Basic impressions of this book: the language is extremely vivid and rich and unbelievably American. It seems dated, obviously, and its influence can no doubt be seen in all kinds of novels since, including the early Delillo (Americana) and Pynchon (Crying of Lot 49) that I’ve read, and obviously the other Beat writers, Hunter S. Thompson, etc. There’s an incredible motion, velocity, and kinetic energy to the words, a nonstop restlessness that really starts to carry you along if you surrender and let your eyes be drawn along the pages by it. The prose isn’t dense or difficult to untangle and there aren’t a wealth of big, bold ideas. What Kerouac gives instead are sketches of fascinating characters in America’s great cities at midcentury - San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and New York City primary among them - and a slowly unfolding and surprisingly deep exposition of the narrator’s evolving character and, most importantly, the impact of Dean Moriarty on the trajectory of his postwar years. There are unforgettable scenes, many of them. The one that springs to mind immediately for me is the one that spawned the term “beat generation” - Paradise and friends hedonistically banging back and forth in Denver between bars and parties and basement apartments, feverishly sharing ideas, standing on top of the world in the middle of the continent, poised as though on a knife’s edge between the two coasts, looking West at San Francisco and all the possibility that lies ahead, at least before the land runs out.

Moriarty is a very complex character, a rogue and a saint and a philosopher and a fool all in one, twice-divorced, thrice-married and living with his second wife, seemingly incapable of reining in his mischief for long. He steals cars and takes them for joyrides, inevitably runs off with the youngest or hottest girl in the room in every situation, and self-destructively runs from responsibility and stability whenever it starts to creep in around the edges of his life. Paradise is slowly drawn into his nonstop, “lessgo!” mode of living; he burns lots of bridges and trashes all his friendships and personal connections, bouncing back and forth between the coasts like a rubber ball, eventually bottoming out back in Denver, in Moriarty’s home town.

A BIT LATER: Just read Louis Menand’s article in the New Yorker this week regarding Kerouac’s/the beat’s place in American 20th century literature. Apparently he agrees with me regarding some of the above - he mentions the influence on Pynchon and Delillo (“Americana” mentioned by name) as well as Hunter S. Thompson. I guess that stuff is kind of obvious if you’re up at all on 20th century American fiction, but it was nice to see that I sort of know what I’m talking about, at least, without just aping what the New Yorker and Harpers say every week or month.

Menand also brings up the “boys wanting to hang with boys” theme that hovers around the periphery of the story. He makes a really good point: these guys drive across the country over and over again because it gives them a chance to spend time with one another in an exclusively male space, without drawing any unwanted attention to the potentially-homosexual vibe of it all. Kerouac doesn’t seem to explicitly crush out on Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty, but he does have a kind of intellectual infatuation with him: he’s a muse for him, and for all of the beats. And moreover, he’s a link to the sixties, reappearing as the driver of Ken Kesey’s bus in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” One more interesting thing that Menand points out is that “On the Road” is perhaps the earliest example of the nonfiction novel, published seven years or so before “In Cold Blood.” This is especially relevant since I’m taking a creative nonfiction writing class right now.

I don’t know what’s more amazing: that artists included unlistenable, speaker-destroying sounds at the ends of their pop records (and in some cases even coded the games that those sounds represented!), or that record companies actually agreed to release them. But I can completely relate to the type of geek, lurking squarely at the intersection of music nerd and computer nerd, who would risk hearing loss to dub the squealing buzzes to cassette and feed them into their computers - even if the result was sometimes a King’s-Quest-style text adventure game starring the Thompson Twins!?!

Hey, that cylindrical-shaft-extending-to-infinity thing looks familiar! The image from my blog’s header is from a photo I took at Chateau de Chambord in France’s Loire Valley, aiming up toward the sky in one of the many wacked-out towers that King François I built there, presumably just because he could.

