merry christmas!

Pretend that there are antlers and a red nose. Or don't.

smaller and smaller

8-bit quirk?

Antoni and Alison

horny holidays

untitled

kind of blue?

I want this for Christmas.

i am a rock

embrace the glamdom

Sweet

sick of being sick

What started out as a scratchy throat late Monday evening has now become a stuffed-up/feverish/achey/no-sleep malady. I've missed a day and a half of work (though I wouldn't say I'm missing it, buh-dum-bum) and will most likely be out the rest of the week. Luckily we are extremely slow in December, and I still have plenty of sick days to use.

I felt too weak today to even concentrate on the internet. Instead, I watched Cocoon on cable--now that's sick! I did catch a couple Spongebob episodes, so my sickbed viewing was not all in vain.

I usually don't listen to any music when I'm feeling this sick. A few years back I remember playing Gorecki's Symphony No. 2 when I was fighting a nasty sinus infection. I began hallucinating that the music was slowly eating me from the inside. So no Lustmord or Nurse With Wound until I'm good and healthy again.

Random sickbed observations:
--The Jeffersons was never that funny.
--Airborne helps your immune system but makes you whizz a lot.
--Applesauce and crackers are yummy when sick.
--Chicken-spread sandwiches are not.
--I hate Fox News.

The hills are alive with the sound of mucus. Good night.

lot's wife on a cloudy day

all aboard the honky tonk train

london is fallen

I love bridges. To me, they can symbolize transition, the gradual movement from one stage of life to the next stage. Or maybe they represent triumph over adversity, victory over the existential abyss. Or maybe they simply look cool. Sometimes a bridge is just a bridge.

London is fallen over me -- The Autumns

be like water

reflection

the way out is through

send in the drones iii

Jem Finer has created a piece of music designed to last 1,000 years. Longplayer consists of looping sections of Tibetan bowls ringing and droning on and on. This piece will play without repetition until December 31, 2999.

I listened to Longplayer last night for about thirty minutes and achieved maximum mellow-ocity (not a word but I like the sound of it) after just five minutes. The tones swirl constantly from speaker to speaker, creating the illusion of an underwater belltower. Take a break and absorb this music for a spell--your blood pressure will thank you.

and miles to go before i sleep

berry bad

I thought that these were cranberries, so I picked them and served them on Thanksgiving. Now I have explosive diarrhea. Slayer was right--God hates us all.

embrace the random xiv

WolframTones generates musical compositions through mathematically mutated checkerboards, or some such mumbo-jumbo. Hmmmm, algorithm, Al Gore rhythm? Nah, that'd be too stiff. Anywho, it's fun to change the instrumentation of these melodies, creating loony tunes that would make Carl Stalling proud, or unearthing tribal songs from yet another green world.

untitled

bare trees

under the bridge

elemental

anti-thought of the day?

Logic deals with the secondhand. Logic deals with the junkyard, the used--used by many people. Logic deals with inference. And remember, it is good as far as the human world of intellectual garbage is concerned; the moment you go beyond that boundary, logic fails utterly, [falling] flat on the ground. -- Osho

a musing

Is it me, or doesn't this look like John Kerry on acid?

embrace the random xiii

PMusic: Singles

What if a jukebox mated with a slot machine? Paul Ramsay has created four virtual 45 RPM singles that never spin the same tune twice. The revolution will be improvised.

untitled

like a hunchback in heaven

names for bands viii

A baker's dozen or a coven? Or who cares?

* Idiot Juice
* Fakebook From Hell
* Darla Hoodlum
* All for Naught
* Inhuman Interest
* The Orphans' Picnic
* Raining Maggots
* Singing Hologram
* Jacob's Bladder
* Disensemble
* Tone Deaf MF
* Lurid Crime
* All My Dreams Are Stolen

self-portrait with cave

untitled

through my rainy windshield iii

keep digging, watson

When I was eight or nine years old, I read a bizarre short story in our third-grade reading book. I think that it was an old Mexican folk tale, but the memory is hazy, the details sketchy. Here's how the story goes:

There was a bad little boy whom no one could control. One day he threw a rock at another little boy and accidentally killed him. He then propped up the dead boy in the middle of a road where a horse and buggy soon came by and struck the dead boy. The townspeople blamed the driver for the boy's death and either jailed or executed him.

Somehow the bad boy ends up dying (don't remember how). St. Peter takes pity on him due to his age and lets him into Heaven. Big mistake, as the boy commences to torment all the angels. St. Peter then sends the boy down to Hell. The boy torments the demons there even more, nailing crucifixes inside their houses (even at my young age, I chuckled at the idea of little bungalows in Hell, as if the damned had merely been relocated next to a steel mill).

