January 2013

three movies we won't be seeing, ever:

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Lincoln - in this biopic, miserable hack director Steven Spielberg, who yearns for respectability so badly it's killing him, misrepresents Abraham Lincoln as the first Hollywood liberal.

Django Unchained - one slave's payback is a pitiful feelgood substitute for a depiction of a general revolt, but any such depiction would have to show the resulting retaliatory massacre to be the least bit historically plausible, and that's just too grim for a movie.

Zero Dark Thirty - torture or no torture, an exciting suspense film celebrating extrajudicial murder is not a great idea. The "hit" punished a crime that had a zillion lingering questions instantly put to bed when the snuffing took place.

vegetable stand

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potato_corn

...is I guess what you'd call this. Based on a photo of some food stylist insanity that became a minor dump.fm meme.
The objective here was to try some old-school painting using the "improved," Windows 7, Paint program.
You can't blend worth a damn so the only way to build up any volume is with scratchy strokes where the slight transparency of the edges overlaps. In physical media it's probably analogous to the crosshatching with egg tempera glazes famously practiced by Paul Cadmus. The result is a little uncomfortably close to illustration for me (as opposed to "photorealism," if that term has any meaning when making a computer rendering eyeballing a photo).

indispensable graph search

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If, 15 years ago, America Online had announced, "we have a product that we believe is competitive with Google called Graph Search, which allows you to search all of AOL," they would have been laughed off the web.
The New AOL just announced its own Graph Search (it's actually called that) and tech pundit Andrew Leonard stroked his beard and said:

If Facebook’s past is prologue, a vocal minority will complain loudly for a week, the majority will start avidly using the tool, and six months later, Graph Search will feel like an indispensable part of our daily life.

That's supposed to be ironic, maybe, possibly.

to video or not

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Disquiet posted some videos from the performance event at Apex Art I participated in last November. ("Speculative Sound Performance with Disquiet Junto," in conjunction with the exhibition "As Real As It Gets," organized by Rob Walker.) I was excited to be involved but didn't think my tunes needed video documentation. As I explained on Disquiet, in the comments:

Not that anyone’s asking but I requested that Apex take down my video because it didn’t really add anything. My songs were performed on the Octatrack groovebox exactly as you hear them on my website. Hearing them in person gave the added “oomph” of a quality PA system but I could just as easily have been sitting in a chair in the audience pressing the “play” button. The video took the music straight off the soundboard so the only thing you were getting in that documentation was a permanent image of how I looked from a certain camera angle while the music was playing. Boring! It was great (and encouraging) for me to hear the tunes in a room with actual listeners, in a program of music by others whose contributions I enjoyed. But going through the motions of traditional performance makes me uncomfortable and I wonder if other ambient and electronic musicians have thoughts on how we should present ourselves physically, or whether it’s necessary at all, as part of the process of re-inventing music.

No one answered so this would appear to be my issue alone. Although not too long ago there were these groups Drexciya and Underground Resistance that de-personalized their music and didn't participate in the traditional star-making commodity structures of publicity photos and performance videos showing the musicians' faces furiously concentrating as genius welled up from their fingertips. In the YouTube era we are all conditioned to act out so we can be the next Justin Bieber and eventually be infinitely documented throwing up onstage.

where is reagan???

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Funny/sickening story from the Tampa Bay Times about Gov. Rick Scott's discreet return of a photo-op "rescue dog" after he won the election.
While on the campaign trail, he posted a picture of the Labrador retriever and had a Facebook contest to name the animal.
His FB friends chose the name of one of the worst American presidents.
After the election, reporters started asking what happened to Reagan the dog. The governor's press spokesmen got very testy and evasive, prompting one reporter to ask if the dog had been killed!
Finally someone asked the Governor directly and he admitted that Reagan had some behavioral issues and "wouldn't get better." Staffers then confirmed that Reagan had been returned to All Pets Grooming and Boarding in Naples.

via eschaton