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A few weeks back I noted the similarity of our Pres to Paul Lazzaro, the character in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five who lives for revenge (played by Ron Liebman in the movie). Lazzaro describes cruelly killing a dog who bit him once, biding his time and waiting for the right moment when the animal "least expects it." Eventually Lazzaro whacks the book's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, as payback for some ancient slight. Bush offers nothing positive or constructive as a leader but excels at settling scores, Saddam being the most conspicuous "because he tried to kill my dad at one time." Recently blogger Elton Beard made the Lazzaro connection too, and even found a similarity in language used by George and Paul:
Q: Mr. President, what do you think of the successor to Zarqawi that was named by al Qaeda? ...THE PRESIDENT: I think the successor to Zarqawi is going to be on our list to bring to justice.Now, it's one thing to relinquish without fight a fragment of language like "begging the question" which is at least arguably only of interest to logicians. But if "to bring to justice" comes to be commonly understood as "to kill on my command" rather than as "to try before a duly constituted court" then it seems something crucial will have been lost.
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Speaking of killers - readers of Vonnegut will no doubt also appreciate Mr. Bush's fine impersonation of Paul Lazzaro from Schlachthof Funf:LAZZARO: You're on my list, pal.Paul Lazzaro lovingly maintained a list of people he disfavored and consequently planned to kill. He was, of course, quite insane.
David Lynch asks a WTC 7 related question (Quicktime). Go David!
Click it today* because it's his daily report and the question probably won't be up tomorrow.
*("Friday, June 23. Here in LA we have blue skies, golden sunshine...")
Update, Jun 26: Here's what he asked on Friday: "An interesting question for the blog page: Do you think all high rise buildings should be condemned? Because as was proven with for instance the WTC 7 building in New York, if a few floors catch on fire, the whole building falls down. Do you therefore think all high rise buildings should be condemned?"
"Piano Three Hands (Drums)" [mp3 removed]
I posted this tune a while back as an "acoustic piano" piece. [mp3 removed] A friend was nice to compare it to Conlon Nancarrow, who laboriously wrote music on real piano rolls to be played by real player pianos.
That's encouraging, but I'm not as atonal or obsessive as CN. I was actually imagining some kind of "dazzling" Keith Emerson/Wyndham Hill solo played without any emotional expression. The crowd-pleasing speed and key-modulating complexity without the ladled-on passion we expect from keyboard virtuosos.
Here, I took the same tune and added drums and changed the piano samples to more of a "house" sound. Now it could be a MIDI version of Yellow Magic Orchestra, or at the very least, not Nancarrow. The point here, if I have one, is that our associations of music depend largely on the instruments used rather than structure.
This one's more fun, I think.
If you liked the video of racing police cars I posted last week you might also like this YouTube clip depicting a deck being torn off a rustic cabin. [via schwarz].
"Our Rulers From Space" [mp3 removed]
The weird effects are mostly the AdrenaLinn II, a beat-synched filter FX box. A kind of '50s "Mars Attacks" vibe crept in.
John Zoller, Alphamega 8, 48 x 70 inches, laser light print, at the APG Gallery, Atlanta, GA. Zoller's "Alphamega" series is "non camera based photography" created with fire on photo emulsion and without any digital manipulation--an old school FX approach, although I'm not aware of anyone who did anything quite like this. It's a bit reminiscent of the Joshua White gelatin/food color/Pyrex dish/overhead projector school of psychedelic light show (pre-laser shows) gone all rigorous and formally elegant. The multifaceted Zoller (a New Yorker now living in Fla.) also did the "United States: Color and Learn" painting series I've posted a few examples of. Below: detail of Alphamega 3.
Sally McKay has documentation up of the "Mods & Rockers" show she curated for Digifest 2006 at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (on view through July 9). A few posts back I ran some pics of kids looking at the part of the installation I collaborated on with John Parker. Below are some pics from Sally that give the overall layout of the show. There are 8 "display windows," each with video capability and divided into pairs. Each of the four participating artist teams (consisting of one Mod and one Rocker) was assigned a pair of display windows. Headphones common to each pair of windows played audio from a single sound source. John and I opted to have the videos running independently from each other--both are looping, "steady state," psychedelically flavored digital abstractions (documented earlier here ). The audio (documented here) is a tune we jointly composed, with the idea in mind that it would generally "go" with the videos without being in sync with them-- thematically, as well as with random rhythmic and melodic correspondences the viewer could potentially experience. Our installation seems to work as a stand-alone piece (based on the feedback I've had from Toronto) but it is also a "digital non-site" in that the various stages of it, our experimentation and thought process, frames, fragments, sound bites, false starts, and "tech content," were documented on this blog and John's website. The subject matter one viewer kindly described as "full on digital." This is from our statement:
Rather than have some kind of face-off, or rumble, we are merging sensibilities. The collective inner Mod is the high tech influence in the form of some sophisticated audio software and a 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 by Tom based on MSPaint versions of Web images of John's work.
We're trying for some sort of parity between the audio and visual material. Pixels and square waves are both medium and subject.
