I’ve been futzing around with the rss feed for the site, so if you’ve added it to your reader already, you may need to add it again. The link up in the sidebar should work now to give you some high-quality feeds. Of course, if you read this in a feed reader, and I just broke the feed, you probably won’t see this message. That is why I am not a real web designer.
April 2008 Archives
After the runaway success of my Pop Studies, with the public clamoring for a follow-up, I retreated into my creative space to develop a new idea.
Listening to the radio on some errand, I heard the beginning of Gloria Estefan/Miami Sound Machine’s “1-2-3” (ironically enough, on that video they cut out the opening counting sequence, but you get the idea). I thought, “Wait a minute, is that Einstein on the Beach?”
(here’s a video of some lego men performing “Knee Play 1,” the opening of Einstein on the Beach)
It was not Einstein on the Beach, of course, but I decided to make it so, using the magic of computers. I took samples from 1-2-3, a couple other Gloria Estefan songs, and an interview with Gloria that I substituted for the spoken word parts, and came up with:
I won’t bore you with too much of the technical detail, but it might interest you to know that:
- I had to reconstruct the “eight” out of parts of a “seven” and a “three,” because the “eight” in the original has a big snare hit behind it.
- The spoken word text has been arranged to mirror the motifs and repeats of the original spoken word part, for example: “Will it get some wind for the sailboat?” becomes “and he was playing ‘Do the Hustle’ on the accordion.”
Overall, I think the result is pretty crazy, and significantly less calming than the original.
My Claps
The second piece I’m putting up today is a new one, continuing the pop-sample covers of minimalist landmark pieces:
This one is a version of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” using a sample from the Black Eyes Peas’ “My Humps.”
In the original piece, a 12-beat rhythm is clapped by two people. They start in unison, but at the end of each 12-beat phrase, one clapper offsets his rhythm back by one beat. This happens repeatedly until the two clappers are back in unison. The result is the generation of new rhythms from repetitions of the same pattern.
I took the first twelve beats of “My Humps” and repeated them according to the same rules in “Clapping Music,” as you can see in the small excerpt image above, and ended up with My Claps.
These are the first two drafts from what I intend to be an album’s worth of ‘Minimalist Studies,’ so stay tuned!
and if you were worried, you can always download the newest goodies over in the sidebar at the bottom.
Renovations continue here at Dilettante headquarters, and over to your right (assuming you’re reading this on the site and not in the rss feed) you’ll see a link to that very feed and a link to add to your Technorati favorites, if you’re in to that sort of thing.
Of more interest to the average person (I hope) will be the new section at the bottom of the sidebar: the glamorously titled “Other Music.” I’ll be putting up links to things as I make them or get around to uploading them. Breaking in the new section is a piece I finished last month called “Estefan on the Beach,” which, if not obvious from the title, is a cover version of Philip Glass’s “Knee Play 1” from Einstein on the Beach made out of Gloria Estefan samples.
Now I’m thinking this stuff deserves its own post, so I’ll end here for now, but get ready to hear about some experimental pop sample minimalist covers!
Happy Monday: new sidebar content over there, my freshly uploaded “muxtape.” If you have any other web 2.0 crap for me to try out and put in my sidebar, comment away.
We watched Dirty Harry for the first time last night. Pretty good action movie, aside from the semi-ludicrous “criminals shouldn’t have rights because Clint Eastwood says so” moral of the story. The movie is old enough too that it falls in the category of proto-action movies—the movies that invented the various cliches and plot devices we get to take for granted in our modern action movies. (Other example springing to mind: the first Die Hard.)
The other effect of being a proto-action movie is that Dirty Harry has a palpably different visual style from other movies with the same general plot. I’m not a huge movie buff, so I don’t usually notice these things unless they’re pointed out to me, but the style of the first 3/4 or so of the movie struck me as worth talking about.
image from Google Image search – surprisingly work-safe for “Dirty Harry”
The outdoor scenes at the beginning of the movie are very bright. Harry is wearing a sweater and a jacket, but other than that, you might imagine it to be mid-summer. (It doesn’t hurt that the opening shot is of a woman swimming in a roof-deck pool.) As night falls and Harry goes out to look for the woman’s shooter (oops, spoiler alert), the scenes become so dark that it is actually impossible to see what is happening. Harry fumbles trying to stand on a trash can in a dark alley, and we only know this is happening from the sound effects.
