Olafur Eliasson On Wired News

Wired News today has a feature story about a new show by Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson is a contemporary artist who works with light and projection. One of his best-known works is The Weather Project, in which he created an artificial sun. As I occasionally dabble in lighting design for the theatre, I'm always interested to read about him.

I first saw his work when the Hirshhorn Museum in DC called to ask for help repairing a Strand (Quartzcolor, actually, but that's another story) OneLight fresnel spotlight. It was part of his piece Round Rainbow which was being shown in their Refract, Reflect, Project exhibit.

Since the Smithsonian wasn't all too keen to ship part of their art collection up to Frederick, I piled into the truck with Sam (our head field-service technician, seen above admiring the "Round Rainbow") and we headed for the city.

Sam was able to get the fixture working again and the staff offered to let us see how it was used in the piece, and show us around the rest of the exhibit while everything was still being installed.


Lighting is an essential part of my work, so I naturally get excited by the sort of art they were showing off in this exhibit. There were weird projected-color pieces, light-as-sculpture pieces, and a wheelbarrow constructed of what appeared to be dozens of fluorescent tubes. I'll admit that I still don't get the wheelbarrow piece but I thoroughly enjoyed the Thomas Wilfred "lumia," especially given that I was able to look behind the screen and see the genuinely antique equipment that created the projections. The public generally never gets to see that part of a Wilfred work.

Eliasson, on the other hand, makes a point of keeping the "gear" in plain view, which I love. For me, part of the fun of a piece like "Round Rainbow," is walking into a gallery and first being stunned by the light dancing around the space and then getting to see how he pulled it off. Refract, Reflect, Project has since closed, but there's lots of good images of Eliasson's work on the web, and Take Your Time, his current show at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, will be coming to New York in April of 2008.

link to Wired News Story

Checkers Solved! Can Mouse Trap Be Far Behind?

19:00 19 July 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Justin Mullins

The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now "solved"

Draughts is merely the latest in a steady stream of games to have been solved using computers, following games such as Connect Four, which was solved more than 10 years ago.

The computer proof took Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, 18 years to complete and is one of the longest running computations in history.

In honor of his achievements, Mr. Schaeffer has been appointed to the University's prestigious Cracker Barrel Chair as Professor of Jes' Sitting on the Front Porch Playin' Checkers, Y'all.

In related news, how the heck do I get a job where I play checkers for 18 years?!

link via Boing Boing

Jeff Victor's Pop Culture Bubbleheads

Over at his blog Wicked Crispy, Jeff Victor is showcasing his extra-cute "bubblehead" character portraits. They're mostly taken from Star Wars, but there's other movie and comics referenced, as well as some examples of Jeff's commercial illustration work.

I'm loving his take on George Lucas' characters, although the portraits of humans all look like South Park characters to me.

The First Pogo Possum Strip

My dad introduced me to the Pogo comics, and I quickly fell in love with Walt Kelly's style of drawing, his characters' outrageous dialects, and the often equally outrageous lettering styles that accompanied them.
Recently, I learned that Fantagraphics will be publishing a complete collection of Pogo daily and Sunday comics in the near future. And then, today, Drawn! tells me that there's a hi-res scan of the first ever Pogo strip up at the Arflovers blog. Click on Li'l Ol' Pogo over there for the link.

Backpack Penguin!

Backpack Penguin!

Backpack Penguin!

Backpack Penguin!

Lolz.

I've been meaning to post this comic from the always excellent and nerdy webcomic XKCD. (Seriously, one of the only webcomics I've found with a decent funny : nerdy ratio.)

I have to admit, I feel a bit guilty for enjoying the whole Lolcat / Caturday phenomenon ... but that doesn't stop me from squandering hours of perfectly good internet on sites like I Can Has Cheezburger? and CuteOverload.

Also: lolrus

Thank You 120 Minutes

Last post I mentioned how MTV's 120 Minutes introduced me to a lot of great music back in the days before the Interweb. Out of curiosity, I dug up the playlists from my junior and senior years of high school to see just how much music I would have missed out on had I actually gone to bed at a decent hour on Sundays.

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Here's some of my favorites, with links to videos where I could find them. I can remember making some of my first mix tapes with these songs, patching the audio output from my parents' VCR into my boom box and recording everything onto glorious Maxell 90-minute cassettes. Fresh.

The Sisters of Mercy: I loved goth-rock before I even knew what goth was. "Lucretia My Reflection" aired in July of '88. Almost twenty years later, I still don't know what the lyrics are supposed to mean.

