Smile like a veil

from my flickr

I found a site that has lyrics to songs that are not normally posted to the Web - obscure some would say, whereas I would call them almost forgotten.

Here's a sample of Smoke by the great-but-defunct Crash Vegas:

You say that I'm your eyes
and I whisper that I've gone blind
you wear a smile like a veil
your clothes smell of last night's smoke and you just drink to stay afloat
and I swim by and pull the plug

Colin Cripps, the guitarist is still active. I saw him perform recently with Jim Cuddy in Ottawa. Not sure about the clear-voiced Michelle McAdorey. The connection with Blue Rodeo seems to run deep.

Philosophy (and physics) of time

It seems that time is a ficticious variable that we use to simplify the complex interelationships between changing things. A sort of abstract currency. Not my idea. Here is a quote from this recent article in Discovery:

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

I like the idea that things are interrelated in such a complex way that we invented this thing that ticks, to give us a reference. In architecture this is called a datum, the 0 elevation point, totally arbitrary, like the Earth being at the centre of the universe.

With computers we may be able to better manage the complex interelationships and understand them without the artificial variable "t". Strangely enough, most CPU's are slaves to their clocks, but some of the fancier ones have multiple, asynchronous clocks that run locally, both to save power and to be more efficient.

I have to go lie down now...

Architectural introspection

(image by A. Barake)

Some professions are famous for introspection, i.e. endless debates about what it means to be an X. Architecture must be at the top of the list. Maybe it is the word. Information architects, IT architects, enterprise architects and the original culprits: (building) architects.

Some light shone on the causes of this recently, through a letters to the editor response in the summer issue of Perspectives, the organ of the Ontario Association of Architects. The original article, by Martin Poizner questions the reasons that architects earn on average less than real-estate agents and asks whether this is an indication of how little their work is valued.

It is the response, by Ian Ellingham of Toronto which I think is very interesting. He puts forth the notion that architecture has given up responsibility for the entire process of building and has recently focused on very narrow definitions of design, leaving much of the rest of the process to engineers (2 or 3 kinds are usually involved), urban planners, general contractors, technologists, building officials, and financiers.

He has a point, and he drives it home with a comparison to a more successful profession: medicine. Doctors specialize, but they all have the fundamental medical training first.

The same should be said of the construction specialities I list above. Wouldn't it be great if they all had to undergo basic architecture training first, learn about proportions, history of architecture, learn how to draw and how to put materials together, understand the motivations behind building and fire codes, learn about structure and properties of materials, and study great building and try their hand at designing? But as it stands now, most of the people who have power over the construction of the built environment do not have this complete set of basic skills, except the architects, and they are relegated (or have relegated themselves) to design.

There are many possible reasons for this. Architecture can claim roots in the arts since the Renaissance (in the Western tradition). Michelangelo after all was one of the designers of St. Peter's. Engineering and architecture separated during the Enlightenment for many reasons that Perez-Gomez writes about. One of my hypotheses is that people study architecture today as a way to make a living as an artist, a "safe" form of art as it were.

Unfortunately, any artistic creation requires artistic control, and architects are increasingly losing control of what they build. Because they are inherently generalists, they are sometimes perceived as "not good enough" to lead the building process. I think that to remedy this, architecture training should be the basis of all other building consultant professions, not a specialty on its own.

It may be too late to do this and we may need another name, since the word has become overloaded and its origins no longer relevant - the uber builder is now sometimes the under earner.

Road songs

from my flickr

The sense of longing that travel gives is wonderful. A new place to sleep every day, not owning a space, just passing through. Is this a North American thing, a railroad country thing, or does it date back to the troubadours who were reflecting their lives in their songs?

Music for Cats

As I was doodling with a new riff on the acoustic guitar the cat was eyeing me suspiciously as he half-dozed, squinting in the sun. Was I going to play loudly and disturb him? I was careful not to, and then the idea of calling a set of tracks "music for cats" came along. Checking for precedent, I did the quick Google search, and here is what comes up:

• MusicForCatsRecords - sounds like a label I can get to like
• Music for Cats and People Too, a record for pets and their owners, the cover art fits Kliban's definition of "brother-in-law-art"
• Another Music for Cats CD, but not for cats, maybe I'll order it

So, the title may hold, or not, we'll see if anything better emerges once the music is settled.

Portland

Portland, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

My kind of architecture is all about materials. The old form and content argument. We tend to forget this when drawing, but remember it when rendering, but the problem is that the rendering happens late, and the materials must really be considered early. Give me proper materials over form any day.

Lugano, Nachbildung San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

Lugano, Nachbildung San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

On the waterfront of the lake, a tribute in horizontal wood sections of a church long gone, like a TV image.

CONEY ISLAND

taken from a Ferris wheel in Switzerland (flickr)

.

Wonder wheel, as Robert Pirsig said, a big part of being alive is countering gravity. Maybe life and gravity are linked.

Facing the breeze

Beach dress, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Can't seem to get this pocket camera to focus. Canon SD700.

