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.