From Working:

No matter how bewildering the times, no matter how dissembling the official language, those we call ordinary are aware of a sense of personal worth–or more often a lack of it–in the work they do. Tom Patrick, the Brooklyn fireman whose reflections end the book, similarly brings this essay to a close:

The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You seem the put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. Tht’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be.

[snip]

I can look back and say, "I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody." It shows something I did on this earth.

Hello loyal feed followers… things have been awfully quiet here of late, and for that I apologize.

I’ve been knee deep in a ton of projects, all of them quite challenging. I’m quite excited and think that the end results will be worth the blood, sweat and brain cells that have been poured into them, but in the meantime it means I’ve had very little time to perform even the most basic upkeep here at the blog. I have a number of things that really need doing around here, and I’m giving serious consideration to moving off of Wordpress to a fresh install of Drupal, which (again) requires some bit of time investment to accomplish properly.

So, with all of this in mind, I’d like to direct your attention to the netlabel Pelican Dump, run by former Nophi proprietor Randy Garcia (RIP, Nophi). I’ve been promising him some material for release for what must be over a year now, and I’ve finally come through for him. Entitled Shellstates, it is a 41-minute collection of somewhat lowfi abstract ambient/noise improvisations. Thanks to Randy for giving these orphaned tracks a home as well as for providing artwork for the release. It’s totally free as in speech, and can be downloaded from the Pelican Dump website. To give you a taste, here’s a short “sampler” style podcast, but again: the release is free - what are you waiting for? I hope you enjoy it!

Now, I’m off to the Lisp50 event at OOPSLA. I have a feeling my brain will hurt by the time it’s done.

(Speaking of things that I need to do around here, apparently Podpress’ built-in inline media player isn’t working. To listen to the podcast, either download using the link below, or play in the pop-up media player.)

Shared by Jeremy

My friend Vlad has a brief inspirational encounter in SF….

Entering a MUNI station in downtown San Francisco, I pass an Obama election swag table.

“Hey white boy!”

“…”

Big smile: “Are you voting for Obama?” He’s over 60, hair and beard sharp white on dark skin, several million mischievous twinkles in each eye.

I smile big in return: “Yes, I am! And what’s my being white have to do with it?”

“Nothing! But we…” hand pointing back and forth between himself and me, “…need more white boys to vote for Obama.” He hands me an Obama ‘08 button. I pin it to the strap of my Monome bag.

“Looks to me like there are plenty already.” I gesture down the line of people of all shapes, sizes, skin tones, genders and ages picking up Obama buttons, stickers and posters from the table. A majority of those present at the moment are Caucasian.

“Yes, but we need EVERYBODY to vote for Obama…. HEY! Asian boy!”

I love San Francisco.

By Daniel Waylonis, Google Mac Team

Top Draw is an image generation program just launched in the Google Mac Playground. By using simple text scripts, based on JavaScript, Top Draw can create surprisingly complex and interesting images. Even cooler is that the program has built-in support for installing any image of yours as your desktop image. There’s a Viewer application you can install in the menu bar to automatically run with the parameters (such as script and update interval) that you’ve specified. And there’s even a Screen Saver to display the scripts when your computer is taking a break.

The Top Draw scripting language leverages Apple’s Quartz and CoreImage rendering engines for graphical muscle. In addition to the drawing commands that are supported by the HTML canvas tag, there is support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing and much more.

Because it uses JavaScript in a safe sandbox, you can run any script without fear of malicious action.

Here’s the download: http://topdraw.googlecode.com/files/Top%20Draw.zip. Have fun!

Here are some sample images created by Top Draw:

Electronic music is filled with grids and repeating loops. But get off that grid, and you can quickly wind up, well, floating in space. The challenge of marrying music that’s pre-sequenced with music that can generate itself, between self-evolving music and music that you can control live, is the challenge a lot of people are exploring right now. Hans Kuder has been sharing a promising-looking project on the CDM forums, built in the code-sketching tool Processing (site | CDMu | CDMo). The idea: explore nodes live and let your sequences float free on the screen.

Hans writes:

tiction - early prototype 1 from Hans Kuder on Vimeo.

tiction is a sequencing / performance application that tries to bridge generative music with live improvisation. With it you can create looping (or one-shot) sequences whose pitch and controller values change based on screen position. When a node fires its event, subtle or not-so-subtle physical interactions take place, giving life to the system.

Tiction v0.1 is now available as a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I’ll be adding updates over the next couple weeks, but most of the useful features are already in place.

This is just a graphical interface; actual sound happens elsewhere, via MIDI. (Hans includes instructions for inter-app MIDI on Mac. On Windows, you should try MIDI-Yoke or Hubi’s MIDI Loopback.)

