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YouTube: Buddy Rich vs Jerry Lewis drum battle. [dead]
Ruckzuck The Organization. [dead]
Ruckzuck Kraftwerk.
Van Der Graaf Generator performing "Whatever Would Robert Have Said?" from The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other, 1970. The serious prog nerd preferred this group to its better known labelmate (Genesis). [dead]
Tony Williams Lifetime 1971. Almost illegible, but since Lifetime's Ego is some of my favorite music, and this is that band, I watched this like they watch Mars data at the JPL. [dead]
John McLaughlin plays "Cherokee" with the Tonight Show band in the '60s. Bit of a contrast to the last thing of his I posted. Didn't realize he was a guitar god for 2 generations. [dead]
Rhizome.org Net Art News on The GIF Show*:
The GIF Show, an exhibition opening May 3rd, at San Francisco’s Rx Gallery, takes the pulse of what some net surfers call ‘GIF Luv,’ a recent frenzy of file-sharing and creative muscle-flexing associated with GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format files). Curated by Marisa Olson in a West Coast Rhizome collaboration with Rx, the show presents GIFs and GIF-based videos, prints, readymades, and sculptures by a range of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). GIFs have a rich cultural life on the internet and each bears specific stylistic markers. From Myspace graphics to advertising images to porn banners, and beyond, GIFs overcome resolution and bandwidth challenges in their pervasive population of the net. Animated GIFs, in particular, have evolved from a largely cinematic, cell-based form of art practice, and have more recently been incorporated in music videos and employed as stimulating narrative devices on blogs. From the flashy to the minimal, the sonic to the silent, the artists in The GIF Show demonstrate the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files. The opening is sure to be just as lively, with music by Eats Tapes and visuals by Nate Boyce. Spread the luv! - Rhizome.orgAnd on the subject of GIFs, here's another plug for my solo show opening this Friday:
Tom Moody, Room Sized Animated GIFs*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/apr/29/gifs-galore-and-more/
artMovingProjects
Williamsburg
166 North 12th Street
917-301-6680
May 5 - June 25, 2006
Opening: Friday, May 5, 7:00PM - 9:00PM
Music Performance/Lecture: May 19th, 8PM
Note: gallery closed June 8-11
Animated GIFs, the tiny, blinking, often annoying image files that draw your eye to particular parts of a Web page, have been around since the Net's early days. There is a sizeable do-it-yourself culture built up around them, which now includes a second generation of Web and gallery based art using them ironically and/or proactively.
For the past several years, Moody has been drawing GIFs in a simple paint program and posting them on his blog. The gallery will project two of these pulsing, but defiantly lo-fi animations huge on opposing walls of the space. Others will be displayed on monitors scattered on the floor.
The gallery will also feature a lecture/performance by Moody where he will present some of his music. These catchy compositions, made with a combination of old computers such as the Macintosh SE as well as more current soft synths and samplers, have a punchy concision similar to his GIFs. The styles range from videogame Electro to a string quartet piece written for a softsampler. --from ArtCal
"Ninja Elements" [16 MB .mp4]
Audio only: [mp3 removed]
This is my AMV. The idea was to remove all the people (except for the long shot at the end) and have the abstract, amorphous bits be the characters. The title refers to the "four elements" (with smoke subbing for fire) but also "Premiere Elements," "Photoshop Elements," etc, where supposedly all the non-essential stuff is removed. (Although no Adobe products were used.) The .mp4 file is just a thumbnail--it has a bit more pixelation than I'd like but I really don't want to post a bigger file, or an .avi. I plan to show the full-blown video at my music lecture event thing on May 19 (as opposed to my show proper, opening May 5, which will only feature silent GIF videos). The song is my own tune, looking back again to the rave era.
That United Flight 93 movie is upon us and getting hyped. This is the preReview (which means I haven't seen it): "Don't Go!"
Some people believe that plane was shot out of the sky by a (belated) US missile.
The extreme fringe thinks the passengers were flown to the Cleveland airport and shot.
Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer's wife says his words on the plane "Let's Roll" are what he always said to the kids when he was ready to drive them to soccer practice or whatever.
"Let's Roll" became a patriotic song in the "Let's Get Some Payback--Any Muslim Country Will Do" phase of our nation's history.
