January 17th is Art’s Birthday. I doubt I will get anything else done in time, so here is my present to art. Happy Birthday, Art.
The film is footage from the Prelinger Archives, again. The soundtrack consists of an altered (slowed-down) drum track, Jomox T-Resonator, and electric cello run through various effect devices.
Posted in Das Cello, Das Gehirn, ferner liefen, Metamorphosism
Tags: art, art's birthday, cello, film, jomox t-resonator, music, prelinger archives
Video of thereminist Pamelia Kurstin and acapella group Bauchklang. Pamelia, whom I’ve mentioned before, is a brilliant musician.
I finally got around to figuring out how to use some recording interface I bought more than a year ago and tested it on my theremin. Then I fiddled around with the recording in audacity (wikipedia link) and decided to see if I could make a film out of some footage I had downloaded a long time ago from the Prelinger archives, which have a ton of interesting ephemeral film. It was an enjoyable, although time-consuming exercise in finally learning how to use the iMovie program that came with my iBook. The results can be seen at the link above, if I copied the code right. The idea is sort of related to a text I have been working on that I call the Undersea Libretto, which is inspired by B-movies and the deep ocean, and Haruki Murakami without all the cooking, and other things. It was a useful exercise for me, because there are things I like about this little film that are missing in the text, and it has suggested to me ways to improve the text.
Anyhow.
The soundtrack is theremin, run through a Boss delay pedal, and then messed around with in audacity (edited, and slowed down in parts, mostly). It was fun to make, I hope I can find the time to do more of these.
Just kidding. I just wanted to say how much I fucking hate cars.
I had totally forgotten about it, but Brian reminded me.
Anyhow, I fucking hate ‘em.
You probably didn’t know that.
In high school, I couldn’t understand the kids who spent all the money they earned working two jobs on their muscle cars, while I saved mine for a trip to Europe and stuff like that.
Until one let me drive his Camaro. So, okay, they’re really fun to drive. More fun than a 1958 Chevy Apache half-ton pickup truck, or a VW Golf on its last legs, that sets itself on fire when you’re 300 miles from home on the Olympic Peninsula, and Swiss hitchhikers laugh at you.
I especially hate Fiat Doblos, although they look okay. Nice design, lousy mechanics.
Decent public transportation would save so much money it’s not even funny. Theoretically. Of course, someone can always fuck up public transportation and so on.
I took the train to work for 5 years until I got tired of repeatedly having bronchitis every winter, like 4-5 times a winter.
Barring the discovery of some miraculous new energy source that will enable cheap flying cars, though, seriously, what about slot cars? Lightweight electric cars that look like Formula 1 racers, powered not from heavy batteries, but practically battery-free, powered instead by juice from rails in the center of the lanes? The roads could even be made of solar-electric panels and generate their own power during the day. Maybe this would be an unpopular idea because it eliminates batteries, which are central to a lot of electric car business models.
Anyway, I hate cars. I hate buying them, buying the gas, paying for repairs and paying for insurance. Most of all I hate having to take them to the fucking mechanic to have a light bulb changed. That right there is symbolic for me of the way cars are designed to extract maximum revenue from their owners.
Also, your favorite music sucks. Now get off my lawn. Merry Christmas.
Alpha is in Kyoto getting a massage, or something, so Gamma was kind enough to accompany me to a concert last night at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, where the Klangforum Wien performed Donatoni, Brice Pauset and György Kúrtag. It was quite good, if you want my in-expert opinion. We subscribe to their concerts, and are really enjoying this year’s series. I fall asleep a lot, I feel bad about that. It’s like borderline narcolepsy. When I have trouble falling asleep at home in my bed, I imagine I’m in a concert and I usually fall right to sleep. It’s because I get up so early, I think, and then have a long day, and then go to the bar at a hotel that shall remain nameless for legal reasons before the concert for a drink, and not any sort of condemnation of the music. Also a little more oxygen in the atmosphere inside the concert hall wouldn’t hurt.
Gamma is 14. She joined me at the bar last night. I had a beer although I wasn’t really in the mood for a drink, because they won’t bring you peanuts if you don’t buy a drink. Gamma ordered a strawberri daiquiri. With alcohol? asked the waiter. Sure, said Gamma. She let me taste. It was very good. That is something I find agreeable about Austria, they’re not all paranoid about carding people who order drinks.
Another agreeable thing about the country is that its president also subscribes to this modern music concert series, and sits two rows in front of us, just him and his wife. Either that or his security detail is so good that they’re invisible. Last night Gamma went over and said hi to him.
I think it’s neat to have a president who enjoys new music and is accessible like that.
And it’s also neat to have kids like I do.
Even my cats have been friendly and remarkably sane lately, except for the senile gray cat, who is as nuts as ever.
