inevitable news

Whew, I've been busy lately, and I'm sorry to have been letting this blog languish. I've been really active elsewhere on the Internet (Facebook, etc) but I'd really hate to let this blog die forever. (I am going to need to figure something out in another few weeks, when Blogger ceases its support of FTP publishing...)

But anyway. The number one thing I've been blasting away on lately is the Inevitable project, which shouldn't come as a surprise, given that the only posts on this blog for both March and February are Inevitable-related.

The latest: I re-designed the look-and-feel of the in-game Catalog to make it easier for new players to find what they're looking for. Four complete pages (and a bunch of other junk) are available for free preview over at the Inevitable "leaks blog."

I also generated a promotional postcard (using these folks) and distributed tons of them at gamer Mecca PAX East. Whether this was a useful endeavor has yet to be determined, but if you want to see the front of the postcard, this link may work.

Next piece of merch-like stuff is stickers, I think.

The last piece of exciting news is that Jon Leistiko, Inevitable's co-designer, just got nominated for an Origins Award for Best New Card Game (for his earlier game, "The Isle of Dr. Necreaux"). So Inevitable is now officially a game "co-designed by Origin Award Nominee Jonathan Leistiko." Bonus!

Labels: personal, projects

Friday, April 02, 2010
12:09 PM
0 comments

getting excited and making things

Not long ago, I ordered myself one of these shirts:

(I bought it here, if you want one of your own.)

It's a worthy sentiment to keep in mind during the current crisis. For me, it's a way of trying to turn what feels like a depressing indicator of failure—unemployment—into a source of creative ferment. It's a daily practice, that transmutation: it requires work. Sometimes I can manage to stay excited for the entire day and other times I hit the doldrums. But things are getting made. And I'm ready to start talking about some of them. (Some are still secrets.) So over the next few days I'll use this blog as a showcase for some things I made. And I want to know: what are you making? Show me.

Labels: i made this, personal

Wednesday, January 20, 2010
6:28 PM
0 comments

blinkout is live on the internet

The first Flash game that Dave and I worked on together throughout the spring is now live on the Internet.

PLAY:

Play Blinkout on King.com

Play Blinkout on Newgrounds

Play Blinkout on Kongregate (with Achievements)

DESCRIPTION:

How good is your visual memory under pressure? You'll have to use both your agility and good resource strategy to navigate your spaceship through an increasingly hostile dimension. How far can you get?

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Move ship with ARROWS




• Illuminate levels with the SPACEBAR (costs energy)




• Find the key and go to the gate




• Regain energy by picking up charges




• There are 8 levels that will repeat for 6 rounds. The charges are persistent across all rounds, so don't use all of them the first time around...

MORE INFO:

The player will have to use their visual memory as most of the game is played in complete darkness. Illumination of the levels comes through collecting energy charges along the way. The catch is that a charge collected on an earlier level will no longer be available on later iterations. Charges picked up later are worth more energy, so the player will be able to manage their resources accordingly to make it to the harder rounds. In these later rounds the player is faced with greater energy costs for hitting a maze wall as well as greater costs for illuminating the level. The level time limit reduces and the movement speed increases. We realize this game is quite challenging and will likely intimidate at first as using visual memory, keyboard agility, and resource management together may prove to be a new experience for many players.

We are very happy to have gotten the game sponsored by King.com and they have been great to work with.

Enjoy!

Labels: game_design, personal, projects

Wednesday, August 05, 2009
10:55 AM
0 comments

wikipedian tag

So I've been busy with loads of project-work this month, but I also had time to invent and playtest a new game. It involves using the vast, super-complicated structure of Wikipedia as a play space, an environment through which one player chases another. I like to think of it as a kind of competitive parkour through the architecture of all human knowledge, but calling it "tag" is a little simpler. It's easy to learn and loads of fun.

I've put the full rule-set on a separate page.

Labels: game_design, personal, projects

Thursday, July 02, 2009
5:03 PM
1 comments

playtesters needed

OK, the prototype of the game depicted below is up and running. It won't be live on the Internet for another few months, but we're inviting playtesters to look at a private, locked beta. If you're interested in being added to the beta tester list, drop me a line via the usual channels.

(Note to beta-testers: The level depicted in Friday's post does not actually appear in the current version of the game, so don't knock yourself out looking for it.)

Labels: game_design, personal, projects

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
7:40 AM
1 comments

where I've been and what I've been up to (no. 1 in a series)

Those of you who have known me for any length of time know that I've had a long-standing interest in thinking about and designing games.

What I haven't talked about on this blog is that I've been collaborating lately with my good friend Dave Evans of Hybrid Mind Studios on some video-game design. We have a massive list of ideas, and this past month we've been pushing hard on the first of those.

We'll be seeking sponsorship for the game, so I can't say too much about it just yet, but I wanted to say that part of my absence from this blog lately has been due to cranking hard on some level design. It's been a very rewarding creative experience, and I thought I'd share a screenshot:

There are some interesting mechanics we've got in mind, but more about that later.

Labels: game_design, personal

Friday, April 24, 2009
7:22 AM
0 comments

top-secret dance off: dance quest one

As promised, I am doing this. Behold!

Labels: arg, personal, videos

Friday, April 10, 2009
1:10 PM
2 comments

best films of the 1980s

So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.

Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting to reach that sweet spot where I can command it to produce certain types of output, and get results that I feel are reasonably accurate. For instance, just as a test, I asked it to show me all the movies from the 1980s that I've given a rating of 8 or higher to (out of ten). I'm pretty pleased with the results, a list of 30 films which I think I could defend as the "best films of the 1980s."

Anyone want to have a good-natured argument about it? Anything I've left out? Anything I've wildly over-rated?

I chose the 80s more-or-less at random, and will happily present the results of a different decade upon request.

Labels: filmographies, lists, media commentary, personal

Monday, March 02, 2009
12:50 PM
7 comments

awp conference, 2009

First full day of the 2009 AWP conference begins today; I'm going to head downtown in the next hour or so. I'm primarily there to promote a new project, the Vivarium Review of Books. Fans of innovative writing (poetry and experimental fiction) may want to check this out.

Handing out Vivarium flyers is my main goal, but I'll be doing lots of other conference-related stuff, too. Predictably, three of the panels I'm the most interested in (for today) occur at the same time (1:30 pm):

R155. Multiformalism: Postmodern Poetics of Form. (Susan M. Schultz, Hank Lazer, K. Silem Mohammad, Annie Finch) Language poetry meets new formalism at last, and the poems fly! Editors and contributors to a daring new multicultural, multiaesthetic anthology talk about where poetry is headed now.

R169. The New-Media Novel: The Intersection of Film, E-Lit, & Story. (Steve Tomasula, John Cayley, Tal Halpern, M.D. Coverley) New authoring tools are allowing a new kind of novel to emerge, one that resides between print and independent film. Often created by a team of collaborators working in sound, animation, and language, these new-media novels involve many of the same challenges and pleasures of working in film or theater. This panel will take up several aspects of this exciting new genre, including its writing, creation, collaboration, and publication.

R172. The Age of Invention: Innovation and Experimentation in Middle-Grade and Young Adult Fiction. (Mary Rockcastle, Liza Ketchum, Anne Ursu, E. Lockhart, Anita Silvey) Very innovative work is being done today in middle-grade and young adult fiction—innovative in form, style, point of view, design, and subject matter. These books boldly satirize and comment on the human condition; they take on taboo subjects; and they interweave fiction, poetry, drama, and visual art. The panelists will discuss artistic innovation in their own work and in the work of writers they admire. They will set this work in a context of the larger field of fiction for young readers.

In any case. Anyone interested in meeting up sometime in the next three days is welcome to contact me at editor@vivariumreview.org. If you simply want to track my movements, try here. Twitter users may wish to note that lots of AWP-ers are using the #AWP09 hashtag; you can see the whole feed of them here.

Labels: personal, projects, vivarium

Thursday, February 12, 2009
8:51 AM
0 comments

the dreaded "25 things" virus

Those of you who have logged into Facebook in the last few weeks have very likely witnessed the wildfire spread of the "25 Random Things" meme / virus. I wasn't going to do it, and then last night I abruptly caved in and did it. I was fairly happy with the results so I thought I'd post them here as well.

1) In general, I like people and I like the world.

2) I enjoy making lists, and I spend more time than I probably should tracking data about my own life. For instance, I maintain a database of all the films I've ever seen (you can see the last 20 here)

3) I like having conversations, but I don't really like talking on the telephone.

4) I do, however, like text messaging, and I send several hundred text messages a month.

