Saturday, March 15, 2003

ART ALERT: MuseumStuff.com ... is a virtual gateway to 20,000 museums, museum shops, and carefully selected educational links on ye olde Internet. 11:58:06 PM    comment [] A Nation Dividing From: "Suzanne M. Johnson" Subject: NM state leg. passes bill objecting to Patriot act NM has passed a Joint Memorial Bill (HJM 40) "Affirming Civil Rights and Liberties;  Declaring Opposition to Federal Measures That Infringe on Civil Liberties" Among other things it directs libraries to post warnings to patrons about requirements for monitoring and recording information about what patrons may be accessing.  It also directs their representative to Congress "to work to repeal provisions of the USA Patriot Act". Is this something happening in other states as well? (via IP) http://legis.state.nm.us/Sessions/03%20Regular/memorials/house/HJM040.html 11:49:34 PM    comment [] Watching TV. Faster..    (Gizmodo) Buried in this story over at PCWorld on all the unexpected gadgets that getting WiFi added to them, like a digital camera from Sanyo and a handheld file server from Sony, is this: a new DVD recorder from Matsushita that records television shows at 1.3 times faster than normal speed. Why? "That's slow enough to understand what is going on but also cuts the time it takes to watch a TV show by a quarter." Sounds crazy, but if you're a busy person, that'll skim fifteen minutes off an hour-long show. Here at Gizmodo we've got another trick for cramming more TV into less time, though it only works with a TiVo or other digital video recorder: turn on closed-captioning and watch the show on TiVo's slowest fast-forward setting. The captions will still pop up, so you won't miss what anyone's saying, but everything will happen in double-speed, making it perfect for watching three episodes of Blind Date in a half hour. And yes, we know how fucked up this is.  Read 11:31:16 PM    comment [] Sacred Texts I might have posted this before. No matter. "This site is a freely available non-profit archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, in some cases, in the original language." "This is a quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship." Just recently added, to give you a flavor of this EXTENSIVE site: King Arthur: Tales of the Round Table, The Ramayana, The Awakening of Faith of Ashvagosha, The Science of Fairy Tales, On the Study of Celtic Literature, Songs of the Russian People , The Babylonian Talmud, Book 1: Tract Sabbath, The Lesser Key of Solomon, The Book of Ceremonial Magic, The Hypertext Bible (including the apocrypha), Judaic texts, The Flying Saucers Are Real, Native American Religions... Give Sacred Texts a look: a one stop shop for all your enlightenment needs. Seriously, this is the sort of thing the Internet excels at, a vast repository of public domain information. This site is a labor of love, but is unfortunately hosted in the material world. Give them a donation if you can! 6:01:51 PM    comment [] Spring is in the air... I mean, it must be. Case in point:  The Dildo song.  [ASF file, 2:26]  (thanks - I think - metafilter) 4:56:43 PM    comment [] Spring is in the air...    (Christopher Locke) "Why do you always twist my words?" she said. I thought of telling her about R.D. Laing's Knots, Gregory Bateson's breakthrough ideas bout the double bind. You never say you love me anymore. I love you. Oh, you're just saying that. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't. But it didn't seem the right time. Between knots and binds, the right time would never come. Do you want me to leave, I asked. She said, do whatever you want to, Chris. I left. I didn't know in that time-lapsed moment that I'd never be coming back. I didn't know much of anything." He's baaack.... Although he never really left, as he will be the first to tell you. Chris can really write. He lays it down (in blood drenched phosphors) like nobodies business. Hey Chris, be well. 2:28:20 PM    comment [] ART ALERT: Stop Making Sense Cease and desist already. Get happy, pappy. Spring is in the air here in beautiful New Jersey, the armpit of America. The swamp rats are performing their intricate mating dances, to the delight and amazement of camera laden Japanese tourists. All is well in god's green waters, as long as you don't drink them. There simply is no bad news to report. Today. I dedicate todays postings to art, to music, to fun, to just plain goofy weirdness from other dimensions. Long ago and far away I posted Superbad, an undescribably delicious artzone. Click away, enjoy the ride. Dada is not dead, it's merely resting. And now this: http://www.deadbicycle.com/, the long lost son of Superbad. Not just for fish, oh no, but for vertebrates of all political persuasions. Dance the hampster dance, find some sweet romance, (although the two may be mutually exclusive activities) live in the now and laugh laugh laugh, for tomorrow we will all surely die. 12:50:32 PM    comment [] Electronica: Pauline Oliveros   (Katie Dean) "As a young girl, Pauline Oliveros was fascinated with the crackly sound of her grandfather's crystal radio and the whistles and pops of her father's shortwave. It was this early interest in the technology and the sounds it produced that led the musician to experiment with electronic music. The 70-year-old Oliveros will debut her latest piece, Sound Geometries, commissioned by l'Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles, at the international Ars Musica Festival in Brussels on Saturday. * * * Her latest piece, written for a 13-piece chamber orchestra, combines the sounds of the ensemble with Oliveros' Expanded Instrument System, a sort of sound "time machine," as she calls it. While the musicians play in the present, the acoustic sounds are recorded on the computer and played a few seconds later in the piece. Oliveros says it's a sound-processing method that expands time in both directions: into the past and into the future. In Sound Geometries the music is modified to send sounds to the speakers in auditory geometric patterns. "You hear the sounds moving and the patterns changing and the rates of speed changing," Oliveros said. "You'll hear the acoustic sound of the ensemble and the reflected sounds flying around in space."  (SOURCE: 50 Years Melding Tech and Sounds, Wired News)" The article has more information and links to sound samples of Oliveros performing with her band. If you like this avant gype of electronica, there seems to be a fairly good selection of it over at EAR/Rational Music. Plus regular electronic music like Boards of Canada or Klaus Schulze, for example. 12:22:38 PM    comment [] File Sharing and Morality   (Cory Doctorow) "The moral case for the entertainment industry is twofold: it is meant to compensate artists and to make work available to the public (copyright exists in the US to acheive this latter end, using the former as its tactic). But today, 80% of the music ever recorded isn't available for sale anywhere in the world, and 97% of the artists with a recording deal are earning less than $600/yr from it. IOW, the recording industry has failed utterly to fulfill the Constitutional objectives of copyright -- and hence it's hard to understand what "legitimate interests" it is serving. Meanwhile, Napster and its progeny have resurrected much of that 80%, the dark matter of copyright, and put it back into the public's hands. Admittedly, these services have failed pretty terribly to compensate artists (don't forget that some of the blame for this rests with the recording industry itself, which rejected Napster and Kazaa's multi-billion-dollar compensation overtures, opting instead to sue these companies into bankruptcy and then acquire them at pennies on the dollar). The moral case for the filesharing nets has nothing to do with theft or not-theft -- it has to do with fulfilling the objective of copyright: the maintenance of cultural continuity, a heritage of creative works that define and reflect our society, to "promote the useful arts and sciences." The filesharing nets have resurrected that heritage, sucked it from the attics and basements of the world, digitized it, added metadata to it, and distributed it around the world in redundant storage systems, a massive and fantastic RAID containing the largest musical library ever assembled Nothing the recording industry proposes serves either the goal of compensating artists nor the goal of making more work available. Suing filesharing nets out of existance, hacking end-user PCs, sending out perjurious takedown notices, intimidating university administrators into trading academic freedom for limited liability, suing cryptography researchers, or asking the Congress to grant entertainment execs a veto of the design of general purpose computing machinery will not put *one nickel* into *any* artist's pocket, nor will it make *one more track* available. Compensating artists is crucial, and it's clear that the entertainment industry has no intention or interest in pursuing it. They cheat their signed acts and propose no "solutions" to the file-sharing "problem" that will increase artist compensation. Meanwhile, the file-sharers are busily building and maintaining the library. They're doing so without funding terrorists and without compensation -- even, I think, without any altruism beyond an enlightened self-interest. Some of the forward-thinkers in this field are imagining various solutions to the compensation problem (the CEO of Kazaa recently advocated compulsory licenses with levies, other have proposed voluntary payments in exchange for limitation of liability, others have proposed direct payment to artists) -- none of these proposals are yet in a position to be taken seriously, but at least they attack the problem: paying artists, instead of the solution: building the library in the fastest and most efficient way imaginable. "Taking what doesn't belong to you" is just jingo, a misapprehension of the nature of intellectual property as a true property right, as opposed to a Federal policy whose objective is to make the widest body of work available to the widest group of people.  (SOURCE: ip list) 12:28:06 AM    comment [] "The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."   Rachel Carson 12:13:18 AM    comment [] The Quiet American The Quiet American provides glimpses of other cultures via phonographs: snapshots of sound.   (metafilter)  From the website: "Third Ear Open The world makes its own music, but we rarely listen with naive ears. Quiet American is the manipulation of sounds I hear and record. The project began as I grappled with what it meant to be a tourist in another culture. It continues as I grapple with what it means to be a tourist in my own. The opportunity, the thrill, and the risk of travel is being present to the world. My goal with Quiet American is to sketch in sound the experience of being in an unfamiliar place. The work on this site is not a replacement for travel. But if you are willing to listen, you may be transported. I am opinionated and verbose. To those who suffer for these things I offer this: what I hear when I am quiet. These recordings are quite lovely and subtly evocative. Ambient sound at it's most interesting. 12:10:49 AM    comment []

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