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.

David Byrne’s New Band, With Architectural Solos

“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.

Filming ‘The Road’ - At the End of the World, Honing the Father-Son Dynamic

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.

Animal Farm

From Publishers Weekly:

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.

Gold Bug Variations

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)

Musical Ramblings: May 2008 Podcast: the New Orleans Show

Against the odds, film noir just does not get old.

Darkness visible

Ever wanted to create your own isometric pixel picture, but didn't know what the word isometric meant? Well, now you can fulfill your wildest dreams with Cubescape!

Cubescape - Your own digital landscape

Vertext is an OpenGL-enabled Processing vector font library. This enables you to draw giant, detailed typography at high frame-rates.

Vertext

A memoir of life in a nuclear research town.

This review is being written by a white-trash guy who grew up in village a lot like author Kelly McMasters' blue-collar hometown, Shirley, on Long Island's south shore. It's one of those places beaten up by the weather and changing economic conditions, one that rich people speed by on their way to the fashionable Hamptons. Places such as Patchogue, where I grew up, Shirley and its neighbor, Mastic, have not been the subject of much literature.

McMasters is correcting that with a disturbing, ambitious book twining her life in Shirley in the 1980s with the relationship the town and its residents have to Brookhaven National Laboratory, a nearby high-energy physics and nuclear research complex, and the potentially disastrous environmental consequences of that geographical fact.

Home is a very heavy nucleus.

'Welcome to Shirley' by Kelly McMasters

In the end, red tape proved mightier than the sword.

It is about the possibilities of escape — slim at the best of times — from those prisons we make for ourselves.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

What Lives On