tom moody

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Hate to link to YouTube because past posts have turned into mortuaries of dead links as this corporation or that petulant artist has demanded that their crappy grainy minuscule scraps of content be removed, but...

Was talking to a friend last night about Gilbert & George and their start in the '70s as "living sculptures," before they became big gallery-supported purveyors of large multi-pane conceptual photographs.

Found a YouTube excerpt from a documentary about those early years here.

fffound bugs me except when I fffind my work there, then I'm ffflattered

wm gibson joke: "phantom gun syndrome" - right wing spy dude keeps patting waist where his gun would be

"he went from full-blown critical writing to picking apart press releases"

vid festival sent DVD back, post screening, to Mailboxes Etc where I mailed it from--good thing I happened to go back in there

according to R Krauss the grid mediates between the sacred and the secular--kind of a compromise motif

home techno musicians have yet to benefit from substantial critical analysis

i hate the way google suggests shit now as you type

i could cannibalize what's on my hard drive(s) and on paper in my studio and would never need any "new material"

horrible dream where I kept putting my left shoe on my right foot and vice versa while people were waiting for me at a dinner party

2 former manhattanites: "where are you now?" "jersey city--you?" "queens" (both trying to smile)

fragment of video for The Knife minus the smooth vector style and sadomasochistic frisson

hat tip JS for The Knife

Recommended video: "Probably How It Will Go Down" by Ricky on Double Happiness.

cf. Don DeLillo's "airborne toxic event" from White Noise:

Through the stark trees we saw it, the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers--immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. There were cracklings and sputterings, flashes of light, long looping streaks of chemical flame. The car horns blared and moaned. The helicopters throbbed like giant appliances. We sat in the car, in the snowy woods, saying nothing. The great cloud, beyond its turbulent core, was silver-tipped in the spotlights. It moved horribly and sluglike through the night, the choppers seeming to putter ineffectually around its edges. In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboards.

"France" [1.9 MB Quicktime .mov]

"Round the Middle" [3.6 MB .mp3]

This was going to be "RMV Study No. 3" but it needed a piano part; the rhythm alone wasn't carrying it. The basic meter is a drum and bass midi groove that I assigned various (mostly) synthesized hits to. The three note bass part was created using the Reaktor Sinebeats synth.

Update, March 2010: Remixed and reposted. One of those bass notes was way too loud for the mix.

In New York (or maybe everywhere) "karma" has become synonymous with "revenge."

1. US military repeatedly dumped sarin, nerve gas, mustard gas, and explosives into the coastal waters of New Jersey from World War I to the early '70s (and then supposedly stopped).

2. Nuclear wastes at the Hanford facility in Washington state are slowly creeping towards the water table and the Columbia River.

I realize there's been sort of a learning curve vis a vis our place in the planetary ecosystem, but if extraterrestrials held a trial tomorrow of all other living creatures vs us the brief looks damned sorry. "We thought if we buried it or threw it in the water it would just go away! You can't see it, right? Duh, drool..."

There is an organization for voluntary human extinction. Don't breed, try not to contribute too much toxicity during your brief time. Let the planet rest and start over, maybe with birds or bugs instead of mammals. It sounds extreme, but then so does dumping 64 million pounds of chemical weapons into the ocean.

Just learned from the disquiet blog that composer Donald Erb died. First heard of him during a radio interview with Frank Zappa, in response to a "what are you listening to?" question. Have had the Nonesuch recording of "Reconnaisance" and "In No Strange Land," chamber pieces using live electronics, for many years.

I saw a live Erb performance in Dallas, sometime in the late '80s. I recall a long raucous bellowing trombone solo, which climaxed the piece, and then during the applause a young woman started screaming, like a teenager at a rock concert. Erb looked bemused. I wondered if it was his daughter or a student who knew him well. That kind of emotional response to 20th Century music was...rare.

Update: Just re-listened to my Erb record. The electronics soloing in the first movement of "Strange Land" rivals Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra at their most frenetic and wacked-out. Really intense stuff. Ah, the '60s.