April 2009

Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard

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Sean Penn to play Larry Fine in Farrelly Brothers Three Stooges movie. This interminable Onion AV Club thread makes that blood-curdling announcement somewhat palatable, with frequent typing of "multiple face slaps," "nyuk nyuk nyuk" and the requisite "Spread out!" Boys, boys.

Moe: So you think you can make flapjacks, eh?
Larry: I don't think. I know.
Moe: I don't think you know either.

and

It's one thing to be the full blown idiot Curly was and bring the constant wrath of Moe down upon you, but it's one step further to defend that idiocy...and thereby challenge the leadership of Moe. If that doesn't deserve multiple slaps across the face and a little hair yanking, I don't know what does.

"B4 the Blue"

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"B4 the Blue" [mp3 removed]

After several years of using Cubase SE (the student, or "lite" version) I recently moved to Cubase Essential 4 as my main digital audio work area--also a lite version but with added features such as being able to add effects to audio without first rendering it and the ability to use controller curves for multiple parameters in softsynths (obviating the dreaded "midi learn"). "B4 the Blue" uses several of these features. It's not that radically different from what I've been doing but required a whole lot less steps. I do think having multiple settings changing simultaneously by using overlapping curves will affect my sound quite a bit.

There is a reverbed piano part at about :40 that I'm really happy with--it makes me think of some kind of modal, McCoy Tyner thing but my background is only listening to jazz piano, not playing it. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to keep pushing further and further into music: discovering things that are already inside.

my j.g. ballard library

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jg ballard library

...such as it is. The RE/SEARCH book by Vale and Juno on the bottom of the stack is top-notch, if you can track down a copy. Interviews, reviews, excerpts, illustrated with infra-red filtered photos of bleak industrial and desert landscapes.

Those enjoying the antics of the Dharma Initiative on Lost might get a kick out of Rushing to Paradise, a politically incorrect fable of what happens when a fanatic liberal activist suddenly has infinite funding for research on a Pacific island (hint: she becomes another Pol Pot). If you've never read Ballard I swear by Concrete Island, The Crystal World, High-Rise, and his breakthrough autobiography Empire of the Sun (sentimentalized by Steven Spielberg, what a surprise).

Rest in peace, Jim. Another guy the gatekeeper literati didn't know what to make of, adored by artists, filmmakers, etc.

Update: Not that Ballard necessarily wanted past the gate. As Simon Reynolds notes in a Salon obit: "There's an impulse among some Ballard fans, especially those who are 'proper' literati themselves, to elevate Ballard and argue that his work transcends the ghetto of genre fiction. Although Ballard occasionally expressed frustration with SF's pulpy aura, and later in his career wrote novels that fell outside its parameters, he generally was content to situate himself in the genre and loudly championed its potential. 'I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature,' he once declared, '... all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.'"

"Dearth of the Cool (2009 Remix)"

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"Dearth of the Cool (2009 Remix)" [mp3 removed]

This is some acoustica done about 3 years ago. It needed more variety in the second half, so added a couple more motifs, and also made the mix more balanced. A jazzy dodecaphonish midi quickie but I like parts of it a lot.

posts elsewhere

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ginormica at Nasty Nets (the cyborg in popular culture)

web art preservation at Nasty Nets

Carolyn Swiszcz paintings at... Nasty Nets

discussing a famous NY cyber conceptualist's talk in Toronto that apparently went over like a lead Hindenburg. The subject of Net Art 1.0 vs 2.0 came up so had to refresh my memory by looking at a textbook history:

I am re-skimming some of Rachel Greene's book Internet Art. She seems to have been sleepwalking in some of her descriptions of the early work. She calls Lialina's 1996 piece My Boyfriend Came Home From the War an "oblique, dramatized romantic narrative" with elements of interactivity (what Sally calls "find-the-place-to-click-me").
But to hear Lialina talk about that work in a lecture here in NY it is a Dadaist goof with a pseudo narrative (what boyfriend? what war?) that made fun of the slow loading tech of the time.

Heath Bunting's King's Cross Phone In, 1994, reads to me like the prototype Net Art piece that launched a thousand Rhizome commissions. Bunting publishes a list of pay phone numbers for a London train station on the Internet with instructions to start ringing the numbers at a certain time. Passersby in London witness a "spontaneous" international phone-ringing symphony--a Situationist or Fluxus type event. It's the predecessor of the cell phone "flash mob" although Greene's 2004 book was probably too early to make that connection.

To me it says more about long-distance rates and I would assume that the "international-ness" of the calls depended on how well heeled the participants are. I'm guessing most of the calls came from within the same area code, but Greene doesn't get into the economics of it at all.

In any case that situationist stuff is mostly a great story--hearing about it is just as good as participating. That interests me considerably less than making visual art, film or music with brain dead web based tools.