Plans are a-Bodypart, Especially a-Foot.

Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

When we walk home from school every night, across the bridge over the ex-river, just bed now, we wish certain things. Not for things, just things. Just. We look in the river. Not so much water there, just ice. Justice.

But our judgments are clouded. Or our cloudments are judged. Call me someone who lived through the 60s—okay Peter was born in the 60s but only just, and I am near to being born in the 80s. No that’s a lie, I wish. We are the same age—it must have been all that acid because I am seeing what they mean when they say you can see things in the clouds. I can see Kennedy’s assassination, and I don’t even know any of the details. It is a virtul history lesson, inchoate. I know it involved an incontrovertible—what sort?—and a building and a gun. I see now how tires are changed on cars, how all those Kiwis and Aussies died at Gallipoli, and if I bought a Tonka tank instead of a car and we (oops!) had a daughter as cute as Peter’s niece <em>>, then we could teach her how to drive it! Even in, or seeing a sand[pit|box] [-bull|-] -terrier. And I think I see a chemistry set for her tenth birthday bunsening away there, and a very pretty girl up there, very. Before we played in our sandpit as kids, we had to check it for cat poop!

Peter says he misses what he thought was you. He was floating on cloud nine. It’s not even that you encouraged people to play golf on the rooftops of our fine city, he could have dealt with that—sh!t fcuked up as. Oddly, I have just thought how strange it is that Harvard has kept the “fas” part of all College/Graduate School of Arts and Science email addresses, e.g. Peter was “whincop@fas.harvard.edu”; it used to be “husc”. But you were to him:–

Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid’s archery,
Sink in apple of his eye

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

... of a storm, a blogstorm has been brewing like a cup of tea for two, like the two tease in that network channel, TNT, which, to sum up this sentence, are we being asked to first T the second T? Like teeing off the roof where (who? fun-lovers?) flog balls and hit on them. (“Flog” in New Zealand English means to steal, to hit, or to sell off cheaply.) I have exhibited great restraint. And on October 1st, some year, how about this for the screamplay:–

how much of us was real since my changed paintings and drawings reveal a lot but it would take years to analyze them and i am destroying everything you wrote to me physically and by computer because the little i have bothered to interpret has caused a complete identity breakdown which you have witnessed and in fact with others caused and i was supposed to cave but i didn’t even though i now realize the world is a truly despicable and dishonest and disingenuous place and if i am right about you then i despise you more than even you who are evil reified could possibly imagine and i shall not let that rest without converting it into actions which i cannot imagine anyone would especially like and i have to stop my research for the sake of my sanity because both obsession and the content have almost destroyed me in a way you had not planned on but i am far from ruined and i am well [prepared to fully recover] when the time comes and i feel that time is pretty much now and the big question that you could answer with the alternative being far worse by my researching further and you well know i am not that stupid even though you have been so full of misplaced hubris it is risible and i will find out even more and i know way more than you think i know

[There is no reference to bad contraptions, in case the Feds are wondering and listing, or waxing supercilious. We don’t use g*ns. Held them, yes. I’ve also been in an earthmover or groundshaker—I bet they can even do that, those impact and collision geophysicists—people think a meteorite is going to slam into our fair planet in 2012, scatological eschatology—and have operated some lever age or another—I don’t think it actually operated the machine/vehicle itself—but I wouldn’t trust me to do the subtler things of landscape gardening, I’d break the twigs in all the wrong places, push it one leaf too far.] Details were not going to be divulged here. No one knows who we are talking about, and if you do, you are wrong, go reckon again. Sometimes a kittypile is several miaows deep and some purrs too. And we are not talking. We are writing. We are not writing. We are tapping. (Check out our tumblr blog which has one of P’s compositions on it that has some boring detail about not talking or writing. Dumb.)

And then there is this, and I hope including the entire lyrics of a Loquat song is not naughty: I thought perhaps it was the other way around (read the lyrics), but, no. Well, perhaps now. But it was you, in innumerable ways, and I mean that in an ℵ₁ measure. Generously. The whole quotation here is for academic reasons, as we are both music faculty, to the word, not to the letters (haven’t got that Ph.D., fifteen years down the track; I got the idiot’s Harvard A.M. degree which means I suck). I am smitten with the voice and songs of Loquat (the timbre of the guitar is a bit nasty, not to criticize the actual work of the guitar, but the engineer got better at it in the second then third album; the singer’s voice is amazing amazing, especially when notes are hit exactly—which she is does for sure, or with no shouting; all perfect in the following song), and they sing of such tortured types of woe, some might say facile, some might say difficult (or even difficile), even fruitless, I’d certainly say with a culture of women claiming their rightful turf, as sisters they should. I’m more for siblings and everyone, but, etc. And I know this is a kittypile of kittypiles. A veritable palimpets. I say, wear their t-shirts and wait for their next album. You’re just a dandelion seed, that flies through the air, randomly, and disappears....

