news from the east / stuff that people do

Good news from the east: Manchester airport has free wi-fi. The bad news is that I arrived while everyone was busy with their respective Thanksgiving dinners, and will probably have to wait here for a few hours. My Thanksgiving dinner may be a jelly donut from the Dunk, which investigations have revealed to be the only establishment open in the entire airport.

I'm out here on this coast for a Spring Conference staff meeting, and it will be good to see everyone... I'll be sticking around for a couple of days, and may even get to see the Antony Milton / Peter Wright / Geoff Mullen / Area C show in Boston on Monday (details here). The Milton / Wright US tour is skipping Chicago, hewing (as it is) close to the two coasts, and I feel lucky that it coordinates so tidily with my own jaunt this way.

2004 Blastitude interview with Antony Milton located here: interesting in many places, but especially for the description of how Milton came to name his CD-R label "PseudoArcana":

"[T]he name itself was intended as a critique of what has often seemed to be an elitist and high-brow perception of 'experimental' music. It is so often represented as an arcane and privileged discourse, and I guess I found that kind of problematic. The name is therefore a reflective way of saying that 'this is the type of music that people say is trying to be arcane but which is really just 'stuff that people do''."

Labels: music_commentary, personal

Thursday, November 23, 2006
4:57 PM
0 comments

instruction scores

For a long time now, I've been interested in conceptual artworks that take the form of a set of instructions on how to produce a finished artwork... see here for an older post on the topic.

One subset of this idea is the notion of a conceptual score, for music: that is, a piece where the score exists not in the form of standard notation, but as a set of instructions. I'm trying to build up a little collection of these things (here , for instance, are the instructions for LaMonte Young's piece Thanks).

Anyhow, I spent a little bit of time today digging around the website of sound adventurer Bill Thompson (who came to my attention because of an event earlier this year where he recorded the interior of a burning harpsichord), and I found this compact little score which I thought worthy of reposting here:

Five (1999)

Gather five objects, distinct from each other, found in nature;
gather five objects, also distinct from each other, that are man-made.

From these objects, draw forth sounds.

Labels: conceptual art, instructions, sound

Tuesday, November 21, 2006
11:38 AM
0 comments

drone scene | drone sale

So the label that I help to run, Rebis, just got written up in the Chicago Reader as part of an article on Chicago's "new drone scene." Friendly coverage is always auspicious, so in honor of the occasion, we've decided to hold a sale.

There's two basic package deals available: you can either pick up our two long-form works compilations (one, two) for the discount price of $20 (normally $32), or you can pick up any two regularly-priced discs for $15. Hit the Rebis newsblog for details and the requisite "add to cart" buttons.

Tomorrow is the kickoff for the folk-drone-psych-noise-centric Three Million Tongues festival; I'll be working as side-stage manager. Chicago-area readers of this blog, feel free to stop by and say "hello."

Labels: rebis

Thursday, November 16, 2006
5:28 PM
0 comments

recent reading

Some new capsule book reviews of things I've read in the last couple of months:

Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughn & co.
Q: In a near-future where only one man survives, will there still be stereotypical man-hating feminists? A: Oh my yes. Promising premise (first pitched by Mary Shelly in 1826) degrades quickly into garden-variety gynophobia.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Short stories. The title story is a killer, one of the best I've read in recent years.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Autistic boy attempts to solve neighborhood crime. A promising premise, one which the book dutifully carries out, and then memorably transcends. Recommended.

Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose
When a book defines itself as "moving" in its own subtitle, approach with caution... and, indeed, this memoir-ish book is not without its soft-focus moments. It does manage, however, to amply convey that peculiar love that a teacher feels for even (especially?) his or her worst students. But its episodic nature and unwillingness to follow through on its argument(s) grows wearying by the end.

Venusia by Mark von Schlegell
Delirious piece of writing growing out of that verdant patch where the tributaries of science fiction, psychedelia, and abstract critical theory all drain into one another. Equal parts William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs, this book features sentient plants, unstable psychic landscapes, drug-induced reptile hallucinations, and pulp-grade sex: what's not to like?

