May 31, 2008

links for 2008-05-31

Posted by oook at 03:33 AM

May 30, 2008

Janet Klein: The Sheik of Avenue B

...and if this strikes a responsive chord, try also her rendition of Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars (lyrics under "More Info")

Posted by oook at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

Jeffrey Lewis lays it out for you


And see Abject Learning for another take on Jeffrey Lewis's accomplishment, with SkreemR clips. I really admire what Brian Lamb has done here, and am somewhat nonplussed to admit that I don't quite understand all the bits he's using. Showing my age, I guess.

Posted by oook at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2008

Deadpan mandobanjo

Dennis Pash and Meredith Axelrod play Tickled To Death:

Posted by oook at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

Some links

The del.icio.us harvester seems to be misbehaving. Here are some from the last few days:

Policy Map "...an innovative geographic information system which allows you to easily create custom maps, tables, and charts."

Thorazine shuffle from Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research and their "Online Gallery of Modern and Vintage Psychiatric Drug Advertising"

Mapping the Human 'Diseaseome' from NY Times: "a map linking different diseases, represented by circles, to the genes they have in common, represented by squares"

Gitwithit's photostream from Flickr: portraiture, ads with 1950s flavor

Posted by oook at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2008

Muto

I saw the Baden version of this last year sometime, but the Buenos Aires iteration is more detailed. You won't regret the 7+ minutes:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo, and I reached it via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, who snagged it from Jenn Lena's blog.

Posted by oook at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2008

Tsk tsk

This one somehow escaped me in my sheltered youth, but I'm making up for it:

say the Notes: from "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, written by Dr. Seuss himself, we have this musical number featuring the film's villain Dr. Terwilliker getting dressed to conduct his 500-boy piano symphony..." and there's mooore:

How did this ever get made? Here's some more context:

If you've somehow managed to avoid it thus far, it's a very '50's, very Seussian musical. Simply put, it's the story of a boy falling in love with a plumber while trying to escape from a maximum-security piano camp. It's also the story of how movie-making can go awry.

As it turned out, Ted 'Dr. Seuss' Geisel hated the experience of being involved in the movie, and detested the final product. He forbade any other Seuss material to be adapted to the big screen during his life time. (Sound reasoning, as it turned out.)

In turn, Columbia Pictures lost faith in the film mid-production, yanked promotion, cut the budget, and cut huge portions out of the finished movie.The plans for an epic children's fantasy along the caliber of Wizard of Oz were dashed, and the film received tepid reviews upon release.

And yet there's still something there, and it's a movie that needs to be seen. Especially if you're a Seuss fan.
(from I'm Learning to Share)

Posted by oook at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

ok, enough already with the dancing

...but you hafta admit, there's something sublime here:

Posted by oook at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Prophetic or what?

Cleaning up the Desktop led me to this image

Harry Grant Dart 1911
(see larger)
a Harry Grant Dart cartoon snagged from Paleofuture (who got it from Life 1911). Note that the multimedia User is pointing with his left hand to "Son Willie" on the menu, and that a real-time image of Son Willie's doings is projected (other choices are "The Office", "Golf Matches", "Aeroplane Races", "Theatres", "Tennis" and so on), and that the sign to the left says "International Wireless Home News Service Events As They Transpire Accurately Recorded"

Posted by oook at 08:23 AM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2008

Yet another who knew?

(see also the currently viral Robert Muraine)

And this one is fuzzy but worth watching for sheer chutzpah:

Posted by oook at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

Chabon reads from the Yiddish Policemen's Union


followed by Q&A session from the same reading.

I picked up the book in the Pittsburgh airport and have been enjoying its improbabilities. Not surprising that it's a Nebula Award winner, and up for Hugo and Sidewise awards too. An example of its descriptive and analytical astuteness:

A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of schoolgirls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they've been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid --the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground. (pg. 197)
I'm interested to see that Christianne Alarmist-Librarian identified the very same passage as the quintessence of the book...

Posted by oook at 08:02 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-24

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 23, 2008

Something is Happening Here but you don't know...

Sometimes you realize that Time is Passing You By, but there are ways to get yourself Up to Speed again, like deconstructing this (some Extra Help at Wired):

(once again, I'm rediffusing something that Everybody Already Knows About, just in case you don't...). To further confuse/inform yourself, immerse yourself in these two:

Any Student of Americana surely needs to include Liam Kyle Sullivan in the Canon: liamshow.com and Liam's YouTube videos will be efficacious, but caution is probably advised in the where and when... Still, Let Me Borrow That Top, Muffins and Text Message Breakup strike me as Contemporary Cultural Essentials.

Posted by oook at 03:03 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-23

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 22, 2008

Vicarious flight

Amazing what a bit of geekery can do:

Posted by oook at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

Amy Walker introduces herself

via BoingBoing, which probably means that everybody has already seen it, but just in case you haven't:

One may ask just what a native speaker of each dialect would identify as bogus, but one doesn't need to really.

Posted by oook at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

Hodgman on hoboes, redux

...and what-all you can do with a single image, backgrounding a culturally significant Fabrication:

See also link to reading of 700 hobo names and illustrations too.

