I recently watched Ken Burns’ documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright and felt compelled to write about it.  I’m sure his other documentaries are similar:  longer than necessary, almost laborious, but once it’s over you’re glad you made the effort.

A couple things stuck out to me.

Even as Wright was just beginning his career, he lived above his means in a large house with many unique collectibles.  I liked his quote that went something like this:  “take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.”  The seeds of self-promotion had germinated.

The film hinted that Wright was one of the pioneers of a more open floor plan.  In opposition to the Victorian style, he envisioned the living space of a house as a continuous room.  One commentator noted that Wright’s early prairie-style houses have relatively low ceilings but that his use of horizontal space lends the interior a certain endless depth.

After his early success, Wright abandons his kids and wife, who refused to divorce him, and moves to Europe with his (also married) mistress.  The newspaper reported the scandal (as was common in 1909) and Wright’s reputation and career were significantly damaged.  He later returns to the US with his mistress to live in his newly constructed Taliesin house in Wisconsin.  While he is away working on a project in Chicago, one of his servants uses gasoline to set fire to the house and murders seven people with an axe including Wright’s mistress and her two children.  Crazy.

As the International style of modernist architecture becomes popular in the 1920s and early 30s, Wright is seen as out-of-date.  Basically, wood is “not cool” and flat roofs are “way cool.”  But if anything, Wright proves adept at combining various concepts and styles to form his own unique architectural lexicon.  He incorporates modernist elements to stunning effect in his famous Fallingwater house (1937) which extends over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania countryside.  After contemplating the site for months, Wright sketches the complete design in just three hours prior to a meeting with the client.

I found it intriguing that Wright’s most productive years were much later in life–he completed hundreds of projects in his seventies and eighties.  He worked on the Guggenheim Museum, for example, during the last fifteen years of his life.  The museum opened to the public six months after his death at ninety-two.  Wright stands as a great example of the type of lifelong mastery that Malcom Gladwell writes about in “Outliers.”

Kim asked for some iPhone app recommendations so I thought I’d throw a few up on ye olde blog:

Music

• AOL Radio - listen to all kinds of radio stations, local and otherwise.  I enjoy the “Brand New Indie” station. 
• Pandora - type in an artist or song and listen to an ad hoc radio station of similar music. 
• iTunes - now you can download or stream free (audio and video) podcasts right from the iPhone. 

Twitter

• TwitterFon - I like this one the best because I find it to be easy to use and quick.  Nice search feature too.
• Twinkle -  First app that effectively integrated “nearby” tweets.  You can adjust the “mile radius” which is nifty.  Has some cool extras, for example, turn the screen sideways and you get a cool realtime map of recent public tweets.
• Twittervision - Nice realtime map of recent public tweets.  Can translate tweets from other countries.

Games

• Tap Tap Revenge - guitar hero-like game.
• iBowl - fun use of the accelerometer.
• Tris - touch screen Tetris. 

Other

Images of Beijing’s grandiose opening ceremony still hover in the back of my mind.  What a spectacle…

I learned from a recent article by Roger Ebert that the director of the opening ceremonies, Zhang Yimou, is also a successful film director.  His more recent films include Hero and House of the Flying Daggers.  Not only did he have a $300 million budget to work with, but over 2,000 unpaid volunteers helped make the event possible.  Who needs technology when you’ve got people?

Speaking of unpaid volunteers, North Korea’s Arirang Festival and its “mass games” are now underway.  The scale is simply unbelievable–120,000 performers in all.  And in case your looking for a last minute summer vacation, the country is now encouraging foreign tourists (constant surveillance included at no extra charge).  For those of you unable to make it, check out this photo gallery from the Guardian.

A former schoolmate of mine, Hudson Spivey, has started an interesting new blog entitled, “Confronting Scarcity.”  As the title suggests, Hudson’s site is more focused on the causes and solutions to issues such as over-population and dwindling global food and water supplies rather than the more media saturated theme of global warming and carbon emissions.

Hudson “confronts” this challenging subject with a blend of historical perspective, agricultural insight, nightmare visions, and an appetite for grand themes and radical changes.  A sort of Chuck Palahniuk for the ecologically minded.

I want to share a few excellent articles I read while on vacation with the fam in Boston.  The surprisingly interesting Smithsonian magazine (my grandparents are subscribers) featured an article about an archaeologist attempting to reproduce the colors of the Ancient Grecian statues.  My ignorance aside, this was a complete revelation to me.  I assumed, much like Michelangelo and the rest of Renaissance Rome, that the Greeks preferred their statues in “plain” white marble.  At least my ignorance shared good company.

