couldn’t go to sleep night so i sewed myself up a new sketchbook and listened to the archived KPFA broadcast on henry cowell. i first became aware of henry cowell while investigating an instrument called the rhythmicon, which was constructed at cowell’s behest by famed electronic instrument pioneer lev termin (aka leon theremin) and later came to be used by joe meek. the rhythmicon is a keyboard device that outputs not only tonal patterns but rhythmic patterns as well, making it by some definitions the world’s first drum machine. a note at B flat will sound at one beat per unit time, a third above will play at one and a third beats per unit time, the B flat above that will sound at two beats per unit time, and so forth. it sounded like a great idea so years ago i decided to try and make one. many schemes down the road and i realize that a commercially-available solution exists, and was at one time extremey popular and still very inexpensive (though it’s polyrhythmic properties were heretofor undiscovered)– the legendary casio sk-1 sampling keyboard. anyway, cowell’s the guy that started it all, he’s a great american composer with a great sense of humor that really comes through on the broadcast. oh, and after all this, the broadcast does not have “rhythmicana”, his sole composition for the rhythmicon, but it does have other polyrhythmic piano stuff. for more rhythmicon stuff, here’s a brief rundown of it’s scandalous path (henry cowell was imprisoned for his sexuality, joe meek shot his landlady, then himself, lev termen was abducted by the kgb, the machine itself was several times impounded as a terrorist weapon before and after being used by the scientologists for indoctrination procedures). here is an online version of the instrument itself.
hey mike t, i wanted to come to your gross drinks party but instead as mentioned earlier i went to way western mass to mass moca (and now it’s 10pm and i’ve already spent 5 car hours today). but i’m coming down this week to record (knock on wood), so i’ll try and hunt you down.
mass moca was great, a recommended jaunt. as we were going in i asked a nice family coming out if we could have their admission stickers and they were delighted to help us in a low-level scam (as many are, i find). so for three people that’s $30 saved, making the whole trip $10 for gas, $10 for pizza / 3 people = $6.66. as for exhibits- the museum has a couple huge rooms that they usually divide into three shows. in the large room (which is football-field-sized, with enourmous ceilings) servos methodically dropped tracing paper piece by piece onto the floor as voices over loudspeakers spoke in a manner unintelligible to me. the loudspeakers slowly lowered all the way to the floor and raised again. it was nice. upstairs was an exhibit called “the interventionists”, which was a loose smattering of, oh, let’s see what the website says… “artists in the social sphere” if you can believe it. the most interesting of these (besides the enourmous sticker/stencil wall from god bless graffitti, which included an item from our own beth tub), was the biotech lab from the critical arts ensemble. the lab is a fairly simple one, high school stuff, but set up to test food for transgenic ingredients. actually, i didn’t get to see the lab, as it was seized by the fbi weeks ago, and the artist taken into custody as a bioterrorist. for more on this lousy story please see CAE defense fund . org.
i guess it’s odd to shift gears to less-overtly socially conscious subject matter after such an orwellian freak out but that’s all i got left so here goes. the best thing at the museum and the thing i was most excited to see was the matthew ritchie exhibit. i’ve been thinking a lot about shimmering complexity and busyness, like in gamelan music, or public enemy, or lots of creative music, where there’s so much information being thrown at you but you still determine paths and clusters and surfaces. matthew ritchie’s heavily involved cosmology is like that, his beautiful paintings (which in form and color remind me of a shredded jim woodring) forming a beautiful mess of a universe, on top of which he scribbles explanatory diagrams and formulas, identifying lines of force, polarity, movement, relationships and so forth. part one the busy world, part two the attempt (be it successful or not, translatable or not) to make some sort of sense of it. i loved it. for a very interesting matthew ritchie thing on the web, see the hard way. ok, i gotta go drink some lemonade and get to work. and if there’s no lemonade i’ll just drink tap water.
adam ryder’s moving from worcester to providence in a couple days. it’s a popular move, and i’d be lying if told you i didn’t consider it every month or so. anyway, we’re going to mass moca this weekend and i’m reading up on matthew ritchie. the 8-year-old son of the show’s curator, who traded Yu-Gi-Oh cards with Ritchie, pronounced his [game-oriented piece] to be “cool, but pretty easy.”.
yesterday we went and saw “hero”, the new jet li movie. it was good, but no crouching tiger hidden dragon. good costumes. it got me thinking about shoes- i want to make my own shoes. with coiled straw soles, like espadrilles.
