View current page
...more recent posts
Beige Programming Ensemble at the Whitney; The Slowes
I missed Cory & Jamie Arcangel and the Beige crew at the Whitney last night because I had to w_rk, but fortunately Thickeye is on it with an excellent report. I like his description of the line of kids wrapped around the block for free admission night, soon to be groping in the darkened video rooms, contrasted with the image of middle age people sitting at tables in the downstairs dining room, politely listening to the Beige-rs explaining their new 8-bit iPod concept.
Beige has a music download page that I highly recommend, consisting of their vinyl releases in mp3 format. Cory also recorded several songs as The Slowes, which I am pleased to offer here. The melodies are faux-dumb and very catchy. I say faux-dumb because they're actually fairly ambitious in terms of musical reach--a lot of pop music history is integrated in them (lounge, 60s-electronica, progrock, Pink Floyd...). The lo fi-ness keeps the homages from being overt or too reverent. Here's how Cory explains them in an email (edited slightly):
yeah,...the slowes is just me. most of the melodies were written by a melody writing program i wrote called "Rudy Tardy Generator Pro"..it was a cgi script. every time you went to its web page, it generated a new song and melodies (in the slowes style, which is lotsa open roller rink kinda chords) so....... i would have the program spit out 10 melodies...i would then pick the best few, turn them into a song, and go into my bedroom and record them. i used an organ, atari, drums, + guitar////The Slowes downloads:the whole myth of the slowes that I made up was that it was this guy who sat in his basement all day and worked on his atari. his name was Rudy Tardy. This was his band. For a few years, i used Rudy Tardy to sign all my art projects...[Beige recording artist] Paul [B. Davis] to this day still Dj's under the name DJ Rudy.
"Fat Bits" [.mp3 - 1.33MB]
"Starship Izod" [.mp3 - 4.12MB]
"The Anthem" [.mp3 - 2.29MB]
"Hooked on a New Thing" (cover of 3Nuff Z'Nuff) [.mp3 - 5.2MB]
Suite: All Four Songs Above [.mp3 - 13.14MB]
Wow. The March 14 Mercury News story about the Fresno polygamist child murder that Atrios originally linked to has been extensively rewritten (see my previous post about all this). I went back to look at it because it described policemen carrying dead children out of the house and weeping, and quoted a police chief holding back tears, saying "this sort of thing doesn't happen in Fresno" or the like, and was very slim on details of what actually happened. The police reactions seemed pretty over-the-top (even for such a tragic crime) and I wanted to reread the account, in light of allegations that the cops had negligently given Wesson time to go into the back of the house and shoot the children while the gendarmes stood on his doorstep, ignoring the pleadings of relatives who knew what Wesson was capable of. Well, all that detail about the crying cops is gone from the story, sucked down the memory hole, and Fresno Police Chief is suddenly dry-eyed, in control, and quoted as saying "what happened at the house is under the investigation." So much for an independent press--obviously this story was rewritten to placate the authorities. Nowadays you have to save every story you read to your hard drive. (A copy of the rewritten story is here.)
UPDATE: It looks like the article was rewritten several times after publication. Mark found another version, posted in the comments.
UPDATE 2: Mark found the "crying, child-carrying cops" version I read, slightly differently worded, on the Mercury News website, as an AP story dated March 13, under a different byline. So it's not down the memory hole (yet). I really do wonder why the article was rewritten several times, omitting more and more detail each time about the emotional state of the cops.
So far, Atrios called it correctly when he predicted, on March 14, that "the horrible case in Fresno, where a man...allegedly slaughtered his 7 children, [will get] about 1/50th of the media coverage that the Andrea Yates case did." Andrea Yates, you will recall, had a history of depression and drowned her five kids; she's now doing prison time while her fundamentalist Christian husband has remarried. Alleged cult weirdo and woman-controller Marcus Wesson has been charged by the Fresno police with shooting his seven kids and two grandkids and stacking their bodies in the back of his house, which had ten coffins in it; he is believed to have fathered the grandkids by impregnating two of the now-deceased children. Sure enough, it looks like the latter is being treated as "local news" and we won't be hearing much more about it. Atrios doesn't spell out why he predicted what he did, so please allow me to state the obvious: Wesson is a man and has the right to sire as many children as he pleases and then destroy them at his whim, while Yates is a woman and has no greater duty than the sacred trust of child-rearing. The media knows this; everybody knows this. That monster, how could she? I'm getting all upset just thinking about her case again.
UPDATE: As Barry mentions in his comment, Wesson is black and Yates is white, which may also have something to do with the disparity in coverage. A Seventh Day Adventist, Wesson lived in a reasonably affluent neighborhood but no one ever really asked what he and all those women dressed in black were doing with the schoolbus parked in the driveway (transporting coffins, among other things). Control freak to the core, he allegedly murdered the children when he became convinced the authorities might take them away from him. Hardly any ingredients of a national story here.
UPDATE 2: The story has picked up unexpected juice with the revelation that the Fresno police may have been cooling their heels at Wesson's front door while Wesson went into the back of the house and shot the children. "Fresno's police chief acknowledged Wednesday that his department is looking into whether Marcus Wesson fatally shot nine of his children while police waited outside his house, despite frantic pleas from relatives to intervene." (CNN). The google count on "Marcus Wesson" jumped from 9000 to 11,000 since this morning.
UPDATE 3: The newspaper account of the Wesson arrest was rewritten several times after publication. More here.