You used to throw gourds out the window
And I’d cover my mouth, laughing
You’d eat your broccoli with ketchup and cottage cheese
We look kind of the same
But you're different because you’re a time bomb

You’re not my strawberry girl
I know I’m awkward around myself
But this isn’t fun anymore
You make me feel obsolete

And it’s taken so long for me
To ignore you
And I'm so proud of myself

I never could predict the moment
When I’d be thrown in the closet
And I’d be stuck in there for months
Sitting locked in the dark

Mushed into my clothes
I’m much too afraid to ask you
To let me out of here
And start over without you

—Loquat, “Time Bomb” (Before the Momentum) [© attribution]

I don’t know if a disclaimer is necessary or not. And this just in, hot off the 1912 press, by Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant, an itinerant laborer who was active in the IWW. He made up the now-famous expression:–

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

...

—Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave” [© attribution]

He then goes on to attack the Salvation Army and their hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I wanted to use a nickname for them, since we call them the Sallies in NZ, but I see here they are the Sally Ann. One of the first links I clicked was alt.lawyers (cached in case this one bites it; this is true for everything I include), presumably as old as usenet itself. Ah, those lawyers, never can tell with language like that. Must have used more than just uuencode (from the man page: “Uuencode and uudecode are used to transmit binary files over transmission mediums that do not support other than simple ASCII data”—that has me thinking back to soundfiles...). And the Wikipedia page on Usenet has, as with most things freely dispersing around the internet appearing not to make money, the most amazing diagrams, which I will reproduce, with a wink in my left eye. (The right one got an apple jammed in it. Kind of got shoved in my mug. In fact, a crabapple. Yeah, that’s it, crabapple jelly and custard pie.) (I also wonder about buildings changing hands for big bucks but never a lot being done with them. Useful for the fourth of July, to get a good view I suspect—Cambridge/Boston’s fireworks are amazing, with pyrotechnic cubes and happy faces from the 60s and also numbers—or even for the finale in V for Vendetta, which I imagine 43% of MIT’s student population might like. Oh, meta-Google “Google Ron Paul” or go to http://www.apfn.net/ (or .org), a not-OTT fantastic web site in general, good essays. The first of its kind, I think. The video on how good capitalism is is a hoot.

Oh, here is the Wikipedia Usenet main map:

The other two diagrams will be in my next post because they are fascinating are here! Their descriptions make so much fall into place—the article (not so much usenet itself but its freakishly ubiquitous clones), the diagrams taken as a whole, free data sources, exchanges, Yiddish words like yadda yadda*. In that way it disturbs me: too much excitement is, well, too much incitement, and having such curiosity as to give rise to fascination doesn’t let me sit back and do nothing. It makes me want to use the bathroom! And to write.

“A diagram of Usenet servers and clients. The blue, green, and red dots on the servers represent the groups they carry. Arrows between servers indicate newsgroup group exchanges (feeds). Arrows between computers and servers indicate that a user is subscribed to a certain group and reads or submits articles.” [From Wikipedia, “Usenet.” Benjamin D. Esham, the copyright holder of this work, published it under the Public Domain license.]

“A visual example of the many complex steps required to prepare data to be uploaded to usenet newsgroups. These steps must be done again in reverse to download data from usenet.” [From Wikipedia, “Usenet.” Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.]

*And just because, I wanted to find a Latin translation of “yadda yadda,” as I saw it in an excellent book recently. I think it was borreo, fascio, or something like that, but I couldn’t find the idiom. I did, however, find this. I think there needs to be a theorem a little more sophisticated than the four-color map theorem: we need a wherefore color map theorem that not only proves things about figure–ground colorings, but about boundary conditions of colors in general, using endomorphisms, orbifolds, and graph theory. I will be posting on maps in the next fortnight (I was too weak to thing of the American term); I have a number of old maps, and books on maps, and looking down on earth from space I doubt has one in awe for any reason other than for its awesomeness; looking down on maps of countries, or counties, or heroin trafficking routes (there’s a great French cartographer who produces remarkable maps of “transportation”—the cotton trade, Hannibal’s tour of Europe, etc. and I will bring in many examples from him. And after that, unusually coded, or claimed-to-be-coded, texts, such as the Voynich manuscript—I thought it was “Voisnitch”!—and the Codex Seraphinianus—I have a tumblr-to-be blog post on that incredible Codex), bemuse me, like the pieces are put together in such a way that... you’ll see. It has in a painful way fascinated me for years. Again, as this is a slightly anachronistic editing effort, on my Tumblr blog, which runs parallel to this but the two never duplicate each other, I have music, Peter’s, since we haven’t worked out how to do it on Blogger. One piece talks about strange things, include maps. Briefly, but it’s the context, and what a con-text it is. (Our own site, anon-∞, has links to all these pre-figured blogs, sites, bookmarking things, social networking sites to be ignored, sites for posting sounds, music, and art, a writing publishing site, etc.)

Incidentally, my astrological sign is Taurus. The Bull. Makes me stubborn. And mine is Aquarius. The water bearer. Makes me bloated. [© attribution]

Like a Water, Under Troubled Skies, I will Lay me Down.

Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

Today I’m learning a kindred spirit to see-plus-plus: to code piano the Terry Riley way*.

