Tuesday

02010-09-14 | Uncategorized

This dovetails nicely ino what I wrote on Friday. Not only is that fake history very silly, it is also a hazard for the people who create it.

Sandblasting Abandoned By Levi’s and H & M
Levi’s and H & M have announced that they will no longer place orders for sandblasted garments (included jeans) due to the health hazard they pose.

Music from the very influential band Can from Cologne. (((and yes, Holger was a big inspiration for Eno and Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”. He was adding snippets found on short-wave radio years before Eno did, and Eno heard that when he worked with the band Cluster in a studio near Köln)))

BP-Global-PR outed

Andrew Bird Cultivates a ‘Sonic Arboretum’ – PBS
– more looping… everyone is looping these days

Nice article explaining the machinations behind a toy for the rich and shameless.

This, on the other hand, is a beautiful restauration of a lovely machine.

Tuesday in Santa Fe

02010-09-01 | Uncategorized

Ottmar Liebert’s Diary: Benefit Concert for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
Ottmar Liebert – Tour Schedule: Benefit Concert for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
OL + Luna Negra at Popejoy Hall in Albuquerque on September 30th.

You can buy tickets here – select “Search by Event” field and scroll down to Ottmar Liebert & Luna Negra.

From John Cage’s 1967 foreword to his book A year from Monday:

I then explained that I believe – and am acting upon – Marshall McLuhan’s statement that we have through electronic technology produced an extension of our brains to the world formerly outside of us. To me that means that the disciplines, gradual (((I think he means the Soto school of Zen))) and sudden (((Rinzai school))), formerly practiced by individuals tp pacify their minds, bringing them into accord with ultimate reality, must now be practiced socially – that is, not just inside our heads, but outside of them, in the world, where our central nervous system effectively now is.

The Monk and the Monkey – nice animated short on Vimeo.

Musicians talking about music. An Andy Zuckerman film. Has his trademark high-tech, white background look, which doesn’t do much for me. Interesting, but it looks like a hospital, like a disection room. Here is a link to his website. He has a Vimeo account and this is a link to a short film for his book Birds. The detail and colors of the birds are fantastic, but the blown out whites look just doesn’t work for me. Very Sixties future… 2001 and all that…

Marginal Revolution: Markets in everything
Music lovers can now be immortalised when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones.

A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favourite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles.

But, who still has a turntable… (((Well, I have one, but the needle is kaputt)))

Old keyboard. A lot of keys no longer worked. I put it in the dishwasher at the lowest setting and took it out before the drying cycle could melt anything. I’ll let you know whether this worked.

I love walking down the stairs into the bracing cold air in the kitchen, cooled overnight by leaving all of the windows open to the mountain night air. The cold air wakes me up and makes the first cup of tea or coffee seem even hotter in my hands.

How different Glenn Gould performed the first piece from the Well-tempered Clavier, the “Prelude in C Major”. It sounds like a mantra almost, the way he turned the second half of each phrase into a slightly staccato statement. Unusual and compelling, I had to download it from iTunes yesterday, and listened to it half a dozen times in a row, right away. I realized what makes Bach so grand is the absence of rhythm, the falling away of rhythm in favor of harmony. As if one sibling stepped aside to allow another to shine.

iTunes album link.

Wednesday in Santa Fe

02010-08-11 | Uncategorized

Marginal Revolution: Spontaneous order on the road
Here’s a video of a small town in Britain that turned its traffic lights off.  Order ensued.

I updated the photoblog with new images.

Charles Lloyd recently sent me this link to a video for his new album, which will drop next month. I met Charles in Paris and Tokyo with Yohji Yamamoto in 1991. The new album sounds great!

Gerry on August 11th, 2010 at 03:32
‘For a while I thought that Creative Commons licensing was actually a good idea, but no longer.’
Could you explain a little more? Do you have any advice for musicians/ songwriters about protecting their work? I’ve been thinking about using an indepenent agent such as ‘protect my work’ who charge an annual fee around $50 but don’t know if it’s money well spent.

LAH – that stands for “laughing all hard”, which is the New Mexican version of LOL… I have a hard time believing that you will get much more than a few automated searches for the $50 annualy. Well, plus maybe they’ll send a form letter when they find that somebody is using or sharing your work. Copyright is automatic and you can send CDs to the Library of Congress or ask somebody, who’s done that before, to do it for you. I haven’t dealt with that in a couple of decades, as our publishing administrator takes care of this, but I remember doing this in the Eighties. I am sure you can find instructions somewhere on the internet.

Here are a few thoughts:
– what are you looking for: do you want to perform your music or sell recordings or both?
– do you want to use your recorded music to procure gigs?
– the value of your work increases with its popularity
– the value of your work may also increase because of its rareness (((e.g. clothing from the German fashion label Acronym is only available from a few retailers around the world. Acronym produce a limited amount which is highly sought after and sells out before market saturation)))
– your music is safest if you don’t let anybody hear it (((like keeping a painting in a vault, never showing it)))
– if nobody hears your music, it can’t become popular
– licensing of your music will only occur if the music is heard
– your music will be licensed if it is popular or fresh, or both
– at present protecting one’s music is a bit like trying to hold water in one hand
– do you want to spend most of your time creating music, or chasing after pirates?
– too much protection lowers the chance of the music being widely heard
– too little protection means that everyone already downloaded the music – why should they buy it?

I don’t know whether that helps. The truth is that I don’t have answers, and in fact nobody has answers. Some people (((cough Chris Anderson from Wired cough cough))) have made money from writing about the longtail and from giving talks about it, but I am afraid they are the only ones who have made money from that idea. We are all collectively stumbling about, looking for a way. Culture is moving down a tunnel, blindfolded, trying to determine what might work. In the opinion of many, popular music has never been worse… perhaps and perhaps not.

