In my current employment, I’ve got the iTunes loaded up on the office PC (take that Windows Media Player) and uploaded my series of Squid Lord comps for something like three full days of music, should I choose to stay at work that long.
And while I like iTunes’ ability to crossfade tracks (gawrsh, it’s like a radio station in here!) its shuffle play leaves a lot to be desired. I’m curious about the algorithm (or whatever) used to determine what track comes up next, because certain tracks pop up all the time. SoundJam MP does this too (yes, I still use it at home).
However, shuffle play is a great little thing when the collection is large and varied. If post-modernism is all about recontextualizing, then shuffle play is the great recontextualizer. It gives the listener those brief seconds at the beginning of a song to re-hear something, to compare it with the song that came before. It can elevate tracks from albums that were obscured by “the single,” or connections between disparate genres can suddenly appear as if planned.
Author: tedmills
Bong craftsmanship
Here’s a posting of scans from OUI magazine from the ’70s, featuring handsomely photographed drug paraphernalia. The bongs look like works of art (well, the Ultraman mask bong looks like folk art), even the roach clips look of the highest quality. This could never be a coffee table book (most of this stuff is probably long gone) but it bloody should be.
By way of Boing Boing
The Spell-binding world of Yumiko Kayukawa
More wonderful printwork, this time from Sapporo-based Yumiko Kayukawa. I dig this stuff, man, we need something like this up in S.B. By the way, I found this at a gallery site based in Palm Springs. On my one trip to the city I never managed to see anything like this, just “rich people art”. I wish I had known this place existed!
Julie Dermansky’s fine arts
Once again, Danny Gregory points out another artist to take note of. Julie Dermansky does damn near everything, from photography to metalwork to “events” to paintings. The latter are in the neo-outsider style that is pretty common these days, and I quite like her series of Bishop Paintings.
Avengers Disassembled
Make hilarity in the comfort of your own home with a cardboard box, Photoshop, and $300 worth of action figures. What a hoot.
By way of Metafilter
Strandbeest
Theo Jansen makes walking machines out of plastic, strange, organic creatures that only need the wind to keep moving. There’s a lot of movies at Jansen’s strandbeest site–check it out.
By way of Metafilter
What do the Bible and Bush have in common?
Why, these wonderful diagrams over at threetwoone.org, silly.
The Royal Art Lodge
I have no idea who The Royal Art Lodge are, but it’s some sort of Winnipeg-based collective. The work has a Shrigley-like feel to it, but more deadpan.
By way of The Cartoonist.
Academia meets the Sopranos: Sopranos wins
There’s a lot of essays out there on the Sopranos, but like a lot of pop criticism (and academia in general), there’s so little substance to these essays that, once you get past the paragraphs name-dropping theorists and philosophers, past the paragraphs that awkwardly sum up the film/tv show for those who’ve never seen it (but are snoozy to those who do), and finally past the references to the other books and films the author has read, there’s very little analysis. I spent a little while looking around the web for some good reading on The Sopranos, and while Salon has a few good articles, this one by Martha P. Nochimson is one of the best: Tony’s Options: The Sopranos and the Televisuality of the Gangster Genre
The Codex Seraphinaianus
Fans of surrealism, fantasy, and late ’70s European illustration should find much to groove on in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, a 400-page imaginary encyclopedia of a world similar to ours populated by bizarre creatures. The above site features a little background on the mysterious work, and links to illustrations. Totally out of print, used copies cost boogaloo bucks. (Or do they?) At least the Amazon link suggests other strange books, even if there’s not a Codex in stock.
Serafini has a site, but it’s under construction. There is, however, a site devoted to the Codex. And apparently Serafini is just updating the original “mysterious” work, the Voynich Manuscript.