Donny and I jammed out a number of tunes on guitar and drums. The idea, theoretically, was to have a two-piece where I’d play through multiple amps (guitar and bass, a la US Maple and no doubt countless other acts these days) and Donny would slam the hell out of the drum kit. We never did come up with any kind of vox concept for the band,  nor did we play any shows — but we did have some catchy song titles!

Eventually Bront was reconfigured into the second AWSTA lineup, including Arthur Purvis and Ben West on guitars and bass. AWSTA played some pretty wild shows - and some mediocre ones too - and went on a small tour of the northeastern US, as the quaintly “slice of life” (i.e. not updated since 2005) page reveals.

I guess I forgot to renew the domain name bront.org at some point, because now it has pages about paintball and stuff. So, in honor of what never was, I hereby present to you, members of the universe, some songs that aren’t really finished but that you may enjoy anyway. Maybe some enterprising David Yow in training can karaoke some vocals onto these tunes and Bront will live again!

BRONT - 4trk demos.
Recorded at Slab Studios, Brooklyn, September - October 2003

1. load up on the way down (3:23)
2. ghost song (3:28)
3. dot kong (2:33)
4. the ambassador (3:56)
5. vanilla invasion (2:36)
6. gringo! (3:12)

For what it’s worth, I still think “ghost song” is a pretty badass song; with the right vocals it would be just the thing. “load up on the way down” has a great riff but we just didn’t get the feel so good on this take. And “dot kong” is another great riff in search of a song, but I still enjoy listening to the bendy crazy guitar noise in the breaks around 1:00 or so.

Free registration required, but it’s probably worth it cause there’s lots of good video up there. And I promise nothing evil will happen when you sign up because I built the site with my own bare fingers.

Also from the recently-launched bin: the official Android Eats Records site, where you can sample tracks from his new Fulton Lights album (as well as older Maestro Echoplex and John Guilt tunes.)

And in a strange coincidence, I finally got around to viewing the be-linked item, “Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda”, last night. It is very, very freaky, kind of queasifying and creepily disorienting. Psychedelic facepaint. Fake ears. A man in a larval butterfly suit. The “mylar chamber” refracts, doubles, and blurs it all together. Droney, percussive ragas whip the whole thing into a chaotic froth. I’ve never seen anything else like it.

“Object Lessons” (Gigantic Art Space, NYC)

I posted about this previously, but this show downtown at GAS made a big impression on me. The art definitely cool, especially Sean’s cabinet and the eggs, but most of all it was inspiring to see some friends who make weird electronic things for a living, mostly. The resulting discussions kicked me into a little obsessive whirlwind of visual and hardware projects, some unfinished / in hibernation, some having actually been shown to other humans.

Aloha, “Some Echoes” LP (amazon, myspace)

Another labor of love from friends of mine, this record took a long time to sink into my head. It’s complicated and gorgeous, highly detailed, and wonderfully psyched-out in places. The craftsmanship shines through in every single aspect of this recording: the musicianship, the lyrics, the engineering, the production, and everything ineffable and inbetween. Once it got to me, it really got me in a way that Aloha’s previous records haven’t: a cohesive whole, a unity, a sequence that works from start to finish. To my ear, it sounds like they’re well on their way to finishing the transition that started on “Here Comes Everyone,” but where it’s leading I can’t guess yet. I really want to know.

Errol Morris, “Gates of Heaven”

This is a strange and wonderful documentary about pet cemeteries, the first from the famous documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. (Read Roger Ebert’s review.) The film is shot in hyper-bright color under the nearly blinding northern California sunshine; I remember it as all blue skies and green grass and yellow sun, like a Kodachrome print from the early seventies you’d find in a family album. Morris spends some time meandering through the origins of various pet cemeteries near Los Altos, CA (coincidentally, about five miles from where I now live - what does it mean?) and finally settling on one very interesting family in Napa, proprietors of the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. The film isn’t narrated, and the tone is very hard to pin down: cruel or sympathetic? Artful or accidental? It’s ambiguous and excellent filmmaking and you should see it to decide for yourself. Interesting side note: this is the film that Werner Herzog bet Morris he’d never finish, thus resulting in Herzog eating his shoe before the film’s opening.

