Eagle-eyed Abigail recently posted a comment on my previous entry about Adrian Tomine’s New Yorker cover. In her comment, she offers a very strong candidate for the identity of the book both characters in the illustration are reading. Below is an enlarged scan of the book in the image, followed by the cover for “The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness” by Karen Armostrong, which was released in hardcover in March of this year. It’s not an EXACT match, but it’s pretty close.
For the past three years I’ve been involved in an annual effort to get local members of a growing Michigan(ish) music community to record Christmas songs. Getting 20 plus part-time music-makers to agree to contribute a Christmas song is one thing, collecting the song in order to meet a deadline is another entirely.
It is in the interest of encouraging everyone to contribute that we stress a Lo-Fi friendly policy. We typically set a deadline around the beginning of December and keep pushing it back as we try to gather everyone’s submissions to burn a master. Once this is done, we put together a few hundred hand-packaged CD’s and distribute them.
Over the course of three CD’s we’ve collected 63 original and traditional holiday songs with production ranging from Parsons to Barlow, all of which are available for download in a variety of formats (mp3 / zip / torrent) here. This year, I play on these songs and recorded the basic tracks for this one.
Over time, this compilation has become an excuse for people to write and record in groups independent of their ‘normal’ band situations. This inevitably leads to a slew of pseudonyms and joke songs, which punctuate the more somber/sincere offerings nicely and keep the mood ‘balanced.’
It’s worth noting that we used a wiki to organize this year’s efforts. Everything (With a few exceptions) went smoothly, and we finished up about 2 weeks earlier than last year. Imagine that! Wiki + Musicians = Productivity!
Also still available is my Christmas Mix from last year. I haven’t stumbled across enough new christmas music to justify a new installment, so I defer to last year’s page, which I am very glad I left up.
With this entry, I’ll be continuing my recent habit of only updating this website when I spot the work of an artist I like in a place I’m not expecting to see it. I was in Borders today and noticed that the cover of the newest Michael Chabon book, “The Final Solution: A Story of Detection,” has cover art by long-time indie rock poster designer Jay Ryan. You can view his website here, or sort through this gallery of his work at gigpopsters.com. This cover is pretty underwhelming compared to his other work – two of my favorite posters by Mr. Ryan are this one and this one.
Having fallen embarrassingly behind in the maintenance of Acmenoveltyarchive.org, I thought I would make an attempt at bringing the following item to people’s attention before its too late:
Cartoonist Chris Ware and ‘This American Life‘ Host Ira Glass have collaborated on a DVD which is only available to those who donate to public radio. The DVD contains the narrated slideshow that Glass and Ware were presenting at various speaking engagements during the past year. I’ve pasted some background on the story below, taken from the official website for the DVD.
“Ira Glass and cartoonist Chris Ware decided to co-report a story together. Ira does the sound. Chris does hundreds of drawings. The result is a 22-minute story, with sound and images, now on DVD for the first time.”
“This story has never been on the radio. It was presented in pieces – as it was completed – on This American Life’s May 2003 “Lost in America” tour, and at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. It’s the true story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960’s and 70’s when they were being torn down.”
“At one point, hearing that a favorite building at Clark and Adams is being demolished, a thirteen-year-old Tim demands to meet with the architect who’s designing the glass-and-steel building that’ll take its place: Mies van der Rohe, one of the most famous architects in the world. Tim finds van der Rohe’s office. The legendary architect meets with the teenager.”
“Much more happens. It’s a very sad story, drawn with beautiful pictures.”
The DVD is only available in exchange for making a hefty pledge to your local public radio station. If you’re interested, but your local ‘This American Life’ station doesn’t appear to be offering the DVD, they can probably still get it for you.
A bit more on the DVD and packaging:
“Audiences who saw the work presented onstage saw huge projections of Chris Ware’s drawings. The cartoon buildings were tall as buildings.”
“To accompany the DVD, Chris has designed a 96-page book, full of never-before-published photographs of Louis Sullivan buildings, in their glory and in various states of demolition. Also, there are DVD extras: audio outtakes, a look at Chris’s pencil sketches, a high-resolution version of the movie that plays on PCs and Macs. “
“As he worked on this, Chris said he wanted it to be the most beautiful thank you gift public radio has ever offered listeners. The whole package is this gorgeous little book, filled with photos, with the DVD tucked inside. It’s being released first and exclusively through public radio pledge drives, and not available anywhere else.”
There’s a quicktime preview of the DVD available for viewing here.
I can’t be the first person to come up with this idea, but I’m amazed it hasn’t actually been executed yet. Maybe it has and I just don’t know it.
FADE IN: CUBICLE.
BORED EMPLOYEE (ON PHONE): Yes. (LONG PAUSE) Yes. (LONG PAUSE) Yes. (REPEAT AND INTERACTS WITH CUBICLE FOR 27 SECONDS. CHECKS EMAIL, GOOGLE, ETC.)
CROSSFADE TO:
Verizon Logo: “Can you hear us now?”
Do you have to have a specialized degree to be an advertising “Idea Man?”
I finally got my hands on that functional japanese gramophone model kit thing that I wrote about here. What follows is my review! Get excited!