The lighting struck me particularly because I had kept thinking about one of the opening shots, where the camera sees the sniper from behind, the woman in the pool on another roof some distance away, and then pulls back to show a remarkably wide view of some San Francisco streets and rooftops.
If I were a real movie blogger, I would have a screenshot or something, but I’m not so I don’t so too bad.
The sniper’s vantage point effectively lets him see all of San Francisco, threatening both individuals (that swimmer) and society as a whole (the traffic below). For most of the rest of the movie (save the last 1/4 or so that I don’t want to spoil for you), Dirty Harry is about the power of seeing versus being seen. Given that basically every character in the movie is armed, seeing gives one physical power over the seen. As soon as a line of sight is established, the one seen is disabled: the getaway car driver that Harry notices during lunch, the killer when he is spotted by police helicopter, Harry himself, when he is seen on the trash can by some angry neighbors.
The publicity material for the movie shows this effect as well—you’d be hard-pressed to find a promo shot of Clint Eastwood as Harry not looking down the barrel of a gun.
Google Image Search for “Dirty Harry” at your own maybe-work-safe risk!
Not much to add to that, I guess. Also, out of recognition that this is probably the most obvious observation about Dirty Harry ever, I didn’t bother to search for other similar analysis. It’s easy being a dilettante sometimes.
[update: the whole seeing/being seen thing is also obviously about sex. see: killer’s flouncy walk, gay man on street, cruiser in dark park and Harry’s dead wife.]
I didn’t want to leave the internet all alone this weekend, but I’ve been busy with some behind the scenes work. In addition to the behind the scenes work, I have also been busy fighting off yesterday’s disagreeable seafood lunch.
But, what the heck; I might as well take the chance to talk a little about the new tricks I’m learning. This whole blog is supposed to be about my sabbatical (or whatever you want to call it), not just the books I finish.
Some people have asked me how I put together my Pop Studies album that I posted earlier. Basically all the sample-based work I do on my computer happens in Ableton Live. Live was originally designed to be a tool for electronic music producers who needed a coherent way to synthesize and arrange all their tunes. So, if you wanted, you could take a prerecorded drum loop, load it up in Live, visually “warp” it to mark where the beats are, and then play it back in sync with the rest of your composition.
Instead of loading just short instrumental samples, you can also load entire songs into Live, using the warping feature to line up their beats, and use Live to DJ. What’s great about this is that you can combine things like professionally released songs with your own drum beat or live guitar playing or anything else you can think of and run various effects throughout the whole thing.
For my Pop Studies, I loaded the sampled songs into Live, and used its various features to chop them up and rearrange the pieces. Once the pieces were set up, I could use a MIDI controller to improvise the compositions on the fly, recording the results and touching them up after the fact.
The warping feature in Live makes it great for DJing, but many people who perform digital music use Max/MSP instead. Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead runs his guitar through custom made patches in Max, Autechre and Aphex Twin use it for more electronic music, and Girl Talk actually uses it to make his mashups.
As you can see, it’s a bit more complicated to use and set up than Live, but it gives a lot of flexibility and should let me set up more customized interfaces to use for future sound projects. I’m still in the midst of the early tutorials (apparently you can also use the program to do basic arithmetic, if you want), but if something worth talking about happens, I’ll post it up here.
The eagle-eyed among you regular visitors may have noticed the new bits showing up periodically on the right side of the page, in my fancy new sidebar. As I think of things to put there, I’ll be adding stuff, so keep your eyes glued to the right side of your screen. At the moment, we’ve got a live feed of my most recent Twitter posts, and a list of categories which will optimistically guide you to special pages where you can read everything I ever wrote about books, movies, or, God-forbid, blogging about blogging.
Most recently added to the sidebar is a section called “Pop Studies,” which includes a little image of the cover of my first album (self-released, of course). If you click on the picture, you should hopefully get to another page that contains the details about the album and download links! The short version: I took a bunch of pop songs, messed with them, and then picked the most interesting ones for a gimmicky little experimental sound album.
If that sounds up your alley, click on the picture in the sidebar or here to go have a listen.
The download links will be dead for a while as I convert my .aiffs and upload to zShare, but I’ll update here when everything goes live. We’re live. zShare links apparently die after 60 days of inactivity, so if it’s late June, the links may be dead. Post a comment here if you want em back, and I’ll try to download them once every 60 days to keep them online.
