==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, December 31, 2005

R.I.P. Derek Bailey

Saw little note of this online when Jeph mentioned it on Wednesday, and BlogStudio was down since then...

Wikipedia entry & Gavin Bryars' touching tribute.

Never listened to him much because my taste runs more to atmospheres and compositional innovation than musicianship and spare dissonance, but his abstract and relentlessly innovative playing/composing has had an incalculable influence on musicians who've never heard of him -- as well as many who have, of course (Fred Frith comes to mind first).

...despite often performing and recording in a solo context, he was far more interested in the dynamics and challenges of working with other musicians, especially those who did not necessarily share his own approach; "There has to be some degree, not just of unfamiliarity, but incompatibility [with a partner]. Otherwise, what are you improvising for? What are you improvising with or around? You've got to find somewhere where you can work. If there are no difficulties, it seems to me that there's pretty much no point in playing. I find that the things that excite me are trying to make something work. And when it does work, it's the most fantastic thing. Maybe the most obvious analogy would be the grit that produces the pearl in an oyster, or some shit like that."

Thanks, Derek.

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Blogstudio was down for a few days, back up now it seems...

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Monday, December 26, 2005

Life in a civilized country file

Canadian Supreme Court OKs group sex clubs

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R.I.P. Vincent Schiavelli

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Sunday, December 25, 2005

I watched Bozo, Gar & Ray: WGN TV Classics last night with Susan (who grew up with these characters in Chicago Metro -- they were new to me, I had Sandy Becker in NJ), and today found this site dedicated to clowns past and present

The WGN show reruns today at 2:00PM CT.

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Saturday, December 24, 2005

xmas message [video file]

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On PBS this Wednesday: Imagining America: Icons of 20th-Century American Art

Featuring archival interviews with artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquait, and new interviews with artists and art historians including Ed Ruscha, Wanda Corn, Jonathan Fineberg and Grace Hartigan, IMAGINING AMERICA provides a window into 20th-century America through the eyes of those who both chronicled and transformed it.

Each section of the film examines one of three basic questions: How do American artists represent the world around them ("America Pastoral"); how do American artists represent themselves ("Songs of Myself"); and how do American artists help us understand how mass media has transformed our sense of self and society ("The Media Is the Message")? Through the work, ideas and lives of more than 50 leading artists and scholars, these questions are stimulate the viewer to think about what makes us distinctly American.

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Thursday, December 22, 2005

Creepy news

Alistair Cooke's bones were surgically removed and sold on the black market for use as dental implants despite being infected with cancer cells

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Monday, December 19, 2005

Marc Weidenbaum's interview with Christiaan Virant, of the Buddha Machine-creating duo FM3

Weidenbaum: The record industry is so focused on piracy, I imagine that somewhere there's a record executive who wishes he, or she, could so closely tie music with a physical object, as you have. Do you think the Buddha Machine in some way comments on the current issues in music distribution?

Virant: Hmmm, again, living in Beijing, the focus of music dialogue is often different and this is something I've never really thought of before. Of course, there is an extreme piracy problem in China and many of my artist friends complain about not making money from their releases, even though they may sell tens of thousands. And even an FM3 release in 2004 was heavily pirated. But when we designed the Buddha Machine, we were mostly thinking of making our lives easier by having essentially an "instant" sound installation. Avoiding bootlegging never entered into the plan. And, actually, I must say, that FM3 downloads on Soulseek [the file sharing application] have directly led to more gigs for us and a wider global fan base.

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A moment of silence for the end of the gangster-clotted music industry

OK, that's enough.

Turn up the music...

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From the WFMU blog

Mark Allen's er penetrating review of Brokeback Mountain

Fussed-over and coiffed even in its gritty moments, the film is oddly fairy tale-like throughout... despite its almost sickeningly blighted ending. On the film's surface it is picturesque, poetic, dreamy, slow and subtle. Skilled director Ang Lee casts the rugged wilderness of Wyoming as a gorgeous, ever-turning Marlboro ad kaleidoscope - his take on the beauty of nature would have made Andy Warhol blush. Fitting, because at it's sad, sweet heart, the story being celebrated in the media as "new" and "shocking" - is only so within it's own slim mainstream pop culture bandwidth.

