PingMag - Audium: See With Your Ears
Now imagine yourself seated in a pitch-dark room being flooded with multiple layers of soundscapes wrapping around your body… and 174 speakers guide you into a heaven of noise, composed by Mr. Shaff himself.

Funny, had to find out about this sound theater in San Francisco from a Japanese magazine… to be visited (I think I am playing a couple of solo shows in San Fran next May)

Link to Audium website.

Op-Ed Columnist - A Biblical Seven Years - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
After attending the spectacular closing ceremony at the Beijing Olympics and feeling the vibrations from hundreds of Chinese drummers pulsating in my own chest, I was tempted to conclude two things: “Holy mackerel, the energy coming out of this country is unrivaled.” And, two: “We are so cooked. Start teaching your kids Mandarin.”

Start here.

I love that title!

Here is another example of the theme I keep circling back on - balancing body and mind… no, let me re-phrase that: Balancing Body and Brain - for I believe that Mind happens somewhere at the juncture of Body and Brain. Where body and brain meet, mind happens. That would make a fine bumper sticker. Check out this story:

‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ by Haruki Murakami - Los Angeles Times
The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has run nearly every day for the last 23 years and participates in at least one marathon a year. In his slim memoir, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” — the title is a nod to Raymond Carver, one of the many American writers that Murakami has translated — he narrates his origin story as a novelist and as a runner. In his 20s, he owned and operated a jazz club. While watching a baseball game, he decided, “out of the blue,” that he could write a novel. “Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it.” After writing two books, he sold the club to devote himself to fiction — his first novel to be translated into English, “A Wild Sheep Chase,” followed. As his writing career took off, his health began to decline — the result of all that sitting and smoking. Murakami decided to take up running.

And Murakami does not not just jog… he runs marathons, ultramarathons (62 miles) and triathlons…

Cool Hunting
In conjunction with Creative Time, Playing the Building is an installation by David Byrne that transformed a 9,000 square foot abandoned room in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Maritime Building into an instrument for the summer. An antique pump organ controls devices that create sounds using the building’s infrastructure, including heating pipes, metal beams and pillars.

I subscribed to Coolhunting.com’s vid podcast in iTunes. The quality is higher than the YouTube version and they have a lot of nice little vids. Click here to go to the web page or go to iTunes and search for the Coolhunting podcast.

A cool store in Copenhagen sells several lightweight cargo bikes.
Gotta love the John Player Special.
I want one!!
(Via Copenhagenize.com - The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog)

Related Link

PS: in case you didn’t get it… check out this.

I turned one of my water bottles (a 40 oz. bottle I bought here) into my bulk olive oil carrier. I figured stainless steel can easily be cleaned and won’t break during transport. At home I fill up a glass bottle from this container. Could not be easier. Now that it is properly labelled all I have to do is re-fill it and pay for the oil. Zero waste and zero recycling.

I want to find similar stainless steel containers I can use for rice and other bulk items.

How about that moon last night! As I drove home around midnight, I would come around a bend thinking that the moon was a streetlight. It hung so low that I was afraid it might topple down onto Santa Fe.

Promoting Cycling in Style from Holland
Nine adverts promoting cycling from Holland.
(Via Copenhagenize.com - The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog)

If you can make it through to the end - the last one is hilarious.

Canton and I brainstormed on a sweeping web site remodel. A lot of groovy ideas came up. It’s about time we shake the cobwebs out. Canton built our first web site 12 years ago… remember Pandora’s box?

August 29th’s concert near Denver will feature Souhail Kaspar on percussion instead of Davo Bryant.

This morning I discovered that the rear tire of my bike had deflated, walked the bike back up the hill to my house and drove. When Jon pulled his bike out of the shed he keeps it in, he discovered that he too had a flat rear tire… What are the odds? Jon says that as he was opening the door, he thought how weird it would be if his bike had a flat tire as well…

We met for breakfast and saw this very cool cargo bike:

dave commented:
Well, it does have 8 speeds. You could put your guitar in front and pedal to local shows.

Link to Dutch manufacturer and link to U.S. dealer

From an earlier post:

Ottmar Liebert » Blog Archive » Saturday Music One-Two
In a few years you might just find me on a horse or bicycle, with a guitar and laptop strapped to my back, riding from gig to gig. Or, maybe this itinerant mariachi with international connections should use a mule-drawn cart…

Op-Ed Columnist - Flush With Energy - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.