As stated in the article, Euripides play Helen of Troy makes clear how the Greeks preferred their statues:

If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.

After you finish reading about the statues, check out the excellent feature about the restoration efforts currently underway on the Parthenon and the subsequent insights into the architectural processes those efforts have helped surface.

Big news today. And no, this is not a late April Fool’s joke. After a long sabbatical from the songwriting world, I’m proud to announce my first collaborative song with Sean Boyle. By collaborative, of course, I mean that Sean did 98% of the work and the total time of my effort from concept to recording of the “lyrics” was about 5 minutes. As a matter of fact, you can hear me laughing in some parts of the song (or was it meant to portray the humans’ reaction to the bleak state affairs post-robot revolution?).

My vocal part was recorded on a PC microphone so its quite amazing the magic Sean was able to work with it. My dream of becoming a techno god has now been fulfilled. Hopefully, you will find the tune is in accordance with the proud tradition of my other collaborative hit song, namely Glenn Knights (inside reference for the die hard fans; you know who you are, I love you guys!). Put it on repeat.

Maybe I’ll explain the lyrics later, but for now you can post your theory in the comments.

 

 Robot Revolution [3:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As I complete my latest tune, I’ve started to expand my general production sound. The detuned leads have grown stale for the time being, and I’ve been experimenting more in chillout and Drum n’ Bass sounds. The sheer difficulty of DnB production is recognized by many in the electronic music production scene as the hardest genre to produce. It follows it’s name sake: one half of the trouble of making it is programming the drums, the other half creating the bass. The genre that this song is in, however, is unknown to me.

About the song

I feel that all the great artists have pushed for their own unique sound, so I’ve tried to do the same. The main focus of this song is the piano, which I’m not a stranger to. I tried to extract the melody from my imagination without much interference from anything, resulting in what I deem as my “pure-self sound”. When I produce, I always seem to naturally produce laidback themes with a cooler edge to them but am torn over my love of happy hardcore music. This causes me to alter my songs to sound more like what I like to listen to rather than what naturally comes out. The strangest thing is that I don’t have a single chillout song in my massive music library.

The song’s name is the name of a good friend just as the song itself is a close friend of mine. Naming a song is much like naming a child — I feel that it is harder to give it a name than it is to make it (totally not sexual). Nomenclature is a very interesting thing so I’ve decided to experiment in it (instead of the cliche names of happy hardcore - almost all of them have the word “love, angle, high, flying, etc…” in them). As much as I enjoyed writing this song, however, I leave the verdict to the listener - Which sounds better, the chillout or the happy hardcore?

P.S. I also have some songs with a harder edge that are in the works as well as a trance song, so keep an ear out for them.

 

 Amelia [3:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Back in my college days, I had one friend who tweaked and customized Windows XP on his computer such that it had no start menu, task bar, or desktop icons. He launched all his applications from the “run” command line. He went so far as to set the desktop background as black because he believed it might lessened the amount of “radiation shooting at my face.” Lest you jump to conclusions, I can (mostly) vouch for his sanity.

Eventually, his minimalist computing experiment crumbled as Windows became increasingly less stable with its pillars of normalcy toppled. Years later now, I use some simple tricks that echo this bygone experiment to help me quickly access my most relevant programs, files, and web pages without so much as the click of a mouse. Call it laziness under the guise of efficiency.

Now if you’ll excuse a divergent style change, below is a “how to” for those interested in some of the techniques:

Continue reading ‘Launching programs, folders, and files quickly in Windows’

My blog postings have been unable to keep up with Sean’s prolific output as of late so I’ve created a separate page featuring a flash player and mp3 downloads of all his songs. Fans will note that there are four brand new fantastic songs here in addition to an older one that was never posted on my site.

Sean’s latest work branches out into more varied styles and sounds and shows increased attention in his post-production tweaks. I also asked him for some album art of sorts and he provided the sketch included to the left.

In other news, one of his earlier songs, “Creative Burst,” was used in this YouTube video.

You’ll certainly be glad to hear that Matt Bunn, senior ModernBizzle contributing essayist (see here and here) and history student extraordinaire, is keeping productive amidst his recent German expedition. You can read his latest political piece, Why the Mukasey fight might be different, and follow his future DailyKos diary entries. *Bonus Points* there is a fun quiz too!

This is just another rousing example of the kind of talent farm we run here at ModernBizzle.com. Readers, please be kind and don’t take down the DailyKos’ servers too hard with the subsequent massive traffic spike.