From the NY Times today:
A defiant Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused Thursday to remove himself from a case involving his good friend, Vice President Dick Cheney, dismissing suggestions of a conflict of interest. In an unusual 21-page memorandum, he rejected a request by the Sierra Club. The environmental group said it was improper for Scalia to take a hunting trip with Cheney while the court was considering whether the White House must release information about private meetings of Cheney's energy task force. Scalia said the remote Louisiana hunting camp used for a duck hunting and fishing trip "was not an intimate setting." [...] For the first time, Scalia revealed details of his trip with Cheney. Scalia said he was the go-between to invite Cheney to hunt with a Scalia friend, Wallace Carline, who owns an oil rig services firm, Scalia wrote. Scalia and Cheney are friends from their days working in the Ford administration, Scalia noted. "I conveyed the invitation, with my own warm recommendation, in the spring of 2003 and received an acceptance," Scalia wrote. When the time came for the trip, Scalia and Cheney flew together, accompanied by one of Scalia's sons and a son-in-law, Scalia wrote.Got that? The hunting trip was OK because (1) Scalia and Cheney were chaperoned and (2) the trip was really about Cheney getting together for some male bonding with an oil industry tycoon, and Scalia just hooked the two up. These people are so deeply in bed they expect normal people to think rules of etiquette like "avoid the wet spot" means "never met the dude."
I'm finally getting around to scanning the ad that ran in Artforum for my Munich show with Gregor Passens in May 2002. It's pretty murky, but the source image originally came off the internet and it's been copied umpteen times. The guitarist is a semi-famous musician who played at the Aldrich Museum, where my sphere piece was installed, using the piece as an impromptu backdrop. It seemed reasonable to borrow his guitar-playin' bod for my ad, with his face eradicated to avoid "likeness rights" issues and as an homage to Boards of Canada. homeroom director Courtenay Smith is currently the curator at lothringer dreizehn, a Munich art space that is opening a new show this weekend, "Changing Rooms," featuring the work of Monica Kapfer, Aylin Langreuter, Martin Schmidt, and Tom Früchtl.
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, is a fascinating book and an enjoyable guilty read for antiwar types with a passing interest in things military (I'm describing myself here). Nevertheless it's flawed and also kind of sick, and its cult in the military should be questioned. Here's a quick, dashed-off criticism for anyone who hasn't read the book.
(1) The book envisions a society shaped by years of war against a relentless enemy from space. The government is coldly totalitarian and kids are watched for special aptitudes and recruited at like, age 6. Family members are pitted against each other in competition for coveted slots in the military.
(2) The military training passages are well-imagined and I can see where they'd be useful in educating troops in a total-war mindset. But they're kind of gratuitous in terms of the plot, since Ender ultimately saves the world not through bonding with his buddies but with his solitary videogame-playing skills. More than one critic pointed out that the book, which came out in the early '80s, flattered the adolescent reader who was spending a lot of time hanging out in arcades.
(3) Card, the author, is a practicing Mormon and, just like our President, thinks in terms of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, so a plot like this is not farfetched to him, but it's still an escapist fantasy, and to imagine we have enemies as implacable as the Buggers from outer space just plays into the neocon propaganda line.
(4) Gratuitous editorial: A strong, well-trained military is of course necessary when your country is threatened militarily. But otherwise, it's a dangerous thing to have because then you feel like you have to use it. Thus, you send it off periodically to keep it in trim conquering weaker countries (always in the service of humanitarian goals, of course).
(The above comments originally appeared on Jim's page, about a year ago, right after the Iraq invasion was launched and bombs were bursting in the air. I'm reprinting them here as a kind of tribute to a former co-worker who joined the Marines thinking he was going to be doing "communications" and is about to be shipped over to you-know-where.)
A few quick unrelated items: (1) dan at erase reports on a Squarepusher/Steve Reich/Aphex Twin-related live gig in the UK that sounds like a lot of fun. He's also been posting links to good online mixes, such as this
tech-house assortment [since removed--"Eucalyptus" and "Night Herbs" were the ones I recommended] and this 80s/00s electro jam. (2) The Doris Piserchia Website has been updated with a sample chapter from her 1981 novel Earth in Twilight, and a review of that novel reprinted from Nathan Shumate's website. (3) A friend lent me his Cowboy Bebop series DVDs, which are fairly mindblowing. In the .GIF at left, bounty hunter Spike is opening the Bebop airlock so he can push a refrigerator out into space. He left a lobster in there a year before and it mutated into a blue springy thing that escaped and bit all of his shipmates and put them in comas. More horrible stuff was breeding in the icebox, hence his need to space it. And his skin isn't really yellow-green except in a 16-color .GIF.UPDATE: The mixtapes mentioned above are by Sami Koivikko, from Finland, who makes tracks when he's not dj'ing. The "Night Herbs" mix is flawlessly beat-matched and contains a number of those angelic arrangements of 3 or 4 confectionary notes that probably have a more precise musical term but are what I like most about house tracks, especially of the minimal/tech variety. Producers such as Losoul, John Tejada, Paul Kalkbrenner and other favorites are included in the mix.
How cool is it that the people of Spain reacted to the terrorist attacks in Madrid by firing their right-wing government? And that the new government plans to bring the country's troops home? Let's do that here! Unfortunately we have to wait eight months before we can get rid of George Bush Jr., whose crappy leadership the Spanish have also implicitly rejected. Or maybe we don't--for the crime of lying us into war with the wrong country (and general all around corruption), how about impeaching the perpetrator? To get an idea of how bad things are over in Iraq--our tax dollars at work--please read Robert Fisk's one year recap. Here's the plan: send Bush back to the Midland Racquet Club, then pressure Kerry to end the occupation post haste. After paying reparations, we'll only be out a few hundred billion for our little adventure.