Charles Curtis, performance of Terry Jennings’ “Piece for Cello and Saxophone” (Tonic, NYC)

Terry Jennings was an acolyte of minimalist high priest La Monte Young. Terry died young, in 1981, and his works are rarely performed and are mostly unknown. They were certainly unknown to me when Jim and I headed down to Tonic to see the cellist Charles Curtis perform this piece that was only 70 minutes long, but which felt like 3 hours. The instrumentation (”cello, sine waves and cello drones”) created an endless, glacially shifting landscape that seemed to hypnotize the audience as it slowly modulated through a very minimal set of chord progressions. It certainly hypnotized me. Curtis’ stamina was unreal; he literally never stopped playing throughout the entire performance. When he finished, he kind of slumped over his cello and there were several beats of silence while the audience seemed to recover from their trance, and he was treated to a thunderous, long ovation. This was one of the most beautiful musical performances I’ve ever seen, and while I’ve been unable to obtain any of Terry Jennings’ work (I’d kill for a recording of Curtis’ performance that night) I spiraled down into a long La Monte Young fixation that took me to the remarkable depths of his “Well Tuned Piano”, an even more epic work for intriguingly-tuned solo piano - well worth the five-hour listen if you can get your hands on it (got $750.00?)

Well, there goes an interesting year. I’ve been lucky to be exposed to all this great culture. I hope 2007 can come through for me too!

Here you go then, in no particular order. (This is part one of a list that turned out kinda long! Here’s part two.)

Bill Fay, “Time of the Last Persecution” LP

It snuck up on me, this grey, morose, apocalyptic, utterly British, and relentlessly melodic record. There are a number of great reviews of “Time of the Last Persection” scattered around the web; no need for me to rehash all those fine words. I’ll add only that this album manages to evoke the richest and most complex reaction in me of anything I’ve heard in years, possibly ever: it’s chilling, fragile, beautiful, loose, prophetic and sad and surreal, and it somehow bridges my obsession with the apocalypse and my love for psychedelic pop. I can’t believe it took me this long to find out about it.

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”

We know a fellow who once told me that he’s read nothing but Melville since he graduated from college (over five years ago now.) At the time I thought it was a sort of affectation on his part, a willfully arbitrary narrowing of his literary horizons on one great American writer, but then I read “Moby Dick.” There’s a whole universe inside this book, inside the very white whale that consumes it (and Ahab, and presumably the author as well.) It’s the deep weirdness of this book that really got me into it — the endless lists of technical data about the ship and whaling and whales and whale heads and spermaceti and all the rest. All the interesting obsessiveness aside, however, this is an honest-to-god epic novel that requires the biggest possible canvas to contain its gigantic insights about mankind.

Jonathan McCabe, “Nervous States” and “The Origami Butterfly Method” DVDs

I encountered Jonathan McCabe while reading the great computational art blog dataisnature. He’s a visual artist in Australia who specializes in algorithmic and generative approaches to the visualization of data. He was kind enough to send me DVDs of two of his pieces, “Nervous States” and “The Origami Butterfly Method.” I’m lucky that I was able to view them before the DVD drive on my laptop kicked it. They’re unearthly, fluid, organic, and definitely psychedelic constructions that seem to follow a kind of alien logic all their own. The “Nervous States” piece visualizes the output of a neural network, and the “Butterfly Method” uses a simple, iterative fold-and-copy process (described at generatorx) to create a trippily reflective image evoking butterfly wings.

BIACS2: “The Unhomely” (Seville, Spain)

An old friend of mine, Jim Thomas, is the assistant curator for this international art exhibition in the south of Spain that opened in October. Becca and I flew over during Thanksgiving and made our way through each of its beautiful venues (a monastery and an ancient shipyard.) The art was world-class, highly political, mostly stark and often confrontational; it was a demanding journey for a visitor, but definitely rewarding. My personal highlight reel: a video from Olivo Barbieri, a collection of gripping b&w photos from Chris Marker, and installations from Thomas Hirschhorn and Mike Kelley. Most impressive of all, though, was seeing the culmination of a project that Jim has poured his heart and soul into over the past year, and which he likened to producing a small motion picture: a level of passionate dedication and perserverance to which I can only aspire.