some DNS problems but we’re back now. we’re glad you caught our signal and not us.
in the “they did their part” dept., anacrusis rallies the spritual capital nesseccary to bring us peter pannishly back into flight. permalink. thanks, children everywhere!
last night nathie swung by and picked us up for to see fat day at the shed, in beautiful palmer mass. the shed is an actual shed behind someone’s house, slightly smaller than my bedroom. they’ve been having shows there for a while, and it’s just great that they ever thought that it could be a valid show space in the first place. the line-up was thus: dr. doo (who i saw the day before in worcester), dosdedos (really awesome creative sax / drums duo), greyskull (george and dan (defneg) again, but with added flavor of jeff / noise nomads– they slayed this time– dan smashing badminton rackets as surrogate guitars) and of course, fat day. man, fat day is so awesome. as mike said in the car ride home, they really “master their own reality”. and by this he meant, their sound is theirs alone, they look totally crazy, they have a lightshow. fat day, you’re the best. speaking of “total package” fat day was passing out free pshaw newspapers. “hand me my clod popper! i’ll cleft their steeple like a chisel hinge!”. yee!
hoom bom! friday’s movie show was aces high and everyone a winner. representing worcester, i had a movie about dracula, the terribles made a great scary movie with lots of hydrotechnics, and jason the flash made a spooky movie with talbot and mary that looked like it was shot on a security camera. from providence mostly there was xander, mat brinkman, peter glantz, laura rodriguez, jo dery, and ben coonley, all on tour, and from parts unknown, ben jones and defneg. defneg actually played kind of a noise set, with a weird static-y video in the background, but i counted it as a movie because i didn’t watch them, only the movie, and as dan flailed about i just concentrated on his flailing shadow on the colorful screen. also there was the guilty pleasure of a noise performance where nothing really worked. the rest of the movies proper were so great– at turns mysterious, filagreed, whimsical, frightening, melancholy and so forth. though i had some editing difficulties and a cop-out ending and a totally last-minute soundtrack (my plans to do a jaw harp solo fell through when i realized that i am unable to play jaw harp for 12 minutes), my dracula movie (“dracula at borgo pass”) came out pretty ok. i put xander’s lady long arms character and a classic mat brinkman hulking hairball in my movie as monsters, and they seemed to be flattered. the night ended with some of us getting pizza.
the lorna doom cd is awesome. if you see them in boston on friday (when you should be in worcester watching my movie about dracula (8pm at the WAG movies with live soundtracks.info )) get the cd.
the show last night was a lot of fun. tiny hawks was awesome as always, the good good was too, their bass player was real playful in a chico marx dancing fingers way. lorna doom was great, though i had a hard time making out what aj was saying all the time. actually the only thing i could really make out was “i read when i shit”. this is incidental but i really liked it when during their set a song ended abruptly and mel (continuing a conversation at the level one would use during a loud band) said “email” really loud. soophie nun squad finished off the night and got crazy, like a punk parliament, everybody wearing diapers or hot pants or fright wigs playing huge theatrical extravaganzas. they had a lot of crowd involvement stuff, too, which was really great. actually, scratch that parliament thing, soophie was like seeing feral high school theatre kids trapped in the band room overnight getting sillier and sillier. it was great.
of all the acts i was most excited to see lorna doom. aj and lee have been working on their hip hop act for over a year and i’m happy to finally see it come to fruition. too bad they’re fronting now like they don’t owe me eleven dollars…
after some cajoling, the kid at the video store sold me “screwball academy” for a buck. we watched it tonight and there isn’t actually anything having to do with an academy, and there isn’t really even any screwballs in the classic teen movie class clown way. if you find yourself in the position i was in earlier today, cajoling the kid at the video store, CEASE CAJOLING! your dollar bill will be better spent on five packs of tortillas at duffy’s, or dropping the dollar and a goose grabbing it and chasing the goose.
nick – we were talking about a specific bioluminescence and i got it wrong. in the deep deep waters getting only trace trace amounts of sunlight, no red light filters down at all. many fish have lost the ability to see red light and animals that are red are close to invisible. however, a very small amount of predators have red-light-producing photophores under their eyes that act like headlights. not only does this illuminate the otherwise invisible prey, but the prey don’t even know they’re being lit up and set up for a swift snack. bam!
i feel like fujichia fan fiction is almost upon us. for now, however, i’ll have to settle for this fan fiction inspired by fujichia.