I apologize for the horrible title of this blog entry. I could not help myself and am already ashamed, but continuing in the trend of reviewing things that happened a while ago as if they are newsworthy, this concert actually happened almost three weeks ago:
While standing on the balcony in the dark at the Paradise waiting for the concert to start, a man and his girlfriend came up and stood next to me. Apparently this man wanted to take the headlining act as literally as possible, and he proceeded to lecture his girlfriend, non-stop, about how noise music is the real avant-garde, because it makes you question societal conventions about music, you don’t need the be loud to be noisy because you can overdrive a low-power amp quite easily, he has dedicated his life to promoting noise and the avant-garde, people just aren’t ready to accept it, this music is like a spritual experience, and a host of other inanities time has been kind enough to let me forget. Once the music began, he cut his diatribes with some savant-style humming, extemporaneous shrieks, and energetic humping.
In spite of my distate for my neighbor, he was actually right about a few things. (Actually, most of the things he said are roughly true, although still hazardous territory for the aspiring conversationalist or girlfriend-keeper.) The thing that sounded the most inane to me at the outset turned out to be my one-line summary of the show:
Seeing the Boredoms in concert is like going to church, if church was awesome.
Apologies to the religionists out there, but even though you invented awe, I think Yamantaka Eye does it better.
The concert starts with eYe in the center of the three (!) drummers, holding a pair of glowing orbs. As he swings them around, they make some insane noise, responding to the motion, as eYe shrieks, and the drummers start this rumbling beat. This continues as some sort of crazy crescendo until someone behind the scenes switches the orbs from “noise” to “synth” and they start making tones. The drummers go nuts, and eYe goes to beat the crap out of the Sevena.
What is the Sevena?
photo from trontnort’s flickr
That’s it from the back. Seven guitars fused together, played with broomstick handles of different lengths. That way, you could play each neck individually, or you could smash at all the strings on one side at the same time. It sounded as awesome as it looks, and required a helper guy to stand behind it constantly retuning as eYe broke the strings off.
The whole thing was awesome, and I feel stupid for bothering to write this down, because the best thing about the whole experience was the sense that there would be no way to describe it to anyone who wasn’t there. So, just take this as a hearty endorsement/recommendation from me to go see the Boredoms if you ever get a chance.
(That standard disclaimer about bringing earplugs still applies, although I took mine out because it was too awesome and I don’t respect my hearing enough.)
two posts in one day, booyah
I have to admit that when I saw this book in the hands of some guy on the T for the first time, I was really interested in it. I’m a sound guy and avaricious book hoarder, so this seemed right up my alley. I had heard Oliver Sacks on a few podcasts, and he always had interesting brain anecdotes, and I’ve got some free time to kill, so why wait for the paperback version?
The book is divided roughly by type of musical brain abnormality, from people who can’t distinguish pitch, to people who have debilitatingly active perfect pitch, with a consistent pulse of people who were musicians losing their abilities and people who weren’t musicians gaining musical abilities.
And that’s it.
I eventually realized that Oliver Sacks’ nifty stories become rapidly less nifty when he groups them by symptom and relays them one after another. I felt sort of like I was reading from Borges’ infinite library, where every possible book exists, and adjacent copies are only distinguished by additional commas or minorly altered details. As examples taken individually, maybe in the context of an interesting podcast, the stories are great little case studies. Repeat them over and over again, and the people start to fade away, leaving just the bones of the story: the symptoms of whichever disorder the chapter is about.
But maybe that’s the point?
I missed not having any pithy gray text in this one. So here it is.
While fancying up the site, I still managed to find time for some cultural stimulation. Since I didn’t write them up before, I’m doing it now. Join me in pretending that these things just happened.
This is how I described Freejack to one of my friends who had not seen it:
- Emilio Estevez: race car driver who dies in a crash
- Mick Jagger: bounty hunter from the future who takes Emilio’s body before he dies
- Anthony Hopkins: powerful executive from the future who wants to put his mind in Emilio’s body
- Rene Russo: Emilio’s girlfriend in the past, Anthony’s employee in the future
You can imagine the drama that unfolds. (That is, if you can wrap your head around those star-studded variables.)
I would have put a spoiler alert or something, but the plot is alternately so obvious and so poorly developed that it would be disrespectful to my reader(s).