Sixpoint Craft Ales Brewery Tour (Brooklyn)

In a delightful goodbye to New York City, we traveled down to Red Hook on a Saturday afternoon and waited in the rain for the tour guide to take us on a tour of the Sixpoint Brewery. The tour guide turned out to be one of the two founders of the brewery: an awesomely techie chem nerd who let us drink half-fermented beer from the fermenting tank (chewy and good.) The Sixpoint operation is so small (we could have fit it all into our old loft), quirky, and customized, and the proprietors obviously love what they do so much, that it rapidly becomes obvious why their beer is so damn wonderful.

Part two to follow tomorrow…

Never, ever, ever apologize for your price. Gots to remind myself of that one periodically. I think I learned it from TJ or maybe my father first, but oh how it’s easy to forget.

This has been a relatively good year for me as a freelancer… I’ve certainly never lacked for work and I’ve managed to keep my schedule extremely flexible. Plus, how many jobs let you switch coasts with barely a hiccup in any of your projects or client relationships?

Still, I have the strange sensation sometimes that I’m barely making ends meet, and that I’m working more than I probably need to be. This is at the expense of the many, many, many creative projects that need constant care and prodding to continue their long, slow journeys toward becoming something more than just hot air.

Altoona, With No Immigrant Problem, Decides to Solve It

I hadn’t heard about this ordinance passing. I can see how this might have played out as good political theater — a revenge drama against all those gun-toting illegals who are no doubt just waiting to roll in over the Alleghenies to take over Altoona — but I think it’s a real shame, an echo of the racism and the deep, deep bitterness that seems to haunt the area. The triple homicide that made national news last year has been used as a lever to foist narrow-minded legislation on a frightened population in the name of safety and security. (Does this sound familiar?)

Fittingly, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Councilman Rieker, after he finishes tarring the ACLU as “a nutso organization” standing between him and the maintaining of the “rule of law” in South Central PA, lays all his cards out on the table:

He said he worries more about the viability and livability of a rust-belt town that continues to lose population. He says he is weighing whether to resign his council seat and move his family and his insurance business to North Carolina.

This really gets me: a political opportunist not afraid to tarnish my home town’s reputation with a ridiculously overreaching “solution in search of a problem,” but also unwilling to stick around and deal with the consequences of the course he’s charted. I hope Altoona can somehow see past the small-mindedness of this kind of leadership, and past the isolationism and xenophobia that’s festering at its root; otherwise it’s doomed to decline and extinction.

Altoona should be listening to its religious leaders, who, happily, haven’t forgotten that Christianity carries at its core a message of inclusiveness and tolerance.

[Bishop Joseph V. Adamec of the local diocese] is not swayed by those who say that the three murders might have been prevented if the ordinance had been in effect in 2005.

“The one who did it, he came here when he was a boy and went to our schools,” Bishop Adamec said. “He didn’t come here already formed. He’s one of us.”

At long last, images from our trip to Spain over Thanksgiving 2006. Highlights included ham legs and a turkey dinner for eight in Sevilla, Moorish palaces in Granada, and very strong sherry by the Mediterranean in Malaga.

Suppose I want to generate a cohesive, personally meaningful, culturally relevant body of work - an album’s worth of song lyrics, a novel, a work of art - where do I start? Do I generate the big ideas first, try to pierce the veil and glimpse the sublime, then somehow capture aspects of the experience in my work? Or do I just start turning the crank and generating ideas, periodically evaluating my output to see where it’s headed?

I (lamely) see these as analogs of top-down and bottom-up design in software engineering, and I recognize that my traditional methodology has been very much bottom-up. But I should also recognize that I’ve never produced anything that I would consider as approaching anything like “cohesive, personally meaningful, and culturally relevant;” better adjectives might be “quirky, surreal, and slipperily abstract.”