Then the cockpit recordings came out and--whoops, looks like Mrs. Beamer was wrong and "rolling" possibly referred to a bunch of passengers rolling a dinner cart down the aisle in a last-ditch assault on the hijackers.
It's great if there was heroism--we'd all like to believe people rose to the occasion in this doomed scenario and that we'd do the same if we were there. Certainly the hijacking was villainy. But the cockpit utterances are spotty at best--a lot of the movie's narrative is speculation.
Are you ready for a work of semi-fiction that passes itself as fact when the bigger questions of 9/11 haven't been answered?
Questions like, were our leaders, or elements within the government, complicit in this thing on any level? Criminally negligent? We may never know, because the commissions were whitewashes and no one in the government got fired.
Is it right that the US has 700 military bases around the world, 17 years after the end of the Cold War? That we continue to prop up bad regimes long after the Cold War excuse has gone away?
Is it understandable that some might hate us for that, however heinous their methods of reprisal?
Are Americans responsible for the actions of their government?
The movie is voyeurism and jingoism without acknowledgement that there's a bigger story and that the film is fiction. The truth is we still don't know what happened that day.
"Ninja Elements" [16 MB .mp4]
Audio only: [.mp3 removed]
Recently added to the Young Turds tribute page: Two Howard S.M. Wuelfing reviews from back in the day, that is, ca. 1979-80. Pinched from :30 under DC. PMRagan says there, about the Turds: "I always thought it was ballsy as hell for them to go on with their Bonzo Dog Band image. In 1979 it was quite uncool to have a beard and long hair...and a button down shirt ..." Wuelfing says "[T]he Turds ain't power pop, art fascists, or nutty punks. They're better-than-smart nouveau greaseballs--intense earthshaking idiot fun and that is not what most straight [as in square --tm] clubs want to deal with, or even the art-dens (d.c. space, f'rinstance). The Turds capture something too dangerous for their taste--the essence of early rockin' rebellion."
From Curbed, a post captioned On Puke and Class War in the Central Village:
"This isn't relevant to anything or even remotely newsworthy, but I thought you'd enjoy these photos of my wealthy neighbor cleaning up the vomit that appeared on his East 11th Street stoop on Friday night at 11 o'clock, courtesy of a normal-looking, non-homeless person. The man had about 10 choices of places to puke in the immediate vicinity, including a tree and the back door of Jack's Bistro, and he chose the front door of a multimillion-dollar townhouse."
"Dance of the Nematodes/Calypsum (John Parker Mix)" [mp3 removed]. John Parker remix of a couple of my Mac SE tune(s). Work in process--Parker says this will change. Some interesting textures and a nice backwards bit I've been humming. Meme for the day: visual artists invade the province of musicians using new tech; work is not a substitute or facsimile but employs different skill sets in addition to the existing ones. It is nonetheless music--personally I'd rather listen to it than what's already known.
related: artists writing their own music hybridized with video.
More YouTube:
Haruomi Hosono, "Xevious BGM" (Video Game Music--disco version). I mentioned Hosono when I first wrote about Cory and BEIGE back in aught-2.
Naruto AMV (String Quartet). Found this looking for video mashup material to go with my string quartet piece. I have to do a public performance of my music in a few weeks and think I'd rather have videos playing than stand there picking my nose while the CD runs. I'm thinking about further cutting up this one, that got me thinking about Rose Hobart, etc...
Read Art Fag City's review of Art School Confidential, the latest Terry Zwigoff/Daniel Clowes offering. Her comparison of stills from the film with a Clowes drawing (above) does not bode well.
We make fun of the art world on a this page, things like the recent out-of-control phenomenon of collectors chasing student tail ("'I bent him over a desk and mentored him till dawn,' says a noted venture capitalist..."), but we're insiders. As AFC points out, Clowes has been out of the game a while, apparently no longer comprehends the difference between Soho and Chelsea, and has dealers offering shows to freshmen in a Brooklyn art school (Pratt?)...filmed in California.
