October 1, 2009 #Suburban Gothic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"break[ing] down the facade of normality that pervades suburbia." Thanks to Long Division for the turn on. These would surely make an excellent Netflix queue:
September 30, 2009 #Doris Duke’s “He’s Gone” from her 1969 I’m a Loser. The rhythm section is just out of this world, especially those bass stabs that sound like synthesized honey. Thanks to DJ Mental Feelings for the turn on.
September 30, 2009 #Perfectly underwater-high-definition-summer video for the Washed Out track “Feel It All Around.” Traveling with friends, poured drinks, easy beaches.
September 29, 2009 #
a solitary point, by virtue of being infinitesimally small, is a border that encircles the entire universe. This wall is not a dam, it is precisely that there is nothing inside. Rather, everything is on the other side, inside the labyrinth.
—Hanging, chatting, strolling, listening, absorbing with D this passed week in NYC, spotted his entry on my return.
September 29, 2009 #Coffee By Week, 2009
Some Kiwi is documenting each cup of coffee he consumes. Neat JavaScript interface for highlighting coffees by day of the week.
September 29, 2009 #
Z and I somehow snuck into the “secret” Rorschach show in the basement of the Charleston in Williamsburg on Friday night. It was overcrowded and there’s no way we would have made it in legitimately. The crowd was energized and sweaty and the pit was wild and friendly. Found this pic of Z screaming for the mic. Nostalgia for nostalgia. Good clean fun.
September 25, 2009 #A 20 minute short documentary about a homemade mobile music venue from Oakland, CA that runs on veggie oil. The film follows the bus as it travels from town to town with a vibrant crew of itinerants, chronicling the high and low points of life surrounding this unique temporary art space and social utopia.
Check out more of Ryan Junell’s work at Superbarn.com
September 25, 2009 #In NYC this week, I went to Issue Project Room last night to see and hear Melvin Van Peebles speak and show some of his work. Probably best known for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, his 1971 film often credited with starting the Blaxploitation film movement, Mr. van Peebles is an actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, composer and Celestial Mechanic (read: arithmetician). This video is from his stint as a Channel 5 news guest commentator in 1985.
June 20, 2006 #I recently submitted a re-design for Oak Knoll's Antiquarian Catalogue. Oak Knoll is "the world's largest inventory of books about books and bibliography," with a hefty share of titles concerning typography and book design.
I used Robert Slimbach's Minion Pro Condensed with its
proportional ("Old Style") figures, widely spaced small caps for book titles, and a very readable italic for book descriptions:
The page proportion is a standard 2:3 (a perfect fifth, according to Robert Bringhurst's "Page Proportions As Musical Intervals") and I designed a harmonic text block proportion of 3:5 (Bringhurst's major sixth) with margin proportions 1:2 (the octave):
Not a winning design, but an enjoyable exercise and a chance to dig deeply into a treasure-filled catalogue for bibliophiles.
March 3, 2006 #I went to Anthology Film Archives Thursday night to see and hear Iannis Xenakis' La Légende d'Eer. In attendance were Thomas and Paul---appropriate companions as the three of us met during a residency at Xenakis' Ateliers d'UPIC in a smelly suburb of Paris.
La Légende d'Eer is a piece from 1978 created for the opening of the Centre Georges-Pompidou that included a 7-channel tape composition, an architectural construction of Xenakis' design and a visual component of 1,680 lights, 4 lasers and 400 mirrors. Thursday night's performance was composed of a video of visual documentation of the installation in the form of 350 photographs by Bruno Rastoin plus a surround-sound seven-speaker version of Xenakis' music mixed from the orignal master tapes live by Gerard Pape.
I was impressed, enjoyed the music and revelled in the rare occasion to hear Xenakis in NYC. Gerard Pape did a masterful job presenting the sound component: not sure how much leeway Xenakis leaves for the mixer of the sound, but any liberties Pape took were well received. The visual component was interesting, not wholly necessary, and I did close my eyes occasionally to take in the music as three dimensional. Watching the images on the screen sometimes flattened the sound, forcing me to focus too much on the two dimensional surface and not on what Xenakis was trying to explore in terms of sound in space. That said, the photographs themselves were often times stunning, the transitions in the still images were well executed and the whole product could be seen as an experimental documentation of an event/space. I would consider purchasing the DVD (the video presented at Anthology and a 5 channel version of the music component) for such a documentation. In all, an interesting night returning me to thinking about Xenakis.