So the boy ends up before St. Peter again--Lucifer must have lodged a complaint with the eternal housing board. St. Peter says that the only solution is to turn the boy into a stone. Rude to the end, the boy insists that he be a stone with eyes. Thus, there is now a stone with eyes as part of the Pearly Gates.

I know what you're thinking: what sick, twisted individual would think that such a story is appropriate for third-graders? Remember, this was the seventies. There was no such thing as political correctness--in choir one year we sang the actual lyrics to the theme from M*A*S*H, Suicide Is Painless, and we also used to sing John Lennon's Imagine. Damn, I miss the seventies.

Anywho, I've been trying to track down this wicked folk tale for years with no luck. That's where you come in, dear readers. Has anyone else ever read or heard of this story? Any idea who wrote it or where I could find it?

Let's make this a contest. I have an extra copy of Blood Sugar by Nicole Blackman. Tell me what this story is, and I will send you the book along with my heartfelt thanks and maybe a surprise gift or two. Please help me solve this decades-old literary mystery!

self-portrait with earthmover

vote early and often

Choose the new Seven Wonders of the World.

CBGB's is no longer on the list.

embrace the random xii

Ornamism

Quite possibly the most beautiful computer art ever, like a sketchbook of alien flora come to life.

bells for her

don't forget your moonpants

humor me

Feeling tired on an autumn Sunday, I may have an excess of black bile. But I refuse to be listless, so here's a list of melancholic tunes that bronze my backbone:

Melancholia -- Pete Townshend
Way to Blue -- Nick Drake
Medicine Bottle -- Red House Painters
Smog Moon -- Matthew Sweet
Feel So Low -- Porcupine Tree
Wise Up -- Aimee Mann
Out of My Hands -- Michael Penn
Lost in My Hometown -- Harry
Spider and I -- Brian Eno
Ghosts -- Japan
Ride On -- AC/DC
Pantomime Horse -- Suede

embrace the random xi

Potatoland is a world of interactive sights and sounds from the digital imagination of Mark Napier. My favorite area is p-soup, where you can create your own abstract art and ambient soundscape.

parklife

Cleveland Metroparks

watcher of the skies

be drinkable

a tale of two harrys, part one

About thirteen years ago, I would drive my younger brother to Guzzetta Hall at the University of Akron for his weekly classical guitar lesson. While sitting in the lobby during his lesson, I would occasionally glance at this odd sculpture that looked like groups of brass mallets and abstract pussywillows. I figured that they made some sort of sound but never had the opportunity to find out due to the blue velvet ropes and silver stanchions barricading the sculpture from nosy admirers with sticky fingers.

Many years later I came across an article on Harry Bertoia in a magazine called The Wire. Bertoia was an American artist who created sonic sculptures: metal gongs, rods, bars, and various other arrays, all designed to produce melodic tones when struck. And this article struck something in me--I had seen one of his sculptures in person before! But where? Finally, it hit me: the lobby at U of A where I could only look but not touch all those years ago. My mission became clear--I was going to revisit that sculpture and clang the cobwebs off of it.

So I drove through a light rain from Cleveland to Akron to capture the sights and sounds of Bertoia, barricades be damned. Leaving my car under the watchful eye of an unemployed parking meter, I strode past a pack of soggy band geeks and entered Guzzetta Hall [digression: who designs their psuedo-military uniforms? Sgt. Pepper should find that guy and kick his lame ass up and down Penny Lane].

Approaching my target, I saw that the velvet ropes were now positioned behind the sculpture. Had the university changed its position on interactive art, or had the cleaning crew merely been lazy after mopping? Who cares! I began snapping photos, merrily banging the mallets and reeds together as the occasional piccolo player walked by with a puzzled expression. Chimes are great because there is never a wrong note--the same was true for Bertoia's creation, all of the tones and overtones merging together into one shimmering cloud.

Bertoia's sculpture should really be installed outdoors. That way, everyone on campus could hear the wind stir up tones such as these:

through my rainy windshield ii

light at the end? i hope so

guaranteed to raise a smile

a surreal blog

the science of whimsy

kinetic sculpture

michael myers mushroom mask

Happy first day of autumn!

untitled

parting with the red sea

embrace the random x

This photo has been Hockneyized.

cry me a rhythm

96 Tears--? and the Mysterians
To Cry You a Song--Jethro Tull
Lament--King Crimson
Wailing Wall--Todd Rundgren
Sob Story--Minor Threat
And of course...
The Weeping Song--Nick Cave