Griffin (L) and Fleur (R), the Tiny kittens, 4.5 months old.
I got up at 4 this morning. It’s nearing 5 at the moment. We have doors and windows open, fans going. Inside temp is about 80 degrees F, but hopefully that will come down closer to 75 before we close the house to protect our “cool” air. I like hot weather, but when it gets into the high 90s and low 100s, my brain slows way down, along with the rest of my body, along with everybody else in un-air-conditioned conditions. I’m not really a big fan of air conditioning (so to speak), but it has its temporary emergency uses. I have A/C in my Chamber of Randomness upstairs, so I could hole up there during the evenings if I absolutely had to use my brain in any functional capacity, but somehow, lounging languidly in the backyard on the hammock with a foot in the wading pool, sipping an iced beverage and reading… that sounds better.
Harry Potter is the current main reading project/obsession. I’ve started on Book 4. Depending on my location and ergonomic situation, I alternate between reading on my Palm PDA and my Dell Mini netbook.
A side interest is War Surf by M.M. Buckner. I’ve been reading really impressive hype about Buckner, and tried to find a sample of her writing running wild on the open internet (that is: a pirated ebook)–but FAILED. Therefore I took the extraordinary step of registering an account at Fictionwise.com and BUYING an ebook. Nine frickin’ bucks for a text plagued with not just a few obvious OCR errors (does the PRINT version suffer this badly?).
On the other hand, because I bought Fictionwise’s “multi-format” version of the Buckner ebook, I can download and re-download War Surf in any or all of a dozen file formats, unencrypted. I.e. in contrast to Amazon’s Kindle ebook program, where Amazon can reach into your Kindle machine via its wireless network and DELETE books it wants to, I actually OWN my ebook versions of War Surf. I could email a copy to you right now. (Although that would be a copyright infringement, of course.)
LaunchPad meets today at Chez Random. First plugged-in Swarm in 6 weeks. We were acoustic last time and of course at the OCF. LP has two gigs coming up: Friday 7/31 at the new Cornucopia on Pearl near 5th, across from Steelhead, 10pm, free, 21+; and the next day, Saturday, 8/1, at the Whiteaker Block Party, on the “Rocker” stage across from Territorial Winery, sometime near 5pm. We are still confirming exact stage time.
The kittens seem to have fully recovered their vim and vigor after getting “fixed” last week. It’s great to have them careening around all crazy-go-nuts again. What good are vimless vigorless kittens anyway?
Harry Potter has me hooked. I’m over halfway through book 3. I think I got as far as the third book years ago, but I’m ready to plough through the whole series now.
From the past week or so, my Scobert Park concert pix: Alpha Dahlia (7/24) http://bit.ly/NCPTG | The Underlings (7/22) http://bit.ly/a4PGR | Pony Prance (7/17) http://bit.ly/zNdgA.
I drank wine last night, several glasses of cheap white, ending or at least punctuating the drinking hiatus I started on April 17. Kinda bleary this morning, but it was good to do. I don’t know what my drinking status is now. Day to day. That was the second 3-month hiatus in two years. Everybody has to manage their own vices in their own way. It’s a matter of balancing energies, I think.
I spent several hours with my drum machine last night. Alesis SR-16, which I’ve had for at least a decade. Built a virtual drum kit to emulate drum sounds on a Cure album. And then tried to replicate the drum beats for one song, “Jumping Someone Else’s Train”–I did get a basic pattern down, but every measure in the recording contains variations, naturally. However, cloning patterns and introducing small variations is pretty easy with this machine. Just takes some work. I also want to come up with all new hot beats for LaunchPad. Due to a nasty unpredictable sudden loud noise it now emits, I’m done with my trusty old Yamaha PS-510, which contained several signature LP beats. Time to change the rhythms.
THE UNDERLINGS ARE PLAYING IN SCOBERT PARK TOMORROW NIGHT (Wed, 7/22,7pm).
