln at SCREENFULL: [260 kb(!) .mp3]
the original tune: [4.7 mb .mp3]
thanks to linkoln for this--the lower resolution gives the song a much-needed pirate radio feel. i like what the loss of bits does to the different sound levels--the kick drum is boomier, the guitar seems about 30 feet back from the microphone, and the percussion after the first chorus really becomes an instrumental break, which is how i envisioned it but didn't realize as well in the original. [ /lower case]
Highly recommended: MEQ AND THE URS, four songs performed entirely on the Sidstation synthesizer, using its unique wavetable features to write sequences (as opposed to overdubbing separately played parts, which is the lazy way out around here). The Sidstation is modern hardware incorporating the much-geek-fetishized SID (sound-producing) chip from '80s Commodore computers, and while this page has complained repeatedly about a lack of substantive musical content in the so-called "gameboy scene" hyped by Malcolm McLaren as the new whatever, I'm pleased to report that the MEQ songs are dark, soulful, trancy little numbers with clever compositional hooks and surprising transpositions, working within the cheesy video game limitations of the chip while reveling in its sensuous sawtooth sonorities. I finally got the .sid-song player working on my Sidstation so have been listening to some of the '80s game stuff but prefer what MEQ is doing, which is exploiting the capabilities of a smart present-day instrument built around a success story of the early era of home computing. The point is not to be stuck forever in the '80s but to pursue hybrids between the overlooked or still perfectly good old and the ingeniously programmed and collectively vetted new. "A Tale About Reactivation" and "Union Bob" especially shine.
More on this thread. Jotsif explains it's two Sidstations (using wavetables) playing side by side in real time, sequenced from the Monomachine (another synth made by Elektron, the same Swedish company that created the Sid).
Next time someone says you don't support the troops because you're opposed to Bush's handling of Iraq, the reply is that Bushvoters don't support them either. Fundamentalist preachers aren't urging their congregations to enlist in the personnel-starved Army, Rush the Hillbilly Heroin Addict isn't exhorting his dittohead radio listeners to serve in Iraq, and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders (right wing bloggers) aren't doffing their khakis and polo shirts and quitting their jobs in the tech industries to help Uncle Sam. They all love to bay for war but don't think their kind should have to pay the ultimate price. The official word from Bush to America is still shop for the war effort. I'm sick of these people and frankly don't think anyone should listen to them. (excellent graphic from PST; rant partly recycled Gilliard and Kos)
"Hiphop Guitar (Final Version)" [4.7 MB .mp3]
"Hiphop Guitar (Rhythm Only)" [mp3 removed]
This is more of that acid-y guitar used in my guitar solo video--I was able to save the settings and fool around with it more. The rhythm-only track is more soothing.
Update: Just want to say I'm taking this concept of home computers being the "new garage" (as some magazine called it) very seriously.
My cubicle yesterday, the last day of the ART@><*WORK show (click image for slightly enlarged view). I like the contrast between my "dude holdin' it all in" style and Erika Somogyi & Evan Greenfield's rather more expanded field behind. Below: detail of my workspace. Bear in mind it was a performance piece--this is just scenery for me sitting there for 44 hours being the office dork I am in my other life. Thanks to those who came out to witness this--your interest and support is greatly appreciated!
A few more installation shots from the ART@><*WORK (cubicle) show, in addition to my earlier ones and the ones Chris Ashley took. Top to bottom: Tony Luib's tribute to latex office supplies, including an abundance of what I call thumb condoms (used for flipping pages); an assortment of Michelle Rosenberg's "office supplies converted to bellows" (squeeze them and weird game calls inside squawk and chirp); Irene Moon's entomology thesis photos (excuse my lame reflection in the shot).
And lastly, a view out the window of 520 8th Avenue, Suite 1602.
Did these two drawings my last day of work, which was today. More documentation photos of the cubicle and surroundings are coming. Like, wow.