==pla|\|ing lakes==

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks: review

Sounds like a good summer read.

5:07 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Katharine Hepburn

4:56 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, June 27, 2003

CNN interview with Arnold Jarecki, director of the acclaimed Capturing the Friedmans

CNN: The film doesn't draw any conclusions about the guilt or innocence of Arnold and Jesse, it seems.

JARECKI: It doesn't feed them to you with a spoon. It is usually [shades of gray] in a legal case. We'd like to think when we read the paper and the guy pled guilty to 42 counts of something or other and we think he must have shoplifted 42 different items. But in the end you find out it's this incredibly complicated dance with the prosecutor about what you're willing to say you did. ... It's more about cutting a deal -- like everything else in America is now at the moment. ...

Previous post.

6:04 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Art for the post-tourist

For four weekends this winter, the Dencity Bus Tour made its pilgrimages through the city's trash and raw sewage. The ride, says Rene Gabri, one of the three artists who conceived and produced the tour, was meant "to interrogate the format of the tour itself, which relies on verbal information that is often incorrect anyway." His collaborators, Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, produced the live soundtrack, largely made up of samples taken from the industrial area itself.

According to Gabri, the tour evokes what wireless gadgetry promises to provide: "Moving through space, yet having a constant stream of information." But all tours do that, or at least they try. Unique to Dencity is the detachment and illusory sense of privacy encouraged by the atmospheric music and darkness. On the bus that night, one couple made out, another gossiped, while others stared out the windows. Without the unifying element of a tour guide to produce a sense of community, Dencity has hit on, perhaps accidentally, a lonely vision of a supposedly hyperconnected world where each person has electronic access to all varieties of data, anytime, anywhere.

2:48 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Polynesian island of Niue casts wifi net over whole island

7:39 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Researching translations of Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript I discovered that Wojceich Has actually made a well-received film of the gothic classic in the 60s -- with music by Krzystof Penderecki

"Head movies" -- those mind-bending epics like 2001 or El Topo that are supposedly best viewed under the influence -- frequently require drugs just to get through them. In the case of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), the equation is reversed; anyone going into this three-hour mind-fuck straight may well come out feeling stoned. Those who like a challenge and can handle a dizzyingly dense structure that's more puzzle than plot will be well rewarded. A great score by Krzystof Penderecki and gorgeous cinematography (black-and-white Cinemascope) keep the ear and eye riveted even while the brain is in meltdown. [Bright Lights review]

Another reason to get a DVD player and sign up with Netflix, since it'll be a cold day in hell before this baby shows up in Cottonwood.

11:11 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

I like this guide to CD-R recording, though I'm no expert, I think it lays out the issues and info very well

10:48 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Edward Miller mentioned The Complete Review today, "a Literary Saloon & Site of Review"

Worth a look for avid readers.

10:45 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wayne Cunningham at CNET on dealing with Orrin Hatch and his anarchist cohorts in the record industry:

First, I can't stress enough the value of a personal firewall such as ZoneAlarm or Sygate. They're very easy to set up. Second, don't leave your P2P client on all the time. Many of these applications default to launching when you start up Windows. Find that setting and turn it off; and only turn on P2P software when you are looking for or downloading a file. Also, check which folders your P2P client shares with the rest of the world. Ideally, you should use a removable storage device such as a separate hard drive or a CD-RW drive, making it harder for someone to hack into a shared folder on your main system.

Since I have a dialup, I don't use firewall tech, but if this gets out of hand, I will anyway.

10:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Norman Rush's Mortals: James Woods' review

Rush recalls Conrad not only in theme but also in language, even if he does not precisely resemble him. The Conrad of whom Ford Madox Ford wrote that he practiced a "ferocious avoidance" of the ordinary sentence, who would go to great lengths to disrupt and to ornament the standard literary vernacular, must be an example to Rush. One reason that Rush has so excited literary readers -- and excited them on the strength, until now, of only one novel -- has to do with his extraordinary prose, which could only be American, and which, like Bellow's language, combines high and low registers in greatly unstable compounds. He is very interested in speech, in the slightly barbaric twisting of language that we commit when we speak, or speak to ourselves.

[...]