I’ll make a note to do some research on creativity to see if anyone online has further insight into this issue.

Another thought about my current lifestyle: I’m currently a full-time tinkerer. I dabble in a broad variety of creative pursuits, specializing in none of them, possibly save web development as it somehow manages to put food on the table. I’ve done what I can to try to “hibernate” projects in a manner where I can one day “thaw them out” and get rolling on them again, but without any external structure or stimulus imposed on me I inevitably grow lazy about completing anything. So my natural tendency is to try to uncover and collect new avenues for expression, rarely nurturing any single one of them enough to bring it into full bloom.

Given all of these tendencies, viewing them as value-neutral aspects of my personality, neither good nor bad, what can I do to focus on following through on projects? Think and discuss.

The Berry paradox is the apparent contradiction that arises from expressions such as the following:

The smallest positive integer not definable in under eleven words.

You see, it’s a paradox, cause the statement itself, which defines said integer, is only ten words long! Get it? Hmmm. This reminds me of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and, of course, a very long, amazing book I once read.

Quite revealing - Amazon UK as “guest edited” by Jim O’Rourke. He rattles off an eclectic list of favorite albums:

• Sparks - “Propaganda”
• the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” soundtrack
• Bill Fay - “Time of the Last Persecution” (which a different Jim also just turned me onto)
• Genesis - “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”
• Van Dyke Parks - “Song Cycle”
• and a bunch more I need to check out…

I can see little bits of these sprinkled throughout Jim O’Rourke’s “pop” records- “Eureka”, “Insignificance”, and that EP “Halfway to a Threeway”. Jim’s a quirky, picky, cranky, brilliant dude and it shows in these choices and his sort of impenetrable illuminations of them, e.g.

Derek Bailey, Mirakle - If you look through the trees, you might see a small group of people around a campfire, an odd collective, the wizened sage sits on a tree stump, the tree cut down to build his “axe” (and this is why we have the term) while a tour bus stands nearby, wheels flat, on a standstill from its journey to “funkytown”, or whatever the hell Lipss Inc was goin. How come that name was never hailed much? It’s brilliant. Anyways, oh yes, Derek Bailey, Jamaladeen Tacuma and Calvin Weston get down to some serious abstract funk. As Mike Varney from Guitar Player magazine would say “this one shreds!”

Now if I could only track down Jim’s supposed personal site from years ago, Hoobalaboobala, which has mysteriously disappeared from the internet.

(via “the ONLY Bill Fay site on the internet”)

I’ve been getting sort of addicted to cycling since I moved out here and bought a decent bike two months ago, and I’ve slowly been working on building up my stamina for these longer rides… though this one kind of spanked me (you might say “nearly killed me”.) My longest ride before this one was a 29-mile segment of this route that I did last Sunday, but today’s ride was pushing twice that distance. The saving grace was that the additional miles I added were much flatter than the hills (actually part of the Santa Cruz Mountains) separating Menlo Park from the ocean.

Anyways, here’s the route I took:

The way out was awesome - it was cool and gray, doing the bright overcast thing that the Bay Area likes to do. I climbed up Old La Honda Road, which the Stanford Cycling page calls “a beautiful classic benchmark climb of the region.” It is beautiful indeed, winding up through deep, dark, cool redwood forest, past big estates and hippie-ish homes with their own little water towers. There were lots and lots of folks riding this hill today, and I actually managed to keep up with a few of them for once!

One of the most bizarre, unexpected, and awesome things about this route is that it took me damn near Neil Young’s Broken Arrow ranch, which sits along Bear Gulch Road somewhere north of Highway 84 near the wacky little town of La Honda (one-time home of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.) I had no idea that Neil Young’s ranch was within a bike ride of me. Maybe next time I’m out there I’ll ride up to the gate and see if he’s out shooting at stuff or tending cattle or riding around on a train or something!

