==pla|\|ing lakes==

Friday, January 31, 2003

Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans documentary [robot wisdom]

Jarecki (who as a sometime musician and former CEO of Moviefone.com may have the most unlikely background of any director at Sundance this year) proves a smart, assured, unsentimental documentarian who never sides with any one interpretation of events, never stops reminding us of Arnold Friedman's past transgressions.

He has us pity the implosion (and, at times, self-immolation) of the Friedmans without ever once asking us to forgive the heinous nature of Arnold's and Jesse's possibly real, possibly imagined crimes. By remaining so resolutely objective, Jarecki forces us to put ourselves in the Friedmans' position and ponder how there, but for the grace of God, might we go.

3:15 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Victim of Polanski rape case would like um closure

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Copyright lunacy file

Finnish kindergarteners charged fee for singing songs [Undernews Jan 29]

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Thursday, January 30, 2003

Had a pretty bad 24 hours, psychologically. Music helps now.

Live on tomorrow

Put me in the shower, pull me out of bed.
Am I only dreaming, or did I wake up dead?
Throw me in the garbage, shackled up in chains.
But I still got my boots on
So I can walk away.

A heartbeat says you haven't died.
You gotta try to stay alive.
Leave me to the vultures.
Throw me to the wolves.
I'll live on tomorrow
And purity of soul.

Dump me in the ocean,
Tied to a piano.
But you forgot to rip my heart out
Before you let me go.

A heartbeat says you haven't died.
You gotta try to stay alive.

Lock me in the basement,
Without anything to eat.
You can hurt my body,
But you can't hurt me

Juliana Hatfield

Music is too important to be doled out by gangsters.

Thanks to sing365 for the lyrics.

3:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

This review of The Little Friend (and The Secret History as well really) is pretty much on the money

I gave up on TLF after about 150 pages, for reasons I'll go into when I have more energy. For now, read Ruth Franklin (above link).

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Tom Carson's new tour de force, Gilligan's Wake

I used to read Carson's reviews and so forth in the Village Voice and the short-lived but fondly remembered Soho Weekly News in the 80s. I always liked him, and I'd like to like his book. But the Joycean wordplay (and from my look at it today, it's got little of Joyce's hyper vibrancy or whatever it was he had, as David Kelly noted) is way too mental or even precious for me these days.

But it's chock full of pop culture references, and many people will probably love the shit out of it.

I also checked John Laurence's The Cat from Hué: A Vietnam War Story, after seeing him on Booknotes on the weekend, and that's more up my street. If I can get through at least one of my Intel tomes. . .

For pop satire in book form, I'll stick to Victor Pelevin for now. Maybe that's partly because I've just had enough American culture for now. Maybe my sense of humor is closer to the darker, more disorienting Slavic acid-etching of Pelevin.

I just wish I read Russian, because I know I'm missing a lot in translation.

Fiction has to be right on my wavelength these days or I just can't stay with it.

3:38 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario (the 10th largest museum in North America) hires Frank Gehry for a re-design, as it expands with a new bequest and aspires to world-class status

Gehry is from Toronto originally.

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A new book argues that the fragmentation of modern life began with the ear, not the eye

From a review:

The aural experiences of yore were often communal - a congregation listening to a sermon or a choir, or an audience listening to a play. They happened in a specific time and place, and when they were over, they were over. Anyone who was wool-gathering during the second act simply missed it. Period.

Nowadays, however, we have a soundscape that is as much a "built environment" as is a city skyline. But the myriad forms of sound recording and amplification make it a fragmented soundscape. Instead of an audience that, as one, laughs or cries or sits enraptured, we have collections of individual auditors, each with his or her own headset. This fragmentation is like similar phenomena in other modern media and art forms - such as flashbacks that cinemagoers once had to learn to "read," or photo montage and stream-of-consciousness literature.

The reviewer notes that we once had to learn to speak over the telephone.

Hard to imagine a world so unified-in-hearing now. This is why artists like Laurie Anderson prefer live audiences.

Being an opinionated, firecely independent sort myself, I shudder at the thought of having to listen to the music the majority likes, for instance. But some communal experience might go a long way toward healing the alienation and anxiety we all feel.

Even in the 60s and 70s, the music I listened to was a shared experience (even if you weren't at a live concert), in a way it isn't now.

But how does that organically occur? It couldn't work any way but through a natural flow.

It would have to grow out of an intention. A shared intention.

Which seems to be a trend: collaborative art, that's made by a group or interacts with the audience.