Posted by oook at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Back again

A several-days outage due to some server snafu... teaches me that the Blog matters to me, and I have a considerable backlog of stuff ready (or almost ready) to post. I note that the feed from my del.icio.us collections hasn't updated, so that's another thing to try to fix manually:

U.S. Gas Temperature Map temp=$$

NY Times archive, 1851-1922 "All the news that was fit to print"

1973 Sears catalog progress has been made...

Chris Harrison's Amazon book map "...10,316,775 connections (edges) between books Amazon believed were related. This allowed me to throw the data into my old wikiviz engine to spatially layout a huge mosaic of books (I let it run for a 140 hours). Items that were noted as being similar had attractive forces, bringing them together, often into large groups."

Teddy bear stuffer from Shorpy brrrrrr...

Duckies on parade: "On January 10 1992, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores."

YouTube takedowns by requester

Posted by oook at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2008

links for 2008-05-16

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 15, 2008

links for 2008-05-15

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 14, 2008

Wooten Bros

Darryl Landry sent me the link to this, in response to yesterday's excess:

...and I'll bookend it with

I don't find these as incomprehensible or inaccessible as the Die Like A Dog example, perhaps because I dimly grasp what the musicians are doing.

Posted by oook at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-14

Posted by oook at 03:31 AM

May 13, 2008

The outer limits

or maybe outré... Peter Brotzmann (alto & tenor saxophones, tarogato), Toshinori Kondo (trumpet, electronics), William Parker (double bass), and Hamid Drake (drums, percussion) are the Die Like a Dog Quartet. Their performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival 1995 is available, 9:31 of it. I know precisely ONE person who is equipped and inclined to appreciate this sort of thing. All I can do is shake my head in wonder. Can't say I like it, let alone understand it, but I guess I'm willing to accept that there's something to understand. From WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Posted by oook at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)

Deceptively simple

Echidne of the Snakes sometimes includes links to YouTube musics. This one has a pretty remarkable guitar accompaniment by Senegalese wizard Hervé Samb, whose fingers are unfortunately not clearly seen in the video. His MySpace page has some more examples of his playing, but I haven't found any recordings for sale just yet.

Posted by oook at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-13

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 12, 2008

from Ken

The Day the Squirrel Went Berserk:

Posted by oook at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-12

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 11, 2008

Gliss

About 5 years ago I happened upon a Glissentar

in a music store where I ummmm just happened to be (happens a lot...) and didn't resist. For those unfamiliar with the instrument, it's sort of a baritone oud (in terms of its string setup, with 5 unison pairs and a single bass string), fretless, with piezo pickup. I haven't really tamed it to my purposes, for reasons that I don't quite understand, and a couple of days ago I came close to deciding to sell it (not something I am in the habit of doing with instruments --I buy them, and have them). I've reconsidered that rash decision, and now I'm thinking about new departures I might assay instead. Since my chequered musical career has been almost entirely acoustic, I'm pretty clueless about what happens and could happen when an instrument is plugged in, but I guess it's not too late to learn. I've found several YouTubish bits that suggest possible directions starting with Robert Godin himself talking about the glissentar:

But how can a player actually use the instrument? It's interesting to see Michael Vick's guitaristic approach, but it's not what I want to do myself:

I'm more attracted to Fatih Ahiskali's approach to the instrument as a variety of oud, and his chops are pretty impressive (he uses both the traditional oud plectrum and an idiosyncratic finger style):

and this, where he ventures into classical guitar repertoire:

and THIS one is really spectacular:

I also found some worthwhile bits on setup and string alternatives (n.b. Savarez Alliance).

Posted by oook at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-11

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 10, 2008

Is it the hat or the venue?

and here's more:

Posted by oook at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2008

Politics

via a link on Kate Beaton's deleriously wonderful Hark! A Vagrant:

Posted by oook at 07:32 AM | Comments (0)

I think it's the boots

(via Dr Frank's What's-it)

Posted by oook at 07:22 AM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

links for 2008-05-08

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 07, 2008

Lesson in Press Conferencism

I can think of lotsa people who could take lessons from this:

(the last moments are especially important)

Posted by oook at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

Mary Jo Salter

Christopher Lydon is almost always interesting, surprising, enlightening. Today's wonder is an encounter with a poet, Mary Jo Salter. What first caught my eye was the text of Salter's "Young Girl Peeling Apples" and I predict you'll enjoy it too. Here's the 34-minute interview, and it's quite worthwhile. Me, I don't usually buy poetry, but I'm making an exception by ordering her Phone Call to the Future. The UPS Man will deliver it in a couple of days.

Posted by oook at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-07

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 06, 2008

Disnification on the Tigris

This in today's Guardian:

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad's Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

It goes on, if you have the stomach. "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" indeed...

Posted by oook at 07:42 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-06

Posted by oook at 03:31 AM

May 03, 2008

May 02, 2008

links for 2008-05-02

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM

May 01, 2008

Found in the barn

We've been cleaning up stuff in the Nova Scotia house, opening boxes that haven't seen the light of day in 10 and even 20 years. One contained this set of favorite coffee cups of the past:
once-favorite coffee cups

I can remember the feel of each of them, and recall the sense of loss as, one by one, their handles broke and a successor had to be chosen from the trove of Karen Truesdell cups. The cleanup task has had lots of similar moments of remembrance.

Posted by oook at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-01

Posted by oook at 03:30 AM