The thing about the future in Freejack, is that it is like Victorian England—but with laser guns. The majority of the population lives in abject poverty, which we see entails wild-west-style fistfights and clothes stolen from the cast of Oliver Twist. The lucky upper class (led by Anthony Hopkins, and populated by Rene Russo and some other not-famous people) lives in an office park. They drive wacky round cars, and have filtered the air somehow to make it breathable (everyone in the poor districts has whooping cough and psoriasis or something from pollution).
See, it turns out that Anthony Hopkins is dying, and wants to use his company’s “Spiritual Switchboard” to take his mind and put it in another body. Why not just clean up a poor person and take their body? Because clearly they are too damaged by the atmosphere that stops at the border of the rich district to live a healthy life ever again. So, Mick Jagger gets hired, sucks Emilio Estevez’s body out of the past, the doctors are about to wipe his mind, and in a post-apocalyptic convoy attack, Emilio escapes into the environs, making him a “freejack.”
In the ensuing plot, we meet a cussing nun, the sleazy agent from Emilio’s past who remains sleazy, and a magical negro who eats rats on a dock by the river and speaks exclusively in metaphors related to eagles.
While I haven’t entirely figured out what this blog is going to be about, it is not going to be about plot summaries of every piece of media I shove in my brain. (Although I couldn’t help myself this time: the plot of Freejack is just too good.) Some analysis or cultural criticism is in order, I guess, and even though I am out of practice, I’m just going to kick it from my head:
Out of all the themes in Freejack (and there are a lot), the one that they repeat the most is the cognitive difficulty of involuntary time travel. First, Emilio Estevez has to figure out where he physically is, waking up in a moving doctors office with a mind-wiping laser pointed at his head. Second, once he gets that he’s still in New York, but things are weird, he has to figure out the social system.
This social system involves unfamiliar technologies (phones that can see you), neologisms (“freejack,” for one), and a completely re-worked political economy. When he tries to take shelter in a church, he is assaulted by a cussing nun with a gun, and when he tries to go to his girlfriend’s old apartment, the new tenants scream “Freejack!” and point a gun at him. His first contact with someone he knows from the past is similarly fraught: his old agent tries to turn him in for a government reward, and, of course, assaults him with a gun.
When Emilio finally finds his old girlfriend, he confronts all three of these issues at once: she assumes he is some sort of technological trick being played on her, so she responds using the current language about legality and policing that he doesn’t understand. When she resists him, he tells her how what has been 18 years for her has only been one day for him, and this is the crux of the movie’s plot.
Emilio’s experience (and the experience of the audience) is a sudden change in the entire social system, and the point of the movie seems to be “what if” this cultural shift happened overnight? While everyone else in the movie has slowly adapted to the new way of things, Emilio plays the role of alienated observer. Time travel enables a strange sort of verfremdungseffekt where sudden defamiliarization is not the result of artistic intent, but the reality of a suddenly displaced person. Emilio Estevez becomes a walking defamiliarizer, shocking people out of their complacency with the state, and bringing with him to morally bankrupt 2009 the values of idyllic 1991.
Okay, that one got a little of control. Here’s to reining in the lit major talk in the future—sorry if I alienated you.
You may have noticed that some time has elapsed between the Official Launch of this blog and now. (Or, maybe you haven’t noticed because I have managed to delete my post dates by accident.) [dates restored, long live pope gregory]
My excuse is that I’ve been working hard at the office (bagel shop/coffee shop), grinding my way through a beginner’s html book so that I can actually change what my website looks like. Go figure. If you want to see what I’ve come up with so far, just look around the page – take in all that white space and Helvetica that I’m using as a substitute for decent, original design.
Now that I’ve finished my html book and taken out the brain-scarringly mediocre default Movable Type template, I’m ready to put actual entries up again. The site design will keep changing as I tinker and fix things, but I’m at a point now where I do not feel a sense of aesthetic dread when I imagine what this entry will look like on the real internet.
So, keep reading (please), and enjoy the white space while you can. (Next version: red on black with repeating skull GIFs in the background)
Also, if you’re into RSS feeds, you can get mine here until I manage to stick an RSS subscribe button somewhere up there.
maybe I should just write “0 comments” at the bottom of each entry and save my server the trouble [thanks, katie]
