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[May. 16th, 2008|09:13 am] |
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I so want to quit my job. I have options but Mercury is in retrograde soon. baalllllls. |
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[May. 14th, 2008|08:38 pm] |
weird thing about acting classes - I got three movies from Netflix. BSG Razor - meh. period movie with Matt Damon, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman - nerdgasm. depressing British movie with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tatou - nerdgasm. my nerdgasms have reversed polarity.
Burning Man is good. building a temple, probably incorporating Archaeopteryx to autogenerate ambient music, probably getting electrical power, vegan meals, showers - the Burning Man equivalent of resort living. I'm a spoiled fucker. :-) |
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[May. 8th, 2008|06:49 am] |
there's this horrible woman I work with who's irritated me several times. in the past I've gotten people like that fired, but I don't care about corporate power any more - so I don't have any - and she's quite popular in a bullying sort of way. also, she's a functional alcoholic. she's been known to walk around the halls at work with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I took this as a treading water job while finding a permanent part-time thing where I could both work for money and work on my own projects and go on auditions as an actor. I think I may have finally found such a job, but I may not have, hence the treading water job until I do.
(and if I have I can't really start until July.)
anyway, what I want to do is "poison" her Jack Daniels, in a nonlethal way, or at least taint the bottle with something which will produce unexpected side effects. like filling brownies with Ex-Lax. unfortunately the only thing I know of which is odorless and tasteless and will produce side effects is acid. when you're dealing with an unkind, deeply neurotic, functionally alcoholic woman who revels in inflicting her horrible personality on people in a corporate setting, putting acid in her whiskey could be terrible karma.
what I really need is something odorless and tasteless which makes people fart uncontrollably.
alternatively I need it to be July so I can start this awesome job. and I need this awesome job to in fact turn out to be as awesome as it appears to be. I expect that to happen but I want to be sure.
taking jobs you're overqualified for can suck really hard. but finding jobs where you can work part-time, permanently, as a programmer, seems surprisingly hard. |
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[May. 2nd, 2008|09:21 pm] |
OK I created an infinitely-running ambient music generator which would guarantee fucked-up trips. presumably it should be possible to modify the data and produce a generator to guarantee excellent trips. but it took maybe twenty minutes with my existing code base. So at this point I have a pretty effective system for creating infinitely-running music generators. that's a cool place to start, at least.
...
twenty minutes later and I have a wicked bad trip generator. it generates ambient music composed entirely of a sample of Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer saying "looks like Giles has some schooling to do." it is sick and wrong. I really need to get out more. :-) |
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[May. 2nd, 2008|08:05 pm] |
OK so this is pretty cool. I figured out a new way to use my music code.
( Read more... ) |
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[May. 2nd, 2008|05:59 pm] |
so I have no idea how in the hell I can get my music system out to Burning Man. I think the code challenges and artistic challenges are sufficiently big-deal-ish that I won't even get to the logistical challenges. in fact spending your weekends coding doesn't lead to the kind of social life where you even have people to go to BM with, which is pretty weak and sad, so all I've really got figured out is my ticket, which I have, and a shade structure I've found which I can buy.
hooking the system up in such a way that it auto-generates music for indefinite periods is probably doable very very soon, like maybe even now - I'd imagine I could do it this weekend for ambient music if I were to work at it for most of the weekend - so the not-obnoxious, mellow, ambient, soothing use case is very much within reach. the gleefully obnoxious use cases, like live-coding techno, breaks, and D&B are still some ways off, although I do have a video of doing very simple live-coding with a code-generated D&B break.
It's very probable that I'll have this system very sophisticated by the time of Burning Man, yet I won't be able to bring it out because of the logistical complications. that's kind of annoying and kind of not a big deal - there'll be more than enough to do and there's always next year. there's really no way in hell I'll get the UI hooked up by Burning Man, since it requires all kinds of hardware knowledge I just don't have, and if I've got to wait a year then there's a very good chance that next year I'll bring the music-generating system **AND** the UI, which is kind of a significant win.