Posted in Das Cello, Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: gamma, heinz fischer, klangforum, konzerthaus
I remember, back in the early days of blogging, back when my first computer was powered by a little steam engine, that bloggers often wrote about what they had dreamed.
I sometimes did.
Then that got old.
Also, it turned out that I might have interesting dreams, but they rarely are still there when I wake up.
Well.
A couple nights ago I had a vivid nightmare that someone had bought the wrong breakfast cereal.
It was just an image and an emotion. The image was this box of muesli. It looked wrong. There were too many puffs in it, for example. I do not like my muesli with puffs, or with chocolate. At the moment, it is hard to get muesli in Austria without puffs or chocolate, that may have been the source of the dream.
Or it may not. Who knows with dreams?
Anyway, in the dream, I removed the clear plastic liner from the box, with all the cereal in it, and double checked. But it was clearly full of puffs.
Someone had bought the wrong muesli.
I was filled with profound disappointment.
Then I woke up, as one sometimes does with nightmares, still saturated with the emotion.
Wow, I thought, that was some nightmare.
Once, I had a nightmare about a rock in a stream. A big, flat boulder about an inch under the surface, with the water flowing silently over it. At night. That one filled me with regret and guilt. Some terrible crime was buried beneath that rock.
I have never forgotten that one.
Obviously.
On the other hand, I once had a dream about trying to kill a guy who was absolutely impossible to kill. He kept fighting back, it was amazing. I was tussling with him in a friend’s basement while a couple friends watched television upstairs, so on top of everything else, I was trying to kill him quietly. For some reason, it was impossible to strangle him. He was about as strong as me and kept getting away. I finally stabbed him in the neck with a shard of window glass. I hit an artery, too, because the blood was squirting out real far. Unfortunately, I seemed to have only nicked the artery, because although the blood squirted out real far, it squirted in a real thin stream. It was taking forever for him to bleed to death.
In fact, he never bled to death in that dream. He just kept rassling with me.
Then I woke up, full of anger and frustration. Still, it wasn’t exactly a nightmare.
Dreams, aren’t they weird?
Where do they come from, I wonder.
Mike Nelson didn’t know which way was up. He looked around in the darkness and kicked himself for getting himself into this situation. An experienced diver like him! Rapture of the deep killed fools, it killed people who ignored the time, divers who went too deep for too long. But not Mike Nelson, for God’s sake!
But here he was, miles down in darkness, and he didn’t know which way was up.
He didn’t know anything.
He hung motionless in the darkness and thought about that. He knew a couple things. He knew that he didn’t know which way was up, and he knew that he wasn’t really Mike Nelson. He was just some diver who had gone too deep for too long, and that was that.
Aw, hell, he thought.
Rapture of the deep.
Diving is one thing. Making it back to the surface is another thing. But the first is no good without the second.
Aw, hell.
Mike Nelson, who wasn’t really Mike Nelson, looked around.
Fuck, seriously. He couldn’t see a thing. Nothing. No thing.
Then something, like, flashed.
Pretty far away, he thought, although he could’t really tell because it was really dark and his eyes might be playing tricks on him. But something flashed, like a bioluminescent fish out hunting. Or maybe krill closer by. They glow, he thought.
Krill glow.
The diver had seriously no idea which way he was pointed. Hell. How long had he been down here?
He listened to the ocean. He could hear everything. The whole oceanic sound-effects record was playing all at once. The pinging of submarine sonar. The song of a humpback whale. The clicking sound that one fish makes. Crabs clicking their claws together in a catchy syncopated rhythm.
At least that’s what it sounded like. Remember, it was dark.
He listened to his breathing.
The hiss of his, of that thing that did the air. Starts with an ‘R’. Regulator. The hiss of the regulator. The roar of the bubbles passing his head, roiling up toward the surface.
It hit him. The bubbles go up. He just had to follow them. Slowly, of course, so the nitrogen dissolved in his blood didn’t form bubbles and give him the bends, but, yeah.
He lit a torch, briefly, and exhaled and watched where the bubbles went. He was glad he did, he was totally turned around. He got straightened out and turned the light back off because he didn’t want to attract anything large and carnivorous with foot-long teeth and shit.
Just as the light went off and darkness engulfed him, he might have seen something large and gray out the corner of his eye.
Jesus, what was that? His heart slammed in his chest like a rat in a coffee can.
It made him want to drop everything and swim to the surface as fast as he could.
He tried to keep down the panic. If it was a shark, it would already have eaten him. Right?
So that was something else he knew. Two new bits of information. Something gray was real close to him in the pitch darkness, and hadn’t eaten him. Also, now he knew which way was up.
What more could a guy want?
Posted in Das Gehirn, Metamorphosism
Tags: darkness, light, ocean, rapture of the deep
©2000-2013 Mig Living | Powered by WordPress | Pink Touch 2 theme altered by The Branwich Horror for Metamorphosism