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
Take a topic which is inherently fascinating (the inner workings of America's transportation industry), and then hand it over to "writer's writer" John McPhee, with his unerring eye for illuminating detail, and his unerring ear for unusual turns of phrase, and the result is absolute delight. Steering a barge, braking a locomotive, getting a package through UPS: McPhee handles them all with great elan, rendering them accessible to the mind of the reader without sacrificing an iota of their boggling complexity. Highly recommended.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Polymath whiz David Foster Wallace on John McCain, pornography, grammar, 9/11, sports memoirs, conservative talk radio, and, yes, lobster. And yet from the welter of topics a coherent theme emerges: how to communicate in a world so thick with irony and spin that genuine, sincere communication is automatically considered suspect. An important book, highly recommended.

The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
Short stories by Bosnian-turned-Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon. Hemon, like Nabokov, is an ESL writer who puts most native speakers and writers of English to shame: the language-acquistion process seems to generate linguistic strangeness (or at least a total liberation from cliche). Hit or miss overall, but certain sentences here are as good as they come.

I've also begun to maintain a LibraryThing page, for those of you who would rather go there than dig around in the Raccoon Books directory... expect old reviews from 2005 and 2004 to be appearing over there sometime soon(ish). And if you have a LibraryThing profile, dear reader, don't hesitate to post a link to it (or your username) in the comments box, so that I can add you to my watchlist.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, November 13, 2006
4:43 PM
0 comments

in the spirit of scientific / aesthetic inquiry

For the last month or so, I have deliberately been letting a bagel and few pieces of bread go to mold in the back of the cupboard.

Today my experiment came to an end and the bread went into the garbage. But not before I grabbed a few scans of some nice mold-abstractions.

Hello Flickr set! [View full size for the best look at the weird details.]

Labels: photography, projects

Saturday, November 11, 2006
12:57 PM
0 comments

in defense of don rumsfeld

I'm no fan of Donald Rumsfeld, and I won't be sad to see him go. But his departure has sparked some retrospective commentary, in which his (in)famous statement about "known knowns" has made another round of appearances. I've always felt that it is, in fact, misguided to present this quote as a golden example of governmental obfuscation, which seems to be what people intend when they trot it out. Let's give it a listen:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

OK, I'll admit that the repetition is initially curious to the ear, but beyond that neither the English nor the meaning behind it is particularly tortured. Furthermore, this is a completely reasonable, strategically sound, and actually somewhat insightful way to think about not only military knowledge but knowledge in general. I'd go so far as to say that maintaining an awareness of "unknown unknowns" is good mental practice, a vaccination against hubris.

It is true that Rumsfeld leaves a quadrant of his scatterplot chart unarticulated: "unknown knowns," things that we don't know that we know. The omission may be revealing. Slavoj Žižek, writing on this, relates "unknown knowns" to the Freudian unconscious, and describes it memorably as "the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values." Perhaps this blind spot helped contribute to Rumsfeld's failure.

Labels: knowledge, politics

Thursday, November 09, 2006
5:31 PM
1 comments

midterms

Regime change begins at home.

Labels: politics

9:56 AM
0 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

Been keeping a pretty low profile over here on the blog; hope nobody was too disappointed. I've been busy lately with band stuff: playing a few shows, recording a lot, making notes on archival recordings from the past year, and finalizing a few upcoming releases (one on Paha Porvari and one on Apostasy).

Also have managed to happily host a few travelers. First up was D. Bauler, aka Medroxy Progesterone Acetate, the King of Iowan Noise, who we collaborated with (via post) on last year's Damp and Damned cassette-only release. Hot on his heels was the theremin-weilding Gwyneth Merner, aka The Opera Glove Sinks In The Sea, who contributed a wonderful track of tenebrous drone and insect-song to our two-disc Lead Into Gold comp from earlier this year.

During each of these visits we had some time for a little sit-down, where we could play for a bit and produce some collaborative recordings, both of which yielded some intriguing material which may find a home someplace (or it may sit in the archives alongside the super-secret Number None / Skaters jams).

What else?: writing, teaching, reading novels, reading comics, the usual. Enjoying new(est) issues of Cabinet and Kramer's Ergot. Changed my e-mail address and my phone number. Stay tuned.

Labels: number_none, personal

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
1:40 PM
0 comments