So then I got to San Gregorio State Beach and it ruled. I guess there’s something especially seductive about the idea of the Pacific to me, having grown up in Pennsylvania and nowhere near a body of water of any kind (unless you count Canoe Creek or Lake Erie I guess.) Maybe that explains why the idea of transporting myself to the Pacific coast with just the power of my own two (severely aching as I write this) legs is such a big deal to me. Who knows? It was a good goal, if nothing else.

I guess once I’ve recovered from today I’ll start thinking about my next goal. I think riding to San Francisco sounds like a pretty good plan!

PS should you want to see more pictures of this possibly not-so-enthralling-to-anyone-else journey they are here.

If you have been there please tell me what it is like!

Push another item onto the ever-growing, never-overflowing media stack: Ira Cohen’s Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda (more about it here and a trailer here. A more intense and arguably freakier preview over at The Wire.)

This hyperinsane-looking film was recently released for the first time on DVD by Saturnalia, an offshot of Arthur Magazine. And as that trailer to some extent reveals, Cohen often employed sheets of Mylar to distort/fragment/recombine the images he shot. The result, from what I can see on these here previews, is really honestly pretty psychedelic… in that sort of creepy grotesque Max Ernst way, or maybe like the cover of Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets.

One question: who is the Universal Mutant Repertory Co.? Aha: “The Universal Mutant Repertory Company are most known as a group that included drummer Angus MacLise, multimedia avant-gardist who was the original drummer of the Velvet Underground.”

More on this if I can get my hands on this disc!

(found over at the great blog dataisnature)

I used to think of Scott as a slightly cracked purveyor of literate, carnivalesque, sometimes moody fantasy tunes in the vein of Leonard Cohen, maybe, or Jacques Brel, but lately his output has just been getting darker and darker:

…obtuse, sepulchral music that – believe it or not – matches the ambient extremity of Aphex Twin and the queasy claustrophobia of Tricky. Once an expansive singer, Walker now sings with a mournful choke about millennial dread and horror at human brutality.

from Rolling Stone’s review of Tilt (1995), and that was two albums ago!

This plague song though — Seriously!!! Dark!!! I’m talking György Ligeti, chorus-of-the-damned style here.

Once again via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, a really really messed up doodle from the oft-overlooked Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States. Old “Kid Gloves” gives us some of his own atavistic childhood psychedelia — calipers with a skull head! And look out - ostrich on the loose!

This reminds me of something They Might Be Giants could have thought up.

ZeldaClassic is a PC-based emulator and editor for the NES 8-bit classic game The Legend of Zelda. I’ve been thinking for some time about a way to get my hands on the data that constitutes the Overworld map of this game for use in a couple of art projects (covered by fair use, I promise, Nintendo lawyer type folks), and I thought the ZeldaClassic project might be just the ticket. After all, they’ve done all the work of reverse engineering the original data format used in the original Zelda ROM and converting it into a sensible, easily-edited “quest” file. Unfortunately, Zelda Classic is a closed-source project for some reason, and without the source it was going to be pretty hard to figure out what’s going on in those quest files.

Enter Breaking Eggs and Making Omelettes, where Mike Melanson posted a great document detailing the format of the quest files in great detail.

Armed with that information, I banged out a Python “reader” for ZeldaClassic quest files (the unencoded kind - files ending in ‘.qsu’) that, given a quest file, can spit out the tiles that make up the map, and optionally an image of the full map of each level.

A Sourceforge project is hopefully on the way Here’s the SourceForge page, but in the meantime here’s the initial version:

• zc-reader-0.1.tar.bz2
• zc-reader-0.1.zip
• README

I’ve tested this on Python 2.4 on Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows XP SP2. See the README for some more information about requirements, installation, running, etc.

• Guest House Blues (demo)
• My Checking Account (demo)
• Paradise and Hell (demo)

This year was awesome. There was an Ulf Magnet tribute band, a Zeppelin tribute band, a performance of the Overture from Rush’s 2112 (including bathrobes), and great performances from James Merle Thomas, Shades of June, the Nub, and a bunch of of other bands that I missed when I went to go visit my parents for a few hours.

