The Spectacle of Communism
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.
Confronting Scarcity
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.
The Robot Revolution (yeah!)
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.
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.
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.
Links of Interest
A few items I found interesting:
The musical genius of Jens Lekman {slate.com} - I love his new album.
Helvetica DVD {uncrate.com} - Excellent documentary for those who take their fonts (too) seriously.
Even Free Can’t Compete With Music Piracy {techcrunch.com} - Discusses stats on piracy of Radiohead’s new album.
The Arcade Fire released a cool interactive flash “music video” for the song Neon Bible. Try clicking on different parts in the video and see what happens.
+ more...
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