Prereviewing the film (what, I need to see it?)--This might be the latest in a distinguished line of Hollywood movies making artists and the art world look ridiculous. As in, Darryl Hannah as a perfomance artist in Legal Eagles, Demi Moore as a "touch sculptor" in The Juror, Paul Newman's AbEx painting machine painter in What a Way to Go, and of course, Maude Lebowsky. The only film that ever got it close to right was Altman's sublime Vincent and Theo. OK, and Pecker.
Ghost World understood the one art world concept it needed to understand--the Found Object. The film's use of the "Coon's Chicken" poster and surrounding rhetoric was exactly right. But I'm sorry, dealers don't scour the freshman class at Pratt for talent, they just don't.
Not a big fan of Joseph Cornell's boxes--too much about the romance of old stuff scrounged in swap meets, too in love with their own delicacy, too frequently visually inert--but he deserves his place in history as the Father of the Remix. From Senses of Cinema:
Rose Hobart (1936) consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn't feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.Yes! That sequence is amazing, I wish it was in this Quicktime clip from the Walker Art Center. The Cornells of today are lurking on YouTube and/or being busted by the intellectual property police. Too damn bad.
While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of "Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne" from Nestor Amaral's Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.
Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell's hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. (Yawn. --tm) In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.
But the root of Cornell's genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell's version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart's clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.
"Spring Loaded" [2.1 MB .mp3]
This got recalled to the factory, but it's back with a few more notes and a more forgiving structure. It's still pretty goofy. Sorry to Bill, who's excellent comment got wiped when I panicked and yanked the piece. (He said: "I was waiting for the spring break so I could get loaded.") This is another Sidstation and analog drum machine piece, but the most incisive lead sounds are a Kontakt2 synth with phasing and other filter effects.
Update: snipped out a couple of bars of the "main theme" towards the end.
Vice President Cheney during Chinese President Hu's press conference. The Veep's staff says he was "studying his notes," but it's pretty clear he's sawing logs. Oh, well, at least he's not shooting anyone.
This is what he's going to look like in a few years, retired to his 3 million dollar residence on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Just an amiable old duffer, nodding off on his front porch, remembering all the good times from his years of invading countries, ordering "swirlies" for prisoners in Gitmo, and enhancing the Halliburton bottom line. Unless he gets some Pinochet action late in life, heh heh.
YouTube: Frank Zappa, "Pound for a Brown," orchestral version. This is one of the prettiest tunes FZ wrote--originally from Uncle Meat ("A Pound for a Brown on the Bus"). It's nice to see it getting this treatment, even though Zappa thought the classical music consumption/production system was basically ludicrous.
Via MTAA comes the news that Harlem gallery Triple Candie is doing a Cady Noland survey show, consisting of re-creations of her past artworks based on the Internet and other documentary sources. The re-creations are not approved by Noland, who "dropped out" of the art world in the mid '90s but "tightly controls" her work; this is not to say she disapproves--according to the press release she simply "was not consulted or notified."
Noland is a proto-slacker, neo-scatter artist whose themes are consumerism, nihilism, and politics as refracted through tabloid media; she achieved instant notoriety in the late '80s/early '90s with installations of beer cans, machine parts, and other urban or post-industrial detritus. Triple Candie sees her as an influence on a large range of current artists, including Wade Guyton, Sarah Lucas, and Banks Violette.
I'm curious what Noland's reaction to this will be. The press release says she "haunts the art world like a ghost" while scrupulously limiting the exhibition and publication of her work. This project is kind of fascinating coming so soon after Jack Pierson pitched a fit over the sign letter sculptures at Barneys that resemble his conceptualist/assemblage works. Pierson followed Noland in the art world's every-couple-of-years "new car rollout" hype cycle (both showed at the influential American Fine Arts gallery), but he stayed in the game and became a successful market entity. Does she care that Triple Candie is doing this? Would she have the clout or stamina to stop faithful re-creations of her work (as opposed to a mere window-dresser's homage)?
And finally, doesn't Elaine Sturtevant's inclusion in the current Whitney Biennial, showing exacting Duchamp knockoffs, legitimize this project (and delegitimize Pierson's huffing and puffing)? Some interesting questions here.