5) I like "experimental" music, film, writing, comics, and games, but really that just comes from liking music, film, writing, comics, and games so much that I want to experience them in the full variety of their forms. Put another way: I try not to be a snob.

6) I like collecting music, thinking about my music, and organizing and arranging my music. For a period I was buying at least one new CD a week. I've slowed down a bit lately, in part because I'm now involved in trading a lot of music with friends.

7) I am cripplingly dependent on iTunes, especially because of its rating feature, and the way it tracks Play Count and Date Last Played. My music listening is increasingly dictated by the interplay of these particular data-sets.

8) I like to dance, and I like almost anything that qualifies as dance music, from Beyonce to Mouse on Mars.

9) In the mid-1990s, I taught myself how to rap, and I still have a few fairly lengthy raps committed to memory. I intended it to be tongue-in-cheek, but I have actually come to believe that it is one of my more impressive talents.

10) I've been in two bands, and performed music live on stage somewhere around 30 times, although I have no musical training and generally consider myself to have no actual musical talent.

11) I use humor as a sort of social lubricant, and don't believe I could really be friends with someone who didn't think I was funny.

12) I would rather be thought of as attractive than be thought of as smart, although I put WAY more energy into being smart than I do into being attractive.

13) I enjoy flirting, sexual tension, and sexual confusion. If I'm not experiencing two out of three in any given week I will begin to make ill-advised decisions.

14) I think of sex as only one form of a larger category of intimacy, and I think that people who think sex is a particularly unique or special form of intimacy are engaged in a conceptual error. I am not immune to making this error myself, at times, although I try to catch myself.

15) I detest money, and I detest the things people must do to get money. The fact that I care as much as I do about money is one of the things I dislike about myself.

16) I do, however, enjoy teaching, and I believe that I am good at it.

17) I am fascinated by violence, and representations of violence. I don't ENJOY movies that depict torture and violence but I am unquenchably curious about them and will eventually end up seeing them all. (They're always worse in my imagination, just FYI.)

18) From roughly age 12 to age 18, I participated in a program called "Cinekyd," which taught young people the basics of film and television production. I spent most of my Cinekyd time in the "Graphics and Minatures" department, learning about special effects. This is undoubtedly part of where my love of science fiction and horror films comes from.

19) My immediate family has an endearing interest in grotesque stories about things like bodily functions. Hearing a story of this sort around the dinner table is one of the ways that I can tell that I am "home."

20) I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe that places can be haunted. I make no real effort to reconcile this apparent discontinuity.

21) I don't really believe in magic, but in the spirit of experiential knowledge I performed a few "spells" just to see what would happen. The results were... interesting?

22) I have many fond memories of playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I still have my polyhedral dice nearby should someone drop by and want to fire up a game.

23) I spent many hours as a young child playing the Atari 2600, and will still occasionally load up a Web-based replica of the old 2600 game "Adventure," a game in which your "character" is simply an unadorned rectangle.

24) I am one of those people who has Opinions About Fonts.

25) I am seldom bored, and am usually at my happiest when engaged in mutiple projects. An old friend once told me he wished that I could have 36 hours in every day, and I still count that as one of the nicest things anyone ever said about me.

Labels: lists, personal

Monday, January 26, 2009
8:52 AM
1 comments

away notification

I'm currently in the throes of executing a cross-country move, from Chicago to the Greater Boston Area, and my days these past... two weeks or so have been pretty consumed with packing, purging, and lugging. Thursday (the 31st) I drive halfway to Boston and Friday (the 1st) I go the rest of the way, and this blog will update again not long afterwards.

Labels: personal

Monday, July 28, 2008
8:11 PM
2 comments

my movie life

This post is part of Culture Snob's "Self-Involvement" Blog-A-Thon, running July 9-13th. For this Blog-A-Thon, Jeff's asked film bloggers to blog not so much about movies, but about oneself, as seen through the lens of movies. As an example, he linked to an old piece of his writing, "My Movie Life," sharing some key personal details about, well, his life and the movies. That proved too irresistible a model not to follow steal. So without further ado, here's a cool thirty fragments of my own movie life.

1. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars (1977), which I saw with my parents at the local drive-in theatre. I remember items in the car (in particular, a Styrofoam cooler) more than I remember anything about that particular viewing of the movie.

2. I feel fortunate to have had that drive-in theatre as a place to hang out in my adolescence, an experience that nothing else really substitutes for. Movies I can remember seeing there: Jurassic Park (1993), Total Recall (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). The site of the drive-in is now a Target.

3. I can remember having to leave the theatre early during a viewing of Superman (1978), because I was sniveling and crying. (I think the reason for this was because the non-Superman parts were too slow and boring, but I cannot really recall the incident.)

4. The first cinematic nudity I ever saw was on videotape; a friend showed me Risky Business (1983) and the nearly-forgotten My Tutor (1983).

5. The first cinematic nudity I saw in the theatre was Revenge of the Nerds (1984). (I was with a group of young men who went for a friend's birthday party; we were accompanied by his father.)

6. The only R-rated movie I can recall being turned away from at the box office was David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986); it is still one of my favorite movies.

7. I can remember seeing a videotaped copy of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in around sixth grade, and I remember the first murder in that film made an astonishing impact on me. I still can't watch that movie without feeling a mix of anticipation and genuine dread as that scene approaches.

8. In the wake of this, I spent maybe five years watching as many different 80s slasher or monster movies as I could get my hands on, most of them not very good.

9. The films that mark the end of this phase, for me, are Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), both of which I saw in 1990 or 1991, and both of which left me feeling depressed and more than a little unclean. My relationship to horror has been love-hate ever since.

10. Around 1988-1990 I saw videotaped copies of Blue Velvet (1986) and Pink Flamingos (1979), both of which, in their own ways, provided the same visceral shock that Nightmare on Elm Street had provided, but both clearly had agendas that were more complicated than mere shock. Each of these dramatically expanded my sense of what cinema could legitimately try to do.

11. I saw Wild at Heart (1990) three times in the theatre. Its prurient mix of sex, violence, and Americana really was pretty ideal for me at age 17. (As an adult, I've come to think of it as one of Lynch's weaker films.) A few years later I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in the theatre three times. I believe the most recent film I've done that with was The Incredibles (2004).

12. Eraserhead (1977) was a David Lynch film that was legendary in my suburban neighborhood (this was in the wake of Twin Peaks, when David Lynch was getting cover-story profiles in Time) but copies of it were hard to find—there was only one video store in the area that carried it (Southampton Video). That was the first movie that I went substantially out of my way to see. (It is still one of my favorite movies.)

13. Delicatessen (1991) was the first film that I read reviews of when it was still in theaters, and travelled into Philly from my suburban home to see at an art house theatre (the Ritz, where I would later work for a short stint). The second film I did this for was Naked Lunch (1991). (Both of these are still among my favorite movies.)

14. The first film I ever saw that I wanted to watch again the second I finished it was Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

15. Movies I owned, early on: I recorded Yellow Submarine (1968) off of television; I bought a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) when the video store was liquidating their Betamax stock; I purchased a copy of Heathers (1989) in 1990 and began to wear a black trench coat almost immediately thereafter. I've probably seen each of these films at least ten times, and I don't think I've seen any of them in the last ten years, although I still own a copy of Yellow Submarine.

16. The first foreign-language film I ever saw was probably Fellini's Amarcord (1973).

17. The first foreign-language film I ever counted as one of my favorite films was Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

18. I owe a lot of my film literacy to my years at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, which had a private screening room in the basement of the library that students could use, and a fairly good stock of freely-available films. This was a great resource at a time when I had little money, and I saw an incredible number of important films in that little room.

19. One of the things I watched down there was Fantasia (1940), which also marks the first time I ever took acid.

20. I took a few great film seminars at La Salle, including one on Hitchcock and one on Coppola, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (a course inspired, I believe, by their pairing in the relatively weak New York Stories (1989)).

21. The first film writing I can ever remember doing I did for these seminars: I remember doing a "close reading" on a scene from Taxi Driver (1976) and one on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

22. Also at LaSalle, some other film geek students and I formed a film club. We were allowed to use one of the screening classrooms as long as we could make the argument that we were using it for educational purposes; to this end, we were required to have a student give an informative lecture about whatever film we'd screened. I can recall personally giving lectures on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barton Fink (1991).

23. Also at La Salle, in someone's dorm room, I watched my first pornographic video. The name eludes me but I did not find it especially erotic. (I am pretty sure that on the same day and in the same dorm room, I saw Blade Runner (1982) for the first time.)