Specifically, to understand the distribution and tagging of chunks in audio files; as the book says, to find the data that is not audio. There apparently can be, in RIFF-WAVs and AIFFs, any amount of junk, which therefore needn’t be junk. I wonder if the format was invented that way?—like our genome, though not designed—having the so-called garbage genes (which at least some evolutionary scientists believe are part of some imperative, not vestigial, nor accidental or superfluous). So I have taken out Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini’s book (they edited it, almost 900 pages long plus a DVD of code), The Audio Programming Book from the fabulous music library at the college we teach at. I know I have a guardian angel, kind of on a rotating basis. Yes, that book in brimming, a font of wisdom; we can be composer/coders, or musicians, to learn so much. And everything, after all is said and done, says a little something about how the mind works, so reading it reaches untold depths; it also probes the history of synthesis and ways of coding, from Music V to MaxMSP or SuperCollider. Assembly language to C completing full circle back to assembly. One of the editors also edited The Csound Book. Need I say more than the fourth preliminary chapter/foreword text:–

The Csound Book is not meant to be “read“ from cover to cover. Although I have organized the chapters into thematic sections such as SOftware Synthesis, Signal Processing, Programming, Composition, MIDI, and Real-time, the material in each section does not necessarily progress from beginning to advanced. The best way to “read” The Csound Book will depend on your level of experience with synthesizers, signal processors, and computers. I assure you that there is something for both the beginner and the expert in every section, but given the breadth and scope of what is covered here, it is quite easy for beginners to lose their way. Below, I have outlined several of the paths I take with my students at....

(I plan on writing a detailed review of the two tomes: they are encyclopedic, and have forged new mechanisms for those omnipresent, prescient, and wonderful sciences, the sounds of the music technology helps us control, record, synthesize, modulate. Just waving the brain-flag for must-reads. Not that I am one for such excitement, might I add “fervently.”)

And they are both honest titles. I have a book called Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, which, a little into the first part, the author fesses up, and here I quote C. B. Delaney, in the official Amazon review section, “That’s too good to be true! Okay, author Joan Bolker admits she gave her book the title Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day to get the reader’s attention. And she admits that it’s unlikely you’ll actually finish a dissertation at that speed. As she tells her clients, however, a mere 15 minutes is much better than no writing at all when they’re stuck.”

Hence my blogs. They’re all about made up scenarios, not about fashionistas and soccer moms (although I like nice clothes, football, and my mother, this book is quite an anteater to that sucky concoction), and who knows if there is >strong<enough sanity squeezed between the bilge of glib digital seizures in my live blogsss.

And I think that UHU is a type of glue, a joke to keep chunks in certain (all?) file formats held together despite the strain caused by a bulge of data fat. Chew on that. I don’t know if 00010 01001 01110 00001 10010 01001 00101 10011 are the same.

*In C. Thanks, mnemonic cop. That make me catch up, know a lot. But is the composition really that aleatoric? Or has it been treated more as a (ongoing) fixed state than it should be?

When P taught at Harvard (as a TF = TA) he had (Peter here) a brilliant student named Richie Williams. I knew on the first minute of class, when we were selecting students—a class of 12 from 59 applicants! In Ivan Tcherepnin’s old teaching studios—that Richie should join us: he was a VES (Video, Et Setera... no, Visual and Environmental Studies department, really video/animation/film/photography/printmaking... art school stuff, in two of the nicest buildings on campus—Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, and H. H. Richardson‘s Sever Hall with two whispering arches) concentrator (major, main part of degree). He mentioned he wanted to make video feedback, and he was wearing pink socks with flowers on them.

A definite, as an aging friend (but aren’t we all?) used to say, champion (though I mean it in a positive context, and it stands up to the truth by any standards, also what that sweet angel used to say). That feedback thing: I designed a module composed of entirely of feedback performance for my beginner electronic music class. Two people, just two people (not one, not three, ...), stayed after class, six semesters apart, one on the first week, and the other on the fourth, to ask me what “feedback” is. An academic generation apart, yet... did they know each other? By any standards, the answer is no. But with these two, standards are lowered. This is no comment about knowledge, ability, or innate faculty, but on character: males are different from females when it comes to asking about feedback. Don’t ask.

Richie’s final composition in MUS 167r (Electronic Music Composition) was a version of In C... but in an electronic music class, in the “digital” second semester? His was to use all the small piano practice rooms in the basement of Paine Hall, the largest part of Harvard’s music department, each piano having a chunk of his version of In C and a pen if we wanted to alter the notes. We would then wander around, playing his piece for 10 minutes. Very much fun, amazing results. And there were parts in between our little stabs at playing piano—walking, talking, discussing the nature of the world—then back to another chunk of sound.

Digital? Pianos require fingers for his piece, he said.

Scythe Agenda.

(retrieved from http://www.morethings.com/fan/seventh_seal/ on 20110111-0447)

Under PlexiGlass.

This is highly unusual for our enterprise: in a panic that the art was being stolen away from us(!) we glued some unphotographed small paper drawings under plexiglass, on top of a very heavy steel slab. No one could steal it. Okay, crazed, yes yes. The drawings were partly ruined; they are very faint and the glue sort of did some chemistry that was bonding but not in the good way. Anyway, this for contrast.

Traitor Trash.

