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David Lynch asks a WTC 7 related question (Quicktime). Go David!
Click it today* because it's his daily report and the question probably won't be up tomorrow.
*("Friday, June 23. Here in LA we have blue skies, golden sunshine...")
Update, Jun 26: Here's what he asked on Friday: "An interesting question for the blog page: Do you think all high rise buildings should be condemned? Because as was proven with for instance the WTC 7 building in New York, if a few floors catch on fire, the whole building falls down. Do you therefore think all high rise buildings should be condemned?"
"Piano Three Hands (Drums)" [mp3 removed]
I posted this tune a while back as an "acoustic piano" piece. [mp3 removed] A friend was nice to compare it to Conlon Nancarrow, who laboriously wrote music on real piano rolls to be played by real player pianos.
That's encouraging, but I'm not as atonal or obsessive as CN. I was actually imagining some kind of "dazzling" Keith Emerson/Wyndham Hill solo played without any emotional expression. The crowd-pleasing speed and key-modulating complexity without the ladled-on passion we expect from keyboard virtuosos.
Here, I took the same tune and added drums and changed the piano samples to more of a "house" sound. Now it could be a MIDI version of Yellow Magic Orchestra, or at the very least, not Nancarrow. The point here, if I have one, is that our associations of music depend largely on the instruments used rather than structure.
This one's more fun, I think.
If you liked the video of racing police cars I posted last week you might also like this YouTube clip depicting a deck being torn off a rustic cabin. [via schwarz].
"Our Rulers From Space" [mp3 removed]
The weird effects are mostly the AdrenaLinn II, a beat-synched filter FX box. A kind of '50s "Mars Attacks" vibe crept in.
John Zoller, Alphamega 8, 48 x 70 inches, laser light print, at the APG Gallery, Atlanta, GA. Zoller's "Alphamega" series is "non camera based photography" created with fire on photo emulsion and without any digital manipulation--an old school FX approach, although I'm not aware of anyone who did anything quite like this. It's a bit reminiscent of the Joshua White gelatin/food color/Pyrex dish/overhead projector school of psychedelic light show (pre-laser shows) gone all rigorous and formally elegant. The multifaceted Zoller (a New Yorker now living in Fla.) also did the "United States: Color and Learn" painting series I've posted a few examples of. Below: detail of Alphamega 3.
Sally McKay has documentation up of the "Mods & Rockers" show she curated for Digifest 2006 at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (on view through July 9). A few posts back I ran some pics of kids looking at the part of the installation I collaborated on with John Parker. Below are some pics from Sally that give the overall layout of the show. There are 8 "display windows," each with video capability and divided into pairs. Each of the four participating artist teams (consisting of one Mod and one Rocker) was assigned a pair of display windows. Headphones common to each pair of windows played audio from a single sound source. John and I opted to have the videos running independently from each other--both are looping, "steady state," psychedelically flavored digital abstractions (documented earlier here ). The audio (documented here) is a tune we jointly composed, with the idea in mind that it would generally "go" with the videos without being in sync with them-- thematically, as well as with random rhythmic and melodic correspondences the viewer could potentially experience. Our installation seems to work as a stand-alone piece (based on the feedback I've had from Toronto) but it is also a "digital non-site" in that the various stages of it, our experimentation and thought process, frames, fragments, sound bites, false starts, and "tech content," were documented on this blog and John's website. The subject matter one viewer kindly described as "full on digital." This is from our statement:
Rather than have some kind of face-off, or rumble, we are merging sensibilities. The collective inner Mod is the high tech influence in the form of some sophisticated audio software and a newish laptop used to edit and burn the video, and the inner Rocker is the low tech source material: 8-Bit-style tunes on an old Mac (some originally composed in the '80s) and animated GIFs by Tom based on MSPaint versions of Web images of John's work.
We're trying for some sort of parity between the audio and visual material. Pixels and square waves are both medium and subject.
It's been fun knowing you all on the Internet, but the party's coming to an end unless we start lighting up the phones at Congress.
What Would a Non-Neutral Internet Look Like?Excerpts of a debate between an amazon exec and Telco spokesman/hack Mike McCurry here.
by Matt Stoller, Mon Jun 19, 2006 at 01:18:36 PM EST
Ok, it's March, 2008. You go to your computer and open your Verizon-supertier browser, and everything comes at you with blazing speed. You access your bank, NBC news, Andrew Sullivan's blog through Time.com, and check your email. You watch the last five minutes of Scary Movie 7, which you fell asleep watching the night before. Pretty cool.
Then you remember your best friend set up a new blog about her band and asked you to check it out. It's kind of irritating, because she set it up on the slow tier. You minimize the Verizon browser, open up Firefox, and type in the web address. It takes thirty seconds to load. Ugh. The site's fine, and there are some cute pictures of her band performing in a dive bar. You click on a song, and the browser begins loading the first minute of the song. After twenty seconds, you curse the fact that she didn't pay to be on Verizon's internet, and you close the browser. You're even thinking of canceling your slow-tier internet account, since shelling out the $45/month for that plus the $29/month for Verizon super-tier isn't worth it.
Welcome to a non-neutral internet.
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The net neutrality fight is coming to the Senate this week, with the Commerce Committee set to mark up the bill on Thursday. If you live in one of these states, call your Senator. We need strong net neutrality provisions in any telecom reform bill, and those that came out in the second draft over the weekend are not acceptable.
Chairman Ted Stevens (AK), (202) 224-3004
John McCain (AZ), (202) 224-2235
Conrad Burns (MT), Main: 202-224-2644
Trent Lott (MS), (202) 224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), 202-224-5922
Gordon H. Smith (OR), 202.224.3753
John Ensign (NV), (202) 224-6244
George Allen (VA), (202) 224-4024
John E. Sununu (NH), (202) 224-2841
Jim DeMint (SC), 202-224-6121
David Vitter (LA),(202) 224-4623
Co-Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (HI), 202-224-3934
John D. Rockefeller (WV), (202) 224-6472
John F. Kerry (MA), (202) 224-2742
Barbara Boxer (CA), (202) 224-3553
Bill Nelson (FL), 202-224-5274
Maria Cantwell (WA), 202-224-3441
Frank R. Lautenberg (NJ), (202) 224-3224
E. Benjamin Nelson (NE), (202) 224-6551
Mark Pryor (AR), (202) 224-2353