1. 25,000 living rat neurons in a glass dish learn to direct a flight simulator

2. Interesting review of McKenzie Wark's Marxist Hacker Manifesto

3. Famous figures doctored to look like members of KISS

4. Superbroncobattle, an illustration.

5. Army of citizen-journalists / global hive-mind wants to produce your news

6. Griffin Technology sells doo-dad that provides audio input options for the iMac

7. Eulogy for John Peel at City of Sound

8. Titles of Hardy Boys Books in Which the Villain Could Have Turned Out to Be George W. Bush, from McSweeney's

9. The American Conservative endorsement issue refuses to give unilateral endorsement to Bush, instead offering six different endorsements, for Bush, Kerry, Nader (!), Peroutka, Badnarik, and not voting

10. Jewelboxing: quality DIY CD packaging

Labels: linkfarms

Friday, October 29, 2004
10:51 AM
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Playing around with the Mac program DEVONthink, which describes itself, among other ways, as a "freeform database." This seems, at first glance, to mean that it functions as a huge data receptacle, one into which you can dump all kinds of raw material, which then gets retrieved not via the normal array of database queries but rather through a sophisticated search interface.

From the documentation:

"With its intelligent organising capabilities, DEVONthink is the number one choice for the 'hunters & collectors' type of people. They tend to store every bit of whatever they get hold of, from text files [to] images, MP3s and Quicktime movies to web pages and bookmarks, and some of them MIGHT even organise it somehow. But most of them won't bother with kinky things like 'groups.'

"And that's all what DEVONthink ... is all about: storing and organising things. So, H&Cs will throw everything they have into the database ... Then, when they look for 'something they are sure they MUST have somewhere,' it's time for DEVONthink to play out its cards: the advanced search functions and the AI-based 'see also' and 'keywords' buttons. ... If the document the H&C is looking for is not [found]. it might at least be similar to one [that is]. One click, and DEVONthink shows a list of all other documents that are similar to the selected one."

I've been seeding DEVONthink with the data from my index card file, and it's been an interesting experience so far. Browsing the cards using this program is different from browsing them in Access, although in ways that are hard to quantify precisely. At this early stage I am prepared to risk falling into the old Mac vs. PC dichotomy by saying that DEVONthink feels "fuzzier" or "more organic" than Access, whereas Access feels more "precise" but also more rigid, and certainly less associational. At this point it's worth it for me to keep both databases up-to-date and active, but I'll let you know if one eclipses the other.

It's worth it to mention that the DEVONthink strategy of relieving the user of the need to categorize by providing a powerful, intuitive, effective search mechanism seems pretty akin to the idea behind the Google Desktop Search hard-drive search utility. Note the way that Google rep Marissa Mayer talks about search vs. directory in the conversation blogged at John Batelle's Searchblog:

"In 1995 ... you could find what you were looking for by browsing a directory like Yahoo. But over time as the web scaled that model didn't scale. It broke, which is why search (became the metaphor for finding things on the web). We are seeing the same thing happening now on personal computers (which have far more storage than even five years ago)."

Labels: databases, indexing

Thursday, October 28, 2004
6:58 PM
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The Skygreen Leopards (Donovan Quinn & Glenn Donaldson) and the Ivytree (Donaldson solo) both march under the dreamy unfurling banner of the Jewelled Antler collective, but these discs are more song-grounded than previous releases from that camp. Last year's Blithe Sons release We Walk the Young Earth flirted promisingly with vocals, mixing them occasionally into its structures of meadow ambience, but it's only on these two discs that we get to see the result of a full marriage of the capital-S Song to Antler's trademark Californian mossiness. And the results are very pleasing indeed, two of the finest discs I've heard in recent months.

The Leopards disc, One Thousand Bird Ceremony, is the more upbeat of the two, whereas Winged Leaves is a more introspective affair: if the Leopards disc sounds like the music a group of slightly grass-tinged friends might make when sitting around a campfire out in the woods, the Ivytree disc sounds a little bit like the music someone might hear playing from the other room while staring dazedly at a design in their apartment's carpet. It drifts from melancholy Drakean folk to bleak Eraserhead-style industrial hum and back again, evoking a rainy autumn morning the way no album has managed since Richard Youngs' devastating Sapphie (1998).

Both Thousand Bird and Winged Leaves feature Donaldson's fine collage art, which reveals a psychedelic space existing somewhere between the gentle naturalistic universe of a Golden Guide and the scary apocalyptic one of a Jehovah's Witness book.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004
1:05 PM
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Skater-built skatepark in Philadelphia, beneath I-95. Some wonderful photos accompany the opening essay.

Monday, October 25, 2004
9:45 AM
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Last night I attended a wedding where both Jeff Clark and Christine Hume (or, as I like to call them, #30 and #47) were guests, but I didn't manage to talk to either of them. I wasn't actually feeling particularly conversational, and I imagine that if I had gone up to either of them I wouldn't have said much more than "I read your book; it was good. Well, goodbye." Maybe I'll come up with something more clever when they read on the 12th.