I just finished the first Harry Potter in illegal ebook form. Illegal by definition because the author has refused to release ‘em in e form. I forgot how fast the first book goes. Already on to The Chamber of Secrets.
The kittens will have their big rite of passage this week. I’m visualizing smooth and easy, good energy.
Daphne, our old fat 18+ year-old cat, has not been making it to her usual place to pee. Not a pleasant development. The weather is nice and warm this week, so we’re going to put her outside during the day. Fresh air and warm grass will be better than spending all day in the corner on the living room floor, anyway We’ll have to figure out a solution for night time: feline incontinence must be managed!
As long as I don’t HAVE to do anything, I like hot weather. Our house stays relatively cool on the main level, with the upstairs taking the heat. This weekend has been lovely. Would have been perfect but Mrs R was out of town. Now she’s back! And we’re going to eat dinner at Anatolia, a regular favorite of ours.
Yesterday was very productive in terms of music. Stardust came over in the afternoon and we worked on Some New Thing material. A new song emerged, to join the 2 we already have (minus lyrics–they are still to come). Hey, it’s almost a set list! Getting way ahead of things talking about a set list, but progress can intoxicate me. We’re also learning 2 cover songs.
My keyboard has started making a sudden loud sound at random intervals. It’s not the power supply: it happened after I switched to batteries, too. Maybe your noise band needs an unpredictable keyboard? Hit me up.
I started the Harry Potter series, book 1, this weekend. Maybe it’s because the new movie just came out. I have no plans to see it, but the urge to read the whole series of books arose. JK Rowling has refused to release the Potter series in ebook format. But that hasn’t stopped dozens of e-versions from popping up on the internet. The Randoms own all the books in paper form, but that’s not how I want to read them. Therefore, thus, it follows: Yarrrrrrrr!!!
I think a good superpower to have would be the easy ability to form a new subject. To be able to edit one’s own subjectivity, one’s way of perceiving, knowing, feeling. Something like the Leary/Wilson slogan of dialing up a new reality tunnel, of having the facility to switch tunnels, channels, at will.
I would add this to an earlier imagined superpower: the ability to pause-unpause specific focused attention, eliminating the need for long periods of uninterrupted time to do highly focused creative work: one could instantly resume concentration when a small chunk of time becomes available, and instantly save/pause this mode when an interruption occurs.
Both of these imagined superpowers relate to flexibility, adaptibility, flowing with changing situations, dynamic environments.
I’m loading up the mp3 player with music for Mrs. R’s trip to visit family in central Oregon. About 70 albums of stuff she likes, a collection I put together for a trip she made over there last fall. She just puts it on shuffle and drives. The player is an older Creative Zen Micro with just over 5 GB of room for music.
I’ve got several different custom 5GB mp3 album collections saved on hard drives, including one of music for inspiring creativity for the embryo band, Some New Thing. Speaking of which, two more songs erupted last night. I want to set up keyboard & rhythms and flesh out sounds more. I’m enjoying the feedback-loop rush, the standing wave of enthusiasm raised by sustained directed efforts. I’m excited to fold this energy back in to the collaboration, and observe/nurture further becomings.
My personal musical path: going from improv to composed, I wonder if that’s opposite of how it’s mostly done? It’s still improv in a way, slow improv, honed and polished improv, repeatable improv.
Last night I wrote lyrics to a song, and I heard a lot of the music in my head. The lyrics didn’t come from a particular, specific inspiration: it was more that I had certain “effects” that I wanted to achieve. For me art is not about “self expression,” it’s about using effects to change Affect. A sound, a vibe, an attitude, a special sauce to hypnotize, delight, thrill, transport. Art as gateway, portal.
First I imagined a band, and a singer (it was something like Roxy Epoxy fronting Joy Division), then the rhythmic/tonal feel of the song. I felt my way into a Subject, a subjective point of view, with attitude and emotion. Then the words started coming. Verses appeared, a chorus asserted itself. Voila! Libretto! Melodies and basslines murmured at the edges of things.