Mortals is a deeply serious, deeply ambitious, deeply successful book. Like all such books, it is not without faults. Ideologically speaking, Ray, the liberal who eventually leaves the agency, is perhaps too good to be true, so that one wonders about the likelihood of such a right-thinking (or, rather, left-thinking) fellow ever joining the CIA in the first place. And the novel has the air at times of a once fatter man whose thinner frame is now making his skin sag a bit: there are abrupt transitions and sudden deposits of information. But big books flick away their own failings and weaknesses, make insects of them. And how much is accomplished here! For once, knowledge in an American novel has not come free and flameless from Google, but has come out of a writer's own burning; for once, knowledge is not simply exotic and informational, but something amassed as life is amassed, as a pile of experiences rather than a wad of facts.

Sounds tasty, though it might be too dense for my addled brain these days.

Also of note: lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For:

While the novel brilliantly illuminates its unlikely troika, what the narrative leaves out is just as striking....In this way, the relationship of this engaging and original novel to more conventional American narratives of Vietnam may be thought to be like a photographic negative: What's white is dark, what's dark is white, and the image is strange and mesmerizing. -- Peter Zinoman, LA Times

12:04 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Here's the next generation of mouse: the Gyration Ultra Review

All kidding aside, the new version of the Gyration Ultra mouse isn't exactly the next Greatest American Hero, but it's in the running for the Greatest American Mouse. This little beauty gives you the amazing and uncanny ability to mouse around, free from your desktop with natural hand movements. Even more unique, you can use the mouse either as a standard desk mouse -- it rolls around like a standard optical mouse -- or held in the air, like a remote control.

Whether standing or sitting, as long as you're within 25' of the base receiver, you can surf the web, play games, and control your home theater PC, all with the swipe of your hand. There's no need to own a mousepad ever again.

With its own built in dual-axis gyroscope (called the MicroGyro 100, or MG100), the Gyration Ultra detects the motion of your hand (in mid-air or on a desk) and relays this information to your computer, eventually leading to movements of the mouse-pointer on your monitor. In other words, raise your hand up and the mouse pointer should move towards the top of your monitor. Lower your hand, and the mouse pointer should move towards the bottom of your monitor.

There's also a small laptop-style wireless keyboard for $30 more than the $79 the mouse costs, which means I can kick back from the desk finally.

This is one of the few times something is a must-buy for me. When I have the cash I mean.

3:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Jane Juska's A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance: review

2:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, June 23, 2003

Selected search referrals

"our man flint" sounds mp3
www.woman.school,string
shirt from budapest law enforcement academy
marion's tiny rat terriers
electricity "gothic literature"
kkk goblets
email addresses of cobblers in china 2003
lakes and naked women and beer
lakes that start with p?
anomalous female orgasms
the use of gothic representation in the film The French Connection
patricia heaton bare feet
americans fascinated by watching people being punished [#1!!]
donna tartt yoga
songwriting extortion credits
real human skull horns pics
lakes in Manitoba that has 31 letters in its name
promotional labyrinths
WHY PEPYS USE THE WORD ORDER AND THE WORD CHOICE IN HIS DIARY

1:42 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, June 20, 2003

96 percent of cosmos puzzles astronomers

Sometimes headlines say it all.

2:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Another Canadian author who intrigues me: Alissa York

Mercy, her first novel, isn't out here til next year, and I won't be shelling out for a new Canadian copy. But the excerpt is engaging and maybe I'll find a way.

Any Canadian readers out there who find a cheap used copy, let me know.

3:57 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

I was sampling some tracks on the fine Canadian electroacoustic site/store electrocd when I ran across a new album by John Oswald, famous (in some demented circles) for his remix of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star", Greyfolded and his pop recycling project Plunderphonics

Oswald's system of plunderphonics is a by-product of the various strategies he developed to enable a non musician like himself to compose music. He recalls, "When I was first doing these things I just felt that it was an interesting way of working and one that I seemed to have some sort of musical adeptness at. Really," he insists, "it was my way of making normal music. When I was a kid I was attempting to figure out music but I was a singularly untalented musician, so I didn't really have the choice of playing in a bar mitzvah band or an orchestra. Every time I would go to a music teacher I'd be asked not to come back. I pretty much had to sneak into various institutions of higher education to see what was happening. I never passed the auditions. I couldn't even get in the high school band, I had to steal the instruments."