That same episode featured "Peek-a-Boo" by Sioxsie and the Banshees. I think I bought the cassette of Peepshow the next week.

The video for Billy Bragg's excellent "Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" aired in June. This YouTube video is actually for "There is Power in a Union" from Talking With the Taxman About Poetry. It's worth watching for the AFL-CIO organizer in full cheerleader drag. Due to the relative obscurity of Bragg here in the States (or, at least, in Scenic Western Maryland) I didn't get my hands on an album of his until two years later, when I stumbled on copies of Worker's Playtime and Taxman in the discount bin of the Virgin megastore in London.

The Primitives' "Crash" was another July '88 offering - I must have been up late a lot that July. Apparently, it was remixed for the movie Dumb and Dumber; something I only just learned as I've been steadfastly avoiding seeing any part of that movie since it came out.

Finally, "Reptile", by The Church, aired in August of '88. I think I may have actually seen the video for "Under the Milky Way" earlier that year, but I can't prove it. Both songs together got me to pony up for a copy of Starfish in time for the back-to-school moping season. (I lettered in Mope.)

The Audacity Project

I'm slooowly working my way through a box of my old cassette tapes from the 80s and 90s, converting them to MP3 by way of a neat, free program called Audacity. Briefly, it's a program that allows me to record the input from a borrowed cassette player (thanks, Dad! I'll return it someday soon, I promise!) as a .wav file on my hard drive. I record each side of a tape as its own file, then go back through and chop it up into individual tracks. For the most part I've been happy with the results, although albums that feature tracks fading into each other can be tough to split up. Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, for example, was a royal pain.

I just finished converting one of my favorite tapes from my early college days, Only Life by The Feelies. I remember hearing "Away" for the first time on 120 Minutes, back in 1989 or so. That show lead me to a lot of good music back in the days before the Interwub...but that's a different post. Anyway, here's a link to the MP3 of "Away." Illegal, I guess, so check it out before The Man shuts me down.

Next up: Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy. Bring on the gothy goodness!

Making Comics - Chapter 5 1/2 Is Finally Up!

Those of us who purchased Scott McCloud's excellent "Making Comics" have been anxiously awaiting "Chapter 5 1/2," the promised online supplement that goes into detail about webcomics. I learned today that it's finally up over at Scott's site.

Concrete Screen

Despite the web site's Star-Trekky promise of "transparent concrete", it’s basically just a slab of concrete with fiber optic cables embedded within.

Still pretty cool, though, and because the cables can transmit natural light as easily as a projected image, it's conceivable that it could be used to install “windows” in below-ground offices and apartements.

Hilarity Ensues

Boing-Boing pointed me to this story in USA Today about a three-year-old who went to extraordinary lengths to obtain a stuffed Sponge Bob Squarepants toy from a grabby machine, with somewhat predictable results. (Bonus points for the look on little Bobby's face as he is forced to extricate himself.)

Apparently this is not a unique occurrence. The various stories were all so similar, though, that I began to suspect Urban Legendry at work. I asked the Snopes-Dogg to check it out for me; but he says it's all legit.

I'd hope that store managers would start asking the grabby machine-guy to leave a spare key so that the local fire department wouldn't have to be called in every single time.

Just In Time For Halloween: The Monster Alphabet!

(Actually, this Flickr set was uploaded way back in August, but I just stumbled across it this week.)

I first encountered Ape Lad's work on the "700 Hoboes Project" but his "1 Hour Alphabets" (that's "B is for Blob" over to the left) are great! Check out the Superhero and Super-Villian alphabets, too!

Update: I've learned that the Monster Alphabet wasn't actually a one-hour alphabet. My mistake; I still think they're great. And look! T-SHIRTS!

A.R.G.gh!

Been playing/following "The Lost Experience" for the past week to keep myself distracted from stuff at home.

For those who don't know, TLE (as insiders/nerds call it) is an "Alternate Reality Game." It's a sort of roleplaying game where you become part of a huge group of people helping the main character reveal the "real truth," about The Hanso Foundation and some sort of project that THF's new director, Dr. Mittlewerk, is running.

Gameplay mostly revolves around solving puzzles to access photos, video and audio clips, and web sites to discover more of "the truth." The puzzles and clues to same are dispersed through instant messages and e-mails from in-game actors, podcasts, entries in various characters' blogs and, sometimes, advertisements in traditional media like this commercial for The Hanso Foundation's Life-Extension Project shown during a recent airing of Lost.

