As you may know if you’ve visited Jon’s site recently, the durned fool has upped and graduated from CalArts. And I was there to videotape it all! The best moment I will share with you. CalArts graduations are unlike any other. Being artists, there are no cap’n’gowns, no Pomp ‘n’ Circumstance. There is, however, a lot of weirdness. Take for example the goings on of this fellow right here. I don’t know him, by the way.
Month: May 2003
Music Animation Machine
Call it synchronicity or two great minds thinking alike, but I was checking out this site by Edward Tufte on the same day that Scott Rosenberg blogged it in Salon. Hmm, maybe it was because my friend Jon Crow had been there before me and then told me about it all. Ahhhh. I see.
Anyway, Edward Tufte is the “Da Vinci of data,” as his press blurb says, a statistician who also thinks long and hard about the graphical representation of data. There’s a lot of depth to the site, place to go explore, and I’m a sucker for graphs.
Perusing the site led me to a link to The Music Animation Machine, created by Stephen Malinowsky. There’s a few videos you can download, a cross between Oskar Fischinger and the Atari 2600. The graphical representation of pitch and time creates patterns that scroll horizontally and can add to a greater understanding of music composition. They’re also great to watch. Highly recommended!
Lost in memories in The Lady and the Clarinet
Michael Cristofer’s play “The Lady and the Clarinet” is less a straightforward romantic comedy and more like a mysterious chocolate candy. The outside is sweet, but the inside is bitter the more you chew — and by the end you’re not sure if the outside was really chocolate to start with.
Mr. Cristofer earned a Pulitzer Prize for his earlier play, 1977’s “The Shadow Box.”
“The Lady and the Clarinet” dates from 1984, and was at one point an off-Broadway hit for Stockard Channing. Director Maggie Mixsell has resurrected the play and brought it to Santa Barbara City College’s Jurkowitz Theater for a three-week run, where it becomes a star vehicle for its leading lady, Katie Thatcher.