That's only one of the good readings the Discrete Series folks have lined up for this fall—we've got Eric Baus on the 29th, and Charles Bernstein on November 21st. Very exciting.

Here's a site showcasing some of Jeff Clark's wonderful book jacket designs.

Sunday, October 24, 2004
11:24 PM
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Spent a pleasant couple of days engaged in collaboration with old friends in Schenectady, NY, last weekend. Lots of different interesting conversations that I've been turning around in my head ever since. Some flirting, some joking, some gossip, some careful negotiation.

Had a conversation late Saturday night about Vincent Gallo in which I speculated, perhaps slightly drunkenly, that Vincent Gallo is a magician. I don't mean "stage magician" or "magician" as a synonym for "genius"—I mean that Gallo is engaged in what can be considered occult practice, and that his films are artifacts of this process.

It's difficult to explain what I look for when I'm looking for evidence of occult practice; it is something that feels easier to intuit than to explain on a rational level. But I think of an "occult" film as being one where the actual sensible object of the film—what you are literally seeing on the screen—is secondary to the supersensible elements of the film, particularly the subtle use of hidden techniques to evoke desired psychological effects in the audience. All film—all narrative really—has an element of psychological manipulation, but I feel films begin to lean towards the occult when the manipulation depends less on narrative structure and more on devices that are cryptic, non-linear, operating on a more subconscious level.

The use of Cheryl Tiegs in The Brown Bunny is a key example: I look at the way Gallo finds a kind of forgotten icon and then taps into the fantasy power that still circulates around it (her), wields it (her) like a dreamweapon found abandoned in a desert. The fact that what can actually be described as "happening" in the filmic narrative is only the tiniest dimension of what's actually happening, and the fact that what is actually happening is almost impossible to articulate because it's so mixed up with the subconscious, to me is a sign of what I'd consider the occult.

The notoriously elaborate setup of gear that Gallo assembled to shoot the film strikes me as another instance where he's attempting to tap into something—some difficult-to-quantify, essentially magical power that resides within the cinematographical apparatus—and, in keeping with the practices of good ritual, once the energy is discharged, the apparatus (now "empty") is promptly discarded. Insert your own Chloe Sevigny/Vincent Gallo "discharge" joke here.

To read: Precipitations : Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, by Devin Johnston, director of Flood Editions.

Friday, October 22, 2004
1:31 PM
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bjork medulla (on Elektra)

Bjork, Medulla (2004)

With this release, Bjork steps intriguingly out of the pop idiom in favor of more experimental processed-vocal terrain. Early hype led me to expect a sister record to Maja Ratkje's Voice (2003)—something gnarled, angular, and witchy—but the actual disc takes a different tack, and emerges as a much more operatic animal. After the initial novelty wears off it begins to seem like a natural fit: Bjork has, after all, never really shied from trading in the operatic currencies of high bombast and melodrama. The danger with melodrama, of course, is that it can so easily slip into the realm of the inadvertently comic, and when Bjork chooses (for instance) to back herself with a massed male choir the album veers dangerously in that direction, but by and large the pomp and excess are countered by Bjork's characteristic inscrutable translucence. The result is a daring, if not always successful, album. Thanks to Vingus.

Friday, October 15, 2004
10:38 PM
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Spent a good chunk of time this morning at the Golden Nugget Pancake House, with CJO, discussing changes I might make to this blog.

The issue: over the past couple of months, I've been spending more and more time working on the reviews in the sidebar. Because of the usual issues with the complicated allocation of love and resources on the physical plane^*, this forces me to neglect this here main column: often I'll say to myself I'm going to work on my blog and I'll spend an evening just tweaking the sidebar. This is all well and good as far as it goes, but my instinctual feeling is that when people pop over to this page to check for updates, they glance at the top post here in the main column, and if there's no new post they conclude that there's probably no fresh info-matter anywhere on the blog.

The easy solution, I guess, is to take the book reviews and record reviews out of the sidebar, and just post them here in the main column, which is where they began. But CJO rightfully pointed out that there are merits to keeping material aggregated by topic: people who come to Raccoon primarily to look over record reviews probably enjoy being able to quick look at the block of reviews over there in the sidebar, and not have to sift through a dozen posts on narrative or context or taxonomies or any of the other popular Raccoon topics in order to find them. And there are probably people who come here for the stuff on narrative, etc. and are glad to see the music stuff relegated over to the sidebar.

So, readers, I ask you: should I err in favor of a more eclectic main column? Would any of you miss the current, "content-rich" sidebar? (Fans of aggregation, please note that you can always consult the audio and book roundup pages.) What areas of this site do you check out the most? Why do you even visit here in the first place? Besides my winning personality, I mean.

These questions link into larger questions I have about Web readership, about how we browse weblogs in general, about whether it's preferable to have one eclectic weblog that's updated frequently or a set of smaller ones that are focused on more narrow sets of interests, etc.

*- "the complicated allocation of love and resources on the physical plane," a wonderful phrase of no small utility, comes to you courtesy Khaela Maricich, aka The Blow.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004
10:24 PM
0 comments

When E.B. was here, we went to go see a screening of Jemaa-El-Fna : Morocco's Rendezvous of the Dead, one of the DVDs recently released by Sublime Frequencies.