The video above is slightly older than the release you get, so there’s an extra reason to go grab it.

Free software + code + description/instructions for Mac, Windows, Linux. Version 0.1; expecting more soon!

Tiction @ Tink Thank Software

Before someone else says it, no, the idea here isn’t entirely new. It’s especially reminiscent of the work done by Toshio Iwai, best known recently for his Tenori-On hardware and ElectroPlankton DS software, who had experimented with similar interfaces — though generally minus some of the physics here. But then, we got a lot of mileage out of simple step sequencers, and they’ve evolved a lot. It’ll be interesting to see what new interfaces people can cook up.

Those of you Processing users, one tip. Hans is using the ProMIDI Java library, but there’s a better library evolving called RWMidi from our friends over at Ruin & Wesen, plus a driver that will fix problems with MIDI support and Java on some Macs — check out OSXMidiSPI for OS X (direct download).

Brilliant work, Hans! Readers with feedback, please pipe up since Hans asked for it; otherwise, I’ll be interested to see how this evolves!

One more video:

tiction - early prototype 2 from Hans Kuder on Vimeo.

RIP….

Hey, you wanna get yourself a copy of Automaton? I know just the place.

Online remix contests are all the rage these days. User-generated content is becoming this decade’s latest annoying buzzword. But visualist engineer Marco Hinic took a different approach. He didn’t create one video remix. He created an app that can create endless video remixes. Nine Inch Nails Ghosts, meet random visual mash-ups from Creative Commons-licensed online videos. Marco describes the effort:

A few days ago I released the web site ghostss.com; it’s my entry to the NIN Ghosts Film Festival.

It’s an online video remixing application. It builds playlists describing a mix of videos with effects and renders them as an .flv Flash Video file. All the content is on the web site — around 1 gig of video loops and a few mp3’s from NIN music.

In accordance to NIN music, all Videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

The web site is a mix of c++, php and javascript for the client side. Basically the client builds a playlist with video references and effects, the playlist is translated into an xml request that is sent to the web site. The video mixer on the web site render the request into an flv or mp4 file that is then played to the client.

Yep, you read that right: it’s a website coded in C++.

Where would an engineer appear with the technical chops to do such a thing? Well, as you might think, only a select few do. As it happens, Marco is behind one of the most influential desktop VJ apps available today.

I am the founder of ArKaos so I do play with pixels since so many years, I started working on video mixing software around 1992.

This is a new technology I am currently working on at ArKaos.

I think that we are close to the point were the web will be more than just used to share video and this is an example.

I could even allow people to upload some clips or customize some texts but because I have a lot of work at ArKaos so I did limit the human interaction to tweaking the settings.

Marco is actually CEO of ArKaos, as well as the engineer of its engine. Regular readers are of course very familiar with ArKaos, but I hope we attract the occasional reader to whom this is new; if that’s the case, go check out the software we’re talking about. (ArKaos are also working on a new generation of their software entitled GrandVJ.)

This brings up an interesting point, though. People are fond of hyping the blurring divide between Web and desktop apps. But they are too often focused only on the Web side, and only on ways in which Web apps are superficially becoming more like offline or “desktop” apps. The “rich” in “rich client,” by contrast, may involve elements just like the hard-core video processing seen in this app. Too often, those involved only in Web development obsess over tiny details of text rendering and UI and miss out on the media processing power modern computers have. It’ll be interesting to see that start to shift; I think the addition of more rich capabilities is inevitable.

Marco probably has a deeper perspective on this than I do, though, so Marco, we’ll have to talk about that at some point!

In the meantime, go play with remixing Millions of Ghosts of user-uploaded video. The results have an eerily ghostly quality about them, I have to admit. (And, of course, our goal as VJs and visualists is to try not to look like we’re a random algorithm arbitrarily mixing video content!)

http://ghostss.com/

The Guardian UK:  (h/t uglycasonova)

After police banned them from playing a political rally in Minnesota yesterday, Rage Against the Machine whipped out the loudspeaker and went a cappella.

The band’s original plan was to play an impromptu gig at left-wing rally Ripple Effect. Sadly, the police had other ideas, leaving Zack de la Rocha to address some angry fans.

“Rage Against the Machine is a band that has never, ever advocated violence,” he, er, rages. “We’ve always advocated a direct opposition to unjust wars like the one started by John McCain and the Republicans and Bush and all of them.”

He continues: “Why the F@#% are these cops so afraid of us? Are they afraid of us?”

I showed this video to our C&L team and BillW could not say enough how much he loved it.  It’s terrible to me that the larger story of how the police have acted — or have been directed to act — has gone mostly unreported in the traditional media, becaue it really does exemplify the tenuous grasp on basic civil rights that most Republicans seem to possess.