24. I am seldom aroused by film (including porn); that may be a side effect of being in my mid-thirties, but I can't remember being especially aroused by any earlier films, either. Perhaps it's the mediating effect of cinema, but movies make sex or nudity seem weirdly abstract or stylized somehow (I think it may do the same thing with violence, only to a net positive effect instead of a net negative effect). In any case, film ranks a distant fourth in terms of its erotic impact on me (behind interpersonal interaction, imagination, and language (either written or spoken)).

25. Along these lines, I mostly don't get crushes on actresses, although there are at least a few who have done a scene here or there that is stored somewhere in my erotic memory. I will confess, however, that in early adolescence I found Wendy Schall's character in The 'Burbs (1989) to be the paragon of female beauty. And there was a period where I probably wanted a girlfriend like Beetlejuice / Heathers-era Winona Ryder. More recently, I wanted a girlfriend like Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), and I appreciate every moment of her smokin'-hot presence in Lost Highway (1997).

26. The last movie I can remember feeling aroused by while viewing was Sex and Lucia (2001). If anyone's got a more recent recommendation of something that Worked For You, well, that's what the comments box is for. Bring it on.

27. The last movie that made me squirm in my seat with discomfort was Oldboy (2003), and the one before that was Audition (1999). I found the first Saw (2004) to be laughably tame by comparison. Again I'll ask for recommendations.

28. I went through a period where I didn't watch many movies, roughly 2004-2006.

29. I got re-interested in them through a project where I tried to come up with a "canon" of 100 important films for a friend. The final version, as I came up with it, is here, and the set of posts that documents the entire long process of brainstorming it can be found here. This made me realize how much I liked film, and how many important films I still hadn't seen.

30. I keep track of everything I see nowadays, and export the results to a webpage which can be viewed here. I try to do at least a short write-up of nearly everything I see and many of these get cross-posted to Netflix. My reviewer rank at Netflix, as of this writing, is 36,928, and if there's anything more self-involved than monitoring your Netflix reviewer rank, I don't know what it might be.

Labels: lists, media commentary, personal

Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:56 AM
1 comments

100 book challenge: part three: religion, new age, fringe science, and science

Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's plays I'd take that, but I don't. Moving on.

The next couple of shelves are religion, "new age"-type stuff, and fringe science. Here are my picks from that area:

• The Grove Press "Pocket Canons" Books of the Bible box set.
  [I should be honest and acknowledge that I'll almost certainly never read the entire Bible, but reading these twelve books every few years is feasible and desirable.]
  

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem
  [This book took me forever to get through, but was incredibly rewarding. There are so many strange ideas in the history of Judaism, and this book is a fascinating overview.]
  

• A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
  [Contains just about everything you'll ever need to know about the three major monotheistic religions.]
  

• The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Wilhelm / Baynes translation)
  [Carl Jung claimed that this book was alive. Philip K. Dick claimed that this book could not predict the future, but could rather provide an accurate diagnosis of the present, from which probable futures could be extracted. Anything I could add would be extraneous.]
  

• The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
  [If anything, Dick's non-fiction is even more interesting and loopy than his fiction. This book contains a lot of Dick's thoughts on spirituality, synchronicity, and reality: great stuff. I'd also find it hard to part with In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, the book that editor Lawrence Sutin valiantly attempted to carve out of Dick's 8,000 page journal documenting his mystical experience.]
  

• Cosmic Trigger Volume One: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [For better or for worse, Cosmic Trigger changed my life, and although I'm a little more distanced from Wilson these days, this volume is still a real gold mine of high weirdness.]

Let's move on down into the science books...

• Metamagical Themas, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  [Godel, Escher, Bach is more renowned, but this book, which collects Hofstadter's Scientific American columns from 1981-1983, has just as many fascinating ideas, and in more digestible form. Language, self-referentiality, fonts, game theory, geometric art... this thing is like a laundry list of geek interests. Plus it is the book that taught me the game Nomic.]
  

• Emergence, by Steven Johnson
  [A good, readable introduction to the science of complexity and self-organization.]
  

• Chaos, by James Gleick
  [Great pictures of fractals, and still (to my mind) the best introductory book on this particular branch of science. I also own Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which is wonderful to look at, but a bit over my head.]
  

• Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
  [A tiny little book—basically an impulse-buy kind of thing—documenting "surface patterns" in nature—crystal designs, cat markings, vascular structures in leaves, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns I'm attracted to, so this book is pretty important to me. Since it's small, I'll throw in its sister volume, Sacred Geometry, a similar-sized volume on the harmonic mathematics of ritual spaces.]

This brings me right up to the halfway point: 50 books, 50 to go.

Labels: book_commentary, lists, personal

Wednesday, July 02, 2008
10:05 AM
0 comments

100 book challenge

So in the Red Eye a couple of days ago was an article on something called the "100 Thing Challenge"—which caught my eye at first because I thought it was a spin on my long-running 100 Favorite Things exercise.

It is and it isn't. It's an article on one person's attempt to simplify his life by reducing his personal belongings to 100 things. This appealed to me, probably foremostly because I'm preparing a cross-country move in a few weeks, and so the idea of reducing my belongings has been much on my mind lately.

But 100 items only? Sheesh, I thought to myself, I don't think I could reduce even just my books to 100, much less everything else. (It actually turns out, if you look at the original post from the guy who came up with the challenge, that he's allowing himself books as an exception, so that's heartening.)

But it did get me to thinking: if I tried to reduce down to 100 books, what are the ones I would choose? I have a lot of books that I cart around from apartment to apartment to apartment, more for their decorative value than anything else. Many (most?) of them I don't think I'll ever re-read (and if I was struck by the sudden impulse to re-read them, I could probably go get them out of a library). But there are some that I do refer to regularly, or plan to re-read, or just can't bring myself to part with. But is that category larger than 100?

I think I'll make a list of the 100 "must-saves," and see how I feel about the "leftovers." A complete list or list in progress will likely appear here soon.

See also: the LibraryThing Swap this Book feature; BookCrossing; and my own lament, last year, about what to do with all the CDs clogging up my living quarters (a problem I'm still in the process of solving).

Labels: personal, projects

Friday, June 27, 2008
8:55 AM
0 comments

100 favorite things (2008 version)

Hi there, I'm back.

While away, I did some interesting things (including a one-day vow of silence). But I also did my roughly annual 100-favorite-things list, which, as usual, I'll post here. It is written in long chain of association, which may be decodeable by the astute reader:

• indexes, index cards, card catalogs
  

• taxonomies + lists
  

• notebooks, blank books, composition books
  

• digital search
  

• journals + diaries
  

• weblogs + livejournals
  

• the comic "achewood"
  

• reading
  

• studying
  

• projects
  

• the spring conference
  

• receiving positive attention
  

• giving positive attention
  

• not being bored
  

• feeling competent / feeling powerful
  

• feeling like others perceive me as dangerous / alluring
  

• feeling like others perceive me as caring / kind / nonjudgmental
  

• resisting dichotomies
  

• dancing + dance music
  

• drones + drone music
  

• altered states
  

• listening to music while [in an altered state]
  

• having a beer in the afternoon in an unfamiliar city
  

• travelling
  

• roadtrips with a close friend
  

• the landscape of the american west
  

• forests
  

• trails and hikes
  

• the path between april + thor's driveway and their front door
  

• urban walks
  

• exploring abandoned buildings
  

• tunnels, passages, hidden spaces
  

• mazes + labyrinths
  

• dungeons and dragons + its culture + paraphenalia
  

• games in general: board games, card games, video games
  

• rust, moss, decay, mold
  

• taking photographs
  

• birdsong
  

• the movie "george washington"
  

• the movie "slacker"
  

• conversations
  

• listening
  

• group improvisation
  

• being among a group that is functioning well together
  

• being alone
  

• having ideas
  

• feeling creative
  

• writing
  

• laptop computers
  

• managing my music in iTunes
  

• adobe photoshop + adobe illustrator
  

• del.icio.us, flickr, and other web 2.0-type services
  

• the internet more broadly
  

• katamari damacy
  

• cute shit
  

• the idea of time travel / time travel narratives
  

• grant morrison's comics
  

• the marvel universe + its culture + paraphenalia
  

• jokes and being thought of as funny
  

• fonts
  

• the puzzle-solving elements of graphic design
  

• making everyday activities into a game
  

• self-improvement
  

• receiving recommendations from others
  

• cycles
  

• swimming naked
  

• exhibitionists
  

• touching others
  

• being touched
  

• venus
  

• ganesh
  

• thoth
  

• altars, ritual objects, charms
  

• unitarians + quakers
  

• smokers
  

• greasy spoons
  

• good coffeehouses
  

• free wi-fi
  

• long-form serial narrative
  

• buffy the vampire slayer
  

• subcultures
  

• sleeping next to someone
  

• flirting
  

• long-running relationships
  

• the fundamental variety of other people
  

• sharing food
  

• desserts, esp. ice cream + chocolate
  

• watching movies + having movie-watching projects
  

• being busy buy not feeling behind
  

• having knowledge / the unknown
  

• manipulating data
  

• invented languages
  

• silly songs
  

• coming out of depression / feeling optimistic
  

• epiphanies
  

• good memories / the promise of good things to come
  

• the world
  

More reflections to come in a bit.