The discovery of pre-existing recordings as a sound source liberated composition from the hold of the specialists. A powerful compositional tool was now within his reach. He says he scarcely gave a thought to the small matter of who owned the recordings, and he never intended plunderphonics to be an art-political platform for challenging copyright ownership, though he has since been forced to engage with the issue or be destroyed by it. For Oswald, the debates deflect people from hearing his work as music rather than as a thieves' charter. "My game plan has always been to create stuff that justifies its existence by being intrinsically interesting as a listening experience whether or not its existence is currently practical," he says. "So I perhaps naively assume that if an audience really wants it, the consumer environment will adapt an acquisition strategy." [link]

Aparanthesi sounds like just the drone I dig, from the sample.

Probably get the other stuff too, from SoulSeek or whatever.

3:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, June 19, 2003

David Thomson's vinegary & delectable diatribe on W C Fields and a recent bio or two

...despite his brilliance as a juggler, a stage clown, and a movie comic, I want to attest that, above all, Fields is a voice and a wordsmith. You may hear him in Beckett and Pinter as easily as in John Cleese and Peter Sellers. For here is man unkind, filled with dismay, boredom, and loathing at the very idea of women, society, and decency. Here is misanthropus Americanus, preferring to sit in a thickening fog of tobacco smoke, booze, his own lengthening flatulence, and a little unenergetic pornography. Here is the beast ? the defiant enemy of family, sentiment, flag, and happiness; but he is as eloquent as the greatest confidence trickster. He is Huck Finn in the retirement home.

Thomson thinks both Curtis's new (acclaimed) book and Simon Louvish's 1997 Man on the Flying Trapeze are worth reading, if Fields fascinates.

From the amazon reader reviews, I'd suggest the Curtis if you just read one. His previous works on James Whale and Preston Sturges are widely and warmly received.

11:49 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Started Dead Clever, the first of the "Lily Pascale" mystery series by Brit Scarlett Thomas and saw something in the flap bio about her being a member of The New Puritans, a group of writers inspired by the Dogme 95 filmmakers who eschew technique and artifice over narrative simplicity

All I've seen of Dogme is the excellent Danish film, The Celebration, but sets of rules can be useful in art, as Brian Eno found out.

The above article makes it seem like the "New Puritan" manifesto was only half-serious -- it's a salon piece from 2000, and I've only heard of it now, though The Observer (in an article from last year) thinks it may amount to something, if only because the writers hail from the next generation.

Dead CLever hasn't blown me away yet (despite the cover blurb claiming it's "Twin Peaks condensed into book form"). But anything that establishes a creative tension might yield gold.

Have to say the name "New Puritans" is an unfortunate choice, though.

11:34 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

I dunno about the Boston-based early PI novels of Dennis Lehane, but the last 2 -- particularly the new Shutter Island might be worth a shot: Powell's interview

A very popular suspense writer moves past genre, apparently.

1:49 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Tech News

Micro$uck IE upgrades to stop with IE 6 -- unless you upgrade to their new OS.

Earthlink decision to stop covering customers for state access taxes highlights states which charge them -- New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

7:07 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, June 13, 2003

Young 'prefer texting to calls'

Me too, for the most part. Though for me that means email from my desktop.

4:05 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Two composers/musicians I'm looking into lately I found out about through a couple fine blogs

graywyvern propped Q Reed Ghazala, whose Threnody for the Victims of The New Hiroshima is pretty damn challenging but fascinating. Here's one place that you can get it.

Ghazala makes his own instruments (see 2nd link above) and is much more than just a musician, as you can see form his site (third link).

Valentin Silvestrov is a Ukrainian composer who works in a classical vein, sort of. Not generally my line, but Giornale Nuovo makes an intriguing case.

Probably Silvestrov's best-known work is his fifth symphony (1980-82), a grand ruin of music in a single, slow-moving, forty-five-minute arch, somewhat reminiscent of Mahler, or so I gather - I have yet to get into Mahler's work myself - and redolent for the most part of mournful elegy, with the occasional flash of menace and malice eventually giving way, in a prolonged coda, to an air of resignation and lassitude. It is the most ambitious example of Silvestrov's 'postludes': a series of compositions of his which strive to exist as echoes and encores of the entire classical tradition, like something that might issue weakly from failing loudspeakers across some post-human wasteland

I can't get a sense of it from the short samples I've found, and Silvestrov isn't available on any of the networks I frequent. But I'll track him down.