Lawrence Rinder, the Whitney [Biennial's] curator, says of this team mentality, "There's definitely something in the air, particularly with the younger generation." Edward Kerns, an art professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., agrees that "it's a generational thing. Students who grow up with networking systems are used to working together."

[...]

Canadian artist Jillian Mcdonald, working out of a storefront in downtown Manhattan, invites passers-by to tell her their fears, then sews a protective mantra in gold thread into a garment for them.

"Without participation, there's no art - it depends on interaction," Ms. Mcdonald says. "There's nothing like communicating with other people," she adds. "It's more rewarding than working alone."

Ray Kass, founder and director of the Mountain Lake Workshop at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va., has invited visiting artists to work with the local community since 1983. John Cage, folk artist Howard Finster, and French artist Jackie Matisse are a few who've worked alongside students and Appalachian residents.

Two hundred locals attended kitemaking day with Ms. Matisse. More than 700 viewed her artwork, "Kites Soaring In and Out of Space," in a virtual-reality cave. Focusing on a discipline-centered activity to get rural residents involved, Mr. Kass says, "has had the phenomenal effect of creating a kind of local culture."

This gives me a good feeling.

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Monday, January 27, 2003

Music retailers figure this here music file stuff might be worth lookin' into

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Sunday, January 26, 2003

German crop circles

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Saturday, January 25, 2003

Nice review of John Szwed's new Miles bio

It may be that this is the best one book to read about Miles (there are quite a few), just as David Thomson's book about Orson Welles is the best one book about him.

Since this book points to his work in the 50s as his best, I suggest Paul Tingen's Miles Beyond: Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 as an accompaniment. It's the one I've read, and whether jazz aficionados like it or not, Miles work in the 70s is important to me and a lot of other people right now.

Not to say what's best or anything. Just that Miles doesn't just belong to the jazzbos.

NOTE: As you may know, salon has changed their access policy. You can view the whole site now (without paying or Premium access), if you click through a 4-pane Mercedes ad (that's what it is today anyway). You'll have to do this to get the whole article linked above. I discovered this just now because they've walled off Tom Tomorrow's comic -- hilariously, since the first time I've encountered this was the time I read his luxury American gas-guzzler toon.

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Somehow I don't really want Nick Hornby's Songbook to be relevant to me, but there it is

Probably just borrow it though.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Hard to admit music can mean that much to you. Or that it doesn't often enough.

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Friday, January 24, 2003

73-year-old Chuck Barris muses on his um checkered past

I admit it -- I thought he died years ago. He survived lung cancer, apparently, though the article doesn't go into the details of that.

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Some nice pics of Mayan ruins on the northern peninsula, Guatemala and Belize [Earth Alchemy message board]

None of Palenque or Chichen Itza though. But the sites shown are less well known, and harder to find.

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I have to admit, despite my general aversion to tall buildings, it would be hilarious and cool to see a Gaudi building erected in Manhattan

Doesn't look dated at all. And about a 1000mprovement on the design of the original WTC.

Not sure how practical it is but I don't give a damn either. That would be good too -- something impractical on Wall St.

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Tuesday, January 21, 2003

We're all going to jail

Verizon ordered to turn over name of file downloader

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2002 Top Ten albums by artists on the experimental fällt label

I listen to some stuff like this, but there's way too much to hear, never mind afford.

I do like what I've heard from Mileece, Eliane Radigue, some of Tomas Jirku, Janek Schaefer is very good -- his Above Buildings is on my wishlist.

2:41 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, January 20, 2003

R.I.P. Al Hirschfeld

99 years!

An American Institution.

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Dan Gillmor on the Supreme Court's pro-racketeering copyright decision

Swipe a CD from a record store and you'll get arrested. But when Congress authorizes the entertainment industry to steal from you -- well, that's the American way.

We learned as much Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress can repeatedly extend copyright terms, as it did most recently in 1998 when it added 20 years to the terms for new and existing works.

The law, a brazen heist, was called the Copyright Term Extension Act. It was better known as the Sonny Bono act, so named after its chief sponsor even though Disney and other giant media corporations were the money and muscle behind it.

Who got robbed? You did. I did.

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Key archaeological find in Ireland: huge underground temple under Tara Hill [incublogula]

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Ernest Glitch's experiments and other um revisionist science at Lateral Science [Incublogula]

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Sunday, January 19, 2003

Warhol and Ballard would be proud

Combination bonsai trees and "crashed" model cars = Crash Bonsai [Undernews]

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The end of anonymity: product-embedded RFIDs (radio frequency identification) [Undernews]

...RFID tags...typically include a 64-bit unique identifier yielding about 18 thousand trillion possible values. KSW-Microtec, a German company, has invented washable RFID tags designed to be sewn into clothing. And according to EE Times, the European central bank is considering embedding RFID tags into banknotes by 2005.

