Jonny Wilson (of Eclectic Method) has been making music and video with singer Maigin Blank for the past few months. Quite nice.

Tonight on my way home from Troy, NY, I ran into an artist in the 14th Street A/C/E station, Joseph Griffith, whose UFO-filled, pastel drawings I saw, liked and bought on University Place in the Village several years ago. Joseph is still drawing, still selling his work in the streets and subway stations, and seemed well and happy.

Joseph’s work centers on New York street scenes, subway trains in motion, and the UFOs that swoop down out of the sky to destroy them with laser beams, as well as tranquil night scenes of lampposts beneath elevated subway tracks, bright and silent apartment windows. Recently he has started to branch out into absurd and impressionist work. One of the drawings on display tonight was a copy of [that one Picasso or Degas or Matisse with the naked ladies dancing in a circle].

He has drawn UFOs because of their popularity for so long, “6 years,” that they gave him nightmares, so he stopped for a while.

Homeless for 12 yrs, Joseph lived in shelters — including the one on Ward’s Island where Bill Etra lived for the past 9 months or so until, happily, the city gave him his long-awaited apartment — and slept on trains when he couldn’t stand the shelters. He’s now living in a city apartment on 43rd Street. He took from his briefcase, containing papers and bundles of pencils, a nice little postcard-size photobook of his work that one of his collectors has put together. Some of the drawings within were in perspective, which I hadn’t seen in his work, as well as mixed media: figures of men cut from newspapers and glued into the scene.

The first time I met him he walked with a cane. Tonight he was seated in a wheelchair drawing but stood to get my change out of his pocket. I bought a drawing of UFOs attacking subway cars.

And this is the new drawing I bought yesterday.

I had to post this. Benton and Bill have told me Abstractions on a Bedsheet was the first time someone (Bill) used a computer to animate the Rutt/Etra synthesizer. The computer, a PDP-11, generated control voltages to, er, control the parameters of the R/E. Bill stayed up all night programming it.

Thanks to a recommendation from Anton, I’ve started writing for Create Digital Motion. My first two posts are about Doc Baily’s visual effects work for feature films, namely Solaris, and the new features coming for Jitter in Max 5.

I am not stupid. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will ship with a new version of Quartz Composer with a GLSL object, which will run any shader (a program that runs on the graphics card) you put into it. Anton has already got his shaders working in a Leopard RC. While Max/MSP/Jitter will probably remain my main programming language for some time, I want to be able to make simple apps that do a couple of things really well, without the overhead and unpredictability of Max, so, thanks to Eric’s advice, I’m going to take a serious hack at learning Cocoa. I have bought a book. I like this bit from the end of chapter one:

The second trick [of learning] is to stop thinking about yourself. While learning something new, many students will think, “Damn, this is hard for me. I wonder if I am stupid.” Because stupidity is such an unthinkable terrible thing in our culture, the students will then spend hours constructing arguments that explain why they are intelligent yet are having difficulties. The moment you start down this path, you have lost your focus.

I used to have a boss named Rock [like teh television show?! --ed.]. Rock had earned a degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech and had never had a job where he used his knowledge of the heavens. Once I asked him if he regretted getting the degree. “Actually, my degree in astrophysics has proved to be very valuable,” he said. “Some things in this world are just hard. When I am struggling with something, I sometimes think, ‘Damn, this is hard for me. I wonder if I am stupid,’ and then I remember that I have a degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech; I must not be stupid.”

Before going any further, assure yourself that you are not stupid and that some things are just hard. Armed with this silly affirmation and a well-rested mind, you are ready to conquer Cocoa.

That’s good advice for my brain. Expect new open source visual programs to appear on this site in future. THERE, I SAID IT.

The Bad Plus respond to some misunderstandings about their music on their blog. Every trufan of TBP knows they’re not being ironic, of course. Still this will be useful when people — er, older, parental types — ask why you’re listening to such strange music.

As someone who derides celebrity culture and mocks his girlfriend for occasionally picking up a copy of US Weekly, naturally I am fascinated by the mechanics of fame. Stephen Fry, famous British actor, has a new blog in which he has inscribed a fascinating essay — or ‘blessay’ as he prefers, a pun upon the French word for ‘wound’ — on fame from multiple perspectives: in it, at it, up to one’s neck in it and apart from it. As he rattles off the standard approaches fans make to celebs, I cringe at my own remembered fandom. But at least I was able to invite Brian Eno to Share with a straight back.

Woopee! Emily and I are moving to Brooklyn. If you live near the Graham stop on the L in Williamsburg and I’m not aware of it, let me know and we’ll conduct experiments and/or hang out.

//back to packing

LANCE BLISTERS: LIVE Jungle, Breakcore, Punk, and Noise performed with MIDI Guitar and Microphone, using custom software to create cutup political anthems. LIVE synchronized visual transcriptions of the songs’ subjects. LANCE BLISTERS was initiated in 2003 to SMASH THE STATE with a show which will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF! LANCE BLISTERS is a live multimedia band currently comprising Lance Blisters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), with special guest visual performer Dan Winckler for this show.

This Thursday, 27 Sep 07, LANCE BLISTERS will perform at “littoral” an event focusing on the written word. LANCE will play 3 different short sets between writers Daniel Borzutzky (The Ecstasy of Capitulation, Arbitrary Tales) Shelley Jackson (Half Life, The Melancholy of Anatomy, the tattooed novel SKIN) and Deb Olin Unferth (Minor Robberies). Full bios at http://www.issueprojectroom.org/events.html

littoral @ Issue Project Room
232 3rd St, 3rd floor, Brooklyn NY 11215
8pm-10:30pm, Thursday, 27 Sep 2007
$10
http://www.onnyturf.com/subway/?address=232+3rd+Street,+brooklyn,+NY,+11215

Last night Emily and I got back from three days in Bremen, Germany, where I was invited to perform at the MENSCHMEERMEDIEN (man, mirror, medium) festival at the Nordwolle fin-de-siecle wool mill. We had a wonderful time and wonderful hosts. Thanks for the invite, Martin! The whole experience went something like:

Monday: Receive invitation via Share discussion list. Accept.
Tuesday: Martin tries to book ticket.
Wednesday: ticket falls through. Dan books incredibly cheap ticket on Emirates. Wednesday afternoon: Emily decides to come and books incredibly cheap ticket on Emirates. Thursday: leave for Hamburg.
Friday: arrive in Bremen. Eat bratwurst and tour the city with alternate historians.
Saturday: perform at massive old Victorian factory. Eat bratwurst. Party all night with splendid Germans.
Sunday morning: conclude party with Turkish/Sri Lankan falafel.
Sunday: act like tourists. Bratwurst. Completely fail to throw up out of one’s nostrils (note: this did not happen).
Monday: return to New York. No bratwurst.

I played with Axel Himmelmann, who makes excellent music and looks a lot like me. Emily shot some great pics and video of Axel and me performing. You can watch one of them above and the rest on the Internet Archive.