This is our (P’s and my) most recent big acrylic, 30x40” and enough paint so that the raw materials cost around $70. So that, we suppose, is its worth, except the materials are now used and all we have is this masterpiece. Moot: we will never sell our love-children into the bondage of another household.

The painting is, well, a lot of things, including something like a well: you can look down it and see if there is a pussy down there:–

Ding, dong, bell,
Pussy’s in the well!
Who put her in?
Little Tommy Green.
Who pulled her out?
Big Johnny Stout.

What a naughty boy was that,
To drown poor pussy-cat,
Who never did him any harm,
But killed the mice in his father's barn!

—Mother Goose. (Really!)

But we don’t kill kitties. It’s that whole Anglo-Saxon thing: Peter is boringly English with a drop of Shelty, and you can probably tell from my name what my heritage is. So, Angles all around, and a fair amount of hot and steamy Saxon. Angular but all round, everywhere always look over there see there. He as a CD called “Death—to the right of them.” In fact:–

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
  Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
  Rode the six hundred

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

That was the Crimean war, the Cossacks/Russians vs. the six hundred. A Pyrrhic victory? Depends on your perspective. You could learn a million ways of reading that poem, and still not get the whole picture. But, so vivid. So much so that light might change your point of view.

Why do we have colors? Did Locke or Berkeley or Bacon or or or have anything to say on the matter? Ahhh... not matter. A secondary quality.

That is the picture we just posted. Into the jaws of Death. If Ingmar Bergman’s Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal had significant jaws, like gloriously square testosteronal ones (actually, we only refer to the lower jaw when we talk about the shape of jaws), then the painting is a colored version of a very, very, very miserable time.

Worse than Lars von Trier’s Medea. Just hangin’ around. And plotting a hatchery of images and quotes from that “A bishop and a knight” mov(i)e(/solution).

The Silence of Sound.

If I wrote a play, and I am actually writing one, it wouldn’t quite be in Braille, but to start with would consist of a lot of dots fairly well organized, able to be read with a little imagination or delusion. (Spot the différance.) Then I’d join the dots just as we did as kids. Next, I’d perform a Gaussian blur on the image just as we did as kids. And the figures resulting would have perspective, correct shading, take on the form of both humans doing various things and also quite clearly letters. That way I would write a play.

Or I could start of with one of my compositions, and with the fcuked up spectrum that is imposed on everything these days (new project: to trace the source of this leak, shouldn’t neither boil nor freeze me in the process), and my psychological trauma of resulting in terrible co-dependence, I must deface that and what will I find? Exactly that message. Ugh. It seems I have_ daemon written terrible_ socket things without_ resource realizing_ driver_ framework it. Every_ dae.

Convincing? Wait until my next barrage_

Chirp Chirp Marble Dressed up as Love Birds.

Can you see them? Their love is so strong that they even managed to etch, psychically, their names. That much should be obvious. And quite a few angles (well, half each) of their faces.

Oh, rotate so their signature is on the left. They in many forms are on the right.

Vandals.

Waiting for ελευθερία. Beckett. And The Lost Ones. A small world of a flattened cylinder, with a circumference of 50m and a height of 16m. And its pitiful inhabitants. Dense prose. Beckett.

This is How I Remember You Most Fondly.

THis is built on the eigHtH letter of tHe alpHabet. It is an easy letter to miss wHen typing sucH tHat every occurrence of it will be capitalized, kaput. It sneaks in. In Russian it is transliterated to X in tHe Latin alpHabet. In Greek, it is just marked as an aspirant. See, I’m avoiding it quite well.

I saw tHe apparition of an acHe on an ex-girlfriend’s bum (yes, bum; and yes, we sHared Her). SHe offered no explanation. I realized tHen tHat sometHing was awry witH tHe relationsHip. NotHing (I am? SHe is) but a HeartacHe. THe end of my world or one Hull of assail.

So I took a sHot of tHat H-bum and did tHe curve tHing to it in ~PHotosHop. Snap. CHange. Snap. Use Latin. Don’t use Latin.

AnotHer girlfriend, well, tHere was a butt story (not a bum story). SHe also witH a nice round one, sat on an empty soup bowl. SHe stood up. THe plate liked tHat butt, and sHowed tHat by suction. We didn’t need to pry it off. It slurp-glopped off.

I missed six acHes wHen (no, seven!) writing tHis.

I Don’t Want the Top of the Words.

When I was around 8 years old, I went through to my parents bedroom, and said, mostly asleep, but recall it well, and I was very earnest about this, exactly what is written in the title of this entry. I never quite knew what it meant, but I’ve played around with the idea.

The first image is a snapshot of a piece of P’s in the way we view sounds. It is slightly stretched. In fact it was largely ever-so-slightly filtered white noise. For an experiment, I grabbed the whole image, altered its perspective (always fun) using GraphicConverter, and plonked it somewhere so that things seemed to line up well on all four sides, so the lines and circles sync'd very nicely. Just playing around with possibilities, just a study in complete randomness. I have outlined the plonked image in black—its resolution is slightly different. I Gaussian blurred the whole thing slightly, as that brings out strong lines quite well. Just more randomness.

Songs are not Meant to be Stupid. Tread Lightly.

