tom moody

Most of my free time lately that would otherwise go to blogging has been committed to converting a mass of my music to CD.
As mentioned previously, I eliminated about 100 songs (because they were collaborations, fragments, "early experiments," or just weren't wearing well), which left me with about 125.
I have been learning to use the "Audio Montage" feature of Steinberg's Wavelab to make discs where the volume levels are more or less uniform and the tracks have some sort of flow. These are not mixes or montages, though; one track just follows another. After doing a "greatest hits" volume I threw in the towel on trying to pick "the best" and started grouping them alphabetically.
Here's what I have so far:
CD1. 19 tracks, random alphabetical.
CD2. 21 tracks, A-C
CD3. 20 tracks, C-H
CD4. 20 tracks, H-R (in progress)
CD5. 19 tracks, S-Y
CD6. 13 tracks, Electribe (the ones I did mostly on a "groovebox" last year fit together better as a group)
CD7. 12-15 tracks, Sidstation (in progress)
CD8. ____tracks, "classical" and miscellaneous experiments (projected)

I've been listening to a CD of Dutch electronic music from the Philips laboratories from 1958-1963, and reading about all the restorative efforts with regard to the analog tapes in the company vaults. Every scrap of tape is lovingly fussed over, and one CD of the four CD set consists of alternate takes and audio "raw material."

Back then electronic music wasn't even polyphonic--you had to run several tape recorders simultaneously and record that to get a master tape. Everything that took an eternity and was precious then can be done easily and quickly on a laptop now. So what happens to the resulting mega-hours of music of the tens of thousands of home computer musicians? Instead of a few scraps lovingly fetishized, you wind up with a mass of organized sound that's actually a burden for your friends to listen to once. Nevertheless, my vague plan is to send CDs around to a few folks who were foolish enough to say they liked my tunes, to be listened to if and when they have the time. These sets are mainly for me. I wish I could say they were helping me to be self-critical but with 125 tunes obviously I like everything I do. A lot.

Some commentary by yours truly on other people's pages.

The thread at Paddy Johnson's concerns "art about the art world," on the occasion of a show on that subject at Momenta Art.

The thread at Nasty Nets is a response to a Joel Holmberg revisitation of a conceptual work from the '60s. I have a fondness too for pictures of hippies drawing lines in space, etc.

Eileen Jones:

The critics who've now decided to approve of the Coens have to find a way to justify the violence they so deplore. Here's Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times giving it a try: "But as the story unfolds with the awful inevitability of a modern myth, it’s clear that the Coen brothers and [novelist Cormac] McCarthy are not interested in violence for its own sake but for what it says about the world we happen to live in."

Yeah, right. The Coens aren't interested in violence for its own sake like the Japanese makers of samurai films aren't interested in violence for its own sake. There’s no beauty or artistry or pleasure or kick or significance in representations of violence qua violence. Heavens no, Priscilla.

More:

Anyway, the story here is not that the Coens are great—we know—it’s the fact that a mere two-decades-plus into their feature filmmaking careers, the Coens have found broad acceptance with American critics. Now they tell us, based on seeing No Country for Old Men, that the Coens typically "combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos" (A.O. Scott, New York Times). All right, then! Even the Village Voice, that malignant foe of all that is good, especially Coen films, has come around a bit, with Scott Foundas opining that No Country is the Coens' "most measured, classical film of their 23-year career, and maybe their best."

Getting uneasy yet, true Coen admirers? You should be. Something very wrong here. Who the hell watches Coen films for measured classicism? Nobody who really likes them, that's who. The Coens mastered film classicism with their ABCs and zoomed on from there. No, what we have here, instead of critics damning the Coens with faint praise, is critics damning them with loud praise. You keep reading these reviews and you realize the damning part is indeed woven into the praise itself. ("Mischievous high spirits"? What are they, elves?) Or else it’s just about to emerge in the next sentence...

Donna Dennis, Tourist Cabins on Park Avenue, 2007. This is not as cool as the kids who lived in a furnished squat inside the Providence Mall, or the J. G. Ballard story about the man who eked out a Robinson Crusoe-like existence in a gap between freeways, but it does qualify as an example of interstitial architecture. When I was a kid I used to drive by a real estate office in a vacant lot that looked like this cabin. I always used to imagine living in it. As an adult I've spent some time in oversized closets--but not on traffic medians. (Photo-Peter Mauss/ESTO)

Update: Ha, guess I should have clarified that the cabins are artworks. Simon Sellars at Ballardian has more thoughts on them in the context of urban slippage zones: "In an over-commodified, all-seeing, all devouring age in which every point on the map seems to have been articulated, colonised and claimed, the inarticulate nature of these ‘blurred zones’ generates a readymade, real-world wormhole, one foot within reality, the other foot without."

"Trance Sequence Experiment" [6.7 MB .mp3]

Honestly don't remember doing this. Found it on my hard drive from about two years ago and went--"huh." It's like this recurring dream I have where I find a cache of intriguing (usually expressionist) paintings I don't recall making.

Air Force One, 1997 (Harrison Ford as US President dukes it out with post-Soviet commie hardliners on presidential plane)
fiction/reality compare and contrast

Prescient line spoken by Russian communist (a scenery-eating Gary Oldman): "You who murdered a hundred thousand Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas are going to lecture me on the rules of war? Well DON'T."

Secretary of Defense: "We don't negotiate with terrorists."
Except when selling them arms to finance revolutions in other countries.

President stays on plane to help his family and colleagues instead of bailing out in "escape pod."
President keeps flying west after attacks on Washington and NY are over.

Secretary of Defense and Vice President clash over whether President is incapacitated and must be overruled.
Secretary of Defense and Vice President run goverment.

Air Force One is hijacked by Russian commandos spraying machine gun fire.
Four US planes hijacked by jihadis with box cutters (or at least no guns so far as we know).

President is a pilot who flew helicopter missions in Vietnam.
President skipped out on the latter part of his air national guard service during Vietnam era.

President personally flies jet to the ground and safety after routing hijackers.
President fails to stop hijacking and rides shotgun for photo op aircraft carrier landing.

From Of a Fire on the Moon, 1970:

All the while we had been composing our songs to the moon and driving the Indian on to the reservation, had we also been getting ready to go to the moon out of some deep recognition that we had already killed the nerve which gave life to the earth? Yet the moon by every appearance knew more about disease and the emanations of disease than the oldest leper on earth. "Of what can you dream?" said the moon. "I am battered beyond belief and you think to violate me now?"

An editioned resin sculpture. Look closely and you see two monkeys embracing; fur covers their bodies and joins them together and merges with the base, like some horrible Telepod accident from The Fly. But sensuous too--D'Alvia's careful carving of the strands of fur in the original wax (or clay?) model makes the work ecstatic rather than merely grotesque.