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Saturday, December 17, 2005

Wish I could be in San Francisco next month for Noir City 4, a 2 year old festival that already draws fans from as far away as Sweden

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I remember reading that the Masterpiece Theatre production of The Lost Prince is very good -- it's being rerun tomorrow and on Christmas (2 parts, PBS); also, I see that next month Gillian Anderson (yes, of the X Files) is starring in a new production of Dickens' Bleak House

Anderson was lauded for her performance in Terence Davies' film of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, so this is not the leap you might've thought.

I tried to watch Mirth a few years ago but the characters being portrayed just repelled me so much I couldn't get into it. But I'm sure it's worth seeing, otherwise.

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R.I.P. Jack Anderson

A devout Mormon, Anderson looked upon journalism as a calling. He was considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting, renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation's capital.

Anderson won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the Nixon administration secretly tilted toward Pakistan in its war with India. He also published the secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury.

Such scoops earned him a spot on President Nixon's "enemies list." Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has described how he and other Nixon political operatives planned ways to silence Anderson permanently -- such as slipping him LSD or staging a fatal car crash -- but the White House nixed the idea.

Over the years, Anderson was threatened by the Mafia and investigated by government agencies trying to trace the sources of his leaks. In 1989, police investigated him for smuggling a gun into the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate security lapses.

Known for his toughness on the trail of a story, he was also praised for personal kindness. Anderson's son Kevin said that when his father's reporting led to the arrest of some involved in the Watergate scandal, he aided their families financially.

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Having just seen Michael Redgrave's devastating performance in Anthony Asquith's The Browning Version, I wondered whether a good biography existed; looks like Anthony Strachan's Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave, based on unprecedented access to his papers etc., is the one

Redgrave's complex and tortured private life and how it informed his remarkable performances are the focus.

Simon Callow's enjoyable and enlightening review here:

Despite his splendid physical and vocal equipment - the nearest thing to an acteur noble this country has produced - he did not quite fit into a pre-existing mould. "What sort of actor do you want to be, Michael?" Edith Evans had asked him. "Do you want to be like John, or Larry, or Peggy Ashcroft, or me? What sort of standards are you aiming at?" He was in fact that unheard-of phenomenon, an English leading actor who was not an extrovert, always seeking to create from within. Like Charles Laughton, with whom he had surprisingly much in common, he was always in touch with his inner drama, and his best work possesses a sense of fathomless pools of complex life within. Unlike Laughton, his relationship to his own body and his face was not anguished; it is in fact very often the gap between the nobility of his appearance and the turbulence inside which gives his acting its extraordinary tension.

Well worth a look if you haven't seen them are the aforementioned Version, The Importance of Being Earnest (so much better than the recent remake), The Lady Vanishes (in case you somehow missed it), his amazing turn as a ventriloquist in the classic trilogy Dead of Night and Joseph Mankiewicz's The Quiet American -- there are many more (I hear The Dam Busters, Time Without Pity and Michael Anderson's 1984 are worthy), and his stage work was even more accomplished, by most accounts.

He was of course the father of Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, and grandfather of Natasha and Joely Richardson and Jemma Redgrave.

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Friday, December 16, 2005

After seeing her mentioned on FMU's blog I checked out Laura Veirs on her label page and I like what I'm hearing

... though comparisons with Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush & Bjork may be pushing it a bit.

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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Mona Lisa 'happy', computer finds

I was so glad to hear this, I'd heard the old girl had fallen on hard times...

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Best to tread softly and avoid mentally challenging tasks the next couple days, perhaps

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Monday, December 12, 2005

Amazingly simple-minded attempt to halt file-sharing by posting bad files fails miserably

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Sunday, December 11, 2005

New Mexico Plans First 'Spaceport' For Space Travel

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I've only heard of one of the artists (Windy & Carl) who made textura's top 20 albums of 2005, but if I was 25, I'll bet I'd know all of 'em

06. Run Return: Metro North
n5md

The Oakland trio's almost ridiculously accomplished set of 'instrumental rock' features eighteen future-jazz excursions that encompass post-rock, dub, jazz, funk, and melodic electronica, sometimes in a single song.

