Giddy like a school girl

In case you haven't heard, there is a new Radiohead album coming out next week. Wait, let me repeat that: THERE IS A NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM COMING OUT NEXT WEEK!! HOLY MONKEY FARTS!

As you also probably heard, ol' Thom and Co. have finally accumulated enough hard currency and devout followers to DIY the thing (yes, "DIY" is a verb). They've even gone so far as to outsmart those who were just going to steal it from a P2P site anyway. In what could prove to be a new trend in digital rights (mis)management, the googly-eyed scare bears are allowing you, me, and everyone else we know to pick our own price.

Personally, I think the concept is genius. First, consider the number of people who will order the album for download, just because they can pay $2 or $3. Now, consider the percentage of those people who would have ripped "In Rainbows" from his/her P2P site of choice. I would be willing to bet Radiohead make more money selling the album on Radiohead.com for $2/head than they could possible make through a $9.99 download at the iTunes store (you know, that place where sad sots like myself go to not-steal music).

In the words of Devendra Banhart, "I feel just like a child"

Jim Lehrer v Margaret Spellings

I caught a pretty interesting segment on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Peep it here. Aside from the satisfaction I glean from actually watching a news program without all the requisite bells and whistles (i.e., text scrolling in three directions, four simultaneous video panes, and a screaming Bill O'Reilly), Lehrer's correspondents can always find something uplifting that would otherwise fall between the cracks.


This particularly gossamer piece of reporting depicts two schools in San Diego who recently went Charter to remedy their failed attempts at standardized achievement. It took quite a fight for the schools' teachers, parents, and administrators to make the break from the San Diego school district. But they did. Their collective efforts have shown a remarkable shift in student discipline and test scores.

After years of churning out disenchanted students and turning over new faculty members every year, the schools seem to have found a niche. And, consequently, the district suffers, because parents and students want to attend these seemingly new schools. What a tangled web we weave.

Does your Bible glow in the dark?

I'll first say I haven't written a music review/critique in a long time. At one point in time I was convinced I could make a career of borrowing from Lester Bangs. Eventually, however, reality set in and I realized I don't have anything close to Bangs's tolerance for amphetamines, bourbon, or poverty. Nonetheless I recently was lucky enough to pick up a copy of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible and it has shaken me so deeply I am giddily dancing atop a bail of hay on their bandwagon.


A few years ago I was pretty ensconced in the North American post-rock sound. Pretty much everything I bought either came from Canada's Constellation label or Chicago's Thrill Jockey. Both labels specialized for a while in grandiose swelling crescendos and a collective gazing-at-shoes due to incessant droning and concentration on abstractly (intertextual, maybe?) inserted field recordings.

I loved and still love the theme and variation model of composition, building intensity with incessant layering of percussive pulses. This style was perfected by bands like Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, and Trans Am. Yet I sadly longed for a band who could add a note of accessibility to this genre.

And then there was Arcade Fire.

I initially shied away from AF's media buzz due mainly to their consistent association with fellow Montrealers, Broken Social Scene. While I think BSS has an interesting ethos and correspondingly big approach to sound, the romantic in me wanted a crooner to step up to the mic and usher in a new musical paradigm.

After seeing some YouTube videos, I picked up Neon Bible. Now I can't put it down. I have honestly listened to the whole album (cover to cover) three times a day for the last 2 weeks.

The production is fantastic. Somehow all 7 members seem to get ample say in the mix, while vocalist Win Butler chews the mesh off his microphone out front. Each track swells with intensity, encouraging listeners to stand up and lean into the wind until it abruptly stops and they fall flat on their faces.

The band relies on acoustic instrumentation for the most part, illustrating the potency of their collective fingers and forearms with each track's pounding bridge. Yet, on the rare occasions when an electric guitar floats to the top, it does so with tingling, morbid effervescence as in the chorus of track 6, Ocean of Noise. This repeated guitar wail, has me repeatedly welling up as the violin helps to hold it up.

As yet, I haven't quite cracked the egg that is the title track. On an album of repetitive swellings, the irony of a title cut being not so is perfectly fitting. I can't wait to taste that yolk.

a great black wave in the middle of the sea

So here I am, feeling down and hoping to exorcise some emotional/intellectual demons on my slice of Blogistan.
This week has been one of the ugliest weeks of news I can remember. In one week we have had several horrible events and I just want it to be known that I am paying attention. For those who haven't had the time, energy, or impetus, here's the news since Monday:

1. A disaffected student unleashed his frustration with anonymity on the campus of Virginia Tech University. 33 are dead. Millions are mourning. And, to add insult to martyrdom, the student sent a YouTube-style package to NBC to tell us all why we're wrong. I know I'm wrong. I didn't need a pathological individual to prove it to me.
   
2. This has been one of the bloodiest weeks in the 4-year "conflict" in Iraq. Close to 200 people died in 24 hours of bombings and, according to The Great Decider, more will die before Iraq embraces Christianity, Democracy, and the pursuit of opulence.
   