Don't end a clause with a preposition, so: Don't with songs, up with which mess, again: words are very important, without which we would not have such tender expressions as:–

I need to speak up
I cannot see
I need to find you
—Jose Amnesia ft. Jennifer Rene, “Louder” (Original Mix) (Armind label [Dutch Trance], 2006)

Sometimes I spin around for days
Skip and chase and say
—Blonde Redhead, “Led Zep” (In an Expression of the Inexpressible, 1998)

I know the way now
Always I’m not down... oh no!!
—Blonde Redhead, “Melody of Certain Three” (Melody of Certain Lemons, 2000)

But these are the letters from melody
Show me how to read
Show me how to write
These are the things you can do for me
—Blonde Redhead, “Melody” (Misery is a Butterfly, 2004)

And then I’ll have to figure out what to do
I’m kind of afraid I’m co-dependent on you
—Loquat, “Swingset Chain” (It’s Yours to Keep, 2005, Jackpine Social Club label)

(Click on the singer/guitarist’s name, Kylee, for her narrative of the background of the song, and also this—ignore the crappy ringtone blah—in fact the whole site is pretty interesting.)

Think of songs, usually love songs, that involve being lost, needing to find the way, figuring things out. Finally some truth; I know this feeling well.

[All reproduced for the purposes of academic critique. And in this case it is a critique-in-absense, to be found in between the lines of what I write below. © the original copyright holders.]

What if I am actually t&<strong>raining these people—in what? Whatever, I don’t mind, really, honesty never kills—in the sound/musical aspect? (Spect- does mean see, after all. Nah, just opining, I seriously need to chill.)

Splish Splash I was Taking a Bit Reduction and Dithering Around.

First dithered, then undithered (in GraphicConverter) of numbers of colors: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 38, 44, 50, 56, 62, 70, 78, 86, 92, 100, 108, 116, 124, 134, 144, 154, 164, 174, 184, 194, 208, 220, 232, 244, 256, according to the color profile. It should be obvious what this is. Or not. This is an educational video I prepared for class, so I hope I haven’t crossed any lines. I knew someone who did that, but were got our lines crossed and we didn’t know what crack the other was on. More like fissures, then seizures, then...

It looks a lot nice and less familiar normal color-inverted, so if you have a Mac and haven’t heard of ⌃⌥⌘-8, now is the time.

T. S. Eliot, “Usk.”

Do not suddenly break the branch, or
Hope to find
The white hart behind the white well.
Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell
Old enchantments. Let then sleep.
“Gently dip, but not too deep,”
Lift your eyes
Where the roads dip and where the roads rise
Seek only there
Where the grey light meets the green air
The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrim’s prayer.

Hart Crane, “Legend.”

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by...

I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are,—
The only worth all granting.

It is to be learned—
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.

Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,—
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.

Color me yellow.

And lie me our straight
and hope to be gone very soon
  Fit my surface to the moon.

It says bye
and keeps repeating “it”
  Gets the nod.

Plate on a face hot grill
and kick everything violently in sight
  Until my toes fall off.

Press my head somewhere comfortable
and fcuk a towel or anything
  My arms and gravity hate each other.

Someone thought my head was a rubber tree
groove on it stupid stupid
  Sapped it, it is lapped.

With two promises left
  they are the same I am dumb
But one is for you, then I get what is rest.

I am brain damaged
  (really)
Remember her to [whatever].

Because steely
  cold.

Where my Parents Live in New Zealand, or the Ceiling of my Bedroom Repaired.

Show me the way to go home
I'm tired and I want to go
  to bed
I had a little drink about
  an hour ago
And it went right to my head

Where ever I may roam
On land or sea or foam
You will always hear me
 singing this song
Show me the way to go home
—Irving King

I Can Read Better than you Through my Spectacles, Young Thing.

She changed my world. She saw, she conquered, she came... shame, she left. Not the wonderful person in the photo, but my dream, she from years years years ago: daring, endearing, ending, upending, end up... ending ending ending.

Okay, that’s what she looks like now.

My living art studio.

I sleep here sometimes.

I Found this Behind my Stronghold, my Office.

I tried to make this one sexy.

It pains me.

De “lorem ipsum” ex Wikipedia, sine citationibus sed con Petro “inscriptionibus.”

The most used form of the lorem ipsum dates from the 1960s, and for some random reason the writer has paired it with this bit of near irrelevance for this exact sentence, it perhaps can be dated as far back as the sixteenth century. It’s a famous filler for text-space when typesetting. Like saying blah blah. Is taken from Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, §1.10.32–33. “About The Purposes of Good and Evil.”

A pathetic translation was given before this second one of the title, above, with the word “About” put in square brackets. I mean, what does “De” mean in this context? Am I lacking a hyphen before I mark the question? I’ll level with you: I have not read the lorem ipsum, nor have I read the Wikipedia article. Honest. But something tells me that it is relevant. And here is how. All I am doing is filling up this sentence with words. So why not use an official filler of text-space. (Might I note that a context is part of its own context, and also I am defeating the purpose(s) of even this sentence by using these exact words.)