Labels: lists, personal

Friday, June 20, 2008
9:24 AM
2 comments

hiatus

I'm off to my annual journey to New Hampshire for Spring, the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've been involved with for the last eight years. Consequently, all blogs will likely be on hiatus until mid-June.

Some of my photos from past Springs are available here, if you want to get some kind of idea of what I'll be up to.

Labels: meta, personal

Wednesday, June 04, 2008
10:40 AM
0 comments

artists as writers

I don't know what this says about me or my career as a writer, but the writing that most inspires me to write is seldom writing produced by other writers, but more commonly by visual artists who write.

This happened in the fall of 2004, when I was reading Robert Smithson's collected writings (some scavengings and related riffs here), and it happened again just yesterday, in the John Cleary Library at the Houston Center for Photography, when I was looking at Spiritual America, a collection of Richard Prince's photography, painting and writings. The exact writings in Spiritual America don't appear to be online, but this bit, at Prince's website, is perhaps indicative of the sort of aggregation of narrative fragments, factoids, aphorisms, and plagiarized bits found there. I read this stuff for five minutes and for the first time in over a year I wanted to write something that someone might call "fiction" or "poetry." Stay tuned.

Labels: art, personal, writing

Friday, May 30, 2008
2:49 PM
1 comments

film club placeholder notice

It's been a little while since the last Film Club viewing, Sans Soleil... the reason for this is that Skunkcabbage's choice of a follow-up, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), has been a little bit hard to track down, given that it appears to have never enjoyed a US domestic release. We eBayed a copy, but it's been taking a while to make it from Bangkok to Chicago, so it may be a while longer before we can continue with our normal progression. (Oh, and it is maybe worth mentioning that Film Club views its non-Region One DVDs on the Philips DVP5140 Multiformat DVD Player, an affordable domestic player easily hackable to be region-free.)

As a placeholder, we will likely watch Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) sometime this week, and I'll write it up, even though it may not be an "official" Film Club pick...

And I've got some other non-Film-Club related content which I'll be posting here soon. For now, take care.

Labels: personal

Wednesday, May 07, 2008
12:59 PM
0 comments

track of the week: "ambiguity song," by camper van beethoven

I've never really loved the use of "Indie" as a genre designator: I do use it, in my obsessively-maintained iTunes taxonomy, but its connection to the commercial dimension of the music world has always made it function a bit uncomfortably for me. The R.E.M. that produced Document (for independent label I.R.S.) sounds pretty much the same as the R.E.M. that produced Green (for major label Warner Brothers), so are some of those tracks "indie" and not others? What about the fact that I.R.S. itself was bought by EMI in 1994? And today's climate, teeming with subsidiary labels and imprints, makes it even harder to keep score, and if you were attempting to be rigorous in your use of the designator you'd drive apart bands who were making essentially the same style of music.

The option iTunes suggests, "Alternative & Punk," is another genre designator I've never loved, for reasons that don't require further explanation here. If I had my way, I'd go back to a label that seems to have fallen into disuse: "college rock," which I mainly remember from my own pre-college days, looking over the "Charts" page in issues of Rolling Stone, back in the late 80s.

That brings us to today's track, by quintessential college rock band Camper Van Beethoven: "Ambiguity Song." I'm feeling myself to be in a pretty ambiguous space lately, and so this song nicely captures my head-space some days. Unlike the concepts of "college rock" or "indie rock," the concept of ambiguity is one that does not quickly grow dated.

Labels: mp3s, music_commentary, personal

Friday, April 18, 2008
8:18 AM
0 comments

the season of comics

Of the last five books I've read (see sidebar), all five of them are graphic novels. That's the first time that that's happened in the five years I've been keeping a reading log.

I think there are a few factors that might contribute to this, besides the fact that graphic novels are generally pretty quick reads. It's winter, and an especially gray and dismal-looking winter, and the lure of something brightly-colored is appealing. Also, my grading load has increased this semester, and it's hard to want to read more lines of black text on white paper when I'm done with a few hours of reading student drafts. But probably most prominent is that Film Club has begun patronizing comic book / video store / geek haven Brainstorm, and it's one of those local microbusinesses that you just can't help but want to support.

Labels: book_commentary, comics, personal

Sunday, March 02, 2008
10:23 AM
0 comments

tiny hopes

I'm actually pretty happy with the slightly fevered tone of yesterday's Virgin Suicides write-up, and am giving some thought to re-tooling it into a piece for the Bright Lights Film Journal, whose self-described identity as "a popular-academic hybrid" feels like a pretty comfortable fit for the film stuff that I've been writing lately.

I've also been giving some consideration to submitting my "ludic failure" paper to Game Studies.

There's also been some behind-the-scenes activity circulating around "the book" this week, the results of which will be announced here as soon as some paperwork settles. Stay tuned.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, personal, projects, writing

Friday, February 15, 2008
1:12 PM
0 comments

the application process

Mostly-complete applications went out today to both MIT and Georgia Tech. I was pretty happy with my portfolio, which is a weird collection of things, including my "Ludological Failure" paper, a 2003 syllabus on the topic of "Digital Cultures," a tabletop strategy game ("Treefort Nations") that I designed for Invisible City Productions back in 2002, my old "Information Prose" manifesto, and all of Imaginary Year. I was pretty unhappy with the fact that my grad school transcripts didn't arrive in time to make it out in this packet. I think USPS might have screwed me on that one: I Express Mailed the transcript request on the 4th and paid for the return receipt, which still hasn't shown up at my apartment. Sigh. When the transcripts arrive, if they ever do, I'll send them along, and their absence until then might not matter that much—I know the work sample and letters of recommendation are more important—but I really hate the fact that I sent out incomplete applications, and there's at least a chance that my whole application will just go in the trash because of the missing pieces.

Yes, pieces: the other thing that's missing is my GRE scores, because the ones I earned when I last took the GRE, in 1995 [maybe 1996], are long expired. I'll be re-taking the exam tomorrow morning and having the scores sent along ASAP. I've been doing Quantitative practice sets all week and am consistently getting around 40-50 percent wrong, which isn't exactly putting me in a positive frame of mind.

Sigh.

Labels: personal

Monday, January 14, 2008
6:21 PM
2 comments

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

A busy week here around Raccoon HQ.

The biggest news, I suppose, is that I'm thinking about returning to grad school, and taking some steps in that direction. Those of you who know me well know that I've been struggling, for years now, with the feeling of being in a "rut" with my academic career: although I enjoy teaching Composition, my interests really lie elsewhere.

If I were going to try to pinpoint exactly where that "elsewhere" is, I'd say it's somewhere around the point where technology and narrative intersect, a point I've explored with some enthusiasm ever since at least 2001 (when I started writing Imaginary Year). There are two programs I've found that seem to focus on that precise intersection: Georgia Tech's Digital Media Ph.D., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies Master's program. I'll be applying to both.

They're pretty competitive programs, and there's of course no guarantee that I'll get into either one. And even if I got in there is no guarantee that I would choose to go: there are a lot of variables to take into account. But it feels good to be taking steps to open some doors.

Deadlines are January 15th, so I've been spending a lot of time this week getting my applications ready. This process has not been without some frustration: yesterday I learned I need to re-take the GREs, which wasn't exactly news that made me clap my hands with delight. But preparing my writing sample was actually kind of fun. I took some material I wrote for this blog a while back—my post(s) on frustration in games—and rethought the phenomenon a little more carefully, and wrote it up a little more formally. End result?: a 20-page research paper on the topic of what happens when games aren't fun, called "Frustration, Anxiety, Boredom: Towards A Typology of Ludic Failure."

It's nice, every once in a while, to remember that I actually like being an academic.

Labels: game_commentary, personal, projects

Wednesday, January 09, 2008
2:33 PM
0 comments

track of the week: "if we can land a man on the moon, then surely i can win your heart," by beulah

As you might imagine, I've accumulated a lot of CDs over the years, enough that storing them has become something of a challenge. This problem is accentuated by the fact that probably 98% of my music listening these days is on the iPod, and so the actual CDs go mostly unused: their cases serve as room decor at best and extraneous wrapping at worst.