This documentary struck me as nearly unique among documentaries, in that it provided no contextualizing information whatsoever for the images we were seeing and the sounds we were hearing. No interviews with ethnomusicologists or other talking heads, no narration, no subtitles, no identification of any of the people onscreen, just edited-down footage of various musicial performances. None of the information included on the film's website is incorporated into the film in any way, other than what could be directly discerned from observation of the footage, which can be summed up as essentially "in some fire-lit urban square, these people are making this music."

We tend to think of a documentary as something that's going to be illuminating, something that will help to make sense of some certain portion of the world. But, if anything, this documentary lifted the veil on this pocket of mystery just enough for us to become aware of its existence: it introduces us to questions but does not answer them. Where is this happening? What are those instruments? Is this music supposed to be happy or sad? Who are these people performing it? Are they related to one another? Do these people feel that they're "musicians" in the same way people in an American band feel, or do they feel more like how people singing in an American church feel? The sum total is more mystery in the world, not less.

I felt this most pronouncedly in the sequence of the film where one individual is excitedly showing off his record collection for the camera, taking records out of their tattering sleeves and playing them on a cheap turntable. The result is a pure gem of amalgamated cryptodata: a person who's face we don't see is using a turntable which may or may not be properly functioning to play us a record which has been recorded with poor fidelity and which archives music that belongs to a tradition that we aren't familiar with, and the only contextual clue available is the corroding cover art which features a bad reproduction of a photograph of a person who we don't recognize, coupled with text in a language we can't read and images from a semiotic system that we can't decode. Beautiful!

Around the same time I received a package from an associate which contained copies of a number of the Sublime Frequencies CDs. Since these were burned CDs, sent to me without liner notes, I'm not sure how much contextualizing data might be missing, but, like the DVD, these discs also seem to be interested in awakening the listener to the experience of unknowability... this can particularly be felt on the Radio Java disc, which collages together material recorded from Javanese radio in 1989:

"Among many other oddities, you'll hear several examples of Javanese pop (from Dangdut and Keroncong to Hard Rock and Disco), news snippets, folk music, radio commercials, Jakarta DJ's, The west Java Sundanese sound, spooky theatre extracts, and high-octane Jaipongan variations that are completely over the top."

Everything you hear on this disc bears some family resemblance to U.S. radio, but the system of signification is substantially skewed, so you can't always tell (for instance) whether the audio data you're listening to is a commercial or a pop song or something else entirely.

Some might complain that emphasizing this unknowability has the tendency to "exoticize" the other, but I think it's equally dangerous to downplay the unknowable aspect of the other's "otherness." The assumption that alien subjectivities are essentially simple variants of our own points the way towards monoculture, just as certainly as the assumption assuming that alien subjectivities are degraded or primitive versions of our own did.

Labels: media commentary

Tuesday, October 12, 2004
4:46 PM
0 comments

My friend Eric Burger was in town last week for the Wire's second annual Adventures In Modern Music festival, which was great fun (I may yet write up a belated list of highlights). During the day, we sat around talking about stuff, and the topic of poetic constraints came up.

In the course of these conversations, we began to notice the outlines of a sort of taxonomy of constraints. The three constraints I've posted to the site this week illustrate the three primary levels that we began to feel out in those conversations.

The first constraint is purely contextual or situational: its influence on the actual language, content, and structure of the poem is difficult to pin down precisely. We feel intuitively that a five-part poem written in five different cities and over a correspondingly broad span of time would differ from a five-part poem written in a single sitting, but even if we had these two hypothetical poems side-by-side, it might be difficult to determine which one was written according to the constraint and which one wasn't. This raises the question once again of just how much context influences / should influence our reading of a poem, a question raised a fair number of times in this blog over the past year (here; here).

The second constraint is more typical, in that it partially governs the language, content, and structure of the poem, while still leaving substantial room for creativity and maneuverability. This is what most people think of when they think of a "constraint," and most poetic forms fit comfortably within this category.

The third constraint, by contrast, governs almost all elements of the poem. A few bits of subjective intentionality persist here and there but mostly the constraint functions as a kind of "poem-generating machine": once it has been kicked into gear by the chance operation of opening that first book to a random page, the poem basically "writes itself." It's perhaps more proper to think of this as "algorithmic writing."

I think E.B. is most interested in the first sort of constraint, whereas I think I'm most interested in the third—

Labels: writing

Monday, October 04, 2004
4:38 PM
0 comments

1. Go to a library or some other large collection of books and select a book.

2. Open that book to a random page.

3. Copy down all the nouns in the first full line of text on that page. Separate them with commas. You may omit proper nouns if desired.

4. Count the words you've transcribed so far.

5. Proceed to the next book on the shelf; open to the page that corresponds to the number generated by Step 4, and then return to Step 3. Proceed in this fashion until you have 100 nouns.

6. Title the resultant list Arrangement. (If you like, you may embellish your title with adjectives or prepositional phrases: First Arrangement, Arrangement in Black and White, etc.)

Friday, October 01, 2004
10:35 PM
0 comments