My various keyboard-playing friends may not make it all the way through to five minutes of this 10-year-old Japanese girl's performance, and I'll have to say that I don't much like the music myself, but what lies behind is pretty amazing to contemplate:
The news won't please EVERYbody, but the Holy Modal Rounders documentary Bound to Lose is available on DVD. My copy just arrived...
...and a few of you may be inspired to visit the Web site to learn more.
From another Christmas book, Darren Wershler-Henry's The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting:
This search for meaning in the relics of the past is itself what creates their value. We have become a culture of amateur curators, where everyone is able to build meaning by buying and organizing someone else's trash. (pg. 17)E.g., this set from Rockland Antique Mall
...for this Flickr group:
Bears in ill-fitting hats...and there's Lily Allen:
I don't think I've already linked to this one:
(the thing in his right hand is an EBow)
I'm a lifelong if somewhat desultory student of Landscapes at various scales. A couple of delightful books showed up under the Christmas tree, and I'm gleefully anticipating their consumption:
Chet Raymo's The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe teaches valuable lessons by attending to this bit of landscape
FOR THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS I have walked the same path back and forth each day from my home in the village of North Easton, Massachusetts, to my place of work... Step by step, year by year, the landscape I traversed became deeper, richer, more multidimensional, always overflowing the mind that sought to contain it. Ultimately, almost without my willing it, the path became more than a walk, more than an education, more than a life; it became the Path, a Tao, a thread that ties one human life and the universe together... Any path can become the Path if attended to with care, without preconceptions, informed by knowledge, and open to surprise. (pp 1, 4-5, 6)Another explores a landscape element that I've often thought of documenting myself: William Hubbell's Good Fences: A Pictorial History of New England's Stone Walls (see some examples).
I'm working on a new version of the Nova Scotia Faces project (the alpha version is here), exploring better ways of arraying and displaying. Today my attention wandered to a set of comments on the images by a prolific contributor, so I've strung together a presentation, as an experiment in access. For the Flavor of Luscher's comments, click on this one:
The video here is minimalist but makes a pretty effective presentation of the lyrics, and should calm down anybody who is feeling unseasonably optimistic...:
...who got it from http://www.raymondpirouz.com/2007/12/12/a-rare-union-of-persia-india/
...and he's certainly right about how wonderful it is!
Norman Blake is one of my Guitar Heroes. His tune "The Old Brown Case" appears on a couple of 1970s albums (in slightly different versions), and this morning the [consistently magnificent] Old Blue Bus blog linked to OBC3, a more recent version with Nancy Blake and a bass player. Don't miss it.
There's an update to the Humbead's Map project, comparing the 1969 and 1970 Populations. Much more could be done to provide context for this seething anthill, but other things await my attention...
Connoisseurs of maps and fans of agricultural landscape systems will love this presentation of the 1635 Laxton Open Field Survey Map at the consistently wonderful BibliOdyssey. There's more and more of this sort of geographical mashuppery, a Good Thing.
It being winter, one has time for Kurt Gottschalk's A Field Guide to Staying Inside: Bagpipes, from WFMU's Beware of the Blog. Not everything here will be to your taste, but examples like Birchville Cat Motel's "Piss Perfume Overkill" will give the cobwebs in your speakers a good airing. And the Alfred Hitchcock quote at the beginning is worth the price of admission.
Take a look at this table of Musicians, quarried from the Population list that surrounds Humbead's Revised Map of the World. I've been having quite a bit of fun with these bits of data in the last few days, and continue to consider how next to proceed in unpacking the Significance of the Map.
information aesthetics points to this 4-minute opening sequence from The Kingdom, an interesting primer:
...as I am in watching this. Sorta the same effect as reading Gleik's Chaos, 20 years ago: