Hey, friends who are artists or even just those that post a fair amount of content to content-sharing sites like Flickr, Soundcloud, YouTube, DeviantArt, etc.: if a) all stuff is “All Rights Reserved” copyrighted AND b) you don’t really know much about Creative Commons, then please: read up on it, it’ll take you 5 minutes to get the basics. Read up on it, and consider changing the licensing on your content. The Internet is a tool for many things, one of the most prominent being creative, artistic collaboration. I won’t give the whole spiel about how novel this is because you’ve heard that before, likely many times over. But please don’t waste a good thing by not flipping a switch that opens a floodgate of collaborative potential.

Nearly forgot the part about having fun: Have fun!

Culled from a late-nite sesh playing my Korg Electribe, improvising off of patterns that I sequenced:

My first foray into human subjects being featured in my digital compositions. I always calls these types of works “blends”, because at their core is the mashing of pixels, layering one image on top of another, and telling the software how to take a variety of RGB inputs and spit out just one pixular output.

Here are some of my friends & family. The raw material for each piece came from things (and people) I photographed in or around San Francisco. I enjoyed this process so much that there’s guaranteed to be more to come!

Older Blends series (sans humans):

Blends 8 & 9
Blends 6
Blends 5

Aside from playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis as a kid, I didn’t really ever think about hedgehogs. I’m not 100% sure how they re-entered my purview, but I think this had a lot to do with it.

My natural reaction after seeing the post linked above was as simple as it was natural: I need to obtain a hedgehog. A simple Google search brought me to this: http://hedgehogcentral.com/, a charmingly 90′s-looking site with quite a bit of resources. I learned two important things from Hedgehog Central: 1) hedgehogs are essentially perfect pets, and 2) they’re illegal in California. Something something “Fish & Game commission”, blah blah blah “insectivores… detrimental to California’s native animals”, such & such & such, pursuant this, pursuant that, “Section 2118 of the Fish and Game Code, sub-Section 671, Title 14, CCR…” Meh. Infinite meh.

So I either exstatriate to one of the 45 or so states in which it’s ok to own these perfections, or I bide my time and maintain that sickly virtuous patience that I seem to have acquired from non-sensical amounts of turn-based video-game nerdery fostered at the earliest of ages. I also have the Internet to get me through these trying times. And since I’m not allergic to any food, medication, or presumably hedgehogs, and am allergic to: all conventional pets; non-conventional, infeasible pets (horses); trees; grass; pollen; dust; ragweed; and most things that the planet has seemed to bathe itself in, I’ll have to let things like the video below preemptively heal my soul until I can get my first hedgehog (I already know what I’m going to call him, but it’s a secret).

when i first moved to san francisco, i had a loose plan to stay for a few months or so and then travel to Europe for an indefinite period of time.

i’ve now been in this city for approximately thirty months. the reasons for this may be varied and complex, or, sans deconstruction, it may just be one overarching reason, and it might be really simple. i haven’t figured it out yet. and i caution myself to think about the future in the past tense, to try and anticipate the reflection as to why i’ve stayed here so long. but that’s a contrivance built on assumptions and other artifice. so, while it’s not easy practice for me, i am living in the moment. as if san francisco were a time.

but there are forces at work here, of attraction and repulsion. with me as an agent of the scenario, and the city as an agent; but the city as a place and a time. but if the city encapsulates me, if i help to compose it, to what degree is there a separation? and are the forces just acting upon themselves? can they act on themselves, as some sort of positive feedback loop?

looks like i’ve thought myself into a corner. just so happens that it came out onto a wordpress page. i want to end with ‘how ho-hum,’ but honestly it yielded a short bit of enjoyment. now’s the time (four feet away is the place) to go explore those corners in dreamland, where they may not be so cornered after all.

My friend Jason and I did some impromptu recording in my living room one afternoon with some headphones, a mixer, a delay pedal, a harmonica, two acoustic guitars, our voices, and some bells. He then took the raw material recorded into Pro-Tools and imported it into Ableton and added some drums and fx.