GIF Shows
The solo show I'm doing next month is titled "Room Sized Animated GIFs." The ArtCal listing is here (thanks to ArtCal--the listing is in RSS now will go "live" a week before the opening). The choice to use, in the title, a banal everyday computer "file extension" (.GIF) that hasn't quite risen to the level of a household word was deliberate. The point is not to be tech-elitist but rather that there is nothing more un-elite than an animated GIF, your grandmother has several of them on her homepage, but the word "GIF" is nevertheless seldom bandied about in the medieval, still-painting-centric artworld. Another show I'm in taking the humble GIF as its theme is described on Marisa Olson's blog:
Hi, there. I've unashamedly followed the masses to Myspace, and there I've erected a page for an upcoming exhibit I'm curating. Please check it out and become our friend:Why GIFs? They're a relatively "open source" way to get ideas, in the form of moving images, out to broad audience. They are low or no cost to make, consume very little bandwidth, no one has to buy or download a proprietary player to play them. They have their own special charm, minimal in the way garage rock is minimal. Scaling them up to room size, showing them on TV screens as opposed to computer monitors, exhibiting individual frames in a grid, are ways to inject this aesthetic into physical space, which has its own demands, limitations, and pleasures.
http://www.myspace.com/gifshow
The show is called The Gif Show (I briefly considered Meet the Giffords, Meet the Giffordz, Gif Starz, and Choosy Moms Choose GIF). It opens May 3, at San Francisco's beloved RX Gallery, and is co-presented by Rhizome. The artists are Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). Everyone's showing GIFs, and some are also showing videos, works on paper, sound, and other cool related stuff. Together, their work shows the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files.
Hence the Myspace page... GIFs grow, breed, and comingle sparklingly on Myspace. Please come be our neighbor, there, and help us spread the word about the show. (More curatorial & opening party details to come, here, in a bit.)
posted by Marisa S. Olson at 12:01
More YouTubin'--it's weird, I hate TV but I can watch these little blurry things all day.
Can "Paperhouse" live 1970 - awesome - Czukay and Suzuki: "no shirt no service" (also here--louder sound, worse video, loads slower).
"Mushroom"--probably my favorite Can song--suspect the video was made later than 1970.
Boards of Canada "Gyroscope" (for the video) - lots of geometric patterns and mismatched letters - watch out, Jack Pierson's gallery will write you an angry note.
Boards of Canada "In a Beautiful Place" (for the music).
Atari Teenage Riot - "Revolution Action" - ahh, the dotcom era.
Clipse "Grindin" --that '80s beatbox sound will never die. [link replaced Aug 2010]
808 State "Pacific" (1989) - the sublime.
Aphex Twin "Come to Daddy" - the ridiculous. I remember James saying in an interview he woke up and his girlfriend was in the bed next to him wearing one of those masks and he freaked out.
Roxy Music "Do the Strand" (The '80s were invented in 1973--and see Eno in "outre" drag).
Roxy Music "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Eno wearing that feathery thing--with VCS3 and tapes on stage).
King Crimson "Lark's Tongues in Aspic" 1972 (feat. Jamie Muir, who was in the Music Improvisation Company with the late Derek Bailey. Troll repellent: yes, it's "pretentious").
Update, Aug. 2010: All these links are dead except Mushroom, Boards of Canada, and Clipse. Viacom - what a joke.
"Sensor Readings" [27 MB .mp4]
Tuvok reprograms the Lateral Sensor Array to play drum & bass from his homeworld. Or whatever. I'm actually not that big a Trek nerd (just the Borg episodes and, um, TOS), so, what does that make this, an ironic fan mashup? When it's all said and done this works better on a TV monitor than as a Quicktime. Kind of restoring it to its original home, several steps displaced.
Digby theorizes that Bush can't fire Rumsfeld because they're deep in planning the next war (Iran), which they decided to launch right after a bunch of idiots re-elected Bush, making him think he had a mandate.
Bush just issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld. He is stubborn and refuses to change course, as we know. But if what Hersh reported back in 2005 is correct, Rumsfeld owns him. Back in the heady days of his 2% landslide, Bush authorized a covert war with Iran, with no congressional oversight and without even the cooperation of the CINQ's. This makes Iran-Contra look like the Canuck letter.Impeach.