I’d previously been thwarted in my efforts to order it through Amazon Japan. A few weeks later, the kit showed up in an issue of Readymade Magazine, and they were apparently flooded with requests for further information. Several importers have since picked up the kit for distribution in the U.S. If you contact Readymade about where to purchase the kit, they refer you to verycoolthings.com, which is currently selling the kit for a ridiculous $70 US. Their page for the kit does offer this link to a pdf the English version of the instruction Manual. If you’re feeling thrifty, you can get it for ~ $30.00 (depending on the exchange rate) through Hobby Link Japan by clicking here. Both importers are awaiting November restock shipments.
Once you tear into the box, this is what you’re left with – a bunch of plastic, some styrofoam, a motor, a thumb tack, two sewing needles, and a bunch of tiny screws encased in a blister pack. You also get instructions in both English and Japanese. If you’re the sort of music nerd who thinks this is the greatest thing ever, but you’re hesitant to order because of past issues with language incompatibility, rest assured that the translation of the English instructions is actually really, really good. I flew through the assembly in about an hour.
Below is an image of the model after assembly. In short, you swing a weight into place above the needle, turn on the motor, and Speak into the horn. As the motor turns the platter, the sound vibrations striking the horn are transmitted to the needle, which scratches a linear representation of these vibrations into the surface of the media (In this case a CD-ROM, though several soft, white plastic discs are also included). For playback, the weight above the needle is reduced, and the needle rides in the grooves it had previously scratched out. The vibrations of the needle are in turn transmitted to the horn, producing the audible playback. Woo, science!
I’ve only tested it once, but it works and that’s good enough for me. The audio is predictably thin and warbly, as should be expected when using a rickety plastic turntable and a sewing needle to cut grooves into a CD-ROM. This seemed like as good a reason as any to start figuring out iMovie, so without further ado, the reason you’re all here: A video of the model playing back audio of me singing a bit of ‘Young At Heart’ in a warbly Muppet voice.
Gakken Berliner Gramophone Model – “Young At Heart”
From: My Diningroom Table
The most interesting bit of information I can add to all of this is that this particular model is part of a series of ‘adult education’ models – called Otona no Kagaku. On a whim, I searched the hobby link Japan website for the rest of the models in the series, and was rewarded with the following totally great news:
There’s an Edison Cylinder kit.
Oh, hottest of damns! Somehow I missed this when looking at the Japanese Gakken Website (It could have something to do with it all being in Japanese). It appears to be similar in abstraction to the gramophone kit, constructed of interlocking wood pieces, and the recording is scratched into a plastic cup. Some of the other kits aren’t too shabby either. Here are two ‘automaton‘ kits in the same series.
Clumsy conclusion: Four Stars!
Wow… Just – WOW. People got paid to record this in an expensive studio. I’m amazed there hasn’t been a flash video for this in a b3ta newsletter yet.
RIYL: People sticking their heads in your room and saying ‘What the FUCK are you listening to?”
Eddie Murphy – ‘Boogie in Your Butt’
From: Eddie Murphy (1982)
Adrian Tomine did this week’s New Yorker Cover. Just in the past few months, Seth and Adrian Tomine. The only complaint I can possibly come up with is that they inexplicably don’t offer these ‘cartoonist’ covers through their reproduction site. The title of the illustration is “Missed Connections.”
Challenge: Is the approximated cover design of the book being read by the two figures in this illustration based on any real book? Close-up below.
Speaking as a person who has done some programming, the following bits of information are troubling:
I’m trying really hard to just accept the situation and not get sucked into the crazy conspiracy theories that are already circulating, and I certainly don’t doubt the willful stupidity of my countrymen. But still…
MC5 – ‘The American Ruse’
From: Back in the USA (1970)
Back before I started ‘updating regularly’ again, I wrote a big piece on obscure Canadian 70’s rockers Klaatu (There was a persistent rumor that they were the Beatles re-formed). You can read it here. Jamie Vernon, the man responsible for the recent spate of Klaatu CD reissues posted the following on a Klaatu-centric mailing list the other day:
“Klaatu’s John Woloschuk just called me to ask if I could track down a rap song for him called “Lay You Down”. Apparently, a sample of Klaatu’s 1974 song “Dr. Marvello” is used in it, and John’s starting to see royalty cheques from sales. Because Klaatu has no control over their master recordings outside of Canada, John’s curious to find out the context of the sample under which Capitol in the US agreed to license it.”
“Turns out….the song is 50 (fiddy) Cent and his posse G-Unit from their 2003 Interscope album “Beg For Mercy”. The “clean” version is called ‘Lay You Down’….the “dirty” version is called “Lay Ya Ass Down.”
“Also, their song “A Million Miles Away” has also been covered recently….a rather luxurious royalty cheque has popped up for that one out of the US. Can’t seem to find a source of who recorded it though. Anyone?”
I’ve included MP3 samples of both below. They didn’t even bother to isolate the parts without singing – The Klaatu vocals are audible beneath the raps!
Klaatu – ‘Doctor Marvello’
From: 3:47 EST (1976)
G-Unit – ‘Lay You Down’
From: Beg For Mercy (2003)