Once a work of art has colonized your brain you see it everywhere. The landscape piece Duncan Alexander contributed to a recent Nicholas O'Brien-curated show at 319 Scholes has had that effect on me. Was surfing around the website of the Metropolitan Museum and spotted it on a Google cache page. See the red arrow in the screenshot below (not the black one):
And then I found its original location on the Met website. It seems to have acquired a drop shadow but the style is unmistakable.
"Crom and Bass" [mp3 removed]
This song has a message and the message is "I don't care." (Technical note to self: the main synth is the A-112 wavetable playing a sample of the Vermona Perfourmer and harmonizing with another Perfourmer riff played simultaneously with the same MIDI notes. The guitar amp-like vibrato is made with an ADSR envelope's control voltage plugged into the A-112's CV in.)
"Barney's Bag" [mp3 removed -- a revised version is on Bandcamp]
The song is kind of jazzy and the title is kind of a parody of a jazz song title from the '50s. This is a substantial reworking of a song I don't yet have the fortitude to post, with the working title "Barney's Bag (Chipmunks)," which features chipmunk-like vocalese made with live FM synthesis.
This version has the synth-bass-piano combo I've been working with in recent songs; I had to write some harmony to make this work. (Monk meets Glass in a robo-carwash.)
Update: The problem discussed below was solved--somewhat inelegantly--by installing the Disabler Word Press plugin and checking "Disable Texturization" in "Settings."
Before CSS took over all human expression I used two hyphens to make a long dash (also called an em-dash or emdash, ostensibly because it's the length of the letter "m"). In text or HTML that's an adequate way to distinguish dash from hyphen using the QWERTY keys and no special characters. CSS tries to get cute and replace characters you type without having an agreed-upon standard about what's being replaced. Hence this problem:
There is a character called an en-dash or endash that is shorter than an emdash but rarely used. Up until this month, Word Press, or perhaps just the "classic" or "journalist" WP themes, automatically replaced two hyphens with an en-dash. Unbeknownst to me and most of the rational world, you were supposed to be typing three hyphens to make an emdash. I haven't done this, ever. The endash was a poor substitute but it was unhyphenlike enough and sufficed for me to separate thoughts in a sentence. But when I upgraded to Word Press 3, suddenly each endash on this blog is reading as a single hyphen. I've amended the posts from the last couple of weeks to make "proper" emdashes but what about the last seven years?
Google Reader and Bloglines still show endashes for my two-hyphen typing. Saved pages from this blog, in Firefox, show two hyphens. So its clear the "two hyphens into one" filtering is happening in my current, live, Word Press, CSS, theme, editor, micromanager, whatever. Pardon me while I disappear for a while until I figure out a way to fix this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