These retired generals are speaking for a military establishment that has been used like monopoly money by Rummy his fellow magical thinkers (like his "advisor" Newt Gingrich) who have spent the last five years attempting to destroy the military with their useless, incompetent war planning and their surreal Toffler-esque vision of a military that doesn't require an actual army.
I realize that the armed forces always resist change. But I think it's fair to assume, considering the Iraq cock-up, that Rummy doesn't know what in the hell he's doing. The military is finally saying "enough." We are witnessing a coup by media.
The congress has completely abdicated its oversight responsibility, the media is shallow and incompetent, our allies are considered irrelevant, the UN is being run by a nutcase even more far-out that Rummy and the wishes of the people are, as usual, not considered. It looks like the only institution in America that can bring us back from the brink of a tragic, tragic mistake is the military itself.
Carol Vogel's New York Times story today on the art world topic of "younger and younger, what can you do about it?":
Jack Tilton arrived at Columbia University on a recent Saturday with a camera around his neck and a venture capitalist by his side. It was a busy day for Mr. Tilton, a Manhattan dealer known for exhibiting the art of graduate students. He looked at the work of 26 students in their first year of a Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia, then struck out for New Haven to do the same thing at Yale. John Friedman, the venture capitalist, made that part of the tour a week later.Tough lead paragraph, it's sad that it's come to this for Tilton--shooting fish in a barrel, hungry for love.
Update: Aaron Yassin says in the comments:
It's unfortunate that this is the topic for the rare article on the visual arts for which the New York Times chooses to devote one quarter of the front page. What bothers me as much is when Carol Vogel says this: "...while first-rate artworks for sale decrease, dealers and collectors are scouring the country's top graduate schools..." The implication that the reason for this phenomenon is that all "first-rate" work is hard to come by is preposterous. Rather, this seems typical of our culture’s infatuation with youth. Instead of just admitting this, Vogel has to make some other kind of excuse like focusing on buying the work of younger and younger artists is really because there’s nothing else available.My reply:
UnfortunatelyThe great unspokens here are that 95% of art graduates stop making work once they get out of the supportive, structured environment of school, unless they get "picked up," and then they start doing bad work about two years out of school (and stop altogether a few years after that). The five percent who keep making art, year-in year-out, pickup or no pickup, are nutty, driven individuals and a pain in the neck for dealers. But it is from that possibly sexually unattractive minority, not "the country's top graduate schools," that most work (and therefore most good work) comes. Youthful energy is important, but in more cases than "the market" is prepared to admit, it wanes quickly."...while first-rate artworks for sale decrease, dealers and collectors are scouring the country's top graduate schools..."is the widely-accepted wisdom of our current tulip mania bubble market. Almost no one in the market is in a position to disagree with this.
Vogel deserves more credit in my opinion for exposing this shaky logic to the world, by interviewing students embarrassed by the attention, school administrators mouthing fatuities, etc. She's leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion that youth=value is demented, that the dealers and collectors are insecure and/or skanky, and that the schools are pimps, or at best, enablers.
Update 2: It's doubtful there are hard statistics on the art world dropout rate. Who would finance such a study? Based on years of watching "scenes" come and go I'd say the 95/5 numbers are conservative.
Have been listening to more music by composer Paul Lansky, since encountering his work on the OHM "electronic music gurus" CD/DVD. His mp3 page is here. In some pieces he uses the computer behind the scenes, "automatically" writing scores that humans would find difficult or impossible to play. Other works are found sounds, like traffic noises or conversations, quantized or processed tonally. He's a musician as much as a geek, very melodic and modern at the same time. Be sure to check out "Odd Moments," scored for traditional instruments, reminiscent of Copland and Ravel, with a hint of Michael Nyman, but with Lansky's characteristic "smoothness," not in the sense of smooth jazz but in the unusual, somewhat melancholy feel he gets by eschewing harsh attack sounds.
"Sensor Readings" [27 MB .mp4]
This is a sketch. My plan is to brighten and crispen the image, but since that will involve custom tweaking about 50 frames, I'm procrastinating. Batch processing only gets you so far. I might play around with the erratic "cursor" movement some more, but I'm resisting point-to-point, "follow the bouncing ball" closure here, in case that's not obvious.