The opening from Cicero:–

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. “Neither is there anyone who loves grief itself since it is grief and thus wants to obtain it.”

That’s a dodgy and stiff translation, even as an oration or essayed statement. (For example, why amet?!) In translating, and among translators too I suppose, since they translate (like the whole christ thing, trans-latus, “carried across”), there is much freedom. I am not sure what kind of freedom, and if we all subscribe to it.

“It is not known exactly when the text acquired its current standard form; it may have been as late as the 1960s.” I should like, finally, to take to task some writers for their crap use of language, and this is more descriptive than prescriptive. Ways to say things abound; they thrive in their abundance. Many they are. Betwixt the wind and our nobility, some sentences suck. And I have quoted verbatim just one sentence from Wikipedia (at the beginning of this paragraph). How would Fowler—I think one of the sculptors of and commentators on the English language, as living and breathing, not a thing but a process—take that sentence? “Inelegant variation” springs from my mind onto this page. If the sentence (ergatively) read well: “The form of lorem ipsum most widely used today, given [above], most likely dates from the late 1960s.” So I’ve use a contemporary form of “dates.” Good. Only four words difference. But why on earth “acquired” and why double up on the whole speculation or uncertainty thing. It is not so good using the middle voice. “It” is no decent way to begin a sentence! It smacks of unwillingness to say, here is how “it” is, by citing something. Verbosity, inelegant variation, high-fallutin’ snob language, redundancy, no scrutiny of implicit terms even if they are not logically equivalent (not even an academic needs to say both “current” and “standard”; I think that is implied by the sentence taken as a whole, and by the article itself). “May” stands out. Properly, we avoid saying “he” if the person is present (and he isn’t so I believe it is fine—witness a fair use of the impersonal voice). And the text is present and it hasn’t been mentioned by name for a sentence or two, so to call it by its real name I think flows nicely, and it is polite. I won’t elaborate on my comparative.

Or, is there something I’m missing here. Here is a little more of the Latin (using the same sections as above):–

[32] Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

[33] At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat, facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet, ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat....

H. Rackham’s 1914 translation (with major source of Lorem Ipsum highlighted):–

[32] But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

[33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

It really has me scratching my head. But it’s infested. My hair is nice, though. Good use of an “it” construction. Not so incidentally, I think that the above Rackham translation is stylistically inconsistent within itself. Problems. I’m not a Latinist; my only claim is studying with Pope’s Latin Secretary (the guy who write a whole lot of bulls) for his junior and senior intensive courses (mainly for grad students and educators). It didn’t all sink in, because I studied only for a year, and it was a while ago. But we lived Latin, drinking it in with the Carmelite Brothers at the Monestario id S. Pancrazio, talking about current affairs in the real lingua franca. There is still a broadcast of world news every Sunday from Finland! And that is where Linux is from, also Sambuca with melted liquorice, and salt. Mmmmmm. But, that translation flourishes just at the wrong moments.

The link at the end of the Wikipedia article to Metesyntactic variable had some foobar kind of code:

// The function named foo
int foo(void)
{
   // Declare the variable bar and set the value to 1
   int bar = 1;
 
   return bar;
}

I gonna look for some math to throw in. Hmmm. Wikipedia like Google is not the secret holder of information nor the evil power that will one day choose; it genuinely wants to get the message out there: anyone can learn. For some more than others, but that is a virtue far from worth discussing.

A precise version of the spectral theorem which holds in this case is:^[73]

Given a densely-defined self-adjoint operator T on a Hilbert space H, there corresponds a unique resolution of the identity E on the Borel sets of R, such that

for all x ∈ D(T) and y ∈ H. The spectral measure E is concentrated on the spectrum of T.

There is also a version of the spectral theorem that applies to unbounded normal operators.

More Ryoji at Another Site. You Can Share Millions of Dollars with Peter.

More from Peter’s Ryoji Ikeda remake CD can be found... HERE! Among them are 6 extracts of a piece he didn’t finish, as the CD was already long enough. They exist for your listening pleasure, um, torture, misery, reminder that your life doesn’t suck? and also to be used with his stupid blessing—stupid because of his stupid copyright notice he puts everywhere. Yes, go ahead and play with the 6 samples, they are fairly good. Credit him. Do something better than he could. Make it sound like a million dollars. Make that two, because then you could contact him, and he could override the -nc- part of the (CC) license. He is as impecunious as I, and, um, isn’t it a -sa- “share alike” agreement, like give me some money. Now. Make three million.

But as I am doing nothing to speak of, here a couple of his other compositions, from completely different periods of his output. He has a Mus.B.(Hons.) (1st class) in composition, but he has largely rejected what he composed for that. Some things should stay in the workshop, or in notebooks. He is old. Forty-two years old, in fact. That means he was approximately class of ’91. He was making electronic music on 8-track machines, and using a MIDI sequencer that overloaded a Yamaha Rev5 reverb device. In fact, vestiges of his 1980s sounds from the Electronic Music Study in Marama Hall of the University of Otago, New Zealand (sorry, he’s a Kiwi) can be found in very many of his pieces. In further fact, the first piece he had me post to my Tumblr site (linked above) has a background wash of sound, very full, writhes ever so slightly; a little unnerving, but it is about bipolar affective disorder, which terrible as it is, some people think doesn’t exist. Or that people suffering (some would say enjoying, for part of the cycle) from some part of the spectrum are misfits or defective. Fcuk them. It’s something you can’t will yourself out of having. I’d know.