Also check out what the winners are listening to, where I found more familiar names, unsurprisingly.

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The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum on Capote & Good Night, and Good Luck

Rosenbaum liked both films but has some reservations about how the issues of compromise and truth -- that both films attempt to tackle themselves -- are handled by the filmmakers:

Both Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck equate journalistic integrity with accuracy and see compromise as a necessary part of working in the mass media. Murrow attacks McCarthy, then interviews Liberace (also shown in archival footage) to boost his ratings -- helping perpetuate the era's myth that Liberace was heterosexual and looking for a wife. In Capote, distinguished partly for the offhand yet honest way it deals with the author's homosexuality, Capote seems more morally confused and self-deceiving than hypocritical -- as when he lies to Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) about how much of the book he's written and whether he's come up with a title.

The films themselves also frequently engage in compromise, lying shamelessly and sometimes unnecessarily about some matters yet trying to be scrupulously accurate about others. I suppose this inconsistency could be rationalized as poetic license, but the desire of both movies to combine poetic generalizations with prosaic specifics creates more confusion than clarity.

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Author Dennis Lehane's favorite films released by Criterion [pdf file]

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Saturday, December 10, 2005

2 of my favorite people

R.I.P. Richard Pryor & Eugene McCarthy

A comic of genius and a politician with a fierce conscience.

How long ago it seems...

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I see Ryko has also put out a DVD of Eno's 2 video installation pieces from the early 80s, Thursday Afternoon & Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan

Having had to travel to Manhattan to see the latter at the Kitchen, and nearly damaging a brand new Proton monitor to see the former in its vertical format glory, its nice to see this available -- you can watch them horizontally if you want to...

The disc comes with liner notes by the artist in a 16 page booklet, plus an unreleased track.

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Ryko has released a 2-CD recording of one of Bill Hicks' last shows, at Oxford University which I be an essential companion to the recent DVD release of 3 shows from the end of his career which is the best representation of his work and the one to get if you don't know him; also just issued is the Sane Man DVD, which I have on VHS and that I'd suggest only for Hicks completists -- it's very raw and sometimes very funny, but more valuable for the chance to see him work out his material onstage

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Media literacy alert

Must-see TV on Frontline this Tuesday: The Persuaders on new advertising strategies like neuromarketing, with input from Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein and Mark Crispin Miller among others

The entire program is also available at the link above for RealPlayer and Windows Media.

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It's not as easy as taking a pill file

FDA: Paxil Linked to Birth Defects

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Friday, December 09, 2005

New Orleans altculture magazine Antigravity survives Katrina [orbis quintus]

Also from OQ: evidence of a buried pyramid in Bosnia.

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Muslim Afghani woman becomes UK Miss World contestant -- under death threats from Muslim fundamentalists

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I hear ya

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Reference

Tim Berners-Lee's library of web libraries, the WWW Virtual Library [refdesk]

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Meanwhile

New ocean may be forming in east Afica -- but relax, it'll take a million years

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Thursday, December 08, 2005

In the last hundred years, Mexico City has sunk the equivalent of the height of a 3-story building, due to being built on an unstable lakebed

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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

DVD Talk review of the new TLA release of Eraserhead on disc

This edition lists for $24.99, but doesn't include the 20-page booklet included if you buy it on Lynch's site, though it does have the nearly 90-minute doc of Lynch discussing the film. And of course there's also the boxset which includes 5 of his short films as well (this one goes for $79.95, only at his site).

It's a great transfer apparently, and the doc makes the price of the offsite TLA release a good deal.

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Another reason not to go to theatres: more ads

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Sunday, December 04, 2005

In case -- like me last night -- you were looking for a free way to make a flac become a wav, go here

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The disinfo DVDs & books list or not

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Saturday, December 03, 2005

FMU post on the art of Jim Flora

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Paging Dr Benway...

US pathology labs in credibility crisis [LA Times username: ridgewood password: callow]

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Voting machine fraud only newest form of American election fixing

Veil of credibility surrounding US elections slipping more each day: vote buying in West Virginia may date back to the 1960 election at least

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Friday, December 02, 2005

Having the most toys is next to godliness file

Retailers "remember" Christmas, bowing to conservative groups

Gotta love this crazy country...

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