Update: Having said all that, now I'm working on the timing. I don't want to use a ruler, so I'm matching clips to beats by eye. In this consumer program I'm using, any deletion in the timeline shortens the whole timeline (i.e., you can't use markers to pin your finished work in place), so it's taking a ridiculous amount of time. It's harder to make something clunky than something slick, in my experience. The image is brightened up, at least; I batch-processed the panels using "auto-contrast" and then finally figured out how to uniformly crop each panel in Photoshop using "snap to grid." I now have a GIF where the cursor rolls more smoothly than in the motion captures used in the above .mov, it's just a question of chopping it up in a way that accentuates rather than distracts from the tune.
Update 2: As discussed, the file has been brightened and the timing is tighter now. I replaced the old file--it's about 10 MB bigger.
sunaba - renge no atama (beefheart/henry cowish--nice!) [YouTube]
Bad Brains "At the Movies" (live, 1979) [YouTube]
Washington DC band during their punk phase. Loose, proto-MTV intro with White House in background; Dr. Know rocks out; HR does a backflip at the end--Yes!
"Sensor Readings (Audio)" [mp3 removed]
Update: this is now a vid soundtrack so I retitled it from "Wow and Fluster" to its current name.
"With drafting pen in hand, and who knows what in mind, [Daniel] Brush spends countless hours penning the same line. The works he thus composes are nearly 10 feet tall, and, I think, imposing. Delicate yet dreary, humble, yet while humble pompous, they seem the work of someone who finds liberation through enslavement. The trip is his, not mine." --Paul Richard, Washington Post, 1975, reviewing "Five Washington Artists" at the Corcoran Gallery. Brush now lives in New York and makes intricate work with gold.
This flood of home video trash that's hitting the Net via YouTube, Google Video, etc, is funny and all but I'm not sure how closely I want to look at the freaks. I recently watched a video some Net-heads have labeled "Dad scares kid with computer."
I don't really like practical jokes, especially ones that involve startling someone. We all have autonomic reflexes, they're embarrassing, big whoop. Here, a Dad is playing a game or teaching his boy something, probably from a computer in another room in the house, while simultaneously monitoring the kid with a webcam. The kid is about 8. The game is boring, and the kid is asking his Dad questions about how to proceed. Suddenly Dad puts a horrible monster face--it reminded me of the subliminal demons from the Exorcist, eyes and mouth opened wide--on the kid's screen, which simultaneously emits a loud roar.
The kid screams and goes into utter panic, literally pushing the screen with the flats of his hands to make the monster go away. He looks up at the webcam lens, crying, his face a mask of utter fright, mingled with betrayal that his Dad would do something so shitty to him. He can't turn off his emotions, and the camera continues to impassively record his wracking sobs, while you hear his Dad's meek little doughy voice saying "heh-heh...heh-heh." The Dad offers no words of apology or consolation, and the sobbing goes on a while.
I was reminded of the film Peeping Tom, 1960, where a father, a scientist studying fear, puts reptiles in his son's bed while the child is sleeping and films the child's frightened reactions when he wakes up. In the film the boy grows up to be a psycho killer.
I'm not linking to "Dad scares kid with computer," sorry.
Mahavishnu Orchestra on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. "Dance of the Maya" segues into "Celestial Terrestrial Commuters." (Announcer at the end: "Next on Rock Concert: Poco.")
Yes, McLaughlin is a guitar god, and this page is post-guitar, but the best thing about the clip, besides the forgotten high level of musicianship, is remembering the brief time when pop music didn't have to have vocals.
"While it became fashionable to bash the MahaOrch after the punk era as 'pretentious,' it must be remembered that McLaughlin was a Miles Davis sideman and his group's sound had much in common with the intense sonic stew of the Live/Evil, Bitches Brew era. And while their recordings after the first couple degenerated into aimless soloing and hobbit-rock conceptualizing, the early work has flashes of what Kodwo Eshun has called 'jazz fission'--the exciting category breakdowns that briefly occurred in the early '70s before the music got codified as 'fusion.' Better examples can be found in McLaughlin's earlier work with Tony Williams, but people really need to cut the MahaOrch some slack, 'cause there's good stuff there, too." --Theodor Adorno
"One might have hoped that several decades after the '70s, cultural differences would had telescoped down to where early McLaughlin and later punk groups such as the Bad Brains would be seen as emanating from much the same place, tapping into the same motivations. Unfortunately the lines between "prog" and "punk" are just as sharply drawn today as they were 30 years ago, at least to a certain kind of asshole who can't see past obvious marketing differences and actually, like, listen to music." --T.A.
