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Virtual Partch

zymlComposer Harry Partch didn’t write pieces to work with the standard set of 12-tone scale instruments popular in Western music. Instead, he composed with as many as 43 microtones to the octave, then built instruments capable of playing the compositions.

National Public Radio’s “Music Mavericks” has always done a great job chronicling the work of off-beat genius musicians, but their Partch site is a joy to behold. They’ve created a virtual museum of Partch’s instruments, where you can not only hear the instrument played and listen to Partch talk about instruments with names like “Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs” and the “Zymo-Xyl” and “Spoils of War” and “Quadrangularus Reversum,” but also, through ingenious use of photographs and Flash, play the instruments yourself.

Music: Les Baxter :: City Of Veils
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Yard Waste

After almost a year of DIY projects, finally hit one we wish we had paid to have done. When we installed the lawn, moved a ton of small rocks in 50% soil off to one side of the house to “deal with another day.” That day came. Had a handyman do a removal estimate, he wanted $250 for the job, which sounded way high. Decided to do it ourselves. Rented an F-250 and banged some planks out of the side fence to create yard access. Spent the entire day shoveling densely rocky soil into and out of buckets, into and out of the bed of the truck. Hot. Sore. Sweated buckets. Hard work is generally satisfying, but we all have our thresholds. Met mine today.

Wake-up: The city dump is expensive! I remember going as a kid with dad, it was $5 per pickup bed, flat fee. Now there’s a long menu of fees at the entrance, all kinds of prices / cubic yard per material. Interestingly, they now charge $30 just do dump a single computer monitor (that’s a good thing). Anyway, spent $65 on the truck + gas and $80 on dumping fees. Next time we pay to have stuff hauled.

Tips: A) Don’t mix dirt/rocks with yard waste – not only do you get charged more to dump, but it’s a bear to get out of the truck bed. B) If you can rent a dump truck rather than a pickup, DO IT. Spent hours getting intermingled dirt, rocks, and yard waste out of the truck, when one pull of a handle could have emptied the bed.

Music: Impossible Underpants :: Mouthbreathers
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Baby Birds

After chopping down a tree/bush thing today, we found a bird’s nest and put it aside. We thought it was sweet. Then I went to rent a truck. I returned to find Amy crying. She had found four tiny baby birds on the grass — they had been cast from the nest to the ground when the tree came down. No bigger than thumbs, and half that length. Two were dead, the other two were begging with their tiny soft beaks for food. Pink skin and tiny tufts of hair. Amy cut up a worm and put it in the nest with them, but they didn’t eat it – they needed to be regurgitated to. Brand new to the world, and already their fate seemed sealed. We could only imagine what the mother bird would think when she returned to find not only the nest gone, but the whole tree. She probably went crazy with confusion and grief. Poor innocent things.

Music: The Clash :: The Sound of the Sinners
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Webcast Week at the J-School

Dean Schell and the J-School profs are driving a mad events schedule lately, and I’m part of the frenzy, webcasting a ton of good ones in the coming week. Install QuickTime 6 (because we’re using the 3ivx codec now) and tune in. I try to get archives online 24-48 hours after the live cast; yesterday’s Changing World Views of the U.S. is already up. Here are a few of the events I expect to be especially worth checking out:

April 27: Biotech & Nanotech – Remaking Nature in the Image of Technology

April 29: Living With The Genie — On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, with Ray Kurzweil (by videoconference) and others.

April 30: Revisiting Virtual Communities — The Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics. With Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and others.

April 30: Disrupting the News Industry – Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism. With Dan Gillmor of The San Jose Mercury News, and others.

April 30 and 31: China’s Digital Future — Advancing The Understanding of China’s Information Revolution. With Lawrence Lessig, John Gage, and others.

Music: Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers :: My Sugar Is So Refined
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Willful Infringement

New Media Musings’ J.D. Lasica reviews the documentary Willful Infringement for Mindjack. After having been crucified by Disney for creating trailers that included Mouse snippets, the director traipsed the country talking to people whose work had been stifled by overzealous copyright enforcement.

“He … interviews … a pair of party clowns in Anaheim, California, who were warned not to create balloon animals for kids that looked too much like Tigger, Barney, or the Aladdin genie.”