Since I'm in a Ballardian mood lately, this might just be an appropriate background for reading The Drought (aka The Burning World).



1:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The section of Tom Phillips' website about his relationship with Brian Eno -- including the painting After Raphael, a detail of which graced the cover of Another Green World

Old post on Phillips.


12:55 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Gregory Peck & David Brinkley

12:37 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 08, 2003

That's right

Magazine article on plagiarism accused of plagiarism [Undernews]

1:03 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Entertaining and apparently well-informed tell-all about the NYC occult bookstore Magickal Childe, the notorious "Necronomicon", and so forth [orlin grabbe]

Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he'd grown weary of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft's fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge -- with the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman's little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping through counterculture circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in having Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and proto-goth/industrial types searched out obscure Satanic treatises and rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process Church of the Final Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found common ground in the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough variant "traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.

None of the wiccan "traditions" were any older than the electric light bulb, and the OTO had its origins in a very dubious Masonic lineage of no greater antiquity than aniline dyes, but that didn?t stop any of us from having a good time. The Necronomicon was not merely the icing on the cake: It was the hideous formless mass that squatted gibbering and piping where the bride and groom should be.

I visited the store once in the mid-80s and the energy was heavy and off-putting, at that point, anyway.

The fellow most responsible for the text, Peter Levenda ("Simon"), wrote the recently reissued and expanded Unholy Alliance: History of the Nazi Involvement With the Occult, which I thought was pretty good, though he's got his opinions and doesn't hesitate to promote them.

Along similar lines -- and in the spirit of blatant self-promotion -- here's a link to my old epinions review of "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, which is also a fun read (the book I mean, though I like my review too).

1:41 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The 80s Tarot [STARE]

For 80s aficionados only. Not screamingly funny (nor trying to be apparently), but they put a lot of work into it.

1:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

On the real Bob Hope [Destiny-land]

Reporter Margy Rochlin documents how, beginning in 1954, Hope started selling the shows to NBC, and that he had to have been the sole moneymaker on them, since the guest-stars almost always worked for free, and the Pentagon (read: taxpayers) picked up all the travel and lodging expenses.

[...]

The entire [American Life] piece is great, but the best parts are excerpts from a taped interview Rochlin did with Hope in 1986. As she says, it started with Bob's dog biting her and went downhill from there. He does horrible political jokes for her, and you really feel her pain as she tries to laugh. When the talk turns to Viet Nam and how he was perceived by some of the public, Bob mentions that a couple people once called him a "warmonger" and he sicced the local cops and the FBI on 'em! ("They chased 'em out of the town-- they were some bums that were, you know, probably guys that were defectors or something.")

12:26 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, June 07, 2003

The last frontier?

Reality show to advertise in fortune cookies

2:31 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Art & America's death mores

Hadn't heard of Thomas Condon's case -- or I forgot about it with everything else going on

Description of Artwork:?In 2000 and 2001 Thomas Condon, a 30-year-old commercial photographer and artist, was making a training video in the Cincinnati morgue, while there, he also worked on his private art project on the cycle of life and death. Condon had been working on this project for several years. It included images of childbirth, as well as portraits of babies and young children. Dead bodies were photographed with objects on or close to them: an apple, a music score, a snail shell, a key, a toy ladder.

Description of Incident:?A lab worker who was developing the negatives of the photos notified the police. Condon?s studio was searched; his photographs were confiscated. Subsequently the confiscated photographs appeared in the media causing community outrage. In 2001 Condon was convicted on criminal charges of ?corpse abuse.? In Ohio, corpse abuse is vaguely defined as ?treating a corpse in a manner that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities?. Now an artist is actually serving a two and a half year sentence in medium security prison on charges of corpse abuse for taking photographs in a morgue.

Results of Incident:?Condon's request for probation in July was denied. He has been serving his sentence since May 2002. An appeal is currently pending. National Coalition Against Censorship has released an official protest against the criminalization of the photographer who "neither had criminal intent, nor did he cause harm to anybody. Regardless of whether or not he obtained formal permission, a photographer taking pictures does not belong in the same category as a criminal dismembering his victims."