Tree-in-the-forest

Saw Antonioni's Blow-up again after so many years, and his central idea - that reality is created by multiple observers still resonates nicely. His notion of abstract film making is also quite well explained through the dialog the main character has with his painter friend. Also, Sarah Miles represents his muse, the unattainable yearning. Some scenes are dated, like the record-listening with Vanessa Redgrave, but the composition of each frame is beautiful and redeems much of the flaws. His mode of creation is also part of the film: spew-out and then edit.

Wonderful stuff.

Reality TV and movies at home

What can we learn from the fact that reality TV as we know it took-off after movies became widely available on video? I mean, who wants to bother watching a movie when it will be interrupted by commercials all the time? But people do watch plotless reality shows that way. The commercials offer relief.

Is there an analogy with books and the Web? Books online with commercials and page transitions, no way. So the future of books as a separate medium seems bright. The Web, like TV, is a spotty medium (take that McLuhan). Spotty media are not amenable to plots.

Eisenman House X model

from my flickr

Partly mysterious, because it embodies the fine line between architecture and other arts as defined by the Greeks to be useless but beautiful.

Landscapes

from my flickr

I like symmetry in landscapes, also minimalism. Does anyone sit at picnic tables that are set up this way?

Dave Pollard on collaboration

Not Kafka

Where all I ever observed about management relations has been said in a lucid and succinct way. To wit:

There are deadbeats who ride the coattails of more diligent and conscientious workers. There are antagonists who will perversely undermine and sabotage, out of jealousy, fear, or spite. What I have observed, though, is that in most groups entrusted to self-manage, these people will be outed by their peers and will usually leave when they can no longer get away with their behaviour, because their peers simply refuse to put up with it. And schism between 'management' and 'front line' cannot arise if there is no distinction between the two roles.

The most difficult problem with this approach is dealing with people who are dysfunctional because of factors outside the workplace -- people who have been traumatized, depressed, or warped into psychopathy. I have not found an answer for how to make such people effective and energized in the workplace.

link

Sandbanks

sandbanks, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Landscape of isolation. Could be snow.

Joni Mitchell

Her recent honours in Canada triggered many retrospectives and biographical media events. The arc of her songwriting career is an interesting case study in what seems to work and what does not. She was recently approached by a ballet company, Calgary I think, to collaborate on a work based on her music and her life. She accepted but then convinced them to change the terms of reference of the project. It became a ballet on her views on the environment and the world, war etc. She wrote a bunch of new (bad) songs for it. I would have much preferred to see the original idea fulfilled. The personal often makes better art than the general when it is resonant enough. The general often ends up being generic, through the law of averages, since it must apply to many and thus it averages out emotions. Many of her best songs are about her loves and griefs, like Carey and River. I guess I am saying that writing about self can be good but it needs to be edited. The subtext is the seed, but is not necessary to know it to resonate with us. The public only found out about her decision to give up her daughter for adoption late in her career, but the imprint and the references to this in her lyrics resonate throughout many of her best songs. We did not need to know this, but I don't know if the songs would have been so powerful without that emotion behind them. Hemingway wrote that you must hold something back. That is a technique, a trick of sorts, but ultimately, there has to be something there, something personal that can become universal. The emotional load must transcend the petty somehow, and sublimate into an artistic release.

Another interpretation can be that at the start of a career arc there is a drive to push one's ego out there, a necessity in fact, so the songs about self and experience happen and the good ones survive and make it big. With time and maturity, the quality goes up, one gets better at the game of universality and the experiences accumulate and become more interesting. At the waning end, there must be a sense of overexposure, for those artists that don't get addicted to fame, and then there is the recluse phase, where universal themes become more tempting since they allow expression without self-revelation. Unfortunately, I think that unless you are Brian Eno and are interested in weird but cool stuff, the general world issue kind of stuff can be boring (not always to be fair..) and only established artists like Joni Mitchell can get it to be heard. Dunno, this is an anecdotal generalization. Must test against more data.

Attention Deficit Disorder

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (H. Simon, Communications and the Public Interest, 1971.)

Yes, but I would argue that that kind of A-D-D is good for art - innovation can come out of collision of cultures and of ideas.

---

About opponents of folksonomies:
Yes, his argument is strong, but ultimately it can be summarized as "the masses are stupid, I am smart".
I heard it from ultra-conservatives too - those that oppose Swiss style democracy, where every law is voted on by everyone.
He prefers "smart" people at the top interpreting what the populace wants - father/mother figures...
Statistically and historically, the argument does not compute. In signal theory one retrieves weak signals from noise through averaging. The noise cancels out.
This approach is the basis for democracy and for collective intelligence. We just need to find ways to cancel out the noise - the tools are just coming out...

Having said this, I still think that communities of interest are ways to avoid entropy in such systems.

---

Scientists discover that music "moves" the brain - syncopation baby!