Question: If the same kind of “chilling effects” enforcement currently being leveled against any use of music or moving images had historically been imposed on quotations of text, how would our culture be different today?

“My mother was a children’s librarian, and she imbued me with a world view that culture is a conversation, that you don’t own stories, you share them,” he tells me. “What has happened over the past few decades is that culture has become privatized to the point where we’re now facing a crisis. We need to remember we can still quote and sample, we still have fair use. As a free culture, we’re still allowed to do things without permission.”

Music: Cocteau Twins :: Eggs and their Shells
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Deconstructing Echo Chambers

Apparently I missed the supposedly rampant “echo chamber” meme that was going around at the height of the Dean campaign — the notion that bloggers only pal around with people who feel and see the same way they do, thus reinforcing — rather than challenging — their own world views. David Weinberger does a brilliant job tearing down the myth of the echo chamber as either A) real or B) as necessarily a bad thing. What some people call the echo chamber, Weinberger calls bedrock: the “planks of conversation.”

Besides, we humans — echo chamber participants or echo chamber castigators — rarely engage in deep, meaningful and truly open conversation with people who fundamentally disagree with us. I have never debated a neo-Nazi, and if I did, I wouldn’t do so with an open mind: No way is that son of a bitch going to convince me that he’s right. No apologies. Being grounded in some beliefs is a condition for having any beliefs. And that has nothing to do with echo chambers.

Thanks Pam.

Music: Butthole Surfers :: Edgar
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The Ultimate Slideshow

ORA blog: A couple of professors in the Photo department recently asked for my input on methods for digital storytelling with still images. They’re interested in having student photos packaged up into multimedia modules that optionally include interleaved text, audio, effects, and transitions in addition to still images. I’ve started compiling a list of various slideshow technologies, with their respective pros and cons.

Music: Meat Puppets :: Up On The Sun
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World in the Balance

Amazing NOVA: World in the Balance, on global forces of population, affluence and poverty, consumption and production, disease, etc. Casts a very wide net, but somehow manages not to treat subjects superficially; instead looking at the interplay of these forces, e.g. the rise of China as a nation of SUV-driving affluent polluters just like Americans: We export our culture to them, generating demand for a lifestyle that never existed there, they respond by exporting toxic pollution back across the sea to us in volumes that will soon dwarf our own export of same to the rest of the world. Well worth catching, look for reruns.

Music: David Bowie :: I’m Afraid Of Americans
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Spam King Clothing

In news almost too post-modern to digest, Scott Richter, the Internet’s third-busiest spammer, has decided that his spammy brand has become recognizable enough to be marketable in its own right. To capitalize, he’s launching a line of SpamKing clothing — initially shirts, hats, and panties bearing phrases such as “Just opt out” and “Click it.” You can take a wild flying guess how he’ll be promoting the line. Adding an additional layer to the strangeness, Richter is not generally referred to as “The Spam King” — that honor usually goes either to Bill Waggoner or Alan Ralsky, or, going farther back, Sanford Wallace. So he’s apparently usurping the title from his fellow spammers.

Music: Avenue Q Soundtrack :: Schadenfreude
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Songs for the 21st Century

As if it weren’t enough to have written the theme song to Superchicken (“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred”), Sheldon Allman also wrote the theme songs to George of the Jungle and Tom Slick, all in the same afternoon at Jay Ward Studios. He also wrote the theme music for Let’s Make a Deal, and was the voice of Mr. Ed the Talking Horse. Sometime in the late 50s, Allman released an album of songs he thought might be appropriate for modern living in the 21st century, all sung in an overly sincere baritone and accompanied by Spanish pop guitar. Apparently, Allman thought we would be dating humanoid androids, doing a lot of math, dealing with schizophrenia, and crawling out from under space junk by now. The MP3s will be taken down April 30th – get ’em while they’re still irrelevant.

We met once as I recall
I gave her my close attention
When she came walking through my wall
She’s the girl from the fourth dimension
One kiss and my toes were curled.

Thanks mneptok

Music: Sheldon Allman :: Univac and the Humanoid