3. In a 5-4 decision, supreme court justices denounced years of progress toward upholding a woman's right to choose, thus imparting an religio-ethical decision on human rights. It was a major victory for the current commander in chief. Hopefully those victories will be fewer and farther in between for the last 500 or so days of his iron grip on the world.

This is an utterly selfish post for I have hoped that writing it all down might make me feel better. I'm not sure it has worked. I guess I'll go back to watching this video showcasing a musical act, Arcade Fire (to whom I credit the title of this post), repeatedly. It seems they are trying to use theater to show us all how to get up and move in the right direction.

the ultimate instructional design project

While perusing the recent C-Net stories I ran across a photo story of the first distribution of $100 laptops to children in Nigeria for the One Laptop Per Child initiative. It hadn't really occurred to me what the design of such a machine would entail, let alone the interface design for kids who have literally never seen a GUI before.

This was perhaps the most complicated interface design project since the Mosaic browser was designed for point and click access to the web. The interface they came up with totally baffles me, due to its reliance on entirely graphical clickable regions.

It's really tough to imagine the semiotic domain wherein a computer interface would be a wholly foreign concept. Yet, according to the story, the children immediately "took to" their new (cough, cough) educational toys.

About two years ago I had the opportunity to work on a documentary on the Garifuna culture in northeast Honduras. One of the more interesting aspects of the project was figuring out how to engage the villagers in what we hoped to accomplish. As recompense for gaining access to the village, I had to give the kids in the small school English lessons.

We found the children really took to the camera. So we tried to incorporate basic film theory and production in to the lessons. As constructivist learning theory would suggest, the students were much more engaged when we simply handed over the means of production.

-Rest in Peace, Kurt Vonnegut (1923-2007)

final cuts

Well, after about a 6 weeks of work, I finally was able to get a rough cut together of my little video, 'Information: the new Ritalin.' It took quite a bit of post-production wrangling to get it in to a watchable state. But I am happy with the way things eventually turned out.

I'm still amazed how much more work it took to get live video in HD1080i60 in the same sequence as computer screen capture in HD1080p30. Let's just say there was a lot of math and garbage matte layering involved, and leave it at that.

However, I got some really positive feedback and I am in a good position to tighten up what I have now into a solid final cut. I would like to be able to post a clip, but I don't really know how I would do that. The video is in 1920X1080 resolution, and a lot of it is in an even wider aspect ratio (something like 2.5:1), making it pretty unfit for streaming on even the fastest connections and/or viewing on anything less than a nice LCD or HD display.

It was also tough getting the dialogic screen capture text readable from more than about 2 feet from a screen. I plan to keep cracking at it, but I'm not really sure I have the technical chops to "make it go."

All in all, working in video again was a really satisfying experience and I'm glad the audience who has seen it found it mildly thought-provoking. That's about all I was aspiring toward.

-cheers

post-production party

A few days ago I finished production on the video I have been working on. I plunged headlong into the post-production phase on Wednesday. It's definitely bringing back some memories. I'm really excited about digging in with a digital razor.

Thus far I have encountered the requisite issues inherent in using cracked software to accomplish a task I haven't attempted in almost 2 years. I was admittedly nervous about working in Final Cut Pro for the first time in a goodly while. But once I was able to open and update the app, the controls quickly started feeling comfortable again.

I have about 3 hours of HD video between the live action stuff shot by my friends at HNP and the screen captures I have done over the past few weeks. The goal is to cut it down to around 3 minutes. The more I look at it, the longer I think it will take to fit everything in coherently. I have developed a plan of attack for the early stages of the editing process. But I'm really nervous about pulling off the split screen narrative thing. The narrative will be driven primarily by the "dialog" portrayed in the screen capture portion, and the video will depict me acting as something of a Greek Chorus, gaping at the strange goings-on.

Let's call it an experiment in my ability to depict a Human Computer Interaction...quite literally.

Waxing politic

Last night I caught a glimpse of an email from a friend of Tammy's. The email was primarily a response to a question Tammy posed about Barack Obama's qualifications and potential as a presidential candidate.

Her insightful compatriot offered a sound diatribe on the dangers of democrats backing a possibly un-electable candidate. Most interestingly, the friend offered these words about the democrats' collective inability to support a centrist candidate like John Kerry:

"So we ended up with Kerry: tepid water, milk toast, vanilla, Republican-lite."

Longstoryshort, the statement got me thinking. First, about the poetics of the line, then about the blinding truth it represents.

I can't come up with any witty snippets of knowledge to expound upon this line of political poetry. All I can come up with are questions:

Is there a possibility for true progressivism in our modern landscape?
Are we chained to our adopted consumptive collective mindset?
Is there a foreseeable alternative?

/hmmmm

the nerdiest thing i have ever seen

more mental video churnings

For the past few days I have been helping out my old partners at High Noon Pictures work on a narrative short. Getting to run the boom and work as a production assistant again has really got things rolling in my mental map of the video I plan to put together in the next couple of weeks.