(in fact, while the world is filled to the gills with places I could demo the music system and use it in real life to see how well it performs, Burning Man is really **the** ideal environment to test out the UI.)
come to think of it I can probably get an ambient solution in place without working all weekend on it. |
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[Apr. 25th, 2008|07:31 pm] |
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I'm in New York. Presenting my music code at a programming conference tomorrow. |
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[Apr. 23rd, 2008|10:42 pm] |
so there's an effect I created a few times in some private laboratory experiments in San Francisco around 2000-ish with samples of "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" by Janet Jackson and which I subsequently discovered a garage producer named Todd Edwards has made a whole career out of. I made up the effect, went to England to see family, had some adventures and misadventures and strong drugs in London, and bought a fantastic Todd Edwards record there and went hot damn this is just like those experiments of mine.
ANYWAY. reason I bring it up is that a cursory perusal of the Ableton Live manual leads me to believe that it is very likely I will be able to recreate those effects programmatically, regularly, and automatically for any song. I have not yet verified this yet, but the effect was basically a vocalization blurring, caused by taking several measures that had different lyrics but the same beat, and making one measure out of them. this caused the syllables of the lyrics to blur into nonverbal vocalizations. I'm fairly certain that a programmatic control over MIDI combined with the options Ableton Live exposes to MIDI means that this effect can be created programmatically for any given song. obviously this has usefulness for the dance floor.
(I've been working on setting up a part-time job so I have time during the week for these experiments, and also to go on auditions and intensify my work studying acting. so there's a good chance I may make progress with this later on in the year.) |
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[Apr. 20th, 2008|10:18 pm] |
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next month I return to acting classes. still working on music thing. really need to get out more. techno parties in LA looking extremely good. music code thing really hard. very frustrating. |
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| roisin murphy |
[Apr. 19th, 2008|01:58 pm] |
we got it all
the empire and the fall
dear miami, you're the first to go
disappearing under melted snow
strictly rolling vip
it's goth. it's electro. it's sophisticated. it's dumb. it's about global warming. it's about the facile-ness of WMC. it's about the connection between global warming and the facile-ness of WMC.
LOVE LOVE LOVE ROISIN MURPHY |
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[Apr. 19th, 2008|10:35 am] |
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zomg techno is so much bigger in LA than it is in SF. don't tell anybody. |
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[Apr. 18th, 2008|08:33 pm] |
so Willski used to say to me that "magic makes crazy." here's an interesting thing: this is a generally agreed-upon thing, in the world, and you'll find the basic meme coming from people who think magic is fake as well as people who think magic is real. in fact the only people you won't find it coming from are New Age people who think their crystals allow them to talk to dolphins, which kind of proves the point.
was thinking about that the other day. I had an idea for a movie, kind of a weird idea. two friends, or brothers, or lovers, are in a forest, and they encounter a unicorn. this changes their lives forever, and the weird part is that this movie isn't about the unicorn, it's about how their lives change. thought of a couple variations - in one version, they just see it, a mysterious glimpse through the trees; in another, they hit it with a pickup truck and one of them suggests that they should barbecue it. that's the version I nearly turned into a screenplay; if I ever get around to it, the working title is Jimmy Done Killed Him A Unicorn.
obviously the other things that change from version are things like, do they become closer or further apart as a result of seeing this thing? does one deny it ever happened, and accuse the other one of making it up? in the version where they barbecue it, they invite all their friends, and people who ate the unicorn gradually develop strange powers they can't really control. (couldn't think of a good way to make the ending for that one though.)
probably the best way to do it would be lovers - that could make for a really eloquent breakup movie. the only thing is, that genre doesn't really exist. the breakup album is a huge genre, but there aren't many examples of a breakup movie. I suppose it could work for a romantic comedy, except it'd just be sugary beyond belief. the French could make an excellent rom-com out of that premise, but the French could probably make an excellent movie with a script made by hooking up a dictionary to a random number generator. French movies are appallingly good.
oh well, anyway. went to horrible boring party from hell. work party. awful. corporate. unliveable. I don't understand how these people do it, to be honest. might head out to club to hear techno. speaking of which. fucking Christ. check this out. I just found out that Richie Hawtin is spinning in Los Angeles, and I'm going to be in bloody Portland at a big tech conference.