The feeling of pushing into new creative techniques and regimes is very exciting. My goal is to be a factory. But research and development is the game at this stage. Mimicking the forms and methods I see out there, but kind of reverse engineering according to my own style/approach.
I think my role in LaunchPad is being affected by my new focus. We’re already talking about writing and learning songs in a more repeatable manner. I don’t know if that will really flower as a method for us, but I think it’s cool that we’re continuing to evolve and be open to new ways of working/playing.
Pony Prance has a show in Scobert Park on Friday 7/17 (7pm?). There are no guarantees of further shows that I know of, so I recommend heading over to the park on Friday!
Currently reading ebooks: Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids, Cory Doctorow’s serial novel Makers. I think I might be on the brink of plunging into the Harry Potter series. I did read the first two, back when they came out, but didn’t keep going. That was before I acquired and started carrying my nifty handy-dandy ebook reader (aka Palm m515) with me most of the time. I also really like reading on my Dell Mini 9 netbook, too. FBReader rocks! Since adopting an exclusively e-approach to reading, I’ve been gobbling up long-form text compositions (“books”) like never before. My 49-year-old eyes like reading off the screen (backlight, adjustable fonts) much more than off of paper. And huge books are as wieldy as thin pamplets on my devices. Basically, I don’t read physical paper books anymore. I’ve been trying to read the p-book version of Emergence for weeks now, and keep getting frustrated with print on paper. I probably won’t finish it until I can find a non-DRM’d e-version for less than $5.00 for my Palm. And, just for the record, I think Amazon’s Kindle program is a DRM-infested racket. E’s gotta be DRM-free and much lower-priced than P. I have a feeling many publishers will never get it. Just like the record industry, eh?
LaunchPad is scheduled to play a gig at the new Cornucopia (on 5th across from Steelhead, in the old Chanterelle spot) on Friday, July 31, 10pm. Also, we are slated to play a gig the next day at the Whiteaker Block Party. Will announce this louder when I have a location and time.
I’m writing basslines and collaborating on making songs w/Stardust. We’re working hard to bring an embryonic band to viability (building up a set of songs is first phase), but the gestation period for a post-future enterprise like this is unknown. I am in completely new (i.e. non-improv) musical territory, and it feels fresh and fun.
The Oregon Country Fair was fun, and I loved having Mrs. R out there camping with me for two nights. The best day was Thursday, for weather. I wore shorts into the evening. Friday was still pretty nice. Saturday was cool and overcast. Sunday was overcast early, but I did see the sun poke through for a few minutes while I plunked my acoustic bass guitar sitting beside Chickadee road at Entertainment Camp, around 9 or 9:30. But moments after eleven o’clock, thunder clapped. Cheers went up. Within a minute, the downpour began. Instant mud!!
People stopped cheering the thunder and got busy making raingear out of garbage bags, unless they were prepared. I was lucky to have brought my rain jacket, which makes me look like I’m from Palo Alto, as somebody told me. I believe all stages but The Left Side (?) carried on with all of their scheduled sets. I co-manage Shady Grove stage with Scottk. He had the morning shift and did an amazing job tarping the stage and helping keep the show going. Jim Paige had his audience join him onstage under the tarp while he played guitar and sang songs. My shift was just muddy, not rainy. We operated without a sound system because gear needed to be kept covered and dry, and also because of risk of electrical shorting, possibly damaging equipment.
LaunchPad played outside Hilltop Bakery on Saturday night, which was super fun. We had a cadre of hardcore fans, and attracted some curious onlookers.