If someone tried to say it (the sounds, not the b.a.d., although the latter is likely) didn’t come from the EMS at Otago U., then chance are they are stupid (which includes the possibility of them being a liar).

Oh, the pieces will be in separate links (I can’t work out how to get sounds onto Blogspot. Tumblr is so much easier). I will post my thoughts on lorem ipsum and Wikipedia in a second. Peter and I work together on these things, and his website (I suppose we share it but it is messy, doesn’t make sense too often, and never dollars—don’t become a professional musician, he is muttering—but the site is fun, and my job is to make it worth your while).

PS. I lied a little about how the sounds from 1980s were made. It’s part of my non-renter’s insurance policy. A kind of monetary instrument.

Ryoji Ikeda pt.2.

... following from pt.1 (below!)

Perhaps his music is “Ryoji Ikeda” music, in that no one else could make it, and if someone laid claim to it, even if they, say, called it &/| which means “and/or” or half of some teeter-totter fun, or else /^} which could be “division to the power of a bracket” or a pretty ideogram, instead of +/-, and if they then plastered their name all over it, inside of it, it would still be easy to show that Ryoji Ikeda is the author/artist. How so? Some people have an argument against this notion: for another post, god be willing, I will find the exact word, it escapes me sometimes as I feel something has a stranglehold on my mind. But it is a specious argument. At least, when it is the minimum case of one person or a collective (We are Borg), contending it is theirs when it isn't, the argument I am unable to present is even more useless. The problem is the general case, but I find the Go Make Another One And We’ll Hear Or May We Please Watch? test would come into play. There are legal precedents for obscure, and far less obscure, musical plagiarism. That is more of a stretch than outright theft, so theft should be easy to show.

What does music theft mean? I’m going on about this only because I am writing an article for a local record label’s inform, blog-like column, for composers and similar educators to discuss their work, but more in the sitting at a cafe with a bunch of students—the best lessons are had that way—and writing as if someone said, “Why did you do such-and-such, and this time please be pragmatic! Please don’t try Deleuze. Not appropriate!” See Howard Stelzer’s magazine. Mine’s not up yet because it isn’t written (funny, that), but drafts like this, a scattering of ideas, virally spreading, all over the net, are. Ikeda’s CD is structured in those triplets (three lots of three, plus a kind of summary). The pieces within the triplet run on into the next, and while the transition is as seamless as any other, the music of the new track then has a different bunch of material and transitions to throw at us, I hope bloodlessbloodlessy.

I decided, kind of to frame the task—and I wanted to pump out this music as fast as possible for no real reason, since I’m in no hurry to publish, it’s not like my music is going anywhere—such that each piece uses only the material of a single, chosen “victim” (sacrificial? take me to a Mithraeum) piece: that piece alone (altars are small, but were very powerful in the cult of Mithras, rather like a small alteration here and there can be very powerful when organized and calculated perfectly, or altercations, more fun). And each has a completely different form/content thing happening/being, I’ll even throw out the word dialectic. There. For example, one piece might use a specific technique of altering frequency domain information—perhaps my favorite area to work in, though it’s become a lot harder—either my brain is anti-fractal (I never did like them anyhow—Skeeter Davis) or the sounds are kind of fractal, almost inaudibly. I have written a few papers on the subject, scattered unacademically around the non-academic web—a kind of deathwish in several ways (so if I die mysteriously, blame it on the brainweb of academia and the perverse transfer of ready information). Seriously, how to un-secure a job. Ugh. I will not say what the techniques are quite yet. She or he who stole my multi-disk storage array has all my working files. Learn to tap-dance to their algorithms. Betcha have two right feet.

The video is a still image of the entire spectrograph of the musical aspect, and as the piece moves through its two minutes, I start from low gain/high threshold for the analysis (and therefore color/shape representation) and move to high gain/low threshold. (The coupled terms are in fact similar, not opposites: low gain means not so much sound, and high threshold means to get rid of components that are not loud enough before the gain is applied). At the time I was interested very much in architecture (and I still am), and I go into some detail in one article called “Freak Show” (I’ll ask my friend to add a link to my web maze again once I have completed the clean version’s framework): I made the music and ‘drew’ the spectrograph at the same time, kind of moving from one to the other. It was an important task to me, since I find there to be some quite bogus about Aphex Twin’s spectrographic face. And all the other neat detail—faces, perspective, what seem like words, well, that’s a corruption I have tracked down elsewhere, and published privately on the web (findable but not searchable) until I iron out all creases, take out life insurance, look for a very high paying job (which the articles could well land me...) (and I become a trader at the same time), and I want to have my facts straight. I am very happy with it; I cannot think of too many other examples of two things in this manner being done with no privileged term.

F-ing Cartoon communists

the real and zany end!

Ryoji Ikeda pt.1.

