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My artwork in New Dead Families

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Some artwork of mine appears in the current issue of New Dead Families, an online magazine of contemporary fiction, mostly. Editor Zack Wentz describes the publication:

In some alternate universe there is my ideal periodical: a cross between H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, and Gordon Lish’s the Quarterly, and/or Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions. In the '70s there were a number of original paperback anthologies that came close: Damon Knight’s Orbit series, Judith Merril’s numerous SF bests, and Harry Harrison’s Nova.

But where are those sorts of literary venues now? Where could that kind of work go now?

Perhaps New Dead Families is that periodical, in that place, and by some quantum trick I have pushed/pulled that alternate universe into my own. This.

Perhaps.

We can certainly try, can’t we?

I'm still reading the stories but am enjoying them so far. Am pleased to be featured in this venue.

Real Native Plants Imported from Asia

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highlinelookingeast2011

Before the High Line became a tourist destination it was a classic post-industrial decay scenario: an elevated botanical garden of weeds and wild grasses that you could only view from the upper floors of certain West Side buildings. (Above is one of the last of such glimpses, from two years ago.) It had charm as a bit of random, windblown nature existing in the city and when it came time for it to be yuppified as a city park, the architects and promoters made a big to-do about using only "native plants and grasses" to landscape after they tore out all the random stuff.*
Now, maybe not so much. Buried in a recent Salon scare story about supposed cold-resistant cockroaches invading New York (always, something is invading) lies the nugget boldfaced below:

New York’s High Line, an abandoned elevated railway transformed into the city’s hottest new park, is responsible for attracting swarms of tourists to Manhattan’s West Side, revitalizing/gentrifying the area and, according to researchers at Rutgers University, introducing a new species of cockroach never before seen in the U.S.

Periplaneta japonica, common in Asia, was first spotted by an exterminator in 2012. The researchers believe it arrived as a stowaway in one of the imported plants adorning the park.

Only in America, as we used to say: Real Native Plants Imported from Asia. Also, free (one dollar surcharge may apply in some states).

*The High Line is still pushing the locavore angle but includes the fudge words "focuses" and "most" in these claims:

The High Line's unique landscape was created in partnership with Netherlands-based planting designer Piet Oudolf. For inspiration, Oudolf looked to the existing landscape that grew on the High Line after the trains stopped running. The plant selection focuses on native, drought-tolerant, and low-maintenance species, cutting down on the resources that go into the landscape.

and

Local Sourcing: Most of the High Line’s plants are native species, and many were produced by local growers. Locally-grown plants are better adapted to grow successfully in our climate, reducing the amount of plant failure and replacement costs.

Except when the occasional import from halfway around the globe introduces invasive insect species.

self-bombing then and now

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Addendum to the previous post's implied link of 9/11 truth and Peal Harbor truth: here is the brief from the left on whether the US provoked Japan for a casus belli. Usually this assertion comes from FDR-haters on the right but a digger into classified Navy documents thinks we did it and did it for good cause: fighting Hitler at a time when most of the US citizenry opposed European intervention. Causing the deaths of 2500 Americans and then lying about it would be pretty dastardly but we're supposed to take the long view, or global view, of what the war accomplished.
As for American "isolationism," given what we now know about ties between the US financial sector and German industrialists in the run-up to WWII, the true paranoid has to ask how much of that "stay out of Europe" sentiment was also manipulated.

Octatrack Tips videos by SecretMusicUK

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Tip #1 - Amp page and menu
Tip #2 - Playback page and menu
Tip #3 - Slices and Retrigger
Tip #4 - LFOs part 1
Tip #5 - LFOs part 2; Parts
Tip #6 - Resampling
Tip #7 - MIDI
Tip #8 - Effects part 1

This is a fan/user-posted YouTube tutorial course on the Elektron Octatrack sequencer/sampler. It's intermediate level in that it assumes you've read the manual, know some basics, and still have questions. It's fast-paced and smart, unlike many narcissistic how-tos-but-this-is-really-about-me-and-my-wonderful-hands-turning-knobs-on-this-fabulous-gear-I-bought that can be suffered within the YouTube swamp.

Most gear demos don't ask why, as in, what type of music are you making, who is your intended audience, is this just an advertisement for a commercial product, might someone's "workflow" include other things besides this gear, what is a good mangled sound vs a bad mangled sound, is all this complexity about avoiding cliche, is power-sucking equipment a luxury that only one generation will possess on a widespread level, what happens after six years when the battery in this machine runs down and the manufacturer has "moved on," why this piece of gear as opposed to a thousand other gimcracks available for home electronic music makers, and so on.