At this point, I've run out of room for more CD racks (plus I can't get to Ikea) and so I've been forced to begin the process of packing them up into boxes and putting them into storage. Choosing which go and which stay is something of a challenge, although I'm aided by the fact that since 2001 I've created a top-ten list of albums released that year (for the curious: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). This provided a sort of happy solution: there's not enough room to store everything I buy, but there's definitely enough room to store a measly ten a year... plus those are the ones I most want to have at the ready / on display anyway...

But it got me to thinking about those pre-2001 years... the Nineties (and beyond). In order to properly follow through with this project, I should, in theory, need to go back and figure out a list of the Best Nineties Albums.

So I've spent some time, over the last few weeks, looking over the shelves, and trying to make some preliminary list of 100 CDs. It's a decade with a lot of good music: including (for me) canonical college-soundtrack stuff (Nirvana's Nevermind, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head; Beck's Odelay); landmark electronic / dance albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye); a really strong selection of albums from labels like Matador (Pavement; Liz Phair; Yo La Tengo; Cat Power) and, later in the decade, Thrill Jockey (Tortoise; Oval; Town and Country). Then there's the rise of the Elephant 6 Collective, who released some albums that were pretty key for me back then (Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Today's track, "If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart," is from the lesser-known Elephant 6 project Beulah, from their very fine album When Your Heartstrings Break (1999). It's perhaps the best song ever written on the topic of "selling out," a topic which as of today seems, in its way, very 90s.

I'm eager to receive additional suggestions for great 90s albums: feel free to use the comments field.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Audio.

Labels: audio, mp3s, personal

Tuesday, November 27, 2007
1:06 PM
2 comments

a conversation with myself

"I'm not ready."
"There is no ready."

(stolen from anaskyfish)

Labels: cryptic, personal

Thursday, November 15, 2007
12:20 PM
0 comments

living the life

You know you're really an academic when you willingly get up before dawn, on a Saturday, to go participate on an 8:30 panel on "The Internet, Publishing, and the Future of Literature."

Actually I am sure it will be a lot of fun. More later.

Labels: internet, personal

Saturday, October 13, 2007
6:43 AM
0 comments

windy city drone

The new issue of Signal to Noise (#47, Fall 2007) has in it a long-ish write-up on the Chicago "drone scene," taking as its fulcrum the festival I helped to organize this past summer, Fugue State.

Below are scans of a few pages, for those of you who ever wanted to see my picture in a magazine (click for full size).

Also please note that the Chicago debut of Flux Bouquet, a duo made up of Chicago melodic dronesters Chris Miller and Steve Fors, will be this Thursday night, at Schubas. Over and out.

Labels: music_commentary, personal

Tuesday, October 02, 2007
4:28 PM
4 comments

willful obscurity

So I've been playing around with Last.fm enough now that it's begun to serve up recommendations for me... But take a look at this list:

The near-total lack of signifying language here delights me, even as it reveals something about my lifelong pursuit of oddity.

It is also perhaps worth noting that I recently took something called the "Eclectic" quiz, which uses a script located here to take the top 20 artists in your Last.fm profile, and then collect the top five "similar artists" of each of these 20. Combining any duplicates, the resulting number of unique artists is your quote-unquote "eclectic score." Since this post is obviously shaping up to be a brag, I don't hesitate to post my results here:

The script is kind enough to print out the full list of "similar artists" that pops up: the 87 related artists for my profile are:

!!!, Aaron Dilloway, Aen, Aki Tsuyuko, Animal Collective, Antony Milton, Avarus, Belle and Sebastian, Ben Reynolds, Birchville Cat Motel, Boards of Canada, Braspyreet, Broken Social Scene, Burning Star Core (2), Caribou, Cat Power (2), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, DJ Danger Mouse, Daft Punk, DangerDoom, Dialing In, Diplo, Directing Hand, Double Leopards (2), Feist, Fonica, Four Tet, Fourcolor, Fursaxa, Go Home Productions, Hala Strana, Hot Chip, In The Country, Iron & Wine (2), Islaja, Joanna Newsom (2), Junior Boys, Keijo, LCD Soundsystem (2), Lady Sovereign, Lau Nau, Lenlow, M. Ward, M.I.A., M.I.A./Diplo, MF DOOM, Madlib, Manitoba, Massive Attack, MoHa!, Mouthus, Naph, Neutral Milk Hotel, Noah Opponent, Okkervil River, Paavoharju, Peter Wright, Phonophani, Pilchard, Quasimoto, Ratatat, Rilo Kiley, Röyksopp, SPUNK, Sack & Blumm, Sawako (2), Seht, Sogar, Spank Rock (2), Spoon, Sufjan Stevens (3), Svalastog, Taurpis Tula, Taylor Deupree, The Arcade Fire, The Dead C (2), The Decemberists (3), The Knife, The Rapture, The Shins, Thievery Corporation, Viktor Vaughn, Wolf Parade, Xiu Xiu, Zero 7, dj BC, of Montreal

Boldface means I never heard of them.

Labels: music_commentary, personal

Tuesday, September 18, 2007
6:03 PM
2 comments

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

Busy week.

Spent the last three or four days down in Houston, with K., holed up in a Sheraton near the airport. Got out for a bit and walked around, taking photos of the concrete drainage systems and ruined parking lots surrounding the airport. Think of it as a way to renew my FOVICKS membership (that's Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures, for those of you following along at home).

There's a whole Ballard-esque novel waiting to be written about the rings of strange infrastructure that airports extrude, and perhaps another one about Houston infrastructure more generally. It is a city (like LA perhaps) which is designed to be nagivable only by automobile: it is almost incomprehensible when on foot. If we really have moved into the downslope of the peak oil bell curve, then Houston will one day be nothing more than a cryptic artifact. You heard it here first!

When I wasn't wandering around making doomsday prophecies, I was mostly surfing the Internet. It was costing me $9.95 a day at the Sheraton (bastards), so I decided to make it Worth My While, which included making a Facebook page (which you may or may not be able to see through that link) and setting up a Last.fm / Audioscrobbler account. Whoa, Last.fm is very cool, by the way, I did not know it. It is not exactly del.icio.us for iTunes, but that is the way I would begin explaining it to someone:

I like it more than the music-criticism aggregator Critical Metrics. I've found some good music through Critical Metrics, but aggregating criticism in that way leads one towards the "predictable imbalance" inherent in power law distributions (link for math / stat geeks only). There are various ways to avoid this problem in Critical Metrics, but it's a lot easier to avoid via Last.fm. That is all!

Labels: city, houston, personal

Tuesday, September 04, 2007
10:31 AM
2 comments

away notice

Leaving tomorrow for a few days in the Great Northeast; if any readers of this blog happen to be in the greater Boston area and have a free lunch hour tomorrow or Friday, let me know and we'll hang. Otherwise I'm going to the Coop to blow some money.

Because of my trip, film club for the week is canceled, and I probably won't really be upping the blog posting pace, but I will leave you with one observation and one question:

The observation: Charles Stross' Accelerando is possibly the best science fiction novel of the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. I am stone-faced serious when I say this, although to get some idea of why, you might want to read some of what I was saying about science fiction last year around this time

And the question: does anyone know of a good way to defamiliarize prepositions? E-mail me at "projects," at imaginary year (all one word) dot com.

Labels: book_commentary, personal

Wednesday, August 22, 2007
4:03 PM
0 comments

back

Back from two days of mind-expanding drone festival action, two days of on-the-road hijinxs with Harvey P., and five days in Houston, Texas with K. and a rotating cast of guest stars.

Needless to say, I emerged from the far end of it having been pummeled by enough good times to have rendered me nearly insensate. Some highlights, ordered in rough chronology, include: attempting to summarize all of Seasons Two and Three of Lost to Harvey, who indulged this act on my part with a preternatural patience; exploring an abandoned motel in downstate Illinois; listening to the generative music produced by pan-African automated whirligigs designed by polymath George Lewis (currently on display at Houston's Contemporary Art Museum in conjunction with this exhibit); getting caught in torrential rain with old-school compatriots Jon and Sharon; enjoying salmon grill-out with the whole Court of Charleston group; laughing nearly to the point of internal rupture at a story K. told about attempting, when quite young, to make a steak tatare.

Then there was the fest. Saw some fantastic music, felt proud of my own performance as part of The Number None quartet formation, took a handful of decent photos—these are the good things. The bad thing is: we lost money on it, which has resulted in some lingering post-fest complications best left unrecounted here.

