January 2009

Simon Reynolds on end of the year lists. Specific ones, including his, but the general remarks grab you as well:

This year they've seemed more disparate than ever too, often barely overlapping. That's certainly the case with individual bloggers, but even the print periodical and webzine End of Year surveys, which through their expanded electorates and Big Other-shadowed institutional responsibility to "The Truth" usually point towards something approaching consensus... even they have seemed quite far apart from each other.

This jibes with recent social theory that we are becoming a lonely crowd again, not like the 1950s American population of bland, other-directed joiners but one based on everyone having specialized interests: you are the only Star Trek fan in a room full of Seinfeld fans, or vice versa. You just can't connect with these people. That room full of fans could even be your own kin. The internet is blamed but other factors contribute: globalization, shift work and part time work, serial monogamy, etc. This may also explain the rising appeal of fundamentalist religions to some: letting an authoritarian a-hole group leader do your thinking for you trumps that dreadful feeling of rootless disconnection (in the case of the Heaven's Gate cult, he might even let you watch Star Trek).

One sentence of Reynolds', concerning Chuck Eddy's end of the year list, should inspire an Atrios-like "simple answer to a simple question":

Is it really possibly to love 150 albums that came out in a single year?

Music diary: The Mutator filter has wild gain swings and I've been wanting to push it more without clipping (tired of those clicks!). Went to Sam Ash and found a used DBX compressor/limiter for 89 bucks. The peak stop limiter isn't very good (you still get clicks on super blow out volume levels) but at 10:1 compression and output gain slightly below zero it mostly does the job. Have been dialing through Electribe presets with the Mutator removing most of the treble and transients and the DBX keeping the bass blorts under control. I love the dense, heavy underwater sound. Have recorded some of these and compressed them even further with mastering plugins.

open note to Robert Wodzinski:

Sorry it took me a while to get to your your screen capture project. I'm subscribed to the pngmess feed now.
Screen captures as artistic artifacts can be interesting--part found object, part collage, and part documentation.
In some ways they are all we will have of our computers and the Net experience as we know it.
Links go dead (as with some 1st generation net art) and so much flies by in our experience that is never described in words.
The decision of what to capture, it seems to me, is a new form of photography with new, net-centric subject matter (or computercentric subject matter, or even non-net-centric or non-computercentric subject matter) and it merits consideration as an aesthetic. The best captures are not forced or self consciously artistic but are genuinely interested in preserving something that happens onscreen that one notices (whether an arrangement of images, temporary text, or some mix of content and supposedly invisible interface).
These were some ideas I had on seeing your project--keep up the good work.