this morning I read the articles that had arrived in my inbox and webpages overnight and discovered a talented Sydney based textiles designer called Joanna Fowles via this article in TDF (the design files). Joanna is originally from the UK, though has lived in Australia previously - when she did a year-long TAFE screenprinting course. she then returned to England where she studied textile design at Chelsea College of Art. I love her geometric designs - featuring many large and overlapping dots. she specializes in Shibori dyeing and printing, using the Shibori indigo as well as other colours to create her scarves and fabrics. I notice Fowles also has a design featured in the wonderful "Digital Textile Design" book by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac, which "covers everything students and practitioners of textile design will need to learn about designing and printing digitally".
I had the idea today to write a story about memory windows. I think it was after the second coffee. now I can't think of what to write - the characters. this week I've been on holidays and have been relaxing and reading. the "Exegesis" by Philip K Dick arrived (finally - it seems it might have been delayed due to a missing / between my apartment number and street number on the package's postal address). so I started reading it, but it's straight into the gnostic themes, which I haven't read for a few months so then I started listening to the Aeon Byte podcasts again and buying ebooks from Amazon & Google to read in my chrome cloud reader. one was about Hermes Trismegistus, called The quest for Hermes Trismegistus : from ancient Egypt to the modern world" by Gary Lachman. another is "Sacred Economics" by Charles Eisenstein, who's class I'm taking starting this week on Evolver. "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde - which has a great essay on Ezra Pound as the last chapter. I've been meaning to find out more about Pound for a while, so this was good to read. another is a collection of interviews in a book called "Voices of Gnosticism" by Miguel Conner - who hosts and produces the Aeon Byte podcasts mentioned previously.
today, I listened to a song that Matty Fresh had posted on facebook. very lush - lovely piano sounds & beats. I’ve seen a video interview with him where he showed the process he follows in producing a beat - digging in the crates, sampling the vinyl records, transferring to the computer.
then I had these thoughts about the piano sample taken from the record. the sound has layers of stories and human connections with it. there’s the pianist - all those years of training and practicing the piano which led to them playing that song on the day it was recorded. the composer of the original song. the booking of the sound recording studio - I can imagine the musicians in the room - the pianist at the piano, playing the song. how many times did they play this melody that day. did they get into the zone. the sound recording engineer recording the sounds - how did they adjust & tweak the sounds. was it recorded onto tape. was it a new tape or had it been used before and were there traces of older sounds already on the tape. then it was sent to the vinyl processing plant to be both archived and brought to life during the vinyl production process. were there any imperfections introduced in this process. all these steps took time. did the musician think about their performance again afterwards - wonder if they could have changed something, or if it was perfect as is. then the industry takes over and the record gets released and people buy it. who bought this record - the one that the sample was taken from. how many hands has it passed through, and how many plays did it have on people's home record players, or out & about? what were the people doing when they listened - what were they thinking. did their record players add some imperfections to the sounds by faulty equipment, or overuse? did they play the record over & over so it was almost worn out and the vinyl getting thinner and thinner with each play. at some point their lives changed and the record was sold and ended up in a dusty record bin that Matty Fresh pulled it out of and took home and added to his collection. how many other songs were listened to before this one was chosen - how many times was it played by him to be imprinted on his memory to pull it out later when this song was being created.
Sunday TINA 2011 was a day when the rain set in - it was heavy at times, yet it didn't stop people attending the festival panel sessions and performances. this is recorded with binaural mics (line-in adapter - finally found the little battery for it!) on Hunter St Mall - complete with locals/passerbys talking as they walked past me
papert logo program output - I made a little program to draw sun ra circles
this looks a lot like the lisp I used to use in early versions of AutoCAD in the 90s.
(I wrote a very crude program below - first try. run it multiple times without clearing the previous)
27/09/2011
SETXY 10 10
SRAND 23
PD
REPEAT 54
[
CIRCLE (RAND 23)
PU
FORWARD (RAND 51)
PD
CIRCLE (RAND 67)
PU
BACKWARD (RAND 91)
PD
CIRCLE (RAND 27)
CIRCLE (RAND 56)
PU
RIGHT (RAND 21)
CIRCLE (RAND 63)
CIRCLE (RAND 87)
]
15/09/2011: this AI book (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach) is good so far. hopefully it's all like this, not just ch1 ;) am thinking a test to help with archive project would be good. [1]
prob more of a parser than AI but maybe useful to learn some natural language processing & machine learning & automated reasoning #terms [2]
saw mention of using money as the 'reward' for the atoms/monads to learn. thinking of using music instead. like real life in that community [3]
music taste -> street cred -> popularity(?) of sorts. have to know history/share knowledge/durations of participation etc. [4]
I see beauty in the soi - I went for a walk around bangrak streets this evening. it's still so hot & humid 6-7pm, but there's so many things to see. I'm not the best photographer, and my camera is not that good at colours, so they've come out more muted than they really are, and it doesn't focus well in low light - especially when zoomed - but here's a photo slideshow of some of the buildings and people in the soi. a couple of times I could hear people talking and looking - like the motor-soi drivers who sit on the corner, so I snapped a quick shot and kept walking past. there's also lots of very small and scrawny street cats. I love the colours and textures of the buildings - and the windows - I can imagine people looking out of the windows to see what's happening in their neighbourhoods - though I think they also seem to spend a lot of time outside, on the streets/soi, eating at the food stalls and talking with friends. it's nice.