More Boston commuters are taking to their bicycles - The Boston Globe
“We’re definitely at some kind of a tipping point,” said David Watson, executive director of MassBike (massbike.org), a nonprofit cycling advocacy and education group.

Data on commuter bicycle use are scant, Watson said. On his daily ride from Arlington into Boston, he sees “more and more bike traffic from week to week.” He mentioned a survey showing a 70 percent increase in ridership between 2002 and 2006 in Cambridge, quoted on the website of the League of American Bicyclists (bikeleague.org).

Monkey-wrenching Bike Plans in San Fran : TreeHugger
The San Diego Union Tribune reports this morning that, while most cities are seeing a huge growth in bicycle-ridership, San Francisco has a bit of a cog in the wheel. 65-year old Rob Anderson thinks bikes might actually be more harmful for the environment and has demanded an environmental impact assessment from the city, ultimately halting the city’s massive pro-bike plan rollout.

New bike lanes, bike racks and even a possible bike sharing program with an aim to increase ridership 10% by 2010 are all on halt until the city can quantify the environmental impact such a change might have. Bike riders, on the other hand, are furious, but nothing has worked, from protesting outside of City Hall to threatening to bring the issue to local voters.

Anderson’s beef: that cars will always outnumber bikes, and by squeezing streets to allow for bikes, you just make traffic congestion worse - thus increasing pollution. The city’s bike-friendly plan included 527 pages of “maps, traffic analyses and a list of roughly 240 locations where the city hoped to make cycling easier.”

And best of all - the guy doesn’t even own a car. Just a man on a strange and inexplicable mission…

Here is a reaction from Copenhagen:

Copenhagenize.com - The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog: More Promoting Cycling - or Not
San Francisco Sillyness
On the other side of the pond, in San Francisco, there is a man fighting against bike lanes and infrastructure. He sounds like a ‘character’ - read into that whatever you like - but it is amazing that he has gotten this far. There are so many studies from Europe that basically disprove every claim he has. A shame nobody tells the city hall about them.

Top 50 greatest Olympic Games moments - Times Online
Athens 1896. Greeks had expected to win lots of medals but none came until the marathon (which back then was conducted over 40km). Of the 17 runners, 14 of them were Greek. Part time water seller and shepherd, Spyridon Louis, overtook a Frenchman and an Australian to win and was accompanied over the line by Princes Constantine and George who subsequently gave him a farm. Legend says that he stopped at a restaurant half way through the race to down an alcoholic beverage and told everyone he would win.

Transit Stop Design Delivers Message In A Bottle
Yvette Hurt of Art in Motion in Lexington, Kentucky, notes that a Federal study concluded that more people used public transit systems that incorporated art.
(Via TreeHugger)

Moving Targets - NYTimes.com
During morning rush, the teeth-gritting of drivers is almost audible, as superbly fit cyclists, wearing Sharpie-toned spandex and riding $3,000 bikes, cockily dart through the swampy, stolid traffic to offices with bike racks and showers.

Who needs a $3,000 bike to outrun a car in the city.? Most clunkers can do that.

The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Neal Stephenson - King of the Worlds
Building the clock, it turns out, has been an antidote to the toxic fixation on short-term thinking that permeates our culture. Hillis and the friends who joined him—like fellow Long Now cofounders Stewart Brand (who wrote a book about the project) and Brian Eno (who composed a CD of chimes inspired by the clock)—found that its design and construction required recalibrating one’s own mental clock to envision what things would be like in the distant future. Ideally, that mindset encourages behavior that tends to preserve the environment for clock customers in the year 12000, instead of gobbling up resources and leaving behind trash that tends to mess things up for those folks.

Also see this article in Wired Mag on Stephenson’s new book.

“I could never get that idea, the notion that society in general is becoming aliterate, out of my head,” he says. “People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart.”

It’s been THAT long?

January 2009: “Barcelona Nights” was recorded 20 years ago.
February 2009: I have lived for half a century.
August 2009: “Marita: Shadows and Storms” was released 20 years ago.
Deccember 2009: Jon and I started touring 20 years ago.

