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When I stepped out of the subway on Sunday, returning from my short trip to the American heart-land, I was surrounded by kids dancing, old men in chaps, and hippies with anti-war slogans. By some strange cosmic alignment the Folsom Street Fair, Love Parade, and a huge anti-war demonstration all were scheduled on the same weekend.
I know I spend a lot of time ranting about San Francisco, when in fact there are a lot of things I do really like about the city. But there is one characteristic that gets under my skin like no other, it is an air of arrogant victimhood that seems to be part of the very cultural fabric of the city. Arrogance, I don't mind at all, in fact I rather enjoy it, it energizes me. And, well, victimhood happens, bad things happen to people. But the combination of the two is enough to drive someone to madness. Maybe it is due to the fact that the city is populated by many people who are truly victims of repressive cultures. But come on people, get over it! You live in a great city now, you're free, do something! Stop complaining, baby, it's all in the past! If the artists, creatives, and truly brilliant people of this city would just spend 1/3 of their energy on actually doing things rather than whining to each other in their cellphones all day, this could be an amazing place. But that'll never happen, and it's why I have to move away from here. It's just a matter of time.
Well, I feel better now anyway. Had to get that off my chest, thanks for listening.
Message: 3
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:43:10 +0100
From: Laborinthus2
Subject: [sc-users] REe: REE: Re:"Re:" . . .. (...).... Re:
{sc-users}Thankyou to all at that famous Fruity farm.
To: SuperCollider users mailing list
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=MACINTOSH; delsp=yes; format=flowed
Somewhere over the rainbow... lives Alan Turing
And i will meet you all
First Concert SF crisco
first performace ... already started
enduringly and indmiration
in sgerlock hoovian disguise
the complete collective archive
go google
go figure
mf
bf
moi
2
1
0
.
,
/
technotechnotechno
2u@ll
in
7
against
the
facist life
RIP alan Turing
Marie Curie
Let them eat cake
Les Japonaise
heart of the world
inside a kleinbottle invaginated
up DErridas arse
an eneam made of starbucks/costa/pure water
now
FLICKRING
is safe sex
where is
(thesafest)
(
nobody
0
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clothes
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<>
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BIll
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l
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(sorry...messy)...lol
irc
CIa
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b
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NAZI
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On 26 Sep 2005, at 16:55, Aaron Gervais wrote:
That's great! Thank you Lance and Till. :)
a
On 26-Sep-05, at 6:33 AM, Till Bovermann wrote:
Hey,
why not use the FreqScope of Lance?
http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~ljputnam/sc3.html
hope that helps
Till
On 26 Sep 2005, at 09:22, Aaron Gervais wrote:
I haven't been able to find this in the archives and I'm not sure if
it's possible... Is there a way to plot to a pre-existing window
repeatedly? I just want to make a simple FM interface with sliders
for modulator and carrier freqs, and then a spectrogram that changes
when you move the sliders, so that you can see the sidebands.
Obviously, plotting to a new window with every change of value for
the slider would be less than ideal.
Thx
a
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:)
luv
2
a
l
L
fibber
glibber
glibbityblob
po
g
R
U
¸
HUG XXXXX
01273 2722000
DAVID PERKINS
WITH GREAT RESPECT AND IN A BIG LOUD PAN GLOBAL
FUCKED OFF VOIX
LA LANGUE ESPERANTO
TAGALOG
CHI
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COhibAAAA
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see
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in
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yashmac
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n
Trafalgar square
or the castro
onnyeve
2006?
James Mccartney, Nick, Toplap
sign me up
lol.
pmsfladtbrdoj
safter than dynamic stochastic sythesis and cryptography innit
m8!(mousecoombe dialect)
my birthday
29/09/1967
or in binary
-0.1lkjahdfkahfjbaw`f`o8 09[2E09 14 E 1r'
ALAN TURING RIP
DERRIDA RIP
MAKE POVERTY HISTORY NOW
UNIFY ALL RACES AND ALL MANKIND
AND A dlerious
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artaud le momo
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god bless the BBC.
Hey everybody, I'm traveling to see some family north of Chicago at the moment, and for the first time since maybe 1998 I am traveling without a Powerbook. So, I'm away from email, blogging, and all things internet. And it feels great! I just finished reading Vertigo by WG Sebald and just started the oh-so-American Narrow Rooms by James Purdy, a sweet love story between cowboys in West Virginia. Back to normal blogging next week!
Cocorosie's Noah's Ark is a great album, perfect for a chilly fall morning. I keep hearing it described as part of some new-folk genre but I don't think that really fits. I mean, what is folk about it? I guess the fact that it has minimal instrumentation has something to do with it, but other than that I don't see it. It's just an album made by a very creative duo.
Last week I saw Matmos, the Lehn/Schmickler duo and Fe-Mail play at Mills College. The Lehn/Schmickler duo made some extreme harsh noise, the likes of which haven't seen the light of day since Tokyo, 1995 or Munich, 1999. Nobody does Noise like the Germans and the Japanese. Fe-Mail are great, very noisy but with a layer of subtlety. And Matmos was Matmos, offering up a kind of ironic beat-driven pastiche of sample-happy silliness. There is an intrinsic San Francisco aesthetic in that duo, a kind of slapstick and eccentric approach.
Three mysterious photos from Muir Woods:
I've started a podcast from this site. It's a collection of audio objects, field recordings, and new works that I've made.
