tom moody

Matt Smear noted the latest bloglines* (mis)interpretation of a GIF post of mine, and was kind enough to email this image--it's two alternating screenshots showing the post "as it was intended" on Firefox and the "Xtreme stretched" version generated by bloglines. It's so thoughtful of the bloglines designers to help lowly bloggers by regularizing the spacing of GIFs. We just don't know what we're doing and are dying for a CSS whiz to show us the beauty of a well-designed post. That said, I kind of like the vibrating picket fence. But I like Smear's GIF best of all.

Be sure to check out Smear's blog. He is obsessed with Michael McDonald and Russ Tamblyn (in a good way) and takes their multicolored, low-res visages through hundreds of pixelated, psychedelic iterations. Really trippy, ambitious use of animated GIFS, spatially exciting because they take up a large part of the browser window and really work that real estate. Like painting, but on your computer instead of a canvas with a guard watching you stare at it. Here's a comparatively muted image that I like a lot (about 1.33 MB).

*RSS newsreader that reformats blog posts and allows subscribers to follow a lot of different people's content without clicking through to the original blogs. One reason I switched to a generic design is what's the point of having a "unique" page if newsreaders convert every blog to the same format?

Hi, H____,
I saw Oblivion Sun this week at the Knitting Factory here in NY.
They were great, and I like their CD too (subject to the usual complaints about lyrics and their occasionally sounding too much like Genesis).
Very small crowd, but thunderous applause and yelling after every song. These were NY's hardcore Happy* heads. Mostly men, mostly ancient, sigh.
Besides the new material, the band did a lovely "Leave That..." and for an encore, an improvised jam that led into "I Carved..."
I talked to Stanley before the show. He remembered me, and I told him I had seen you this summer.
I didn't stick around to [say hi to] Frank (I doubt he'd remember me), but I gotta say his songwriting is as amazing as ever. His three tunes on the new CD are standouts. Always surprising chord shifts and a kind of darkness or poignancy or profundity not all of the Happy/O.S. writers have. (Check out "Fanfare" on the MySpace page.)
...I really do idolize his musical abilities and will probably have to send him a fan letter.
I'm tempted to describe him as "an American composer" [which is how he's described on his wikipedia entry], who with time and distance from his genre might be given his due as such. Or is his talent inseparable from the band's/bands'? The solo things he posted to his site didn't interest me much but "Death's Crown" is all credited to him and "Ibby It Is" still gives me goosebumps.
Hope all is well!
Best, T___
PS I am not an unapologetic or unrepentant Prog Head. These guys have state of the art keyboards with computers but the computer revolution seems not to have affected them at all. Hiphop, electro, sampladelia, drum and bass are not a phase they worked through. And thus their sound is a '70s time capsule and I think it will hamper them with finding a younger audience, except for the few that seek out a highly structured music that also "rocks."
PPS *About that Happy the Man YouTube--it's progressive rock a la Yes at their peak but without the gold capes and gnomes dancing around Stonehenge. Just normally dressed older men being very professional about playing extremely loud music at high speed. I believe this to be good.

Caught about 10 minutes of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace in the wee hours on Cartoon Network. Holy shit, that was funny. All live action--not a cartoon. A very Pythonesque bit where a priest is rattling on at a funeral ("God moves in mysterious ways. Coming in at a steep angle, swerving from side to side, then swooping up unexpectedly from below..."), then the coffin starts shaking, a zombie pops out, and a very poorly filmed shootout ensues as the mobsters around the graveside start firing off shotguns and flame throwers. Most of the humor is in the appalling production values--it's apparently an ongoing spoof of an '80s horror film. Only about six episodes of this British TV series exist, it's amazing it's airing at all. I want to see more.

jimpunk and Abe Linkoln have returned to the blogosphere as collaborators with triptych.tv. Caution, browserbuster! I got about half the page loaded, roughly ten pixels at a time with the right vertical scroll. The page groans with the weight of embedded media set to autoplay. An abundance of skulls, which should thrill Paddy Johnson. These were the bloggers behind SCREENFULL and 544X378WebTV--they are joined by Mr. Tamale for this outing.

jimpunk has been posting manic video collages to YouTube, such as this one, Unicorn. They are part of a larger project, YTB.

I've been remixing my tunes, getting ready to make some CDs for "demo" purposes.
I've been using John Parker's excellent production on our Scratch Ambulance disc, as well as the two tunes of mine that sounded decent through the PA system at Galapagos last month as my "baseline" and adjusting tracks to that baseline.
I'm not using much equalization but mainly eliminating "muddy frequencies" by moving too-closely pitched sounds to different pan-locations. Also getting basses and kick drums on their own tracks and leveling them separately.
I eliminated about 100 tunes from what I've posted online so that's about 120 I could potentially use. I have done one disc with 20 songs I'm fairly satisfied with, but I'm thinking a multi-disc set is where this is going, just so I have a hard(er) copy record of a fairly productive couple of years.

Just received an email for an audio plugin that "simulates analog tape" for digital recording and producing.
VirSyn is the Germany-based software company that makes it.
Here are a few of its features:

VTAPE Saturator

- Realistic tape emulation
- Tape saturation / compression
- Tape hiss
- Wow & Flutter
- Equalizer
- Aliasing free distortion

25 years after CDs were introduced to the market as a "noise free" sound system, there is a sizeable industry devoted to adding high quality realistic noise to digital sound. There's a moral in here somewhere.

Diana Kingsley, Blue Ribbon, 2005, 42" x 40", lambda print

The artwork above, by Diana Kingsley, was recently removed from a curated show in a building at 55 5th Avenue in NYC (at 13th Street). The property is owned by arts patron Francis Greenburger, founder of Art Omi, an artist's colony in upstate New York. Greenburger employs a full time curator, Elisabeth Akkerman, to install art in buildings he owns around the city and country. And not just install--the above work appeared in a two person exhibition called "Blue Ribbon," which is the name of Kingsley's piece--clearly her work was an important element in the show. The other artist, Kate Gilmore, shows with Smith-Stewart gallery; Kingsley is a Bellwether alum who has been showing at Leo Castelli.

Why was the work removed? Besides housing the headquarters of Greenburger's company, Time Equities, Inc., the building on 5th has a medical office where women come to get mammograms. According to Kingsley, the curator told her that a complaint had been made because someone felt it was inappropriate to see full breasts on display--in a sweater!--in a place where women were possibly getting bad news about cancer.

That's it. That's all it takes, and the artwork is gone. This wryly humorous and rather gorgeous image, with an awkwardly placed brooch mirroring a cheesy floral award in a play of irrational, cantilevered symmetry, will not be seen. And an arts patron does nothing to stop the suppression.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if it was actually men who were disturbed by the image and the traumatized cancer screeners just a politically correct excuse to get rid of it. Corporate lobbies are dull unsexed places and this decorum is ironclad.

MacPaint Study, photocopies, linen tape

"Force Fed" [2.7 MB .mp3]

Aggressive, male club type thing with dirty guitar effects, 808 and very digital acid-synth

Update: added a few more "licks" to the third guitar appearance and took out about 10 secs of synth near the end.