It becomes unnervingly easy to imagine a scenario where everything you buy that's more expensive than a Snickers will sport RFID tags. That raises the disquieting possibility of being tracked though our personal possessions. Imagine: The Gap links your sweater's RFID tag with the credit card you used to buy it and recognizes you by name when you return. Grocery stores flash ads on wall-sized screens based on your spending patterns, just like in "Minority Report." Police gain a trendy method of constant, cradle-to-grave surveillance.

You can imagine nightmare legal scenarios that don't involve the cops. Future divorce cases could involve one party seeking a subpoena for RFID logs--to prove that a spouse was in a certain location at a certain time. Future burglars could canvass alleys with RFID detectors, looking for RFID tags on discarded packaging that indicates expensive electronic gear is nearby. In all of these scenarios, the ability to remain anonymous is eroded.

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Cries from the Asylum

Mad Hillary demands ISPs pay for customers' downloads [drudge]

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Deer in the headlights

Apparent insider says Muzik biz saw online music & file-sharing coming and let it go [og]

He also claims the labels are jamming the networks with junk, though I'd heard of this a while back and figured it was tried for awhile and abandoned.

1:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, January 18, 2003

Apple whacks i-Tunes P2P plug-in developer

So much for Apple's populist blush.

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Good Zippy today: "Humiliation ROCKS, man!"

If you miss it today, you'll have to wait a couple weeks and go here -- as far as I know.

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Alex catalogue of etexts allows content search, variety of formats [refdesk]

Pdf, Palm Pilot, Newton, Rocket all supported.

And just for the record: the Supreme Court sucks.

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NBA edges closer to pro wrestling territory

Class war declared by Shaq:

"The unfortunate thing is it had to be decided by them," O'Neal said of the officials. "A whole bunch of people who paid a lot of money had to see a game that was decided by someone who doesn't make a lot of money. That's unfortunate."

Heh.

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Friday, January 17, 2003

Historical corrective to Gangs of New York's Anglo-Irish foreshortening

Clearly the ethnic mix and the relations between them -- particularly the slavery/blacks component -- was more complex than Scorsese apparently shows. I imagine his simplification and license with the history was necessary to prevent the movie from being 10 hours long for one thing. It certainly could have been more accurate, but this is a piece of American history most people didn't even know existed til the film was released. It's only a beginning, and historical accuracy has never been Hollywood's um strong suit. If Scorsese didn't go a bit out of his way to make the central narrative simple and entertaining, how many people would have gone to see the damn thing anyway?

That being said, hopefully the History Channel or PBS (which just premiered a fine mini-series on 19th century Chicago) will delve into the deeper complexity of this extraordinary time and place.

Of course, if Americans had more of an interest in their history to begin with, we wouldn't have the problem to begin with, would we? Perhaps this is what really angers Foreman -- that American disinterest in history gives movies based on history disproportionate influence on what we think of our past.

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Thursday, January 16, 2003

Back at Portage, a link to the New York Public Library Image Gate, which you can promptly lose yourself in

Gorgeous.

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As coyotes and humans expand and overlap territories, the price might be your pet

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Fastmartblrtok u no?

Fast-talkers seem smarter -- and Hollywood uses quick scenes and chatter to skew towards younger audiences [u]

This thinking was explained by the producer of a popular TV show on the WB network, "Gilmore Girls," which features a mother-daughter duo who are more like friends than like parent and child. The elder Gilmore, Lorelai, became a single mother while still in her teens; now she is in her early thirties and her daughter, Rory, is a teen. The creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, told the Wall Street Journal recently that zippiness is the motivation for many aspects of "Gilmore Girls:" no close-ups (they slow things down); frequent shots of characters talking as they walk from place to place; and scenes shot over and over to shave a few seconds off the already dizzying pace. Screenwriters traditionally figure a page of dialogue to a minute on air; Sherman-Palladino figures 20 to 25 seconds a page.

Surely the fast-forward speech of "Gilmore Girls" helps the characters sound like hip teenagers, just as their jeans and midriff-baring blouses clinging skin-tightly to their teen-thin bodies help both "girls" look like teens. But network shows aimed at fully adult audiences, like the wildly popular "West Wing," follow the same trend. Hollywood producers, according to the Wall Street Journal article, think people seem smarter if they talk faster.

