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Mitch and I had a fun time exploring the uber-cool Caltrans building designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Thom Mayne. The front of the building looks like the mesh grill on the new G5's. More thoughts on Los Angeles to come, I'm having positive feelings about this city for the first time in my life.
High in the Berkeley hills, on a very rainy night, a quiet dinner party with Oslo-based theater artist Rasmus Joergensen quickly turned into a decadent and high-spirited round of bouncy ball.
It is the most fun I've had playing a game. Ever.
Where to start, so many things going on these days. I have a second job interview for a very cool sound designer position this week, don't want to say too much about it until the verdict is returned. Getting this job would be one of the best things to happen to me in a while, so work some majik/charms/spells for me if you're into that. This weekend I'll take a very welcome trip out of town with my friend Mitch, we're exploring LA for four days. Not sure what LA offers really, but one of the highlights is sure to be Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibit. Also, the ramen down there is supposed to be much better than what is found in San Francisco.
Have been in no mood to write in this journal recently, I've got nothing to say really other than my usual complaints about San Francisco being such a sleepy town, and with all the rain, what I want to do more than anything is wrap up in bed with hot chocolate watching my dvd's from GreenCine. Which is exactly what I'd do if it weren't for programming projects and shows coming up and so on. Someday I'm going to take a real vacation, well, starting this weekend I reckon.
The Herzog and de Meuron designed de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park is opening soon. Is nice to see something a bit less conservative happening in local architecture.
The final scene in Werner Herzog's Stroszek, a dancing chicken, was in my dreams again last night. Oh vey....
For years now, I've been working on and off on CD projects as soloist or collaborative, and sometimes they come to fruition, but many times they have come close and just not quite made it to the final stage. Throughout all of this, I keep wondering though, why do I want to make a CD? I mean, really, in 2005, why do it? Delivering music by CD almost seems retro when now it is quite common to just make it in real-time with friends online, or send it via an email attachment or a zipped archive or... I guess it's the part about money that keeps people making CD's. Labels still do exist, after all, and they have some role to play I guess. There are labels that I admire very much for their curatorial expertise, like Lucky Kitchen, ~scape, Asphodel, and Sonig. But that is from a consumer/collector perspective, but from an artist's perspective, what is the point really? Dissemination of my work is a part of the whole enterprise that I just prefer to not to think about.
Or maybe the answer is that everyone has a cd player, so if you want to get your music out there, it's the most efficient way. Maybe it is as simple as that.
life is a whirlwind of activity
-->in the middle of programming a musical interface for chamber opera by Yannis Kyriakides, Escamotage
A magician comes on stage to perform the old ‘cup and ball’ routine but things don’t seem to go as they should. His female assistant has an obsession with quantum physics with a particular fixation for Schrödinger’s Cat, the famous gedankexperiment of the Austrian physicist, which describes how if we take reality to a quantum level a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time. All this unfolds in a peculiar manner, time doesn’t flow in the normal direction, and the failures of the magicians on stage are constantly thrown up again and again, recurring in fluxuating time fields; and like the cat in the gedankexperiment, the performers become trapped in a state of limbo.FNM Staatsoper, Stuttgart to be produced with VeenFabriek, July '05.
-->in Amsterdam mid July, then possibly Tokyo for a bit after that, depending on how my sound design job interview goes at a museum here in San Francisco.
-->performances with Robert van Heumen at the Lab on April 8, and Rx Gallery April 14. Keep an eye on this space for details.
Hey everybody, I finally got around to getting my Audioscrobbler page going. So what are you all listening to?
From Sei:
"At TAG in Den Haag I was creating sound with overdubbing sound materials and tried reaching to the feed backing state several times. With manual manipulation the sound is easily overloaded so that I need very careful maintenance like incubation or cultivating plants. My live performance is showing the process of this improvised incubation. Therefore the title is the same meaning as 'feed'."
A couple updates:
-An article I wrote for New Music Box was posted today. The picture they chose was an, ummm, interesting one, I look strangely starry-eyed and distant, probably just too much California sunshine.
-Seconds of Salvation, a collaboration with Rémi Gérard-Marchant, has its own online home now. Thanks Rémi!
Yes, America has trains. Some pluses: they are usually empty and they are cheap. The minuses: often unreliable, the track layout is incompetent, they are slow and not sexy at all. I sometimes wonder why I don't just buy a car and I think it just comes down to the fact that if I buy a car, besides being too expensive, I wouldn't know myself anymore. For nearly seven years now the benefits of not driving have consistently far outweighed the negatives, even in a country like America where not owning a car basically means that you are a second class citizen and probably a terrorist. My time on trains keeps me sane, allowing me to daydream of being in places like Tokyo or Holland where riding the trains is an intimately social act, reminding us all that we're sharing a small space with others, breathing the same air, as uncomfortable as it might be at times, but still forcing us to engage with one another.
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