Aside from fest music, I've also consumed some other media in the last week, including the Transformers movie and the first two Harry Potter novels, which I'd not read before. Both were surprising: I didn't expect the Transformers movie to be as funny as it is, and I didn't expect the Harry Potter books to be essentially mysteries, complete with clues, red herrings, and big reveals. So many people talk about Harry Potter as a big fantasy epic, but I found them—at least these first two—to be much closer to the tradition of "boy detective"-type novels, set in a fantasy milieu. In any case, they are quite charming, and the Transformers movie was worth my $9.50, even though it adds yet another branch to the messy thicket of Transformers continuity.

Has anybody out there read The Boy Detective Fails?

Labels: book_commentary, media commentary, personal

Monday, July 09, 2007
12:16 PM
0 comments

tonight / tomorrow night : fugue state

Yee-haw—Fugue State happens tonight!

Clicking on the above image will take you to a PDF of the poster, sized at 8.5" x 11", if for some reason you want to see it larger or make a print of it.

It should be a lovely time. If any Chicago-area readers of this blog are able to make it out, I'd love to see you and say hi.

And hey: we're in Time Out: Chicago!

Labels: music_commentary, personal, rebis

Friday, June 29, 2007
8:09 AM
0 comments

advices

Maybe I'm just in a sentimental mood, but here are a few scraps that I've been holding close to my heart this week:

Two bits of horoscope text, courtesy of Free Will Astrology's Rob Brezny. First up, from the week of June 7:

"Remember a moment, after an argument with an ally, when the first tentative spark of reconciliation flowed between your eyes and his or hers. These are good metaphors for the kinds of experiences you should seek out, cultivate, and concentrate on[.]"

OK? And then, from one week earlier:

"Here are a few of the fine improvements I expect you to have accomplished by the end of June: tips on how to live well in two worlds; an addition to the reasons why people find you attractive; a crash course that helps you become more fluent in the language of intimacy; richer, more interesting feelings than you've experienced in a long time; and practical insights into how to avoid being flustered by paradoxes that have driven you crazy in the past."

By the end of June, eh? Tall order. But sometimes quasiangelic assistance can come from everywhere, even, for instance, from Chris Stangl's brief write-up of Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy, which I am 2/3rds of the way through. Stangl writes that the films are less about revenge than they are about "learning that your Right may conflict with someone else's," and "the difficulty of evaluating your motivation and responsibilities in light of knowing everyone is in the same predicament." These are topics I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I'm thankful to Stangl for crystallizing them conceptually. But in terms of advice, I turn my attention to these sentences, Stangl's way of articulating the enduring message of the trilogy's final film: "Revel in your ability to create opportunities for redemption. Be grateful for the instances when you greet a second chance having learned a lesson. Bury your face in them and dig in."

Labels: advice, personal

Tuesday, June 19, 2007
9:30 AM
0 comments

fugue state

Back in May I made some brief remarks about "Fugue State," a two-day festival curated by Rebis (the record label I co-operate). I thought I'd take the time to post the full details here for readers of this blog who are into the experimental music and might be interested in visiting Chicago in two weeks...

These details live permanently here.

FUGUE STATE

June 29-30, 2007

Empty Bottle, Chicago

Purchase advance tickets at www.emptybottle.com

On Friday, June 29th, and Saturday, June 30th, Rebis will present Fugue State, a two-night festival of expansive experimental music taking place at the Empty Bottle club in Chicago, IL. Fugue State is a celebration of the drone in all its many manifestations, as interpreted by some of Chicago's most innovative musicians. An eclectic array of approaches to soundforging will be represented over these two nights, ranging from harsh noise to gentle melodicism and from crafted composition to spontaneous improvisation, often within a single set. Five acts will perform each night.

A visual art component of the artists' choosing will accompany each act. Some acts will present visuals of their own creation, while others are collaborating with a visual artist to provide accompaniment to their live set. A variety of media will be represented, including film, live video manipulation, and other forms of visual expression.

---

schedule

Friday, June 29 (6/29):
DRMWPN
Haptic
Goldblood
Matt Clark
The Number None

Saturday, June 30 (6/30):
David Daniell
The Fortieth Day + Noise Crush
Good Stuff House
The Zoo Wheel
Estesombelo

---

artist bios

Friday, June 29:

DRMWPN
Over the past 2 years, DRMWPN (aka Dreamweapon) has gradually evolved to become the premier band operating at the nexus of the many divergent strains of experimental music in Chicago. Originally intended to be an outlet to showcase the more Dionysian improvisational impulses of the core members of Town & Country (Ben Vida, Jim Dorling, Liz Payne, Ben Abrams), DRMWPN has grown into an amorphous collective that at any given show may include Michael Zerang, Emmett Kelly, Rob AA Lowe, or any other number of Chicago's free rock/jazz/experimental luminaries among its ranks. Drawing on a shared knowledge and love of minimalism, ethnic devotional music, jazz, rock, and improvised ecstatic sound, DRMWPN's sublime live sets are augmented by the flickering hallucinatory generations of their Bryon Gysin-designed dream machine.

Haptic + Lisa Slodki
Haptic is a Chicago-based trio consisting of Steven Hess (Pan American, Dropp Ensemble, On, Fessenden), Joseph Mills (Jonathan Chen, Dropp Ensemble), and Adam Sonderberg (Civil War, Dropp Ensemble) that creates dense, drone-based works that can range from a rigorous minimalism to violent, carefully directed chaos. Initially conceived as a vehicle for live collaboration, Haptic has incorporated a different, rotating fourth member for each performance. Formed in the spring of 2005, Haptic has since collaborated with a diverse group of luminaries, including Tony Buck (The Necks), Olivia Block, David Daniell (San Agustin), and Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded).
http://www.myspace.com/hapticmusic

For Fugue State, Haptic’s floating fourth member will be Lisa Slodki (a.k.a. Noise Crush). Noise Crush combines generative and found media to perform live video manipulation. Through the use of digital and analog mixing, her work engages with human gesture and dissonant emotional states. Seamless looping and overlapping junctures between images are the focus of her live performances.
http://www.noisecrush.com

Good Stuff House
Good Stuff House is the collaborative project of Matt Christensen and Mike Weis (Zelienople), and Scott Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble). Starting with rock elements (drums, guitar, keyboards) and augmenting them with other non-standard instrumentation (harmonica, electronics, reeds, salvaged carillon bells and string and percussion instruments of their own design), Good Stuff House turns these raw ingredients into a psychedelic stew flavored with just a hint of raw Americana. Atmospheric folk drift that lulls one moment, then menaces the next.
http://www.zelienoplemusic.com

Matt Clark
Matt Clark is a mainstay of the Chicago rock/psych/improv circuit, having paid his dues over the past several years in many of the Windy City's most feted bands, including Joan of Arc and Pinebender. Matt's tunefully psychedelic guitar leads have most recently been parsed out among his current collaborative projects Ambulette, White/Light, and White Lichens. For Fugue State, Clark is going it solo the first night, and lending his talents to David Daniell’s headlining ensemble on the second.

The Number None
Number None is the duo of Chris Miller and Jeremy Bushnell, who force an ever-shifting variety of instrumentation (analog electronics, violin, harmonium, children's toys, found records, metals, thumb piano) through bewildering arrays of scavenged effects pedals and homegrown digital patches until they reaches that zone "where even open-ended words like 'free' or 'drone' are limiting." (Scott McKeating, Stylus Magazine) The Number None is the moniker they adapt when they incorporate a third player as a random element; for the Fugue State performance they will be joined by Andre Foisy, one half of the up-and-coming drone/noise act Locrian.
http://www.myspace.com/numbernone
http://www.imaginaryyear.com/rebis/number_none.html

---

Saturday, June 30:

David Daniell
Recent Chicago transplant David Daniell (Antiopic, Table of the Elements), formerly of improvisational out rock trio San Agustin, has in recent years become a favorite guitarist of the minimalist rock/drone set, collaborating with stalwarts such as Rhys Chatham, Jonathan Kane, Thurston Moore, Loren Mazzacane Connors, and Tim Barnes, as well as releasing several sublime solo albums. For this performance, Daniell has assembled a contingent of stellar local musicians mining similar veins of deep sound, including Jim Becker (Califone), Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc), Matt Clark (White/Light, Ambulette), Ben Vida (DRMWPN, Bird Show, Town and Country), Josh Abrams (DRMWPN, Town and Country), Steven Hess (Haptic, Fessenden, Pan American), and Kevin Davis to help him actualize an extended, big band version of the piece "Sunfish" off his most recent Xeric/Table of the Elements release, Coastal.
http://www.daviddaniell.com
http://www.myspace.com/davidwdaniell

The Fortieth Day + Noise Crush
The Fortieth Day is the duo of Mark Solotroff and Isidro Reyes, both key players in the power-electronics outfit Bloodyminded, a local unit known for its confrontational live shows. Here, Solotroff and Reyes show off their kinder, gentler side, using guitar, bass, and synth to improvise "sustained, withering blasts of high-pitched noise that are as distinct from one another as spotlights sweeping across the night sky; jackhammer clatter, jet-engine whines, and forlorn keyboard melodies dart in and out of those huge sounds with the grace and impunity of plovers picking a crocodile's teeth." (Bill Meyer, Chicago Reader)
http://bloodlust.blogspot.com

Video artist Noise Crush will perform a second night, adding real-time computer-manipulated visuals to The Fortieth Day’s live set.