Good article by Deborah Tannen, who also spots IM (Instant Messaging) talk as a bonding strategy.

wrd

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Wednesday, January 15, 2003

I've always liked Charles Sheeler's work, though it's hard not to feel ambivalent about someone who (intentionally or not) glamorized industrial landscapes

I guess I've been fascinated with them too though. I remember being fascinated by a photo of myself next to a giant hydro carbine in Canada as a kid.

This good short piece on Sheeler has a link to a Karen Lucic book which purports Sheeler's ambivalence as well, apparently.

There's also a link to Interior, which I like a lot. Trippy.

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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind looks pretty good

Nice to see George Clooney do so well his first time out directing. Even if it's not as intriguing as Sterritt makes it sound, doing a passable job directing a Kaufman screenplay is an accomplishment for even seasoned directors, I think.

Since the source material kind of gices you license to do what you want, I'd have taken it into a darker, more Phildickian direction probably. It's got that whiff. . .

1:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Bruce Perens' "Open Source" series of books to be offered as free ebooks by Prentice-Hall

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On a personal note: I've tried to list books I'm reading only when I figure I'll finish them. Lately I've been so restless and moody, pleasures like reading have seemed closed off to me.

So it will be a record of my unease more than what I get all the way through, for now anyway.

It's very frustrating, because reading has always been vital to me, and things are definitely unsettled when this happens. And I have so many books I want to read.

The "Viewing" section lists what I've actually completed; for instance, I didn't list the Scorsese apperciation of Italian cinema (My Voyage to Italy) til I'd actually finished it, months after I started (it's over 4 hours long). Still haven't finished Open City yet -- though I watched Germany in the Year Zero immediately. Some of this is because of limited access to the TV, for reasons I won't go into.

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"MAKE MUSIC LIKE BRIAN ENO OR BRITNEY SPEARS" -- from a recent ZiffDavis newletter, referring to an article on building a home studio

Oh dear.

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Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Damn. Looks like we'll have to wait til at least 2005 for Turrell's Roden Crater site to open

He'll have exhibits in Pittsburgh, Seattle, Nagoya Japan and Unna Germany this year though. The 2 outside the US are group shows.

Here's a good interview, if you're unfamiliar with Turrell.

I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some way gather it, or seem to hold it. So in that way it's a little bit like Plato's cave. We sit in the cave with our backs to reality, looking at the reflection of reality on the cave wall. As an analogy to how we perceive, and the imperfections of perception, I think this is very interesting.

And there is the making of Plato's cave literally-at New Grange in Ireland, or Abu Sembal where you don't have a pointing sculpture like Stonehenge. Instead you have an architectural space that is arranged to accept an event in light on the horizon. When that event in light occurs on the horizon there is an event in light, inside that space.

This then became the camera obscura, which appeared in many European towns. They would have these, and eventually even created panoramas and dioramas. The "camera lucida" and the "camera obscura" were what artists used to actually make this Western painting space.

We made this eye that sees for us, like the camera, and this is very much a part of how we organized our culture. Of course it became this holder of truth. I mean in a court of law you take a photograph, and you can use it as evidence.

3:48 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Top 2003 calendars in the US [CSM]

1. George W. Bush (daily)
2. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (wall)
3. German Shorthaired Pointers (wall)
4. "Harry Potter" movies (wall)
5. The Far Side (wall)
6. 365 Cats (daily)
7. Thomas Kinkade - Painter of Light (wall)
8. "Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers" (wall)
9. Dilbert (daily)
10. FDNY Firefighters (wall) - Associated Press

I picked this one (that's a good price too), because the artist caught my eye.

I can't believe how many people are staring at shrub every day. *shiver*

3:15 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

New tech/music industry agreement may end the clearly useless attempt to build copy-protection into hardware

The agreement, expected to be announced Tuesday in Washington, contends that U.S. laws do not need to be amended, for example, to permit consumers to make backup copies of compact discs they purchase or copy songs onto handheld devices. The technology industry also will announce its support for aggressive enforcement against digital pirates.

Under the plan, future generations of entertainment devices won't be required by law to have locking controls that make it more difficult to copy digital entertainment. Technology companies have complained that the locking devices are too expensive and complex.

The deal attempts to heads off government intervention in the rising debate over what consumers can do with copyrighted material they have purchased.

Could be a major step forward, though it could kaibosh Zoe Lofgren's bill which "wants permission for consumers to sell or give away copies of music or movies they purchase, and to impose protections for consumers who break locking controls that violate these rights."

The MPAA did not take part in the agreement.



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Israeli geologists claim a recently uncovered stone tablet is the first physical proof of Biblical history

It details repair work on Solomon's Temple, supposedly, and stirs up the debate about Old Jerusalem's historical provenance.

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