Scrapple (2005: Golan Levin) is an audiovisual installation in which everyday objects placed on a table are interpreted as sound-producing marks in an “active score.” The Scrapple system scans a table surface as if it were a kind of music notation, producing music in real-time from any objects lying there. The installation makes use of a variety of playful forms; in particular, long flexible curves allow for the creation of variable melodies, while an assemblage of cloth shapes, small objects and wind-up toys yields ever-changing rhythms. Video projections on the Scrapple table transform the surface into a simple augmented reality, in which the objects placed by users are elaborated through luminous and explanatory graphics. The 3-meter long table produces a 4-second audio loop, allowing participants to experiment freely with tangible, interactive audiovisual composition. In the Scrapple installation, the table is the score.
Impressions and demonstration of using the Percussa Audio cubes with the tutorial Ableton Live set. The center cube detects the faces of the other cubes to send MIDI notes to Live to change loops.
David Foster Wallace, author of the novel "Infinite Jest," was asked by Rolling Stone magazine to cover John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000. That assignment became a chapter in his essay collection "Consider the Lobster" (2005); the essay has now been issued as a stand-alone book, "McCain's Promise." In a phone interview, Mr. Wallace said he came away from the experience marveling at "how unknowable and layered these candidates are." Mr. Wallace also answered questions via email about presidential hopefuls, the youth vote and smiley faces.
(Click through to Apple for high-quality trailers.)
(This is a "Red Band" trailer.)
World-premiering as the opening-night film of the 2008 Venice International Film Festival; a dark spy-comedy from Academy Award winners Joel and Ethan Coen. An ousted CIA official's (John Malkovich) memoir accidentally falls into the hands of two gym employees (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) intent on exploiting their find. George Clooney and Tilda Swinton also star.
The symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.
The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose.
Filming ‘The Road’ - At the End of the World, Honing the Father-Son Dynamic
Topic: Arts
7:13 pm EDT, May 29, 2008
“The Road” began filming in late February, mostly in and around Pittsburgh, with a later stop in New Orleans and a postproduction visit planned to Mount St. Helens. The producers chose Pennsylvania, one of them, Nick Wechsler, explained, because it’s one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story’s main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.
Mo Yan offers insights into communist ideology and predatory capitalism that we ignore at our peril. This "lumbering animal of a story," as he calls it, combines the appeal of a family saga set against tumultuous events with the technical bravura of innovative fiction. Catch a ride on this wheel of transmigration.
Richard Powers ( Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance ; Prisoner's Dilemma ) is a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant , and it seems appropriate: this strange, overwritten, often infuriating, manically intelligent and sometimes deeply moving novel could hardly have been produced by a writer of mere talent. Powers has woven an extraordinary knowledge of music, of science (particularly of the search for genetic coding, and of computer programming), of the mysteries of language and art history, into a saga that is dazzling and wearying in almost equal measure. The novel jumps back and forth between the late '50s, when brilliant scientist Stuart Ressler is involved with an Illinois research team trying to break the mysteries of DNA coding, and the '80s, when librarian Jan O'Deigh and computer programmer Franklin Todd get to know Ressler, now holding an insignificant night job at a massive computer database operation in Brooklyn, N.Y., and try to figure what derailed his promising career. Not a great deal happens, in a conventional narrative sense. Ressler has an affair with one married fellow scientist and learns music from another; his scientific career is, in fact, aborted by his resulting passion for music. O'Deigh leaves her glib Madison Avenue boyfriend, takes up with Todd and is then abandoned by him in his vain search for information about an obscure 16th-century Flemish artist. Toward the end the three principals are involved in a massive computer scam to help a stricken colleague. Despite occasional bewilderment at arid patches of scientific jargon and interminable displays of arcane knowledge for its own sake, a reader persists with The Gold Bug Variations (the title, obviously, is a play on Bach's Goldberg Variations , which have a key role in the book's intellectual structure, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug , about the solving of a puzzle). For there is a perpetual air of surprise about the book, of intellectual excitement, a passionate involvement with words that expands into delightfully witty dialogue and profoundly evocative description. Reading it is hard work, but it's also deeply enriching; the decade is not likely to bring another novel half as challenging and original.
Musical Ramblings: May 2008 Podcast: the New Orleans Show
Topic: Arts
9:00 pm EDT, May 21, 2008
This new Rambling Podcast is The New Orleans Show, about the musical tradition of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. If you care as much about these issues as I do, here are two charities I recommend contributing to: Habitat for Humanity has specific projects to rebuild homes in the Ninth Ward. The Tipitina's Foundation collects and donates instruments for disenfrenchised schools to preserve and nurture the New Orleans musical tradition.
Here is the setlist:
* Johnny Dodd’s Washboard Band – Bucktown Stomp (02:50-5:55) * Fats Domino – No No Baby (06:50-09:10) * The Meters – Cissy Strut (10:05-13:50) * Snooks Eaglin – Hello Josephine (15:00-18:30) * Professor Longhair – Big Chief (19:05-22:50) * Dr. John – Walk on Guilded Splinters (24:00-29:10) * Guitar Slim – The Things that I Used to Do (29:30-32:30) * Jelly Roll Morton – Sweet Substitute (33:35-36:30) * Louis Armstrong – Basin Street Blues (36:50-43:35) * Rebirth Brass Band – Tubaluba (44:40-50-25) * Galactic – Crazyhorse Mongoose (50-55:58:55) * John Butler Trio – Gov’ did Nothing (01.00.15-01:07:45) * Dirty Dozen Brass Band – What’s Going On (01:08:45-01:13:10) * Bob Brozman – Look at New Orleans (01:13:10-01:18:55) * Stanton Moore – When the Levee Breaks (01:20:05-01:25:40)