notes over coffee today - not very coherent & I notice I contradict my own argument/plot.. oh well. will try (perhaps) to make it easier to read later / think more on it. stream of consciousness notes between sips of coffee. fix / adjust later
:::
04/06/2011 bangrak, bangkok
With the articles in the international herald tribune this week about China’s plans to divert one of their rivers to meet the water supply demands of its people, and then today’s article about the race to find food that can be grown in droughts – rice growing experiments – it’s just like living in the opening page of a science fiction, futuristic novel.
Character: a global nomad – the prices of food have risen too high so she is forced to travel the world working in other places, living in hotels, because her employer is paying for her food and accommodation.
Places like India where there was a grain shortage and there was risk that the poor people would not be able to afford to buy rice.
tonight's taxi driver got a little lost - we ended up on the wrong side of a split one way road and he couldn't find a place to turn, so we did a loop of the back streets / soi. I can't remember the name of the street nearby - at first I thought it was charoen may but it might be (thanon) charoen chan?? not too far from (thanon) charoen krung anyway, if you take an earlier exit off the highway and end up in turning sai (left) instead of qua (right) to get to charoen krung (there was a sign but we were in totally wrong lane by then.
anyway, it was great to be lost - I just love the soi! (small streets / lanes) there's so much activity - people getting their hair done at the local hairdresser, people eating at one of the many street stalls, people waiting for the bus, people at the stores - working, visiting or shopping, people just sitting out on the street / stoops talking or watching the cars and motor-soi drive/ride past. the tuk tuks. the motor soi waiting on the corner with their coloured flouro jackets and motorbikes - they're like a single person taxi on a motorbike. people at the fruit stalls. I saw a durian store and a man about to cut a durian open.
the soi feel "very Thai" to me - at least in my limited view of Thailand & Bangkok so far. perhaps "very Bangkok" or "very Bangrak" / "very Si Phraya", though the latter two I think of the Chao Phraya River too. I've walked down to the temple in the charoen krung video & back on my first weekend here - it was so hot though. I was really dehydrated and hot & sweaty when I arrived back at the hotel. "very Thai" is a phrase I hear all the time - even the Museum of Siam posed the question "what does it mean to be Thai?" in their exhibit. and the WordPlay! Writer's Festival at Neilson Hays Library a couple of weekends ago had speakers who also spoke about this and posed the question. (even though they were mostly expats! which I thought was a little strange - why wouldn't you ask a local Thai citizen, rather than an expat - granted some had lived here for a number of years..)
I'd bought and tried a durian earlier today after we went for lunch (great pad thai too!) - it was in my bag. I could still smell it - it was intoxicating in a way - the tangyness of it is really striking, though the texture is really smooth - sort of like a hard banana texture, but the taste is sweet - I kept thinking of dragon fruit punch (though perhaps that's not the right smell / taste also - have forgotten my words again). not sure if the taxi driver liked the smell of durian - I could hear him sniffing every so often. the smell changed during the evening, I couldn't eat all of it, but I had some more after dinner. it's in the minibar fridge now so the room smells less of durian. apparently it's banned on some public transport and hotels because of the smell. I've tried many Thai fruits now - most from this Thai fruits page that one of the guys from work had sent me - they've been sooo generous at work, especially with food. once I commented to one of the guys that they had a lot of food, and chats at work with food (usually at the end of the day or lunchtime), and he replied, "yes. happiness is most important" which I thought was a fantastic attitude! work pays for the food - apparently it makes the programmers work better in the afternoons. I'd say they're probably right - maybe more places should do this - it's quite common in Asia (so I've noticed) for work to provide food at the workplace.
some photos - lots of river and food photos this time. I hope to get some more of the buildings, doors, gates and windows - they have such great textures, though I feel a little strange walking the back streets taking photos of people's houses and the soi are very narrow so it's hard to get them all in frame on my nicer camera (as opposed to phone camera)
Hunter & Mortar - Fear and Loathing—a few words with Hunter SBX about his new album with Mortar—this was originally an article for ozhiphop.com : article in forum & on http://officialozhiphop.tumblr.com. by AliaK 31/05/2011. Thanks very much to Hunter for taking the time to answer my rambling questions
:::
Hunter and Mortar released their new album "Fear and Loathing" in May 2011—the guys seem a perfect match to release an album together. Written over a few years, there's a range of styles, and fans of either of the two will not be disappointed. My personal favourites are the more introspective songs, such as Mortar's "Expecting to Fly" and Hunter's "Love and Fear" but there are also plenty of hardcore rap songs for the fans to play at parties and bars around Australia. Hunter answered a few questions and replied to comments about the new release. You can find the album in all good stores supporting Australian Hip Hop, and I'd encourage you to buy all of Hunter's and Mortar's albums, including this one—the latest chapter in the Hunter SBX story.