Project 22 theme comic

Wisdom versus Intelligence

Bad moments

Went to see a performance of the Magic Flute and was awed by the level of the music and performance. It transcends a lot of everyday achievement - as it should. The piece lasts about two hours, and is consistent throughout. Some thoughts, there are conventions used, understandings between the audience and the composer and performers, and these help set constraints for Mozart to play within or to push out. I had heard on Radio Canada about 30 years ago (Beaux Dimanches) a concert pianist say that pop music was really totally different than classical, and I know what she means, I keep getting reminded when I see live classical performances. The pianist at yesterday's performance was doing everything, had a synthesizer on the side that she used to do flute and glockenspiel while playing the main parts on the piano with an an extraordinary dynamic range. Too much - but somehow totally inspiring.

Then later at home I heard Dead Flowers interpreted by Steve Earle, and the words and music are powerful and fit extraordinarily well together although it is a parody of hillbilly music by the Sone's own admission. There is an element of truth that just comes out. And that can be as powerful as Mozart's stylized perfection.

Those &^%$ Greeks thought of everything (Dionysians vs Apollonians)

"I emerged in the late 1960s when a lot of writers felt they could take society by the scruff of the neck and change things, which now looks a romantic notion," he says. "What a classicist does is try to order things, which I guess was my chosen lot."

"I've always been fascinated by the opposition between radicals and liberals," he says. "It's a tension that exists in all my plays, but there is never a final decision.

As a writer, you can't hope to change society. All you can do is shift people's perspective on what you see as the truth."

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2042912,00.html

About inspiration

Inspiration?
Don't know if this is useful or not - worth a look I guess: Sources of inspiration

Songs about Thetans
There is a song here somewhere - this rings familiar - I once met a woman on a bus who tried this on me, then went on to 'help' some teenage girls who were sitting behind me, it quite cringe inducing.

Songs about pictures

There have been albums themed around sets of pictures, or purported to be: "The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth" by Rick Wakeman was inspired by the portraits at the National Gallery, "Pictures at an Exhibition" by the Rod - not so sure there... and some of Laurie Anderson's work has been themed around visual structures I think. Was thinking that some pictures could be good starting points for lyrics, i.e. to take an inspiring or evocative picture and to write a caption or story about it and then to make a song. It is a sort of second-order experience, but it may lead to something different at least.

Jasper Johns

Was interviewed for the New Yorker. He talks about his friendship with Rauschenberg and how their discussions fed their creativity, and he talks about inspiration and work methods. In the end, it is clear that he cannot explain the source or the inspiration, which is the way it often is.

'Asked about the worth of his art, Johns once stated: "To be plain, the best critic of a picture is another picture. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion... has to be, not a deliberate statement, but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying." '

Perez-Gomez in his latest book comes closest to finding a key, in my opinion. He makes the link to eros, the old idea of bridging the desire gap, creating beauty so as to desire it. The spark is part of this sublimation of the drive. It (kind of) drives a nail through the whole conceptual art thing, unless you really get off on abstraction. The argument is in favour of sensuality, all the senses. Conceptualism is about the ideals - somehow abstracted from the world of senses. Math can be beautiful, but geometry is the basis of much of it. I still struggle with this when I think of music, which is abstract visually but can trigger emotions as strongly as anything else, maybe through memory, but also maybe through other means, resonance, sympathy, who knows. How do minor chords work? The chill in the spine is a goal...

Joe Boyd is retired

Didn't realize it until recently, but Joe Boyd is one of my favorite record producers. A lot of albums I like have his name on them, and some don't, but he was involved, e.g.: Mary Margaret O'Hara's Miss America - which took 5 years (Boyd was involved in the first takes, and when he saw how difficult she was, he let someone else take over) - she went on to do other stuff, but never topped that one . Notable successes include the McGarrigles' first album, lots of famous folkies like Doc Watson, and R.E.M, amongst many many others, not all folk- since his real love is Muddy Waters and other roots guitar blues, in a career that spans the 60's to the 90's. His style is to make a studio album sound "alive" - which I guess means sort of like "live" but more polished. On a recent CBC interview, he said that he though that his biggest contribution was to make the recording artists feel that they could do anything, have freedom, and he would make it work, go with it, which was a radical thing in the 60's when producers had more power than today, since they were generally not hired by the artists but by the label. Things have changed, and he indicated that there was much self-indulgence today. I think I'll get the book.

Bellerive, Lausanne

from my flickr

A very formal picture. I tried to paint it in oils, but it did not turn out as nicely as I had hoped. Will try pastels or charcoal soon. I like the birds at the end of the pier, and the mist on the water. Much of it may just be nostalgia.

Capt. Beefheart

Rules for guitarists - the first time I heard his name I thought it was B-Fart.

e.g. Rule_ 4. WALK WITH THE DEVIL Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

persistence of (Internet) memory

I am toying with posting all of my drafts and writings to a blog, but all that is posted usually persists a long time and with the Way-Back machine, can potentially be impossible to revise or erase. So the compromise is to post more-or-less finished drafts, stuff that is ok to keep and that I will not regret having made public.

Is this a good thing?