A fair bit of space money was quietly distributed. Some old friends were encountered. Magick manifested in both subtle and flashy ways. I felt pretty good about being back at Shady Grove after taking a year off the Fair. Robin created a lovely camp living room for us, with a canopy, tapestries, chairs, and decorations. I would have opted for warmer sunnier weather, but I think seeing the OCF carry on during Sunday’s mess was worth it. Pretty damn inspiring. Linda D., who is my boss and coordinates several stages, was very proud that all her stages managed to follow their schedules despite sound-system and other challenges. The performers had fantastic attitudes and kept their wet audiences entertained.
One of my favorite memories of OCF 2009: After hours of steady rain on Sunday, a woman looked at her hands and exclaimed “My god, I’m PRUNING!”
I posted a bunch of OCF photos on my Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/mrrandom
Speeds, trajectories, accelerations, decelerations, accretions, erosions, flows, breaks, stoppages, ruptures, diversions, connections. We are immersed in and composed of these, and these too: collisions, splittings, pairings, edits, mixes, realtime amplifications and attentuations, detentions and freeings, rememberings and forgettings.
Hermit network, the network of hermits. Building up the voice charge. Aware of when I mute excitement and when I amplify it to please the bright network organize smile community togetherness VERSUS internal combustion alchemy ecstatic ports & enigmatic allies like free kittens, some new thing every day.
Continuous variation now. How to plough this field of view… or let it lie fallow, recovering from brutal cultivation. I have one male eye and one female eye. My third eye is questionable. Did somebody have a question? Somebody let off a stink bomb and now everybody has to breathe it! Calling upon the whirlwind is only one option. Subroutines multiply under consideration, values added and reward points adopted, like chirps of despair, hopings, pleases and thankyous.
Dick Higgins to George Maciunas, letter, November 19, 1974, Collection Archiv Sohm, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany. From p. 123 of At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet:
I do not believe in amateurishness: that isn’t what it is all about. But in amateurism, is simplicity. An art (by which I also mean non-art, if you prefer, so long as it is aesthetic in some way) on which one cannot hang a cycle of professional crafts and dependence. An art which by its very nature denies its perpetrators their daily bread, which must therefore come from somewhere else. Such an art must be given, in the sense that experience is shared: it cannot be placed in the market place and in this way it differs profoundly from the Fluxus-derived “movements” of earth-works or media-hype forms of concept art. Much of that work I enjoy—I even love . . . I must reject, not because it isn’t officially Fluxus, but because it isn’t free. It’s just so many hat racks for careers to be hung onto. When the name of the artist determines the market value of a work and not its meaning in our lives—beware!
I just made a podcast over at radionot.wordpress.com, about 45 minutes long. Medium bandwidth entertainment, including a few local bands. Huzzah!
Fleur chases her mom, Dr Tinycat, across the yard.
Scribbled notes, here:
Netbook as THE cultural device.
Future arrives unevenly and layered/mixed with past…
Stopped drinking (since late April) but not underindulging in coffee and chocolate. Need to drink more water.
Kittens at 3 months.
Everything: broken half the time & no reliable instructions. Strategies must be invented, then renegotiated at irregular intervals.
People like to put down what they don’t understand or don’t relate to.
I let the kittens and Dr Tinycat out of their locked upstairs suite at 5 this morning. I’d already been up for awhile, tending to data and such. Tiny wanted to go outside, so I let her. But the kittens are having fun times in the living room. Griffin totally loves the catdancer type toy… long thin strip of fabric on the end of a 1ft clear plastic rod. Now both he and Fleur are having their way with my expensive walking shoes.
Yesterday I purchased a 1 “terabyte” external hard drive. They have dropped in price dramatically over the last year. In real terms, its actual capacity is 931 gigabytes. (Computer science and marketing departments have different definitions of what a “gigabyte” is and what a “terabyte” is: marking deparments like base 10 arithmetic and computer science prefers base 2, technically speaking, and for different reasons.) As I’ve blogged in the past, I deal with large volumes of digital data, including lots of multitrack audio sessons, like band practices and gigs. Not to mention photos and videos. So more space is good: I can make safety backups and have more room to organize bits. Not exactly one of those fun-n-sexy gadgets, like an iPod, but a big hard drive is extremely useful in my cyborg life.