Goldblood
Formed in 2003 out of a dual concern with illumination from ecstatic improvised sound, Goldblood is the core of experimental filmmaker and musician Amy Cargill and psychedelic Svengali Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow of Plastic Crimewave Sound, Galactic Zoo Dossier). Call it what you will--imaginary soundtrack, sun-blindness music, noise-ambient, or the new new age--Goldblood’s treated keys, guitars, samples, drone-machines and wordless voice ebb and flow and merge into walls of sound that can turn suddenly inside out at a moment’s notice. Goldblood have performed with Peter Walker, Eugene Chadbourne, Jah Wobble, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Magik Markers, Sightings, The Coughs, Lichens, DRMWPN,, among others.
http://www.myspace.com/goldbloods

The Zoo Wheel
The Zoo Wheel is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Liz Payne (Town & Country, DRMWPN, Pillow, Everyone(d) ). As The Zoo Wheel, Liz builds hybrid pieces of acoustic timbres using voice, field recordings and various musical instruments (stringed and otherwise), coaxing them into complex and shimmering patterns with a life all their own.
http://www.luckykitchen.com/tar/lk032.html

Estesombelo
Estesombelo is a contemplative collective based on ambient soundscapes along with minimal drone. By creating unique compositions for each subsequent performance, Estesombelo seeks to challenge not only themselves as composers, but their audience's listening capabilities. Live performances range from intensely abrasive to delicately lulling sounds, while at the same time keeping the overall aesthetic fittingly referred to as 'this beautiful sound.'

http://www.myspace.com/estesombelo

Labels: music_commentary, number_none, personal, rebis

Saturday, June 16, 2007
9:34 AM
0 comments

100 favorite things : june 2007

I wonder how many times now I've made these lists. I remember doing the first one in 1991 or 1992.

• positive attention

• giving and receiving affection

• teaching

• thinking through an idea

• writing

• narrative + non-narrative

• poetry + poets

• chapbooks + small presses

• fonts

• graphic design + visual composition

• adobe illustrator + photoshop

• feeling competent

• feeling competent enough to acknowledge the existence of things I still need to learn

• photography

• abstraction

• complex irregular forms

• abandoned buildings + ruins

• taking walks

• trails + hikes

• the woods

• the ocean

• mysticism + devotional practice

• the drone

• making music

• audiomulch

• laptop computers

• itunes + the ipod

• databases + indexes

• index cards

• libraries

• the internet

• del.icio.us, flickr, etc.

• gifts and gift economies

• the spring conference

• letters + journals

• dreams + dreamwork

• the films of david lynch

• stanley kubrick's 2001

• richard linklater's slacker

• ensembles and character networks

• network diagrams

• conversations

• bonfires

• candles

• altars + shrines

• things my friends have made for me

• making things for my friends

• collage

• william s. burroughs

• david foster wallace

• earned sincerity

• playing

• playing games

• rule-systems and constraints

• strategies and plans

• making lists + taking notes

• the boundary line between knowledge + non-knowledge

• BDSM

• collaboration

• taking inspiration from other people's work

• completing a project

• an ongoing project

• dark chocolate

• ice cream

• biscuits + gravy

• diners + greasy spoons

• roadtrips

• mix tapes + mix CDs

• unexpected things discovered while traveling

• vernacular signage

• book darts

• reading

• reading in the bathtub

• keeping a reading log

• blogs + blogging

• zines

• dancing

• feeling confident about my physical appearance / level of desirability

• flirting + the thrill of reciprocated flirting

• jokes + puns

• things that are cute

• Japanese aesthetic systems

• mazes + labyrinths

• dungeons and dragons + its trappings

• graph paper

• new sketchpads

• pigma pens

• the tension between permanence and ephemerality

• "this too shall pass" / "perhaps"

• ecclesiastes

• myths + mythic systems

• paul klee

• mark rothko + the rothko chapel

• robert rauschenberg

• marcel duchamp

• grant morrison

• the marvel universe

• watching movies

• having broad tastes

• not being bored

That's my list. I also love collecting these from other people, so write 'em up and send 'em to me. Or post one to your own blog and send me a link!

In other news: thinking, thinking, thinking, about self-pity, self-loathing, growth, responsibility, desire, love, trust, etc. More soon.

Labels: lists, personal

Friday, June 15, 2007
10:20 AM
0 comments

back

Just got back (late last night) from a two-week New Hampshire / Vermont / Massachussetts trip, which included the seventh annual Spring Conference, which is either a summer camp for adults or a utopian cult, depending on who you ask. It pulled its normal sort of polarity-reversing mojo on me, this year most especially in the form of a letter- and journal-writing workshop that my longtime collaborator Lulu S. and I co-ran. We organized our writing prompts into a particular sequence which was designed to lead people into some challenging emotional space; this worked a little bit better than expected, leaving us pretty raw and vulnerable-feeling by midweek: fortunately we'd also designed a second arc designed to get us back to safer territory in the second half of the con. DIY therapy can be a chancy thing (cough), but when it works, it's great.

Some other highlights: naked lake swimming (last year was too cold and I skipped the swimming entirely); powerfully reconnecting with two old old friends from whom I'd recently been estranged; bonfire action; dusting off the Spring Dance Party iTunes playlist and successfully sneaking in some new tracks among the old favorites (Spank Rock's NSFW "Lindsay Lohan" perhaps being the best new addition); playing new games (most notably the simple/diabolical Blokus); etc etc etc—too many to list.

And sad bits: the critical illness of Kiwitayro's dog Fianna (RIP); the one-two punch (hard drive death / dislocated shoulder) that kept sweet Catling from having an exemplary week; continued tensions simmering between people who I love.

Output: the 47 best photos I took are here in a Flickr set (completists may also want to check out the sets from other years: 2006, 2005, and 2004). Also, as part of my journaling thing I did a new hundred-favorite-things list, which I will type in and post here sometime soon.

Labels: audio, mp3s, personal

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
11:19 AM
0 comments

some things I've been up to

Sorry there hasn't been much activity over here on the blog lately. I've been keeping busy with a variety of things, including (in no particular order):

1. Doing paid copyediting on an academic manuscript on the topic of conceptions of time in African-American science fiction (Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez). As some of you might guess, this is a pretty satisfying gig for me.

2. Designing the "visual identity" of "Fugue State," the two-day festival of "expansive music" that Chris M. and I are putting on this summer. I need to write more about that here, later, and it should probably have its own dedicated webpage over at the Rebis page, but suffice it to say that if you like drones and other experimental music, and you're here in Chicago or can get here, you might want to reserve that last weekend in June. Current draft of the poster lives here, if you want to see what I'm up to in that regard.

3. My band, Number None, has been playing a couple of sets around town lately, including one tonight at the Flower Shop(pe), along with Emeralds, Druids of Huge, Bongripper, Bloodyminded, and my old friends the Birds of Delay (now is a good time to once again link to this ridiculous photo).

4. Selling a bunch of shit on eBay, including early printings of six Philip K. Dick books, if anyone's interested in that...

5. Watching my way through the stockpiled third season of Lost, and trying to decide if I want to commit to watching the show through to 2010

6. Researching literary agents who might be interested in the more-or-less completed novel. The dreaded Guide to Literary Agents lists about a dozen people who are openly interested in "experimental" work, so that might be a good thing.

7. Photos, photos. Taking lots of walks with the camera, shooting dozens of shots and then posting the best to Flickr in a pretty steady five-a-day pattern. The fifty photos that the computer tells me are the best are here.

8. Eat, sleep, read, try to remember to pay bills occasionally

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, May 25, 2007
8:16 AM
0 comments

fear and the freedom from fear

Grades went in on Monday, so now I'm beginning to work out a plan for my summer. I have a few goals, including to begin sending the novel out to publishers. It's now in its third draft, although still not exactly "completed." But done enough that I might be ready to send out a few chapters to see if people were interested.

This is the part of the writing process that I hate the most, and the part that I always vow to do well and then lose interest in almost immediately. Will it be different this time? Stay tuned.