Richie Hawtin endorses Traktor, by the way, so I gave it a download and have been playing around with it. I like it but for my purposes it's inappropriately specific and insufficiently automate-able. the guys who made Traktor, it's really a mixed bag, they said let's make it really well, and they did make it really well, but the advantages you get over vinyl or CDs are basically two:
1. you get four decks
2. you have a built-in loop sampler
there's really nothing in Traktor that any DJ who's been around a while hasn't already seen in outboard gear. the only real win is if you've digitized a lot of your music already, or if everything you're getting these days comes in digital format. meanwhile Ableton Live represents a whole new paradigm and gives you unprecedented automation and control. so I'm thinking it'll be Ableton Live FTW, but I don't know yet. I'll find out soon. |
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[Apr. 16th, 2008|07:31 am] |
so these producers/DJs Odeed & Wish are in LA soon. I mailed them once just to tell them I loved a track and whichever one it was I mailed wrote back "You think that's going to even things up between us?! I can't believe you had the balls to e-mail me!!!" so then I was like "um who are you dude? I just dig the track, I don't know you." and he was like "whoops."
(weirdly it happened more or less just after I had started offending people left and right on a daily basis so initially I thought "oh crap! what did I do?" and then I realized I hadn't done anything and it was just coincidence.)
anyway here I am, stopped making music for a while, don't even have turntables with me where I live (although I do have new records I bought since moving to LA, even though I didn't bring my tables with me) --- anyway long story short, never leaving the house, never going to parties, never producing unless you count writing code that does some producing for me, totally stone cold sober day in day out, and I go and I start buying records and I start looking for techno parties, and I rejoin SF Raves, and I start looking into giving a presentation on algorithmic music at a programmer user group out in San Francisco, so I have an excuse to visit and kind of get the lay of the land, and out of the freaking blue this guy in England mails me that I should send this track I made to this other guy who's looking for that kind of material. and I saw out of the freaking blue, I actually mailed it to this first guy literally at least a year ago when he posted that he was looking for this particular type of music. but it was a LONG time ago. anyway, so I'm going to mail this guy, but it's weird, because it's like, totally dormant musically, then I suddenly wake up, and some other distantly connected part of the universe wakes up at the same time, like woahdudeheywow etc.
all in all I'm glad I left San Francisco but I'm not glad about the way I did it. I told people I was taking a break from the scene, and they were like, no! first you must have a gigantic soap opera with us! I should have just taken the break and apologized after the fact. preparing them for it just made them drama-centric.
I say this on the odd chance that Red Stickman is reading. you said you were thinking you might wander off to Thailand, my advice is, just do it when nobody's looking, don't give them time to establish opinions about it, because their opinions could be unexpectedly intense and consequently very distracting. just wander off to Thailand and return if/when you feel like it. (of course now wouldn't be the time, but that's not my main point anyway.)
seriously, it's much better to be Mr. "Where the hell did you go?!" than Mr. "What the hell is your problem?!" |
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[Apr. 15th, 2008|07:45 pm] |
so all my CDs are off in Nuevo Mexico, and I've been intimidated by the file-sharing lawsuits into using iTunes to buy music legally - I know, I suck - so I bought two Sisters of Mercy tracks off "Vision Thing" the other day.
the tracks were "When You Don't See Me" and "Ribbons," and the contrast between these two tracks is staggering.
in my main acting class, the core focus is on winning. this is even true when you play somebody self-destructive, or somebody who plays what appears to be a losing role. you have to find a way that destroying yourself contains an element of victory, because it's striving for that victory which makes you dynamic to watch (according to this acting studio's philosophy).
"When You Don't See Me" is an abysmal failure by this metric, and "Ribbons" is an astounding success. and it's funny, because "When You Don't See Me" has Eldritch playing a winning type of role, basically dumping a chick because she doesn't get him, where in "Ribbons" he's gone insane, is obsessed with his memories, and may or may not have murdered his lover in an extremely bloody and violent way. but in "When You Don't See Me" he's passionless, and in "Ribbons" he's stripped to the bone. listening to the two songs in sequence is insane. it's like seeing the same man sleepwalk one moment and then cry his heart out in the other. so dazed and lifeless in "When You Don't See Me," you can't tell if he's singing or mumbling; so raw and true in "Ribbons" that it's almost embarassing. if you ever want to understand the difference between seeing somebody naked and seeing somebody in the nude, listen to Eldritch screaming on "Ribbons." the voice is naked. it'll give you goosebumps.
in my acting class they'd say the script has him winning, but he plays it like a loser; and then the script has him losing, but he wins the scene, because his sincerity makes every second riveting. |
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[Apr. 14th, 2008|02:55 pm] |
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I've located more techno options in Los Angeles than I can handle, in the space of a day. Gigantic megalopoli ftw. |
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