Highlight favorite photographs in rotating index sectionDONE! Check it out!Better photoblog design - less scrolling for low-res usersDONE!Rework photoblog script to be easier to useDONE!- Category-based archives
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August 2003
August 2003
Todo list
Perhaps the easiest way to compel oneself to complete a list of tasks is to commit to them in the full spotlight of a public forum. In that spirit, a deconstructor todo list:
Posted on
Aug 11, 11:53 PM
Machine Listening
Wow. A must-listen for experimental music fans: Eigenradio from the MIT Media Lab.
Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you're tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you're hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear.
It's a project of Brian Whitman (aka Blitter), who describes his music research at further length here. AFAIK, Brian is brother to Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski, composer of some fantastically experimental music himself, and proprietor of the unbelievably unwieldily-named record label reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge1
1 Origin of the name, for the curious:
The name is a nonsense untranslatable German word which comes from when Wagner went to see a Hindemith Saxophone concerto and walked out ten minutes into it. Wagner said the concerto sounded like someone said "Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge." The late Nicholas Slonimsky, author of Lexicon of Musical Invective, dug up the anecdote and included it in his account of various critical assaults on composers, which is where I found it. The word roughly translates to "nonsense sound factory tools," for what it's worth. - Keith Fullerton Whitman
-- From Pitchfork Media
-- From Pitchfork Media
Innumerable Ones
Apropos of nothing, another delightful excerpt from Borges:
In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:
This classification has been used by many writers. It "shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought" for Michel Foucault. Anthropologists and ethnographers, German teachers, postmodern feminists, Australian museum curators, and artists quote it. The list of people influenced by the list has the same heterogeneous character as the list itself.
-- From Borges' Animals
- 1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.
This classification has been used by many writers. It "shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought" for Michel Foucault. Anthropologists and ethnographers, German teachers, postmodern feminists, Australian museum curators, and artists quote it. The list of people influenced by the list has the same heterogeneous character as the list itself.
-- From Borges' Animals
Spellbound
Stop surfing the web and go see Spellbound right now! It's a documentary about the U.S. national spelling bee competition, and if that doesn't sound like a recipe for fun, let me assure you that this movie is at different times hilarious, poignant, and masterfully depicts a cross-section of American culture. If that's not enough, it has plenty of near-unpronounceable words... AND an electric guitar Star-Spangled Banner solo!
If you're looking for more documentary recommendations, Kevin Kelly's True Films is a good place to start. One of my others is Dark Days, about the people who live in the train tunnels below Manhattan. It wonderfully humanizes a topic which at first can seem scary, and has a great soundtrack by DJ Shadow to boot.
Deconstructor Refresh
...been busy today here at deconstructor world headquarters smoothing out some of the site's rough edges and implementing some long-overdue features. Among the highlights for you blogging nerds:
- This main index should now validate as valid HTML 4.01, if I can keep the tags in my entires clean. The W3C's validator should back me up on this point. Movable Type takes some persuasion to output fully valid code. I used Brad Choate's RegEx plugin to replace & characters in long URL query strings with their character entity equivalents
- Ditched the ugly table markup in the sidebar for a super-clean DIV/CSS scheme
- Implemented the new random links section in the sidebar, where I'll be actively posting interesting links without (much) comment
- Educated my quotes and performed other typographic geekery using Daring Fireball's SmartyPants plugin
- New and improved playlist feed in the sidebar, straight from Winamp
- Shiny new CSS bulleted list styles