This set is the result!

how i’ve been interpreting things lately

My first photo-stroll in a while. This particular one—around the Inner and Mid Richmond district(s)—was was embarked upon with my friend Sterling, and my self-imposed focus was on typography. This comes from a somewhat new interest in typography itself, as I’ve been much more aware of it with my own forays into web design & development, not to mention having recently watched a little film called Helvetica.

I was hoping to capture a number of hand-written signs, whether chalk, paint, or some other medium, but did not find as many as I was hoping. But as the sun got lower and lower, persistence paid off in the form of plenty of other signage and the occasional deviance to capture some texture or object.

This is actually only a small portion of my haul for the day, as while some of the types/fonts were interesting in themselves and would work well as inspiration in other projects, I didn’t necessarily feel my photos of them were particularly special, which is what I prefer to post here on telecommute.

I’m hoping to do another such stroll sometime soon, with a different district for destination. And of course, an ulterior motive for this collection is for ripe source material to be used in blend_z__z__z_.

[4-23-2011]

idea for a writing project:

intervallic signal to noise. a very high ratio. 1:16, maybe. some very meaningful, dense sentences or ideas, followed by lots of noise; glossolaliac rambling, phonetic hip-hoppery, meant to act as knotted static between more familiar, structured language.

example:

[opening]
Do you ever think about the orgasm that caused your subsequent birth? Trals flammit, he grayed at sides, followed by brim pyre, ay-ching at his back, bend routine enough to slide by, quasart those things—whole—in the skyze. i cun ask you to bleeve me, but only to here, me, i’m talking to you remember? Don’t let that fuzz distract you… all… from… that… conundrumt up a dream on his swim or swam out past rim or dam what water gave whut have your stall? Gates swutter closed like london mall; reverb-achoo with paris-lolls, swallow upside down sandwich peanut balls, bread-white flavor feats up against the walls.

I ask, why must i do this to myself, i tell: you whilst change ‘t all. Order of overdue spam, tell my own what i should’ve mastered paul, “dominick, your middle here; what so long, where so been? aint you got no care of ‘t all? What’s this repetitsh i speak? is it that small? someone ask’d you earlier, ‘are you going to be creative?’ well well well well well well Well—creative its are just destructive fuzz, rendered backwards in spiral tries.”

trust not !trust —fetch levers or levels of binary bevels; artisan algos i have mentioned what weather, my, we’re having with fraying raveled endeavors, poorish borish mind i have wroughten in gallows.

———–you come out of it. you’re alive, gasping. no: you’re gasping. gasping. … gasping…




because the breathing space reclined, redesigned your reactional subliminal bodymind. ohhhhhneveryoueverhavetreadonafeathersocourtsiedsopleasured

the red underline of the spell-checker is a conglomerate helper that relieve your communes to others, but also points out your neologs—they’re off-radar enough to claim tether: spin them yet, they may better and better and better. put them together. put them wherever. put them aghast atop your Seussian leatherbound lectures.

In this unedited, extended interview, Senator Jim DeMint explains why he thinks that federal programs make people dependent on the government.

This is the sort of discourse that happens on a “fake news” show on a comedy network. South Carolina Senator DeMint and Stewart have a fair back and forth, yet as the nearly 30-minute long interview progresses—and regardless of which side you tend to agree with more—it’s hard to deny Stewart’s skill for political discourse as well as the cogency of his questions and of his rebuttals. I highly recommend watching all three parts of the extended interview, as the ground they cover necessitates an arc not capable of being distilled to a sound byte or two.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

—

I also recommend the collection of essays, The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News. I’ve read the collection a couple of times now and it will deepen your appreciation for not only Stewart, Colbert, and their team of writers and producers, but for satire in general.

From the Back Cover

This book brings together nineteen essays on the many moments of Zen to be found in the artful humor of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Want the real deal on fake news? Want to know how Jon Stewart stacks up against public intellectuals past and present? How The Daily Show hones your critical thinking skills in the war on bad media, bullshit, and political spin? Want to know more about The Daily Show’s philosophy of religion? About what “truthiness” really means? Or how far down Stephen Colbert’s irony goes? It’s all right here. More than just fake news, The Daily Show has achieved an undeniable cultural significance. What better way to plumb its depths than with the razor-sharp, media-savvy minds of our Senior Philosophical Correspondents?