December 2008

men are men, women are persons

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...according to the Sacramento Bee, which apparently has a hard time writing the word "woman":

Obituary: Nation's oldest man, 112, dies in Sacramento

George Rene Francis, the oldest man in America, who lived through 19 presidents and saw Babe Ruth swat a homer, died Saturday in a Sacramento nursing home. He was 112.

[...]

Walter Breuning of Montana, 112 years and 98 days old, is now the country's oldest living man. Gertrude Baines of Los Angeles, 114, is the nation's oldest living person. The world's oldest person is Maria de Jesus of Portugal, 115 and 109 days old; the oldest man is Tomoji Tanabe of Japan, 113 and 101 days.

What's up with that? My guess is it's a way of getting around the boring headline "US's Second Oldest Person Dies." In terms of world news it's barely a blip without the paper's contorted deep-sixing of gender. But we certainly couldn't rule out rampant sexism at the Bee.

two full screen art adventures

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1. I "made" this:

object array jpg

"Bounded creativity, beauty, banality, despair" might be the tag cloud for Object Array by Arend deGruyter-Helfer (works on principles similar to the build-a-bike utility the Loshadkaites found)

2. The late Sol LeWitt was a great art thinker but not such a hot artist when you actually see his work in person. His stacked cinderblock-type sculptures do have a perverse stark appeal and hope to put up a collection of images of them soon.
As for his ubiquitous (and oft-painted over--by design or otherwise) museum wall murals, Jon Rafman's online versions (1 / 2 / 3) are much preferable. They actually dazzle as opposed to making you stand there saying "Wish these were as dazzling as they obviously want you to think they are."

Update: Apologies if you saw a black rectangle instead of artwork in this post. I used an older version of Photoshop to make a .png and belatedly realized my "alternate browser" wasn't reading it.

"Octavia"

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"Octavia" [mp3 removed]

Am interested in demos as an art form: a piece of music that's not intended as music, just to demonstrate various features of gear. This song is done in that spirit. The instrument is Native Instruments' software version of the classic early 80s synth, the Prophet 5. Am using four patches here: Hot Bass, Hihat, Hihat 2, and Playground. The tune has been posted earlier as "Free Alpha," "Alpha Inshore," and "Blistering Alpha."

Many consider the Pro-53 to be "cold" and "thin" compared to the "warm," "fat" sound of the Prophet 5. I suppose it is. This song was written as if cold and thin were virtues.

"Tesseract Farm Incident"

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"Tesseract Farm Incident" [mp3 removed]

As in incidental music.

I broke my Mutator filter. It was fixed by Armen's Music Shop (highly recommended; thanks also to Mutronics/Audio Kitchen for the great instrument). Did this "song" to test out having both channels working again--it's really more of an intro or demo (see next post) but I'm happy with it and may add to it. The rhythm is from an earlier song, "Tesseract Farm."