As always, thanks to the Lipples for making something awesome happen in their own backyard!

Dear John,

A quick note to say thanks but regrets on the crossword you sent me in March–IGUANA/ENFOLDS.

The grid contains quite a few obscurities and made-up entries, like CLEAVE AT, RSH, CONNEM, UES, AS CAKE, HILAND, OKED TO, BE AS COY, IMPARO, SMART MOB, TO SEE THE, AILETH, NAI, BAC, CELEXA, etc., which would not be allowed.

Very sorry!

For more about crossword construction, please see www.cruciverb.com, which is the website and forum for crossword constructors. Click the links to “Basic Rules” and “Specification Sheets” on the left side of the homepage.

–Will Shortz

Not to worry Will, I’ll keep trying! I didn’t think it was too bad for my first try. And it’s actually really nice to know that the editor of the New York Times crossword sends hand-written rejection emails.

I remember wondering once (perhaps at the behest of a teacher) what a million of something, anything, all in one place would look like. How about Danish starlings?

I wonder what it looks like from the inside of the cloud?

(via boingboing)

p.s. there has got to be a black metal band called ‘black sun’, right? right??!!!??

We spent a good bit of time after the honeymoon throwing together an “art installation”, or something not unlike that, for a show organized by my friend Ben last Sunday at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick. Becca and I had grandiose plans for the installation to say the least — involving a robotic waveform plotter of which you’ll certainly hear more later — but what transpired ended up being pretty cool. I hooked up my oscilloscope, a Tektronix 2235, to a microphone to listen to the music performed by Jim, Arthur, and Danny from Hexa. The music went into the scope, got picked up by an iSight camera, and pumped through a patch I created with the ever-amazing Pure Data to map it to the ASCII character set. It was then writ large and bright upon the wall by an LCD projector.

This is certainly not the first time someone has converted live video to ASCII art! But the oscilloscope’s beautiful monochromatic green scan lines became very beautiful and hypnotic in the ASCII land. When the scope got tiresome I switched it up to some abstracted live performance video. (unfortunately I didn’t save any of it during the actual show, cause it was cool to see Danny banging on the piano entirely made up of ZC$%#&$)

Becca and I want to hack PiDiP’s pdp_ascii.pd to spit out Postscript files for a single frame of the ascii stream. This would allow one to create an Illustrator file of the stream, hack it up into 8.5″ x 14″ sheets, and print it out gigantic style, which is my dream. I want a wall of this stuff. I’m obsessed with it. I’ll keep you posted!

PS there are more images here.

I made a Flickr photoset of some of the pictures from my recent wedding. Now… I’m married! It’s great.

The new Sonic Youth record, “Rather Ripped”, was released today. I’m not normally one to run out and buy records the day they’re released, but I heard a few tracks in advance and got uncharacteristically excited about this one.

So… it’s no disappointment! It was recorded for the most part at NYC’s legendary Sear Sound, and it shows. There’s a level of pleasurable detail here that kind of got lost in the mud on a few of the recent records (I’m thinking Sonic Nurse here), and there’s mucho melody and texture to sink your sonic brain into. Also, Kim Gordon does exactly zero raspy talk/singing, merciful heavens!

This is also the first release in a while without 5th member Jim O’Rourke who, while one of my favorite renaissance men of pop music, I think threw a wrench into the sleek minimal thing that Sonic Youth does best these days.

The instant headgrabber is the 2nd track, “Incinerate”, a classic upbeat/melancholy Thurston Moore track which you can listen to here.

The best yet, I think is their 2006 line. Their Death Valley shoot for this must have been quite a sight to behold… mannequins, hoods that zip all the way up, buildings with no insides. I dig the Raymond Pettibon-esque “graphic novel” feel they’ve got going on with this.

Anyways they’re talented and awesome so you should buy their clothes before you see some scummy trust fund brat beating you to it.