lunch by the Siphraya Pier, Bangkok. reading McLuhan's interview from late 1960s and thinking of it related to the Jean M Auel Earth's Children's series books I've read - am reading her latest "The Land of the Painted Caves" during this trip. so his ideas on the development of the phonetic language are interesting. I think he's talking about more recent times (& Homo sapiens / modern humans - probably around 3500 years ago up until today). but since I've just finished the book - which is about the period when both Neanderthal & CroMagnon man/humanoids are living together on Earth, I was relating his ideas back to the ideas in the book. Auel's books have talked about the sign language and large, communal memories of Neanderthal man (previous to CroMagnon) - they didn't have developed speech - or the ability to talk properly apart from a few words/sounds. so perhaps McLuhan's ideas mean we get the best of both worlds - memory outsourced to writing. I think Erik Davis has talked about these things in his Techgnosis book too iirc. I also liked how in the McLuhan article he was talking about such a "connected world" & computers and communication networks in the early 1960s! well, he did pretty much invent "communication studies" type uni classes, but still, you could read this article with today's technology in mind and it would still be relevant - if not even more today than in the '60s
anyway, a lovely afternoon - lunch, reading and writing and ideas.
...
tonight I've been listening to some of this talk and reading the article - it ties in to the book/ideas of this trip / today's reading also : Scott Taylor and Bob Dobbs discuss "FIBONACCI AND THE ECSTATIC DIGITAL CLUB SCENE" http://bit.ly/iy9YNKhttp://bit.ly/jbSrZP the "anti-cave cave" - they're talking of techno club as a modern cave with paintings on the walls (glowing lights) as well as mentions of the more obvious comparison to Plato's cave & the archetypes of reality, and McLuhan's ideas of advertising and tv being the "cave paintings" of our modern world.
[quote]The McLuhan Dew-Line; and, punning on that title, he has also originated a series of recordings called “The Marshall McLuhan Dew-Line Plattertudes”.[/quote]
McLuhan Dew-Line newsletters ad - love some of the topics: future editions will discuss.. "the end of history via the computer" "the end of the stock exchange via the computer" "the satellite as the end of Nature" "why the 'backward' countries will inevitably dominate the western world"
& I watched this video "I'm not beer" - mentions Bob Dylan, McLuhan, and Bob Dobbs
2011 is the 100th anniversary of McLuhan's birthday. there's a few events celebrating this : McLuhan 2011 (this weekend - just heard about it) and McLuhan on Maui has phone conferences feb-dec 2011 and an in-person conference later in the year (december) their about page has the details - there seems to be audio archives of the calls (eg the one above discussing the essay)
the camera didn't really do this justice, but there were these amazing ghostly reflections and patterns of light moving on the ceiling next to the Si Phraya pier today whilst I was having lunch. mezmerizing
some links on Bangkok sound art and digital art and other interesting blogs / media
art BAM - Bangkok Art Map - BAM is a printed art map available at galleries, hotels, art-cafes and various other places around the city. there seems to be a different issue each month. I found a copy of the 05.2011 version at the Kathmandu Photo Gallery off Silom Rd in Bangrak. the website has art listings and information also and is definitely worth checking out - you can even download a pdf version of the current BAM if you don't find one on the soi
Kathmandu Photo Gallery - there's books, art prints, and a gallery upstairs. it's a great old pre-war building, painted pale green - which reminds me of the smaller rooms in the old RSL halls in Brisbane in the 1970s where we did ballet classes - even the same pale green paint on the wall boards - it's very fresh and colourful. owned by well-known Thai photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom and artist/filmaker Ing K.
Reflections on Hunter's first three albums:
::: "Done DL" ::: Hunter and Dazastah (2002)
::: "Going Back to Yokine" ::: Hunter (2006)
::: "Monster House" ::: Hunter and DJ Vame (2010)
When Walter Benjamin stated in 1936 that, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end" due to the rise of the printed novel and the lowering value of experience, he hadn't anticipated the rise of the hip hop emcee to revive this craft in our modern world. In all his albums, Hunter shows his skills as a wonderful storyteller. There are tales of growing up, getting into trouble and later returning to his hometown of Yokine, Perth, in the songs "Adolescence", "Going Back To Yokine" and "Yokine (Drugs + Crime)". These are stories of self-discovery, and of changing his life, and of hope — giving up old ways that were not working for him to focus on music, rapping and living a hip hop-infused life instead. "What I Do Best" has the feeling of homecoming to a community of supportive people and finding his place in the world. There are stories of mateship and the value of community with his Syllabolix (SBX) family and crew. There are stories of having children and the specialness that can bring to one's life in "Ultrasound" and "Kids of the Future". Littering his rhymes in "Kids of the Future", "The Big Issue" and "Me Old Man" are stories based on his Dad’s advice, as he contemplates being a father himself.