Last words: some people might suggest giving your music away, so that it might be heard and you gain a certain number of fans. Then you might be able to move to charging for the music or hope that these new fans buy tickets for one of your performances. However, those fans you gained will be fans of your free music and it would remain to be seen whether they would be willing to pay for the same music.

Ha! See, I am not helping at all… now you have likely more questions. Welcome to the rubber raft that musicians are currently in, after that ship that was supposedly iceberg-proof started leaking and went under.

That’s a funny headline… and the article is quite good, too:

Epicenter | Wired.com
Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey (UPDATED)

Friday in Santa Fe

02010-06-19 | Uncategorized

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Letter to the Guardian by David Hockney, regarding this article on Caravaggio.

Letters: Art from the sublime to the ridiculed | The Guardian
The critics say he invented chiaroscuro, or dramatic shading never seen before. A lot is known about Caravaggio’s studios, more than most of his contemporaries. They describe the dark walls and a hole in the ceiling (known because he was sued). A few people have made serious suggestions that optical projections were used, and as there are no known drawings, and no record he ever made one, the evidence is very strong indeed.

No conventional historian has bothered to ask how these paintings were made. They think it is of little interest. It is of major interest to us now. The similarity to today’s Photoshop techniques is fascinating. This seems to me to make him a more interesting artist, not less. It accounts for the new kind of space he opened (like TV close-ups), it accounts for the dark walls and the hole in the ceiling. His bones are neither here nor there because of this – a minor event compared with the implications for our time of his new techniques.

Read More

This is about a sixteenth century painter, mind you. Look at these three paintings presented on wikipedia: The Calling of Saint Matthew and Crucifixion of St. Peter, and Judith Beheading Holofernes. Dark subject matter, but with intense light, unbelievable detail and life.
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Wireless Oligopoly Is Smother of Invention | Epicenter | Wired.com
Imagine if the wireless carriers controlled your wired broadband connection or your television set. You’d have to buy your television from your cable company, with a two-year contract, and when that ended, you’d have to ask them to unlock it so you could take it to another provider.

If the wireless company ran your ISP, you’d have to use a computer they approved, and if you wanted to use a different one, you’d pay more. Want Wi-Fi in your house? That’ll be an extra $30 a month and $150 to buy an approved but functionally limited Wi-Fi device.

And

Require the nation’s wireless carriers to publish the specs they use on their networks, so that any device maker can make a device that works on any network or all the networks. Then require the carriers to offer service, with published limits, to any customer, using any compliant device, at a fair price. Subscribers would have the right to use more than one device, or at the very least, switch them with minimal effort. Those devices could run whatever software they like, so long as they don’t harm the network.

That should be the requirement for the carriers who are using the public’s spectrum.

AT&T and Sprint and Verizon and T-Mobile may have paid hefty sums to rent the airwaves, but they do not own them.

The carriers will doubtlessly whine to Congress that their networks are too special and too fragile. Meanwhile, they will brag to customers about how strong and robust their cell networks are — touting services like streaming video for the iPhone, Skype on Verizon, and SprintTV on Sprint smartphones.

They can’t have it both ways.
Read More

I don’t know how I feel about agreeing with Wired… :-)

I think cellular service should be a simple data-pipeline, just like internet service is. Let’s do away with separating that data into voice-call, texting and web-service – that is an artificial differentiation anyway as it is ALL digital data. Charge me by the amount of data I consume, the amount of bits I require to make calls, send SMS and browse the web… and let me choose to consume that data on my phone, on my iPad and on my computer. Come on, it’s only a matter of time. We all know that’s the way forward.
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Nice little web app for regular browsers and iPad.

Time Zones

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On Thursday I was alerted to a new album on iTunes:

I noticed there was already one nice customer review.
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Why Keith Richards should take over Tate Modern | Jonathan Jones | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
Music legends of the 1960s might be welcome in today’s pop music, but contemporary art shuns its old masters – why?

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Ingenious Flipper Bridge Melds Left-Side Drivers With Right-Side Drivers | Fast Company
One of the most vexing aspects of traveling between mainland China and Hong Kong is the car travel: People in the former drive on the right side of the road; people in the latter drive on the left (a vestige of the British empire).

So to quell confusion at the border and, more importantly, to keep cars from smashing into each other, the Dutch firm NL Architects proposed a brilliant, simple solution, the Flipper bridge.

Brilliant and beautiful.
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Musical Mad Scientist Concocts Bizarre Instruments, Strange Sounds | Underwire | Wired.com
Music From Sand

“I had some sandbags in the backyard that I used in November during a rainy day. I was moving them to a different spot when I heard the noise of the sand. I thought that maybe I could try a new sound-design technique, so I bought some piezo-film transducers and started to experiment with them.

“The entire track is created only out of tuned sand tones — no additional sounds or waveforms. I emphasized the inner notes of the sand grains and mapped them on a sampler as a series of instruments. The grooves are all played live with various techniques, including taping two piezo films to my fingers.” —Diego Stocco

Interesting and original. With lots of video, and ads.
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Note from Canton:

FYI our server will be intermittently sluggish and fast today, maybe for the next few days. I’m in them midst of trying to contain a zombie botnet distributed denial of service attack coming out of indonesia. Has been going on for about a week I think, and started getting nasty last night.

Not sure whether that sounds more like early William Gibson or like Harry Potter…
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My new favorite yogurt:

Old Chatham Sheepherding Company
1st Place Winner, 2002 American Cheese Society Cheese Competition

Our yogurt is made from 100% pure pasteurized sheep’s milk and healthy active cultures, nothing else. There are no gums, no stabilizers, and no other artificial thickeners used in our yogurt. Our Maple Yogurt is produced by added 100% percent pure maple syrup.

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I love this house in Korea.