Tom Moody offers "Some thoughts on the amorphous middle ground between between the hissing, honking, and chittering of academic electronic music and the clicks, stabs, and skronks of its club-based variants." [link]. Tom mentions Paul Lansky's The Importance of Being Digital lecture as something of a starting point for observing the convergence between "club" or "techno" music and the equally-needing-qualifying-quotes world of "academic electronic music".

I decided it would be worth the effort to try to dig up my interview with Paul, (now eleven years old!), and get that back on there through the tubes of the internet. Thanks to the Wayback Machine for saving files that my old computers, hard-drive and laziness about backing up stuff couldn't solve. Here's the article, and it includes the transcript from our hour long chat, too.

I spent more than my fair share of time at the old electronic music studios that were once the Columbia-Princeton studios, in it's final years. And it was truly an amazing experience, not only for the historical significance of cutting tape on the same blocks and tweaking the same oscillators that made those early "masterworks" of electronic music, but for the influence that it had on all my instrumental compositions as well (a fondness for timbral manipulation, an attention to envelope generation as a facet of phrasing, perhaps?).

But down the hall the revolution had already been well underway towards a purely digital creation -- even past the doors of the bastard step-child that was FM synthesis and MIDI. Even now, I fear, I'm still enough of a academic pitch snob (or, as Davy would say, I still retain the buttstix) to find too little to enjoy of the auto-composed music from either "serious" composers or whatever you'd want to call the "techno" kids (I wouldn't know what to call them, but by simply trying to distinguish "techno" as something "other than serious" I do everyone a great injustice).

But composition, like everything else, is shaken by the digital revolution, by the power of the personal computer, and now -- hopefully -- by the real gains brought about by the internet and the Long Tail. The machines of music are always changing, thankfully, and the ears that consume the ouput are as well -- and at the end of the day, the gains of digital productivity hit not only the office, but the parlor room that housed the player piano, too.

Who but the biggest curmudgeons (and lord knows, there are many academic composers who fit the bill) can resist the joy of Electroplankton?

After nearly two-years of on-again and off-again play, we've finally defeated Bowser the end of Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2. Some call this the best in the series of Mario games, and based on what I've seen I agree -- an amazing mix of emergent behaviour for your protagonist (Mario or Luigi), a diverse landscape with challenging scenes, and enough flexibility and replayability to keep you hooked.

In the end, my double-jointed super GBA son actually did all the work to get to the castle -- but he wouldn't finish the job...as he simply doesn't care about "winning" or completing the game. How wonderfully zen.

Two years is a nice commitment for a game, even off and on. Just think that all three movements and score and parts for this thing took a mere nine months.

Much has been written about blogs and participatory journalism, which I needn't re-tell, but instead point to two great examples: Yesterday there was a bunch of underground fires and explosions that ultimately shut off power to a bunch of homes (including ours). Baristanet, a local blog (no, probably, the local blog), covered it, practically in realtime with a combination of posts and comments. While TV, print and radio did get there -- the locals were there first, covering it for all the other office-bound commuters anxious to find out of their pets were beginning to swelter.

Meanwhile, more and more folks are descending upon the one part of the Patriots operation that is open to the public: training camp. The net-famous Mrs. B (Karen Cardoza) has been providing blow-by-blow training camp diaries before there were blogs, and now she's joined by many others -- including some amazing photos from Erdoboy. There simply is no other time of year that regular fans get get this close to the team -- and the minute-by-minute coverage of the practices (and Ed's photos) rival that of practically any "real" journalist (although Mike Reiss is hard to beat, and he has a press pass).

Omaha!

Modern medicine isn't all ethical dillemas and pharma/insurance exploitation. It's also about getting your medical records as a JPEG on a CD!

This is a picture of my eyeballs -- I guess to be more accurate, my retinas. I went to my eye doctor's appointment to get dialated and to get examed as last year the doctor found a small blind spot in checking my peripheral vision, and then observed a spot on my retina. A referral to a opthamologist confirmed it was nothing to worry about (perhaps it's fairly common?), but to monitor it every year. So here is a shot, straight on, taken with a big white machine (click for more detail):

On my right eye, way way over at nine o'clock is the vitreous tuft -- it looks like a cannoli (click on the image for a bigger view):


Or maybe like a submarine swimming around the corner of the inky depths of ocean. Or a microbe on a giant grape.

Just had to share. I think it's cool I can have pictures of my body. Proctologist, anyone?