This in from my friend Peter Whincop. He makes electronic music and sounds, video sometimes, paints, and teaches somewhere. He all for sharing art, but never appropriating it. Selling it, yes, but not stealing it. He made me write that, I don’t know what crack he’s on. Clearly strangely obsessed with theft. I know for sure he isn’t the electronic music equivalent of anyone who takes after cookie monster.
______

I made this video and music with two underlying intentions: to produce them at the same time, and to use material (that sounds like his) from a single piece by Ryoji Ikeda, and nothing extraneous. I have completed a remake of his +/- CD, not using all the tracks because some of mine are longer versions of his, one is a video, and because there is a different thrust. Here are some thoughts on thrusting, and eventually with other pieces my friend allows me to, other fencing terms as well (see below).

I have so much to say that I’ll break this into three posts, and for the heck of it put a new piece beside each! This first piece (a video) is the one I am actually talking about: PlusMinusDeathSquareSnowMinusPlus. NB. this is a highly “spatialized” piece, so wear good headphones for the full effect. It is done with IRCAM’s Spat set of dynamic MaxMsp abstractions and externals. When I teach it here at MIT the students are blown away by their new skill—hard to learn, but worth it—that can make their pieces sound as well-produced as Radiohead’s or whatever.

[This should be updated]

Obligatory legal notice:

Title: 0905 ±death⧷death⧷snow∓ [video]
Date: May 2009
People: Peter Whincop (composer, producer)
Credits: Ryoji Ikeda (fair use of material that sounds like his)
Album: ±UNcouth ∓+⧷-
Album/Disk/Track: 18 - (00)
Unix Title: MinusDotDotVideo

Rights: all rights are cleared or implicit. © 2009 Peter Whincop. By permission of owners Barbara and Garry Whincop of Napier, New Zealand. Protected under US and NZ intellectual property laws.

Some idiots thought they could “steal” my music/sounds/art/video/photos/writings/life recently, but I won or they are losing, bad, and I’ve become a little paranoid about the whole “it’s mine even if it’s crap” thing. I’m going to kick their asses. Hard. They also did the fractal filtering (I will fight this to death if need be), digital signing, perhaps mixed in tracks or took some out, though a MaxMSP patch is quite hard to toy with (maybe, just maybe, the thief learned to compose from me? Wouldn’t it be funny if I have correspondence from one of the thieves that discusses a piece? Cleverly worded or not. I do speculate wildly; I do not think I have had a single dishonest music friend), yeah, that’s a lot I guess, isn’t it called fencing when you get rid of stolen goods? All except the composing. Even though the sounds and form are very loosely derived from Ryoji Ikeda’s, they are certainly mine, though I always credit him. And the concept. Only blackmailing me will give the criminals temporary reprieve; until I clear this up legally, initiated by myself. Whatever, and phew.

Ikeda’s 10 pieces are grouped as 3+3+3+1, each group with a “theme.” I don’t mean some fascinating melody, rather I mean what I call an ‘anti-feel’ because I can’t think of his music as having feelings or something that can induce them like a probe sticking you in the brain (or, I suspect, one would respond with equal strength but perhaps differently if a spike was shoved up your rectum); I prefer to think that his pieces enter the mind, but politely so, letting you seize control whenever you like.

But it’s not emotional or even able to be said; it’s somewhat cerebral (and I do not necessarily mean intellectual), even verging on the ineffable. I hope you will hear what I mean; search for his music and it should be clear (well, more than search. Buy or download, listen). It is polite and forceful; delicate/sweet and perturbing: a lot of contradictions, or at least we don’t have singular words for them. I sort of need a word that is, in effect, like a piece of cubist sculpture. Or Erik Satie’s music is like this; as if different when viewed from different directions, in different contexts, with different suggestions. Where can I find words like that?

pt.2 to follow (above!)...

I am Off-Track, or I’m Training (er, shh!) Myself, um, Blogging Techniques.

Hey, I’m new to this, I got a Tumblr account but I thought two “minutes is better than one minute” (FOTC). So I will use this to post music of myself and of friends and we are also conspiracy theorists who want to give a good name to conspiracy theorists. I think it’s a pretty apt, even picturesque and nice sounding, name, but the media has distorted and corrupted so much of what we take in. I think that’s where we get the expression, to be taken in. Nothing to do with cops.

So, blogging I will start! And as I doubt anyone will look, I’ll say and so do as I please (within the rules). NB. The composer and video artist for some of these posts has given me permission to use his material (and his stupid copyright notice attached which I have to include, sorry, I’ll shove it all into one big fat opalescent line).

It is a favor to him; he hates the idea of blogging but secretly wants people to hear and see his stuff. It’s already all around the world, it spans from 2001, with no significant output in a few months (not more than, say 10hrs of finished work) but in private collections, university libraries, radio station archives (he was a performing pianist but now living with him is more like a tantrum), not with everyperson. So it is time. Peter is cautious to kind of mutter that [[mutter mutter i think someone got hold of my sounds and subtly changed them can you add a note when i think they’ve been f-ed up, like in a spectrograph—you’ll see it in my spectrograph piece itself—and i think in that piece there can be seen the profile of women kissing each other but i see that everywhere anyway]] so yeah, I’ll do that.

xxx