So far I've uploaded a piece I made last year called Architecture, working title The Worse, the Better. It was inspired by visits to Rotterdam, ground central of new architecture, and especially the work Koolhaas did there. It was just a short trip from the Hague where I was living at the time.
Also available on the Fundamental SoundCast is a new song I made called Song First, it began as the soundtrack for Practice No. 1 (small online version), a short film for submission to the Slo-Mo Video Festival.
Digiki's PolyPunk 2 is now online. It's very very fun... The first five and a half minutes are especially genius.
It's almost 12:00, time for my German lesson from my ex-flatmate Roman. He's an excellent teacher. For the first time ever I don't feel completely intimidated by learning a language. When I lived in Japan I took language lessons quite a bit, and even studied it for two years as an undergraduate before moving there but never seemed to get past the point of exchanging pleasantries. Weird. In Holland I tried learning Dutch a bit, but I wasn't attracted to the language, I just had no passion for it.
Now, German. I like this language, and am very into learning it and don't feel overwhelmed by it at all. Maybe it's my German roots, maybe there's some genetic connection to the language. Ah, whatever... But it's funny, after starting to study it I've realized that the language is actually very soft, not hard-edged at all. Much smoother than Dutch, that's for sure.
Tonight I'm off to Mills College to see Fe-Mail, Matmos, and Thomas Lehn/Marcus Schmickler, an analog synthesis duo from Germany.
Listening to Daft Punk's Homework on my iPod this morning nearly brought tears to my eyes with a sudden flood of memories of Tokyo.
.
I've recently really gotten into making short films using footage recorded from my digital camera. It can record 15 seconds of video in this great vintage black and white style, with no audio.
So when Ryan Junell asked me to make something for the Slo-Mo Video Festival I decided to use some footage and make a soundtrack. It's the first in a series of short videos I'm calling Practice, all about doing something wrong while trying to do it right. Here's a quicktime movie version of No. 1. It sounds best with headphones or speakers that can play back low frequencies or you won't hear the low end.
It's always an interesting transition to notice, the feeling of moving from the wide–eyed perceptive observation of an outsider to the quiet disinterest of an insider. When first moving back to San Francisco last year I was entranced by the easy going lifestyle and sheer silliness of this city. I wanted to search out the unique qualities of the place, plug into its slapstick approach to life, dig into its role as a gay mecca and get a sense of the really pretty amazing electronic music coming from here. But now, a year later, I feel like I just live here. It's admittedly what I have wanted for some time now, to feel connected to a place and at ease with it, but it is still something of a startling sensation to realize that one just lives in a city, that you are no longer looking from the view of the observer but are just one of the people in the city noticed by tourists with their kids in tow.
After living a sort of internationally nomadic life for a few years, this change is very nice. I enjoy knowing that there is no time limit to my stay here, feeling completely fluent in the language, and understanding the cultural subtext. It's a challenge, especially these days, to say anything positive about America, but this city has a lot of good things going for it. It attracts all of the people who can't tolerate the way people live in the rest of the country, it's kind of a city for refugees from red–states without the cut–throat competitiveness of New York. In other words, it's civilized, relaxed, and has great weather.
I've been reading Momus' blog Click Opera regularly these days. I tend to agree with a lot of what he says, but sometimes his observations are a bit knee–jerk, in my opinion. And on the topic of dissing this country, Momus' vilification of Bush–era USA and joyful celebration of Clinton–era America is superficial. The differences between the two presidents are admittedly extremely important but, and he misses this point entirely, it is the same country that elected both. This leads to a complexity that Momus seems to ignore. After all, does the popularity of conservative De Villepin make France any less French?
Maybe the question comes down to this, when one says, "I really liked the USA during Clinton's presidency" what does it mean? Is it the media representation of the country they liked? Was it really a big nosed president who was a master of "self–mediation" (a poor kid from an impoverished town way down in the deep south turned political powerhouse) that marked the turning point for the world's affection? The truth of the matter is that it's essentially the same people who put Clinton into power that put Bush into power. How is this explained?
It seems to me that Bush is a reflection of the very dark imagination of this country, a personification of the subconscious demons of the culture. And of course a demon that lives and breathes and makes the front pages of the world's newspapers on a daily basis is a very easy target. Looking beyond Bush to America's cultural complexity with all the awful things as well as the pretty good things seems a lot more interesting than the obvious game of calling a devil a devil. Fearlessly exploring complexities is not the strong point of the media nor politics. But it is the job of artists.
Lee and I went to the Club Macho party at Deco on Friday night. It had something to do with BUTT Magazine's 13 edition as well, even though I couldn't quite figure out the connection.
The party was OK, but a bit of a bore. I don't know what was wrong, there was just something missing. Maybe it was the lack of anything close to semi–interesting music. Or maybe I'm just starting to really resent the air–headed sheep–like nature of Vice–toting hipster queerdos and their belief that ironic white–trash fashion is still fresh. As Lee said, "I'd do anything to see fashion that is glam, without the trash." Sometimes trash is just, well, nothing more than trash.
This is shocking, the situation in New Orleans is serious and I am convinced it is MUCH bigger than is getting reported in the mainstream American media. I just heard a report from a Dutch radio journalist who described it as all-out war down there. All this happening while the ineffective/impotent/incompetent federal government can't figure out where to even start. Why is the city not being helped? I can't help but wonder if the Bush administration even sees the largely minority populations currently suffering as people worthy of federal relief efforts. I doubt Bush cares about much other than the fact that his vacation was interrupted a few days early. This country is a mess.
