Some new books listed over there in the side-bar. New records coming soon.

Tuesday, May 27, 2003
9:48 PM
0 comments

Day Seven of no caffeine.

And here's John Cage on computer music and the gift economy:

"Computers're bringing about a situation that's like the invention of harmony. Sub-routines are like chords. No one would think of keeping a chord to himself. You'd give it to anyone who wanted it. You'd welcome alterations of it. Sub-routines are altered by a single punch. We're getting music made by man himself : not just one man."
—"Art and Technology" (1969)

Elsewhere (and some time ago) the always-charming Ray B. points out the most recent realization of Cage's "A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-One Waltzes and Fifty-Six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity," a composition made from field recordings made in and around Chicago according to this amazing visual score.

Monday, May 26, 2003
1:48 PM
0 comments

Day Four of no caffeine. My legs and ankles feel unusually stiff. My nose has also been running for nearly twenty-four hours straight, but I suspect that this is more a leftover from my cold than anything else.

Friday, May 23, 2003
9:52 AM
0 comments

I am currently on Day Three of no caffeine, just sort of trying out an experiment with personal chemistry. I've been working on improving my posture and bodily awareness pretty actively for the last two years and one of the things that has come to light through that process is that I have a great deal of difficulty relaxing—my hands, jaw, face, neck, shoulders and feet seem to always be storing enormous reserves of tension. I'm not certain that the caffeine is fully to blame but I suspect that it can't be helping.

I can't remember the last time I went three days with no caffeine. Normally on the second day I am struck by a terrible headache and I give in. I decided to make a go of struggling through the withdrawl this week because I already have a cold—since I'm already going to feel achey and groggy and unproductive, why not embark on something that's going to make me feel achey and groggy and unproductive?

OK. Time to drag my achey and groggy and unproductive body down to the Chicago Cultural Center to drop off my revised grant budget.

Thursday, May 22, 2003
10:14 AM
0 comments

Raccoon readers in Philadelphia and New York: drop me a line if you want to meet up during my upcoming East Coast sojourn. I'm at jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003
2:05 PM
0 comments

The City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs has just awarded Imaginary Year an $800 grant to be used for advertising and other promotions, provided I can get them a revised budget by Friday. Whee!

Tuesday, May 20, 2003
11:36 AM
0 comments

"Ryoanji is a temple belonging to the Myoshinji school of the Rinzai branch of the Zen sect, famous for its 'karesansui' or rock garden. 30 m wide and 10 m deep, the garden contains 15 rocks arranged on the surface of white pebbles in such a manner that visitors can see only 14 of them at once, from whichever angle the garden is viewed. Only when you attain spiritual enlightment as a result of deep Zen meditation, can you see the last invisible stone with your mind's eye."

In 1982, Cage writes music for oboist James Ostryniec, based on his Ryoanji-inspired drawings of rock gardens. (Some of these drawings contain 225 stones (15 x 15) and others contain 3,375 (15 x 15 x 15).)

Cage bases the melodic line on the stones:

"Using two [sheets of paper] I made a 'garden' of sounds, tracing parts of the perimeters of the same stones I had used for the drawings and etchings. I was writing a music of glissandi. [If] more lines than one were drawn in the same vertical space, I distinguished between sound systems, taking four as a maximum."

—and the accompaniment on the raked sand:

"For the accompaniment ... I made a percussion part having a single complex of unspecified sounds played in unison, the icti chance-distriubted in meteres of twelve, thirteen, fourteen or fifteen. I didn't want the mind to be able to analyze rhythmic patterns."

Now, Art in General is calling for sound art for Rock's Role (After Ryoanji), a group exhibition of sound works by artists responding to Cage's Ryoanji pieces.

"Rock's Role (After Ryoanji) will [break] contributions into 'continuous' and 'discrete' elements corresponding to the stones or the raked sand of the garden. In the exhibition, continuous elements will be mixed and overlapped; discrete elements will be played in succession. We hope for contributions employing sounds and sound-making means of all kinds. The only requirement is that contributions be able to co-exist with any other sounds in the exhibition. ... continuous elements should be a series of individual tracks suitable for 'shuffle play,' with no single track exceeding four minutes in duration. Discrete elements should take the form of a single long track ranging from 15 minutes to an hour. ... Throughout the exhibition, these arrangements will be played in succession together with chance-determined arrangements."

Deadline: September 27.

Thanks to Kristina DzWright and Dasha Dakleva for the heads-up.

Labels: music_commentary

Monday, May 19, 2003
5:04 PM
0 comments

From John Cage's Themes and Variations:

"Life on earth can be improved by means of food alone."

"Love = leaving space around loved one."

"If the mind is disciplined (body too) the heart turns quickly from fear towards love (Eckhart)."