I've been interested in the concept of ARGs since the early days of Majestic and "The Beast" the game associated with the Spielberg movie A.I. but TLE is the first ARG I've ever actually followed and participated in.

I have to admit that it's sort of interesting to try to solve the puzzles and find new video clips and podcasts and such but there are times when new stuff is being released so quickly that you either have to devote several hours every day to finding and solving the new puzzles or "cheat" by looking at one of the many sites devoted to listing the clues and their solutions outright.

Once Robyn's home from the hospital I'll probably stop playing and just wait for all to be revealed at the end of Summer.

I Didn't Win The Contest

Goshdangit!

One of the guys in field service won.

I tied for second, which won me a $15 iTunes gift card. I've already downloaded "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and am trying to figure out how to spend the other $14.01. I'm trying real hard to make my other 14 purchases fairly recent songs as I already have a good collection of 60s - 80s pop, and I've still got a case full of cassettes from about 1984 - 1990 to convert to mp3. Also, my nieces recently made it very clear to me that knowing who the White Stripes and Fall Out Boy are no longer qualifies me as hip, trendy, or "rad."

Current Contenders for My $14.01:

The B-Side Wins Again - DJ Spooky vs Dave Lombardo
Promiscuous - Nelly Furtado and some guy
Feel Good, Inc - The Gorillaz
16 Military Wives - The Decembrists
Gone Daddy Gone - Gnarls Barkley
Jesus Walks - Kanye West

Dang, I just spent a half-hour trolling iTunes for other songs. I previewed a whole bunch of bands I've heard mention of recently (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Walkmen, Death Cab for Cutie) and I don't know why, but they all just sound like Grateful Dead cover bands to me.

That's not a compliment.

Worst Songs of the 80s

So our company recently held a contest in which employees were encouraged to pick the 10 absolute worst songs of the 80s. I submitted my list this afternoon, and reprint it here for posterity.

In descending order of suckitude, my picks for the worst songs of the 80s are:

1. We Are the World – USA for Africa: Not just a horrible pop song, but also the beginning of the trend of saving the world through crass consumerism. “Spend $20 on this crappy album and we’ll give $1.00 to starving kids in Africa!” Call me crazy, but I’d bet that the starving kids in Africa would much prefer you sent them the $20. Or, you know, buy $20 worth of food and send it to them. Easily the worst song of the 80s with triple extra bonus points for being the grandfather of all those stupid yellow ribbons and rubber bracelets.

2. I Just Called to Say I Love You – Stevie Wonder: Billboard #1 Hit, Winner of the Oscar for Best Song (it was originally written for the soundtrack to the Gene Wilder comedy “The Woman in Red.”), and a big steaming pile of complete and utter “Hallmark Hall of Fame” treacle-sweet tripe. I can think of only one song by Mr. Wonder that was worse than this: the “Huxtable Sample Jam” (aka “Jammin’ on the One”) from his guest shot on The Cosby Show. Please, Stevie, you wrote Superstition, you wrote Higher Ground, did you really need that check from Cos, or did you owe him a favor?

3. Working for the Weekend – Loverboy: “You want a piece of my heart / you better start from the start.” Wow, Loverboy, that’s deep. Loverboy is a Canadian band, and when I consider that the CBC’s Canadian Content Regulations would have forced countless rockers in the Great White North to endure this song on high rotation, I am grateful to have lived out the 80s in the USA.

4. Africa – Toto: I don’t know which irks me more, this song’s limp, whiny melody, or its clunky pretentious lyrics. “I know that I must do what’s right / sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.” CLUN-KY! Hey Toto, you go right ahead and bless the rains down in Africa, I won’t stop you. Hey, here’s $20, take a couple of those starving kids out for a burger while you’re there.

5. Heartbeat – Don Johnson: This one seems to lean dangerously close to novelty-song territory, until you remember that DJ really and truly believed that he had a chance as a pop star. Must’ve been all that time with Phil Collins and Glen Frey on the Miami Vice set. A poor song sung by a poor singer, but at least it wasn’t a duet with Phillip Michael Thomas.

6. Dancing in the Streets – Mick Jagger & David Bowie: Ah, what better way to celebrate the influence of black music on modern rock and roll than to let two pasty British guys completely muck up a Martha and the Vandellas hit? Double-secret bonus embarrassment points for the music video, which featured multiple shots of Mssrs. Bowie and Jagger’s leather-wrapped fannies, and at least one shot of the two of them coming perilously close to tongue-kissing each other.