notes on converting two GIFs to ambient-style video pieces. in the real world these would both be on CRT screens (for the toronto collaboration with john parker). the bleaching on the TV images on the left is just my digicam not being able to shoot the screen.
bathtub sticker animation (222 X 345, sized at 450 X 700 in the video). the red circles on the left and right are outside the title safe area, but it looks OK cropped like that, don't want to shrink it anymore than I have to. the frame rate is the same on the GIF and the video, 20 fps; don't think it needs to go faster.
spinning disc animation: originally sized at 350 X 348, white background: [.mov file stopped working -- thanks, Apple -- here is a 97 KB GIF]
sized at 441 X 442 for video, black background: [.mov file stopped working -- thanks, Apple -- here is a 144 KB GIF]. The larger .mov looks much better on video than it does on the web. the .web mov spins more regularly than the TV version; on the TV the disc is slowing down and speeding up slightly, as if the equipment were struggling to keep up with the high frame rate (100 frames per second in the original GIF--30 fps in the video--the max TV allows). this "wowing" is good--it makes the disc more alive, like it has a will of its own, but is constantly on the verge of breaking down. i let it loop for three minutes and when it hits the "chapter repeat" point the image briefly freezes, then revs back up to full speed as fast as it can. it looks like a little vibrating bitcrushed planetoid, i'm especially happy with how this one came out as a video piece.
Update: the music that goes with this video pair is here.
After the addition of the former Borg drone Seven of Nine to the starship's crew at the start of the fifth Star Trek series' fourth season, Voyager's weekly viewer ratings soared by more than 60%... [T]he character was an instant success, and "saved the show" from disorientation and even oblivion. The Emergency Medical Hologram's dermoplastic grafting procedures and follicle stimulation therapies produced a highly sexualized feminine bodily appearance that appealed especially to adolescent and young males, a major portion of Star Trek's viewership. Seven's arrival on the scene was accompanied by a massive publicity campaign in TV magazines and newspaper supplements. Played by a former Miss America pageant finalist Jeri Ryan, outfitted in a skintight, lustrous catsuit and high heels that accentuate her breasts and buttocks, Seven of Nine radiates "available feminine sexuality," yet is paradoxically unaware of her "epidermal" exposure and blatant desirability. Her erect phallic posture, techno-scientific competence, stringently business-like speaking style, and indifference towards male erotic overtures make her an ambivalent boundary crosser with both masculine and feminine semiotic and manneristic attributes.--from Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro (the Bible)
Posting from an...undisclosed location, some time on my hands, don't have my tablet so my project for the night is drawing Seven of Nine with a mouse. This may change as I get time to tinker with it. ("That is irrelevant.")
Attended a NY art blogger social event in Chelsea last night organized by Edward Winkleman. Paddy Johnson has a report (she did a better job meeting people than I did). The mood was pleasant and egalitarian, and people talked a fair amount about art, unlike so many art world soirees terminally marred by climbers, strivers, snubbers, and assorted other dysfunctional bad vibe inducers. (Yes, I was scarred by several years of writing criticism during the dot com era.) Learned about a few sites I hadn't heard of before. There's definitely an uptick in good blog activity since this page's last extended prognosis of the scene, and the scuttlebutt has it that galleries and museums are paying a tad more attention to these self-published vehicles. This matters not so much for getting perks and press credentials as getting out-of-favor ideas heard and mediocre-but-powerful gatekeepers righteously bypassed. Maybe that's all of a piece, don't know for sure. Thanks to Edward for organizing this, looking forward to more such events.
"Speed Too" [mp3 removed]. My remix of John Parker's remix of my Mac SE tune(s). Work in process--still editing this piece, but give it a listen!
The show we're in in Toronto, curated by Sally McKay, is called "Mods and Rockers" (opening May 12th at York Quay Centre, part of digifest). The work will be video displayed on two screens, separated by several feet in a public hallway, with a music soundtrack accessible through headphones hanging between the videos.