1:38 PM
0 comments

Television Without Pity aptly nails the bad thing about Caleb, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's endgame villain:

"A murderous misogynist clothed in religious trappings. Is he a Nazi too? Could [Mutant Enemy] have loaded the deck any more here? ... I don't find evil like this chilling or menacing. I find it obvious. I don't really fear the itinerant, murderous misogynist who is obviously loonier than a bushel of howler monkeys. I fear the misogynist who wears the mask of a reasonable, loving man. The misogynist who holds a position of power. Who has the power to affect my life, or the lives of the women I love, or the lives of all my sisters across the world. The misogynist who walks, fully integrated, in a society that condones his actions, or simply looks the other way. And don't tell me that Caleb is a metaphor for that other misogynist, the one we should truly be concerned about. Because I don't believe that the obvious can be a metaphor for the subtle, the hidden. The obvious merely distracts us from the real threat."

The late appearance of this character is only one of the (many) problems that mar Season Seven, but if I get started on the others I'll be sitting here all night.

Saturday, May 17, 2003
11:16 PM
0 comments

The ever-vigilant Judith sends me a list of novels which prominently feature children, including:

The Everlasting Story of Nory by Nicholson Baker
The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The Saskiad by Brian Hall
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

And she also usefully points out that the worlds of juvenile and young adult literature of course feature representations of children by the barrel-load. Which begs the question: what is the best juvenile / young adult literature out there?

I'm fond of A Wrinkle In Time, myself, and I enjoyed The Golden Compass, the first book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy—although, being fantasy/SF, these books don't exactly have the stamp of "realism" that I'm looking for. Francesca Lia Block is closer.

Related: I had the opportunity on my recent roadtrip to flip through the Dave-Eggers-edited The Best Non-Required Reading 2002, a collection marketed (interestingly) to people between the ages of 15 and 25. The final piece in the collection is a selection from high schooler Zoe Trope's controversial Please Don't Kill the Freshman, published by Future Tense Books (and soon to be reprinted by Harper Collins). What struck me about the bits of it that I read is not so much its originality, but rather the fact that it rang incredibly similar to the writing of a few students that I've had in my fiction classes, also young, precocious women. These writers tend to be startlingly incisive about particular topics (largely gender and sexual politics) and they also tend to share a similar style (terse, clipped prose and a tendency towards stream-of-consciousness and abandonment of standard grammatical convention), and I'm beginning to see it as a kind of decentered movement instead of just a few isolated cases. Who or what are the common influences on these women? (I sense Bukowski in the mix somewhere.) This interview is not particularly illuminating.

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, May 16, 2003
11:54 AM
0 comments

A lovely gallery of experimental instruments, complete with sound samples. Found via Inflight Correction.

Thursday, May 15, 2003
10:56 AM
0 comments

Nick from Blanketfort suggests the idea of swapping "image-mix CDs"—discs full of images trawled from the Web.

I don't have a particularly expansive collection at the moment, but after looking at two screenshots of parts of his collection (one, two), I am utterly convinced that this is a worthwhile pursuit.

I also enjoyed examining the directory structures in the left-hand pane of those screenshots to get a sense of his classification scheme. And I'm excited about the prospect of developing a file hierarchy to store my own images. If there's one thing I love it's a good taxonomy. Please remember that I am a big geek.

Wednesday, May 14, 2003
1:24 PM
0 comments

When I returned from my recent roadtrip I found in my mailbox the newest issue (#19) of the East Village INKY, a zine about raising kids (ages 5 and 2 as of this writing) in New York City. I've always liked EVI (you can read my reviews of older issues over at Invisible City—here and here) and anybody interested in children should check it out. (Send $2 to Ayun Halliday, PO Box 22754, Brooklyn NY, 11202, or subscribe online.)

I've been thinking a lot about representations of children lately, in particular because I want to start writing some kids into Imaginary Year. (There's one floating around at the fringe of the narrative right now, but so far he has been entirely offstage.) I realized recently that I'm hard-pressed to think of any novels that prominently feature a realistic child anywhere between the ages of two and twelve. Where is all the good writing about children?

Online, we could look at the entertaining Raising Hell (don't miss the cautionary tales of the Unfortunate Little Boy, in particular the one about The Little Boy Who Didn't Brush His Teeth) (thanks Laura). There's also It's all going to be OK over at Whygodwhy (thanks Ray).

Labels: personal, writing

Tuesday, May 13, 2003
5:05 PM
0 comments

Over at Sans Sherrif, Ray breaks the news of our new audio collaboration, who loves the forest.

More adventures in sound, dead ahead!

Tuesday, May 06, 2003
2:28 PM
0 comments

Testing the new left-hand sidebar. Let me know if it looks wretched in your browser or on your monitor.

Update: currently making adjustments for the dreaded Navigator 4.7.

11:10 AM
0 comments

The new Number None record is now available.

We had a release party on Saturday night (thanks to Kristina D and David W for hosting). When we were thinking about the party, Chris and I decided we'd bring the MiniDisc to record the voices of the partygoers, as raw material for a future piece. In order to try to generate a wider variety of material, we devised a series of vocal prompts. I put them together into a deck of cards that the partygoers could draw from (because, well, it had almost been a year since I made my last deck of cards). A full list of the prompts that I contributed to the deck can be found here.

I'm thinking about doing a minor redesign to this site. Stay tuned.

Labels: number_none

Monday, May 05, 2003
11:36 AM
0 comments