7. Mr. Roboto – Styx: Concept albums are always tricky, as proved by Dennis DeYoung’s rock-opera Kilroy Was Here. Although the album did go Platinum and spawned two hit singles (Mr. Roboto and Don’t Let it End) members of the band later admitted that they never fully understood what the concept actually was, the tour was a financial disaster, and Mr. Roboto became a joke well before the decade ended. An embarrassing and pretentious misstep by the band who previously gave us gems like The Grand Illusion, and Angry Young Man.

8. We Didn’t Start the Fire – Billy Joel: Hey Billy, REM already recorded this song back in 1987. They called it, It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and it was a whole lot better. I read that Billy wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire because of his interest in history and a desire to be a history teacher. Interestingly, the amount of time most high school history teachers today are given to cover the 20th century makes a three-minute pop song the ideal lecture. Just not this one, please.

9. We Built This City – Starship: Although many critics have picked this for the worst song of the 1980s, I can’t go quite that far. It’s hypocritical crap, for sure; a so-called anti-commercial anthem that, in one critic’s words “reeks of '80s corporate-rock commercialism. It's a real reflection of what practically killed rock music in the '80s.” But it’s still somewhat listen-able and Grace Slick does a fair job on the vocals. The fact that Starship descends from rock royalty Jefferson Airplane may explain why others have been as savage as they have; after all, We Built This City is a long, long way from White Rabbit.

10. My Red Joystick – Lou Reed: Okay, Lou makes the list mostly for personal reasons. Back in 1989 I saw him perform at Merriweather Post Pavillion. About a half-hour into his set we were rocking out to a good mix of his classic hits (Lisa Says, Rock and Roll) and tracks from his then-current album, New York, when Lou threw this clunker at us. Like many of his songs My Red Joystick makes great reading, but it just doesn’t work as rock and roll. Happily, he played Walk on the Wild Side for his encore and we all sang along with the doo-doo-doo’s and went home happy.

Honorable Mentions (songs that were either not quite bad enough to make the top-ten, or such easy targets that I just felt sorry for them) In No Particular Order of Badness:

1. You Dropped a Bomb on Me – Gap Band
2. The Heart of Rock-n-Roll – Huey Lewis and the News
3. Dancing on the Ceiling – Lionel Richie
4. One Night in Bangkok – Murray Head
5. Walk the Dinosaur – Was (Not Was)
6. Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car – Billy Ocean
7. Party All the Time – Eddie Murphy
8. Kiss Me Deadly – Lita Ford
9. This Song’s Just Six Words Long … I mean, Got My Mind Set of You – George Harrison
10. Urgent - Foreigner

That Parkour Thing

Jumping once again onto the "day-late" bandwagon; I've been checking out some of the Parkour footage available on the 'net.

Parkour, for those even less up-to-date than I, is basically a combination of running, freestyle gymnastics, and a Jackie Chan movie. The emphasis in this rather well-done Russian video, seems to be mostly on the Jackie Chan. Or, considering the choice of soundtrack, the Brothers Wachowski.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I've known about Parkour for at least as long as Ray has.

Final thought: the Russian video was, for me, the perfect chaser to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which I just re-read a few days ago. Not so much because of the running and the jumping as for the post-industrial setting and the (non-Matrix-y parts of) soundtrack.

Mixed Up

Dude! Have you heard about mashed-ups? They're the latest trend! You take two songs that are vaguely similar and blend them together to make a whole new song! It's brand-new!

Pah.

Me and my band-geek friends in high school were doing this back when people still called hip-hop "breakdance music" and Dangermouse was just a cartoon. Slick Rick mixed with Madonna mixed with Public Enemy mixed with the theme from Sesame Street. Looping and sampling through the fine art of pausing and rewinding your cassette deck. Busting out break-beats on a Casio keyboard. Oh Hells yes. I still have a tape somewhere of Paul Hardcastle's 19 mixed with 1940s radio ads for a series of marriage counseling books and samples played off a (then state-of-the-art) SK-1 Sampler.

So don't tell me about your mash-ups, kid. I've already been there.