Don't know what the other invited artist teams are doing, but rather than have some kind of face-off, or rumble, we're merging sensibilities. The collective inner Mod is the high tech influence in the form of some sophisticated audio software and newish laptop used to edit and burn the video, and the inner Rocker is the low tech source material: 8-Bit-style tunes on an old Mac (some originally composed in the '80s) and animated GIFs based on MSPaint versions of John's flat work.
We're trying for some sort of parity between the audio and visual material. Pixels and square waves as both medium and subject.
This is just my dashed off statement, issued with John's more or less approval based on an earlier email. Like the music and video we've been posting, it could be Modified. Or I could be off my Rocker.
Oh, and did I mention "organic"?
| T | Trustworthy |
| O | Organic |
| M | Misunderstood |
| M | Mushy |
| O | Old |
| O | Organic |
| D | Desperate |
| Y | Young |
Name Acronym Generator
Big shakeup at the Village Voice since the yuppie New Times Corp. bought the paper. From the comments at Undernews:
"The Bush Blog" was shut down just as things got interesting in D.C. "Press Clips," whose writers over the years included [Alexander] Cockburn and Doug Ireland, has been discontinued. [James] Ridgeway was pulled from the print edition 2 months ago -- now he has been sent packing.This is depressing. Blogs are taking up some of the slack left by the demise of independent, ad-based print media, but bloggers don't have the resources to do sustained, high-profile reporting that requires face to face interviews, travel, etc. RIP Village Voice. I shudder that they'll start scrubbing the politics out of Jim Hoberman's film reviews, which are all about the politics.
Wonder how long it takes before the Voice becomes another pro-war/pro-Bush mouthpiece?
Finally got some pics of the "Fuzzy Logic" show from summer 2005, in Manchester, UK, curated by Jackie Passmore and Michael Connor. A million thanks to Cat Mazza for these photos. The show was discussed a bit here (scroll way down). The top photo depicts Cory Arcangel's Infinite Fill Blanket, Peter Coffin's "wall-based prints bridging ASCII art and knitting patterns," a LoVid soft sound sculpture on the pedestal, my Fuzzyball paper piece upper right, and Claire Irving's mathematical knitting in the foreground. The bottom photo shows Cat Mazza's logoknit pieces and her knitting machine, and Woolly Thoughts' Mathematical Afghans.
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To all my Republican friends and family members (I love you but you are dopes), I offer this tribute to the fall of corrupt legislator, Tom DeLay. It's titled Oh Happy Day, and this is indeed a happy day for lovers of freedom and haters of thieves. Jane Hamsher of firedoglake wrote it:
It’s a beautiful day here in Oregon, and a great day in America.
Tom DeLay, one of the biggest crooks in modern American history, has fallen. In order to appreciate the importance of this I want to link to a couple of articles I think have been really good at laying out the full extent of the criminal enterprise that has bilked this country for billions, of which DeLay was the architect.
Nicholas Confessore’s Washington Monthly article on the K Street project is a must-read for anyone fuzzy on the details about how the GOP gamed the lobbying business to fund its illegal enterprises by hoovering up every tax dollar in sight, and quite nearly got its hands on the "prize pig" of the Social Security trust fund. And Sarah Posner’s article in The American Prospect is a searing expose of how lobbyists like Barbara Comstock set up a clearing house for companies wanting to bilk the government in the wake of 9/11, capitalizing on Republican fear-mongering and making sure that copious amounts of cash made their way back into GOP coffers and insured the perpetuation of the system.
The result? The government bought a bunch of expensive, useless shit it didn’t need. DeLay and the GOP were very good at ripping off the nation but they left the country vulnerable, weakened and poor, ill-equipped to meet the challenges of a new century. National and economic security were the furthest thing from their minds. Every man, woman and child in America now carried $30,000 worth of government debt on their backs. And thousands have died in their expensive, futile, graft-laden war.
Tom DeLay has fallen today. He’s not in chains (yet) but he’ll soon be out of Congress off the House Appropriations Committee where he has stolen so much for so long. And the justice system has him in their sights.
It’s a great day in America.