In other news, I had a nice conversation last week with a few colleagues and friends about next year's Presidential election. At some point the conversation turned to the question of how/whether a Democratic president might be able to fix some of the damage done by eight years of Bush Administration policies. (I mean here both the damage done in the national/global context but also the "damage" that I experienced personally. I doubt I am alone in experiencing events in the wake of 2001 as a strangely intimate kind of emotional violence, a kind of trauma. And the often nightmarish intervening years have proven, unsurprisingly, to be a poor context for my personal recovery, so much so that I feel like I've had to perform certain sorts of psychic self-amputation in order to even survive.)

In any case, not long after that conversation I saw that the new issue of Harper's has taken as its cover story the question of "Undoing Bush," with eleven mini-essays on the topic. An interesting one is Earl Shorris' one on repairing the "national character," in which he describes America as a country in the grip of fear. (Note the related book.)

It's easy, though, when thinking of fear and the national character, to think only in terms of the fear of terrorism, which drove and continues to drive people to wildly seek safety/revenge in in catastrophic ways. And it's easy to look at the ways in which this fear has been deliberately stimulated and to reject this, to refuse to be terrorized and declare ourselves done with it. But courage means not only refusing to be afraid of manufactured evils but also being willing to seek out and confront real ones, whether they be in the offices of our own government or in the uninspected dark corners of our own selves. If we balk at the task then we, too, must acknowledge that we are fearful people, and when Shorris writes "a fearful person is unlikely to be temperate, prudent, or just" we must acknowledge that he is not just writing about Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld but about us too.

In closing, Shorris writes: "To the three basic questions written by Immanuel Kant at the height of the Enlightenment—'What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?'—we must add another: Why am I so afraid? It is a beginning."

Labels: fear, personal, politics, war_on_terror

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
9:05 AM
0 comments

amazon recommends

I call this "running the gamut."

Real content returning soon, I promise.

Labels: personal

Friday, May 11, 2007
12:26 PM
0 comments

business / busy-ness

I've got shit coming at me from all directions this week, most centrally a pile of grading that's about the size of an unabridged dictionary, so the quietude that's afflicted this blog since I finished the big canon-making project will likely persist for another week or so. After that things will start wrapping up and I'll have a little more room to breathe.

If you're desperate for content, you could take a look over at my photos on Flickr: the nice weather of late has pushed me out of the house and into the city, and I've been making a lot of use of my camera to take pictures of, well, mostly trash and assorted disrepair. But if you like those kinds of things, there's lots of new pictures to look at. Try the Notebook on Cities for a taste.

Also, any readers of this blog who are in Chicago, or who can get here before 9 pm tonight, might want to come by to see me perform at the Lakeshore Theatre tonight with my band, Number None: we'll be debuting a new, as-yet-untitled piece. We're in the middle slot: Ben Vida will be opening, and Mike Tamburo will be wrapping the night up.

Labels: meta, number_none, personal

Wednesday, April 25, 2007
9:51 AM
0 comments

recent visual output

Over at Flickr, my "Mold Patterns" set has been updated with a few photos of a revolting / magnificent spore colony in an old thing of leftover soup; the "Notebook on Cities" and "Notebook on Entropy" sets have also seen some activity.

And I also thought some of you might enjoy seeing some of my recent stabs at the art of poster design. As you can see, I'm all about the yellow lately:

Chicago-area residents who love the drone may want to note that the show the first poster is advertising is still yet to come.

Labels: design, output, personal, photography

Tuesday, April 03, 2007
8:35 PM
0 comments

Houston 2007

Just got back from having spent a few days of my Spring Break in Houston. I had a good time, not least because I got to dust off the (new!) camera and take some pictures. Houston has some lovely rusted surfaces which made nice additions to my textures pile, but for those of you interested in seeing the Houston pictures that are more along the lines of the sorts of things normal people photograph (people, buildings, sculptures), I've arranged them for you in a Houston 2007 set.

Labels: output, personal, photography

Wednesday, March 28, 2007
12:00 PM
2 comments

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

It's been a pretty busy couple of weeks around here: between teaching, personal commitments, work on the novel draft, and a cluster of Number None shows, my free time has pretty much been maxed out, no time to create much in the way of substantial new blog content.

I haven't even mentioned, for instance, that the first draft of the "Novel of Adequacy," now titled Meanwhile, is completed. If you want to see how complicated it got by the end, you can check out this crazy interactive diagram I made with IBM's fun little data visualization website, Many Eyes. (Make sure to zoom in by clicking-and-dragging or the thing will just look like an undifferentiated dense heap of datapoints.)

Parts of the novel are still pretty messed up (for instance, there's one cluster of characters who haven't yet been integrated into the main mass) but it's getting close to the point where it is maybe ready to be put out there for comments. I'd like to get all the chapters through a second draft first, but in any case, if you're interested in reading some of it, just ask.

The other thing I didn't manage to get around to mentioning recently is that Number None got a nice mention in Time Out: Chicago, as part of an article on the Chicago "drone scene." It has a photo and everything (I'm the guy with his head cocked in the back row). It's nice to finally be mainstream, I guess.

I've also been quietly posting more book reviews over at LibraryThing, I'll post a bunch of those here tomorrow.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing

Tuesday, March 20, 2007
2:56 PM
0 comments

today's horoscope

This morning, for the first time in a long time, I did a divination from a random passage from a randomly-chosen book.

The book was Dodie Bellamy's Pink Steam, and the passage was this:

"William Burroughs was timid and thin as a young boy, he was in his 70s and Mark in his teens and it felt like two boys in bed, I'm going over to his place this afternoon for a tarot reading, he drew two cards on my phone machine, the first card he said meant chaos but it's just temporary because the second card said that, cosmically, things are going really well for me."

Well. I hope so.

Labels: advice, magic, personal

Saturday, March 10, 2007
2:45 PM
0 comments

raccoon audio

I've decided to spin off the MP3 posts into their own blog, over at Blog*Spot: Raccoon Audio. The reason for this is mainly because I want to start getting indexed in the Hype Machine's database, and I thought they were more likely to index an all-MP3 blog than this one, which I think could comfortably be descrbied as "eclectic" in its focus.

MP3 posts will still be cross-posted here, so you don't need to do anything or even think about the new site unless you're only reading this blog for the music-oriented posts, in which case you might want to switch to reading that one, which has a nice syndication feed and all that jazz.

That's also the place to look if you want the whole top ten all in a single post, specifically here.

I took some liberties with the dates, don't look too close.

Labels: audio, meta, mp3s, music_commentary, personal

Thursday, February 08, 2007
10:38 AM
0 comments

six methods for five films

I've been spending much of this weekend watching films and thinking about my syllabus—I go back to teaching next week, and am writing a new syllabus from scratch instead of repurposing one of my older ones.

I'll be teaching three sections of Composition this fall, and the thematic center of the course is "writing about film." With that in mind, I'm using Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide To Writing About Film as the class text (thanks to BB-A for the recommendation).

The real "meat" of this book, as far as I'm concerned, is Chapter Four, "Six Approaches to Writing About Film." I'm spending four weeks in the center of the semester focusing pretty intently on these six methods, and the rest of the semester is basically going to involve the students trying out these methods for themselves.

The six approaches are as follows:

• historical analysis (putting the film in the context of film history or other historical narratives)
  

• national analysis (thinking of the film as a product of its culture)
  

• genre-based analysis (looking at how the film conforms to / defies / subverts genre conventions)
  

• auteur-based analysis (putting the film in the context of other works by the same creator(s))
  

• formalist analysis (looking at the technical features of the film, mise-en-scene, etc)
  

• ideological analysis (analyzing the underlying values of the film; looking at it in terms of how it approaches race, class, gender, etc)

I've been trying to come up with films that are reasonably accessible to college freshmen but which can also be "read" interestingly through any of these six approaches. I've narrowed it down to a list of five finalists:

• Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992)
  

• David O. Russell's Three Kings (1999)
  

• Sam Mendes' American Beauty
  

• Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002)
  

• Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003)

(Semi-finalists? David Lynch's underrated The Straight Story (1999) and Paul Thomas Anderson's underrated Punch-Drunk Love (2002), both a little too off-beat for my students, I fear.)

The dilemma is this: there's really only room in the semester to screen two films, so I need to narrow it down further before the end of the weekend. If anyone wants to argue for or against any of these films, well, that's what the comments area is for. I'm also taking suggestions for any other films that might also be interestingly read through these six lenses for the next time I teach this course...

Labels: media commentary, personal, teaching

Friday, January 12, 2007
9:06 PM
1 comments