Now, having said all of that. A lot of the stuff coming out lately is pretty good. Most recently, I took advantage of Dean Gray Tuesday to snag a copy of American Edit. Mr. Gray has re-mixed the entirety of Green Day's "Rock Opera" American Idiot throwing in lyrics and beats from sources as divergent as Queen, Ashanti, and the theme from the BBC series Dr. Who. That last, featured in Dr. Who on Holiday is actually a mash-up within a mash-up, as he seems to be using the Timelords' 1988 hit Doctorin' the Tardis, which blended the OOOeeeOOOs of the Dr. Who theme with the Na-NaNa-Na-NA-AH(HEY!) of Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Pt. 2. Post- modern-y!

If you missed out on Dean Gray Tuesday, I'm sure you can find it with your Hampster or your Ka-zam! or what have you. And I suspect that lots of hipster kids will be giving and getting CDs of American Edit over the holidays. I know I plan to wrap up a few copies.

Hovercat

[Church has ended, and I'm waiting for someone from the Music Department to arrive for a recital that was supposed to start loading in a half-hour ago. Hrmm.]

Before I started at my current job, I worked as a customer service rep for a company that sold pyrotechnics, confetti cannons, fog machines and other special effects products for the entertainment industry. For reasons I'll detail in a later post (maybe) business at "the fireworks stand" was slow. Really slow. By the time I finally left the company it was like 2-3 sales a day slow.

Lack of business left me with a lot of free time on my hands during the work day, time I filled by playing games with the Internet. (Not on, with; there's a subtle yet important difference there.) I started with the old standards: vanity surfing, looking up old classmates and girlfriends, and posting nonsense to Unsenet.

During the course of my surfing, stalking and posting, I became a big fan of Google's ability to return a result for just about anything I could think to type into its search box. So, on one particulary slow day, I played my first game of what I now call Hovercat.

The rules are simple: Pick a word or a phrase that, as far as you know, is completely meaningless. Feed it to Google. Hit "I'm feeling lucky," and see what comes up. Of course, the first time I played I used "Hovercat," because, as far as I knew, there was no such thing. The result I got back wasn't the one I've linked to here, but it was similar and I like the animated version a lot better.

From that first result I was hooked. I played Hovercat obsessively for a week at least, and posted some of my more interesting finds to a.r.k. I went from searching regular English words to making up words to just pounding on the keyboard at random. I got a lot of junk results, domain names bought up by web speculators and seeded with pages of random search terms, but I also found a lot of interesting, unique and unintentionally funny content that I would have never even thought to look for on purpose. In a way, it was like dumpster diving the internet, finding little forgotten treasures buried in online catalogs, weblogs and discussion groups.

I still play Hovercat, though not nearly as much now that I have a job that actually involves my doing some work during the day. The FCC gigs are good Hovercatting time, though, especially a day like today when I find myself just waiting around for a group to arrive and load in. Try it yourself, and remember: keep your buttered side up!

Wizards of Winter Real Says Snopes

Updating my previous entry about the "Wizards of Winter" video. Tha Snopes-dogg has determined that the lighting display shown in the video is real; it just looks animated because of compression issues.

For those of you who, like me, are now being pestered by their wives to create an animated Christmas light display (complete with a low-power FM transmitter to broadcast musical accompaniment) here's a link to Light-O-Rama, manufacturer of lighting controllers and sequencers: http://www.lightorama.com/

Of course, if you really want to do it up right, you could rent a 96 channel rolling rack, a few hundred Ks of PARs, some VLs and MACs, and a GrandMA to keep it all under control. Then call the boys in the TSO and see if they're available to perform "Wizards of Winter" twelve times a night on your front lawn. That'll show Flanders! (stupid Flanders...)

Google Video to Internet: "No Porn for You!"

[Jazz Ensemble rehearsing tonight at FCC. Spent most of the first two hours riding levels to keep the vocalist audible, and now I'm up and down between sets as the band rehearses.]

A day or two after I posted about the "Wizards of Winter" video, I discovered Google Video. Finally! A search engine that makes it quick and simple to find funny cats, Parkour footage, Family Guy clips, and videos of diet soda/candy experiments set to geek-punk!

The service is still in beta for now, and I've noticed two odd things about it so far:

First, if you search for a term, any term, and then click the "Refresh" button on your browser, you'll get a page of almost entirely different results. I can only guess that this has something to do the ranking system that they're using for video searches.

The second odd thing I've noticed is that Google seems to be preventing the most obvious use of this technology. It's no secret, the Googlemen specfically forbid it in the Google Video Upload Program Policy. It's even sparked some minor controversey.