– saw a chimney sweep truck on my way to the subway — is that good luck like it used to be in Mary Poppins-era London?
– right after that I saw nuns, which I immediately took as another indicator of good luck, I’m not sure why
– reading this David Foster Wallace piece from Harper’s about proper usage of English and grammar I’m reminded of a time when a bunch of us in High School were trying to explain to someone what an ambiguous pronoun was…we came up with this scenario in which the dinosaurs somehow knew that a meteor was coming to impact earth so they scratched this graffiti that said "A meteor is going to destroy earth! We don’t like it! and that scientists would puzzle throughout the millennia as to whether by "it" the dinosaurs meant the meteor or the earth…we were drunk when we came up with this and just howled at the whole scenario…
– another bit from the DFW piece talks about how language usage follows the norms of a particular community…he makes this point with an analogy, explaining that even though it might make perfect sense for men to be able to wear skirts (cooler, more comfortable, less likely to cause sterility, etc.) in Western culture it would be looked on as some kind of statement. Then right as I’m about to go into my building at work I see a guy in a leather utility kilt! I mean, this is New York, so sure, but it’s the first kilt I’ve seen in the city…I gave him a broad smile, a thumbs up and said "I like your style."
– been toying with some samples and trying to get the whole thing to coalesce and it’s not really happening, but I thought you might get a kick out of hearing a mashup rough draft. Sometimes it’s taking me a million iterations to get something to the point where it’s working, so I had this thought that charting the evolution of the track might be fun…at this point there’s some good interaction between samples, but the flow of the track is a mess…
Sometimes I think if I got a Monome (shown below, played by Daedelus) I could totally rock it, sometimes I think it would be beyond me, sometimes I think it looks pretentious, sometimes I think it totally rocks it futureshock style.
I am kicking myself that I didn’t make it out to the Daedelus/Flying Lotus show at (le) poisson rouge two weeks ago…
Good NYT article on why we should even care about the LHC…
My favorite bits:
"For every known species of particle (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.), supersymmetry implies the existence of a partner species (called, with physicists’ inimitable linguistic flair, selectrons, squarks, sneutrinos, etc.) that to date has never been observed."
"Many researchers suspect that dark matter is composed of sparticles."
"Should the Large Hadron Collider have the power necessary to reveal extra dimensions of space — to overturn our belief that length, width and height are all there is — that would rank as one of the greatest upheavals in our understanding of the universe."
My bartender robot design is coming along. It will now have a rueben’s tube along the top of his head. Also LK has given me some great advice on the drink dispensing. In addition, it has been strongly suggested that this robot should have a mustache, bowler hat and monocle.
Best name so far: DrunkDroid.
Meanwhile, searching for inspiration brought me this which has given me nightmares.
Saturday night Maxine and I went out to this new(ish) place in the Village called (le) poisson rouge to check out a performance of Steve Reich’s "Music For 18 Musicians". Reich was one of the founders of the minimalist school of music along with Phillip Glass, and their music sounds pretty similar. Except that I love MF18M much more than I love anything by Glass. Mike H gave me the album ages ago and it pretty much blew my mind. He went to a performance in New York years and years ago, and I remember thinking how cool it would be to see the piece performed live.
And it was. It was really really great. The musicians set up in this weird in-the-round way (you can sort of tell from the pic below) with xylophone players facing each other and pianists set up so sometimes two people can play the same piano, and clarinets, bass clarinets, vocalists, strings, sitting down. The sound system in poisson rouge was fantastic, and sometimes the sounds would be so eveloping…plus, to see how some of the sounds were made was very elucidating. Things that I had thought were electric guitars and feedback were actually clarinets and vocals. Whoa. Quite a performance.
Haven’t you been wondering what all those "Maxine interviewing" pictures have been about? No? Yes? Well, after a frenzied weekend of editing, we finally finished the 6 minute tease/pitch version of our proposal piece for the Musicwood doc we’re trying to get funded. The band spanking new and improved Hitman Productions website is now rocking the internets (thanks Dana!) and that gave us a good deadline to get focused and motivated to finish Musicwood. We think this piece came out pretty well, and should hopefully be able to assist us greatly in getting this baby funded.
Check it out and lemme know whatcha think… Oh, and feel free to invest if you’re so moved! Donations of any amount accepted!
Also please note that the Dave Matthews/Ray LaMontagne footage is borrowed…for the full doc we’re trying to line up a shoot with a well-known but cool acoustic guitar player type…any suggestions?
I saw this a while back and I’m not sure why I didn’t post it. It’s a run through of the fabled "Hardest Super Mario Ever", some mod of Super mArio Bros that is sadomasochistic and crazy tough. The video is 23 minutes long, but the dialogue of the guy trying to make it is so worthwhile…even those of us who haven’t played Mario in forever can dig the frustration and glorious profanity…
There is something about the way the internet is so full of mind-blowing information — music, film, animation, large hadron colliders, etc. — that when you come across across something really great, a part of your brain lights up that doesn’t lght up all that often. I remember my friend Dr. Mercury telling me about experiments he was doing with fMRI machines that would image the brain activity during activities. He was involved with a study on humor. They would tell the participant a joke and then observe what part of their brain showed activity, hoping to get a better understanding of both the brain and humor.
The joke was this:
What did the elephant say to the naked man?
How do you drink with that thing?!
But to me the really funny part of the experiment was that they had to do a control group — a group where the participants were still scanned, but no humor was taking place — so they could compare the two. The control group joke went like this:
What did the elephant say to the naked man?
Hey there, naked man!
I love that so much. If I had heard the control part I would’ve cracked up anyway.
The point being, that this following science experiment, The Ruebens Tube, tickles some part of my brain that doesn’t usually light up. And it feels good. The guy fills a PVC pipe with gas, pokes small holes in it and puts a speaker at one end of it. He then lights the gas and plays tones through the speaker — fire EQ display. Amazing.
NY Times says “If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine, that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.”
McCain gets Barackrolled. I haven’t been too political on this blog, but this is so good. A blending of memes (have we talked about rickrolling here before?), this has amassed half a million hits in 2 days…the bit where McCain raises his eyebrows is priceless…
Pretty sweet. I’m on a crusade to find a replacement for my old CDJ system, for reals. The thing is, there’s so much info, and so many different components that plug into the laptop…
this vid doesn’t really show anything I’m considering, but it’s always fun to see man vs machine…
He pauses for a minute. “You know what’s weird, though? RZA lives right down the street.”
“No shit? I thought he lived in New York.”
“Yeah, me too,” he replies. “But I saw him at this electronics store over by here a while ago. I remember thinking ‘Oh…. There’s that guy.’ But then–this is the trip part–I just did a tour with him in Europe. I geeked out at the last show we did and I asked him what the sample from ‘Ice Cream’ was. He was like, ‘I don’t even know, man.’ I honestly think he forgot. That dude is a space cadet–he was in the stars.”
Stumbled across this site yesterday called cratekings.com that seems to be full of great stuff…interview with Nicolay, some RZA stuff, and this cool session with Pete Rock talking about a few of his famous beats…including this bit where he talks about Nas’s "The World is Yours" with 9th Wonder, Just Blaze, Nu-Mark and DJ Revolution…
I love in the beginning where all the producers are listening to the beat and just head-nodding…