My tweet upon returning home from the show with Mrs. Random last night:
Santigold at Cuthbert did not disappoint. She even played a STIFFED song! And her dancers/backupsingers were beautiful robotic perfection.i
My Tumblr Feed:- The Vatican joins the search for alien life - Telegraph
- Animated story of how Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter on LSD (via...
- Bruce Mau Design: INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO FOR GROWTH. Good stuff!
- 2012: The End Of The World? | Information Is Beautiful
- Post Tech - Chat with Michael Geist on secret copyright rules
- "Our response to Y2K is remembered as an overreaction—and there’s probably a good case to be..."
- Everything you want to know about the scary, secret copyright treaty - Boing Boing
- Today is Exploding Whale Day! « Shafe Shifter
- 2012: Carnival of Bunkum | h+ Magazine
- Allison Kilkenny: Catholic Church Threatens To Stop Feeding Homeless Over Gay Marriage
- Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
- mr_random on Twitter:
- RT @palafo RT @eric_andersen: Whoa - the Vatican is holding a conference on alien life? http://j.mp/TUW0q /ht @slashdot
- re prev tweet (Apollo 12): here's that first link again => http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo40/
- RT @NASA Apollo 12 launched to the moon 40 years ago today http://www.nasa.gov/externa... and http://bit.ly/EiYQz
- RT @jamie_love Gov't secrecy in trade negotiations on IPR norms is abuse of power by gov't officials, collaborating with big companies #acta
- RT @jamie_love It is important to reject the idea that only some people should see the ACTA text, and not the general public.
- URL shorteners working with Internet Archive for long-term preservation http://bit.ly/GRKc7 (via teleread.org)
- 100 Useful Links for eBook Lovers: http://bit.ly/16Hj9u (via teleread.org)
- RT @kirstinbutler This is *awesome*! RT @dsldsl Animated story of how Dock Ellis pitched a no hitter on LSD http://bit.ly/4dSX4Z
- I liked this. RT @openworld Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth http://bit.ly/JgDRv via @ninakix
- yes! RT @DentonBiety It's funny 'cos its true. RT @steviedove: google wave theory vs reality http://i.imgur.com/zVn91.jpg
- Check this out=> @UrinalGum's "A Guide to Choosing the Right News Source": http://bit.ly/23q2Yy
- .@UrinalGum NICE!(http://bit.ly/23q2Yy) Thx4that. But please do give credit where it's due.. I was RTing @lessig's new meme try.
- new meme RT @lessig Fox-puppet: an angry complaining soul misinformed by sensationalist press.
- RT @CapellaMarket BEER TASTING TODAY 4-6pm: our beer manager Alex will be pouring @Ninkasi Sleighr, Oatis, Total Domination & Believer.
- Thanks for mention :) @blogofinnocence
- My Most Recently Created Pandora Stations:
- The Jesus Lizard Radio September 25, 2009
- N.W.A. Radio August 4, 2009
- Cursive Radio July 14, 2009
- Black Grape Radio July 6, 2009
- Siouxsie And The Banshees Radio May 6, 2009
- The Durutti Column Radio April 6, 2009
- The Transmitters Radio April 3, 2009
- Mary's Danish Radio April 3, 2009
- Dash Rip Rock Radio April 3, 2009
- The Funeral Party Radio April 3, 2009
- Metric Radio March 16, 2009
- Sound Tribe Sector 9 Radio February 25, 2009
- Meat Puppets Radio January 20, 2009
- Isis Radio January 7, 2009
- Stiffed Radio December 18, 2008
- Salt-N-Pepa Radio November 28, 2008
- Yob Radio October 29, 2008
- A New Kind Of Army Radio October 29, 2008
- Melt-Banana Radio August 27, 2008
- Don't Say(I Told You So) Radio August 1, 2008
