tom moody

Sean Penn to play Larry Fine in Farrelly Brothers Three Stooges movie. This interminable Onion AV Club thread makes that blood-curdling announcement somewhat palatable, with frequent typing of "multiple face slaps," "nyuk nyuk nyuk" and the requisite "Spread out!" Boys, boys.

Moe: So you think you can make flapjacks, eh?
Larry: I don't think. I know.
Moe: I don't think you know either.

and

It's one thing to be the full blown idiot Curly was and bring the constant wrath of Moe down upon you, but it's one step further to defend that idiocy...and thereby challenge the leadership of Moe. If that doesn't deserve multiple slaps across the face and a little hair yanking, I don't know what does.

"B4 the Blue" [6.4 MB .mp3]

After several years of using Cubase SE (the student, or "lite" version) I recently moved to Cubase Essential 4 as my main digital audio work area--also a lite version but with added features such as being able to add effects to audio without first rendering it and the ability to use controller curves for multiple parameters in softsynths (obviating the dreaded "midi learn"). "B4 the Blue" uses several of these features. It's not that radically different from what I've been doing but required a whole lot less steps. I do think having multiple settings changing simultaneously by using overlapping curves will affect my sound quite a bit.

There is a reverbed piano part at about :40 that I'm really happy with--it makes me think of some kind of modal, McCoy Tyner thing but my background is only listening to jazz piano, not playing it. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to keep pushing further and further into music: discovering things that are already inside.

...such as it is. The RE/SEARCH book by Vale and Juno on the bottom of the stack is top-notch, if you can track down a copy. Interviews, reviews, excerpts, illustrated with infra-red filtered photos of bleak industrial and desert landscapes.

Those enjoying the antics of the Dharma Initiative on Lost might get a kick out of Rushing to Paradise, a politically incorrect fable of what happens when a fanatic liberal activist suddenly has infinite funding for research on a Pacific island (hint: she becomes another Pol Pot). If you've never read Ballard I swear by Concrete Island, The Crystal World, High-Rise, and his breakthrough autobiography Empire of the Sun (sentimentalized by Steven Spielberg, what a surprise).

Rest in peace, Jim. Another guy the gatekeeper literati didn't know what to make of, adored by artists, filmmakers, etc.

Update: Not that Ballard necessarily wanted past the gate. As Simon Reynolds notes in a Salon obit: "There's an impulse among some Ballard fans, especially those who are 'proper' literati themselves, to elevate Ballard and argue that his work transcends the ghetto of genre fiction. Although Ballard occasionally expressed frustration with SF's pulpy aura, and later in his career wrote novels that fell outside its parameters, he generally was content to situate himself in the genre and loudly championed its potential. 'I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature,' he once declared, '... all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.'"

"Dearth of the Cool (2009 Remix)" [3.5 MB .mp3]

This is some acoustica done about 3 years ago. It needed more variety in the second half, so added a couple more motifs, and also made the mix more balanced. A jazzy dodecaphonish midi quickie but I like parts of it a lot.

ginormica at Nasty Nets (the cyborg in popular culture)

web art preservation at Nasty Nets

Carolyn Swiszcz paintings at... Nasty Nets

discussing a famous NY cyber conceptualist's talk in Toronto that apparently went over like a lead Hindenburg. The subject of Net Art 1.0 vs 2.0 came up so had to refresh my memory by looking at a textbook history:

I am re-skimming some of Rachel Greene's book Internet Art. She seems to have been sleepwalking in some of her descriptions of the early work. She calls Lialina's 1996 piece My Boyfriend Came Home From the War an "oblique, dramatized romantic narrative" with elements of interactivity (what Sally calls "find-the-place-to-click-me").
But to hear Lialina talk about that work in a lecture here in NY it is a Dadaist goof with a pseudo narrative (what boyfriend? what war?) that made fun of the slow loading tech of the time.

Heath Bunting's King's Cross Phone In, 1994, reads to me like the prototype Net Art piece that launched a thousand Rhizome commissions. Bunting publishes a list of pay phone numbers for a London train station on the Internet with instructions to start ringing the numbers at a certain time. Passersby in London witness a "spontaneous" international phone-ringing symphony--a Situationist or Fluxus type event. It's the predecessor of the cell phone "flash mob" although Greene's 2004 book was probably too early to make that connection.

To me it says more about long-distance rates and I would assume that the "international-ness" of the calls depended on how well heeled the participants are. I'm guessing most of the calls came from within the same area code, but Greene doesn't get into the economics of it at all.

In any case that situationist stuff is mostly a great story--hearing about it is just as good as participating. That interests me considerably less than making visual art, film or music with brain dead web based tools.

copied and pasted:

tasteful de Stijl-esque "monument" to famous utopian socialist
collage of famous photoshopped Iran missile in multiple orientations
Memphis furniture sideboard (photo)
excavation of a World War II bunker buried in a hill in The Hague (photo)
low res boxing ring related stills or footage projected in dark room
Pioneer 10-11 extraterrestrial greeting plaque painted on de Stijl lattice
plexiglas-sandwiched slices of decaying organic matter resemble Hirst cut up cow
actual white cube with lower right corner set on fire
post-Biennial stick figure on canvas or panel
photo of photoshopped van gogh wrapped in clear plastic
3D rendering of gallery wall with four conjoined metallic picture frames
busy wall and floor installation of mingled organic and geometric lattices resembling deformed corporate flow charts
cyclado-brancusoid stone sculpture of extraterrestrial "grey"
folding table with flashlight, book, meteorite, etc (3D printer objects?)
3 photos: chair, 3D printer objects, and demo graphic for laser sculpting process
second life sculpture project - assortment of 3D shapes hovers over hilly topography
slightly more eccentric judd-like variations of IKEA furniture parts
grid of adjacent photos covers walls, floor, and columns in vast space, resembling cityscape
photo of 4 people staring at 5th person in gallery with title "What’s on view looks like you"
vector-y graphics (continents, rectangles, triangles) on yellow wall-mounted disc
hockey mask, shin guards, and illegible photo on gallery partition
wind chimes blown by electrical fans in gallery with title re: "Arab tritone" interval
middle east map with title re: politics and poetry
expressionistically applied orange paint on post-Katrina house and yard

Green Cage, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 30" X 30" (whereabouts unknown)

Large "stretched" version

variation

another variation

Update: Should mention that in the actual painting the red and green are close in value so they vibrate almost painfully.

As long as we're using YouTube for a jukebox (love those stationary album covers!) here's Drexciya's "Astronomical Guidepost" (featuring one of the all time great geeky soundbites).

Another photo of my demo/performance last Wednesday, thanks to Paddy Johnson for sending this from her phone.
Sorry for all the photo-self-indulgence. I DJ'd for about a year in the early '00s in a venue in Chinatown, pre- the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, so I never got any "documentation" of all those gigs and now no believes I did them. Am making up for that now.

"Junatic" [8.6 MB .mp3]

This was the opening track in my playlist for the Goodbye Blue Monday show on Wed. (Wanted at least one I hadn't posted before.)
All done in Cubase with Reaktor instruments and a delay effect.