According to the Undernews item that started this, his case is at the Ohio Supreme Court and he will go back to jail if they rule against him.

But even if he had the opportunity to exhibit the morgue shots, he says he would not.

"They've lost their value now," he says. "It hurt those people. I can't change that. I didn't want this to happen. It will never go away. I wouldn't do it again. If they (the pictures) were given to me and I was told I could do anything I want with them or if someone offered me a million-dollar book deal, I would still say no."

It's interesting how corpses can pile up and have dreadful things happen to them in movies, but something like this outrages the bluenoses.

2:04 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Situationism doesn't particularly want your help

"The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images... The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living... The liar has lied to himself"- Guy Debord

The Situationists would argue that by means of the spectacular society, all aspects of our culture and experience is mediated in order to disguise and protect the interests of those who hold real power.

2:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, June 06, 2003

Reconstructed MOMA in NYC to open on time in 2005 with nearly double old floor space

10:46 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Today's lyric tonic

DEAD MAN WALKING

He swivels his head
Tears his eyes from the screen
As his past puts him back in Atlantic City

There's not even a demon in Heaven or Hell
Is it all just human disguise?
As I walk down the aisle

And I'm gone gone gone
[Gone gone gone spinning slack through reality]
Now I'm older than movies
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
Let me dance away
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
Now I'm wiser than dreams
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
Let me fly fly fly
[Spinning slack through reality]
While I'm touching tomorrow
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
And I know who's there
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
When silhouettes fall
[Spinning slack through reality]

And I'm gone
Like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone through a crack in the past

Like a dead man walking
Like a dead man walking

Three old men dancing under the lamplight
Shaking their sex and their bones
And the boys that we were
An alien nation in therapy
Sliding naked and new
Like a bad tempered child
On a rain slicked street

And I'm gone gone gone
[Gone gone gone spinning slack through reality]
Now I'm older than movies
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
Let me dance away
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
Now I'm wiser than dreams
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
Let me fly fly fly
[Spinning slack through reality]
While I'm touching tomorrow
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
And I know who's there
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
When silhouettes fall
[Spinning slack through reality]

And I'm gone, like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone, through a crack in the past
And I'm gone, like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone, through the crack in the past

Like a dead man walking
Like a dead man walking
Like a dead man

-- David Bowie

1:30 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

"because newer is not always better"

OldVersion.com [edwardmillerdotorg]

MusicMatch Jukebox, RealPlayer, Winamp, Eudora, etc.

3:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, June 02, 2003

AOL pulls new encrypted file sharing Waste software leaked by Winamp creator/AOLTW employee Justin Frankel from its site -- but not in time

It allows around 50 users to trade files on a secure and private network, and includes an IM feature.

slashdot discussion.

Other mirrors listed here.

4:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 01, 2003

Stupid blog tricks

Only Micro$uck would resurrect the lovably useless and transparently Orwellian concept of the CueCat for "automating" blogging

1:17 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Grant Morrison's graphic series The Invisibles apparently inspired The Matrix; if you're new to or confused by the series' layered mythology, disinfo has a new guide: review

1:06 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Micro$oft slicing prices on Office, even deeper on components (Word, Excel etc.)

'Bout time. This has something to do with Redmond's own student version that was half the price of Office when it was introduced, and which they've done little to limit the use of to students. (Yes that's a bad sentence and I don't care.)

But for many home users, I'd suggest trying out Sun's Open Office, if you want an (Word-compatible) alternative to the full Office suite. Susan has been using it with no crash issues on our Win98SE PC, while our old Word97 wobbles and falls on a regular basis. I hear newer versions of Word are better (and the post-98 OS too), but if you have Win98 try it.

Re stand-alone word processors: I use Jarte with no troubles at all, as well.

Both programs are free as the wind.

4:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

casa de cyndi

Nice site of engaging, intelligent Mexican-Irish ex-Jehovah's Witness fun feminist.

Thanks to BlogSnob.

4:08 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

eDonkey and BitTorrent et al. amp up file sharing

The second--and main--advance is that the system can break up each file into tiny pieces, allowing them to be distributed independently. As soon as one person starts downloading these pieces, he or she starts offering them to the network at large. That means a movie does not have to be downloaded in its entirety before it can be offered to other people, making distribution of these and other larger files much more efficient.

3:51 AM - [Link] - Comments ()