I am devising a skeleton script and planning all the "scenes." I don't really know if my ideas can be considered scenes, but that's neither here nor there. The working title is 'Information: the new Ritalin.' I'm happy with the way my ideas are starting to take shape. I was having trouble figuring out how to work dialogic interaction between a person and a computer. Then I realized there is a constant dialogue inherent in Human Computer Interaction, represented by none other than ye ol' blinking cursor. The computer's "thoughts" could easily be represented by typing in text fields in any number of applications.

Within hours of my realization I found the following video on YouTube. I have to admit I was a bit disheartened that it's already been done. But I think I have a slightly different application of this narrative device.

Massive Multi-Developer Online RPGs

I found this article pretty interesting. It describes an effort to develop an MMORPG using the input of the actual players. All of them, if possible.

A couple of game developers and Acclaim put their heads together to tap the aggregate creative energy of MMO players and developers in a collaboration intent on releasing a new title in less time than any legitimate studio could hope to take. The initial response to the call was huge: something to the tune of 20,000 eager little beavers.

Dave Perry, the puppeteer who holds all the strings, describes the project as a serious business venture. "I hope it will prove to us that consumers are useful, " says Dave.

I hope so too, Dave.

film for thought

My mind hasn't been abuzz with intersecting plot lines and narrative celluloid twists for a while now. But I have a video project to put together for my Society, Technology, and Culture class. The project (along with a little liminal free time) has given me a little inspiration.

I have been thinking a lot about bio-technology and cognitive changes over time. Plenty of literature and studies have been done looking in to how our cognitive mapping and synaptic connections can be modified. For my little movie, I want to look in to how we are re-wiring our synapses on a daily basis.

Computers and the web are giving us infinite possibilities for knowledge acquisition and retrieval. I have to wonder whether our bodies are ready for the intellectual hyperactivity navigating the web enables within us. Or are we going to reach a system overload somewhere down the line?

I will be adding links to relevant literature soon, but for now, here's a PhotoShop thought of what I have in mind.

virtual soccer network

In the past few days some members of the soccer team I have joined put together a blog site. I'm really interested to see how the blog works out.

Context:

The team just formally got together a couple of months ago. Many of the 20 (or so) players didn't know each other before our first real practice. I suspect several of the players are unfamiliar with blogging and probably lack a lot of web-efficacy. There are a few of us techies who could potentially facilitate if there are any problems.

Future?

As yet we haven't found a really good means of communication for the large group. Different personal schedules and several city league cancellations/schedule changes have made it tough to get to know and appreciate one another's abilities on and off the field.

In three days the blog has been populated with about 10 members and a dozen or so posts/comments. It will be fun to see how such an intimately detached social technology as blogging will facilitate the growth of a nascent football club.

rolling along

I seem to have fallen in to a comfortable stride recently. Despite being sick for the better part of the past week, things are clipping along at a good tempo. Coughing late at night has left my sleep schedule in shambles, but that's neither here nor there. Though it has given me ample time to tighten some of the screws on my personal site, and finally collect artifacts for my portfolio.

I have a pretty big job interview in a couple of days. The results of said interview will have some pretty lasting effects on how Tammy and I pursue the next few years. I know, it seems like a lot of weight to put on an interview. But the position seems like it would make purchasing a living space and giving Gainesville the ol' college try (again) a worthwhile investment.

For those of you who missed the show on 2/17, the opening band put together a short film about the evening. Have a gander (said the goose).

Back in the saddle

Personal News

It's been a while since I have sat down to add an entry. Hopefully things will get rolling again here soon.

I recently had a run in with the pesky little fairies that make my computer turn on and talk to the web. Apparently they weren't very happy with the Bloglines subscriptions I have maintained for the past 6 months or so, and they decided to get rid of them. I emailed the nymphs in CA that maintain the Bloglines servers, but I think it may have been too little too late. We'll see.

My old band, Edward the Bear, will be getting back together for another famous reunion show Saturday, Feb. 17, around 10 or 1030pm. Any and all are welcome. I believe the cover will be a 5 spot. Hope to see you there.

I am in the process of changing jobs. I fell in to a bit of a financial hole last semester and decided I was better off working full-time, and going to school part-time. I can't really see any problem with slowing down the progression of school if I can get hands-on experience in the mean time. All of that should be straightened out in the next couple of weeks.

In other news

I was pretty excited to see Barack Obama declare his presidential candidacy via a live web cast this past Saturday morning. He is quickly mounting a strong campaign presence on the web. The site devoted to his campaign, BarackObama.com, actually provides a portal to a social networking community developed specifically for interested voters. One can develop a personal profile, network with like-minded individuals, and create a political blog.

I think this is pretty ingenious and it shows quite a bit of connection with contemporary trends. And probably a well-recruited group of advisers.