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"Protest Song Variation" [mp3 removed]
"Marching Morons" [mp3 removed]
Moving ahead with the projected "ten songs for analog drum machine and Sidstation"; these are two more, recorded with the new gear.
Paper Rad Info is a blog about Paper Rad. However, it is not Paper Rad. That is here. Above is the Dooman Group. a spinoff band named after Dr. Doo; the photo came from Flickr. Inspiring!
And I confess I missed this Art in America article on Cory Arcangel, which discusses his collaboration with Paper Rad at Deitch Projects, among other activities. Fortunately I have the web to keep me up to date on print. We'll know a zeigeist moment has occurred when Cory is no longer called a "computer artist" and is just called an "artist."
Photos off the TV from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926, a full-length animated film dir. by Lotte Reiniger. Amazing stuff, all silhouettes, inspiring this exercise in couch-potato photojournalism. More on the film (thanks to dave).
Dear Music Diary, I wrote some posts about the difficulties I was having recording a recently acquired analog drum machine. The sound was either clipping or too quiet. I had some good suggestions for ways to compress the drum sounds and those were much appreciated but I finally solved the problem by getting a firewire sound card--the MOTU 828mkii. The audio/digital converters are better than my three year old computer's and the sound is just generally better. I'm using it with a laptop, also recently acquired, which has more RAM and is also better and faster as a music-making machine. Also I can use two screens with it. So once again production will slow down as I migrate programs and sound files to the new environment.
The Village Voice on the yuppie rape of the High Line:
Although the landscape architects expect to use existing vegetation as a guide for the park's greenery, concrete walkways will replace the uninterrupted fields of tall grasses—lush and green in the summer or dried golden like wheat in the fall. Chances are much of the Chinese bittersweet, with its pert orange berries, will be replaced by a plant that won't aggressively overtake its neighbors. And the trees struggling upward, which have dug their roots deep into the railroad bed, will be rooted out."A guide for the park's greenery"--you gotta love it. They're killing the vegetation and completely replacing it in order to save it. That's the American Way, in Vietnam, Iraq, and limousine lib NYC. Pardon the invective, but fuck all y'all.
Interesting factoid I just learned: Cory Arcangel, whose hacked Nintendo cartridge piece Japanese Driving Game is depicted in the GIF above, is a relative of Pop artist Allan D'Arcangelo. Not sure the exact kinship--a cousin, but no one in the family's exactly sure how many steps removed. D'Arcangelo passed away in the '90s (and since we're talking about a distant cousin, this isn't a story of art world dynasty building, much as that might disappoint the dish-minded); some images via google are below. A frequent theme of D'Arcangelo's was road signs and American auto culture. The affinity between his art and the above piece of Arcangel's--which subtracted the cars from an '80s video game leaving the highway, signage, and surrounding landscape--is amusing. D'Arcangelo isn't as well known as Lichtenstein or Warhol, but I've always liked his work. He's one of those "impure Pop" artists, like John Wesley, whose personal style usually peeks out from behind the genre's bland corporate facade.
Update: According to family members Allan is Cory's great uncle.
New media/infoTech/social activist non-profit the THING recently moved to new headquarters in what they're calling the Death Star, the big AT&T building at 6th and Walker in NYC. Rebelling against the bourgeoise strictures of documentary photography that tyrannically emphasize "clarity," Robbin Murphy shot these photos of the Nov. 9 housewarming (and welcome for residency artists Jan Gerber and Daniel Pflumm). Heisenberg, call your photo lab.
Less probabilistic are these views inside the Death Star, the erstwhile manual switching center for the former phone monopoly, which appears to be mostly gutted and is being renovated as a newer-media telecommunications complex (besides THING headquarters, it will host various co-location facilities, such as The Hub at 32 Sixth, described by the developer as follows:
The Hub at 32 Sixth is a true carrier-neutral, co-location and interconnection facility that boasts a robust and growing number of communication providers. Strategically located on the 24th floor of 32 Avenue of the Americas, The Hub has quickly become the primary point of convergence for all buyers and sellers of bandwidth in the New York Metro area. Its co-location facility currently hosts nearly 40 terrestrial carriers and a growing portfolio of content providers, ISPs, and enterprise tenants, as well as an expanding range of wireless providers, making The Hub the interconnection power house.)
In the mid '00s modernist painting and sculpture enjoyed a powerful resurgence among artists bored with the dominant conceptualist tropes of bland photography and turgid written narratives. Leading the charge in the return to quirky subjectivity were Jason Duval (top, at Marvelli), Dorota Kolodziejczyk (middle, at Morgan Lehman) and Ross Knight (bottom, at Team). These works all combined a deft formal sophistication with a rock-solid understanding of art history and the right time to reintroduce themes their teachers and forebears might dismiss as atavistic. (E. Worthy, Early 21st Century Art, Memehouse Publishing, 2038). (Of the three artists' work only Knight's truly merits the adjective "quirky"--still searching for the right word but wanted to get this up.--e.w., I mean, t.m.)