Storytelling and oral culture is local, books are cosmopolitan and the web is international. The first is the most physical as actual molecules are exchanged, air is moved, pheromones and scents are exchanged. Physical presence is required.

Maybe playing music live is storytelling, recording music is a book and midi is the web. Midi is more in the head than recording part after part… Some musicians did well with midi, others did not. Stevie Wonder and Joe Zawinul recorded mind-boggling music before midi, but after they adopted midi, their music (at least to my ears) suffered. The strange thing is that they did not seem to recognize that themselves. Neither of them, as far as I know, ever went back to the pre-midi world of layering instruments. Stevie Wonder is a great drummer, but seemed to be happy using drum-machines after 1985.

I have never really used midi. I record guitar after guitar to a click track, then add bass and then record the percussionists. Then Jon might add synths and the guitar melodies and soli are last.

Yesterday I heard from a friend that some therapists work via the phone or even email. Really? What about physical reactions… maybe the voice stays even, but the patient grips the chair… or, on the phone one can at least hear a quiver in the voice… but email? But, once again there are three levels of interaction… storytelling, book, internet - sitting in front of a therapist, using the phone and using email…

That got me thinking about MySpace and other social sites. No sound, no scent, no personal vibe. In that world a person can be anybody they want to be. A man can pose as a woman and vice versa. A short person can become a giant basketball player. Some people use photos of themselves, others don’t even bother. Headgames. Brain playing brain. What will a person, who grows up on MySpace, be like in their thirties or forties? Will they order everything on the net? Will they go out at all?

Last night I watched this TED talk. Computers don’t have enough Africa in them… If one does NOT grow up with Western Sci-Fi novels and movies and buys into computing - what would one think of it? Would computers be strangely devoid of pleasant smell and touch? Would we wonder why the computer cannot react to dancing input? Why is it so NOT-artistic?

We seem to adapt to the way computers think, instead of the other way around. Then again, personal computers have been around for less than three decades. Maybe they are simply still the shiny new toy.

To me computers are another brain-game. It makes one want to park one’s body, in order to enter the matrix in some way. Should it not involve the body? 25% of Americans are obese, I read somewhere. Does that have something to do with computers - and video games? (((and cars!)))

Why do we try to get away from our bodies? We often drive when we could walk or bike… and isn’t a car a lot like a computer? Minimal physical input… and even that isn’t enough distraction from our lives - we need to talk on the cellphone while we drive…

And then there are those who are waiting for the singularity… to live forever, or at least a few hundred or a thousand years. The brain is a flower - just like the rest of the body… Neural plasticity blooms, flowers and wilts… I guess we will find out the hard way, how long that can be extended sensibly. Better build-in an off switch in case your techno-body last too long…

Ah, don’t mind me. I had a very nice bottle of Pinot Noir with my friend, to celebrate his birthday. I walked to the restaurant and back… the light was incredible, the sky a translucent blue - really, the sky looked like a painted backdrop for an old Hollywood movie. I walked slowly, as if to savor each step and each breath.

June Taylor Jams
June Taylor makes small batches of some of the most mouth-watering jams, preserves, syrups and marmalades we’ve tasted. In this video, June modestly shares her artisan and old-world techniques, explaining how nature helps dictate exotic flavor combinations like Strawberry and Provençal Lavender and how she takes into consideration even the tiniest of details, such as the shape and size of the pieces of fruit. It’s a window into an exceedingly rare level of art and craft.

Ping - Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands - NYTimes.com
GEVER TULLEY has only one qualification for training software designers how to become more creative. He teaches children how to build objects like gravity-powered wooden roller coasters with their hands, at his Tinkering School in Montara, Calif., south of San Francisco.

Now Mr. Tulley does the same thing for dozens of adults who are in the front ranks of software design at Adobe, the big software supplier based in San Jose, Calif. In daylong workshops, about 100 Adobe designers wrestle with plastic beads, small electronic displays, Ikea water glasses and tiny sensors to create wacky motion games. Usually, about the only thing these folks touch on the job is a computer mouse.

“Some people thought we were crazy to do this,” says Michael Gough, a vice president for design at Adobe. “But for others, the experience has started to inform how they work,” giving them a better appreciation of how customers experience Adobe’s programs.

Balancing head and body. I have more thoughts brewing on the subject… maybe I’ll be ready to post my thoughts next week.