Modernism

on civilization and it's ragged edges

It's been a lovely, warm day, one of the best since our recent deep freeze. Lots of patches of grey haze (probably fog rather than smog) amidst the blue. The melancholy beauty of California “summer,” except it's February.

it's starting to feel civilized again.

Speaking of civilization, many of us took time to help out friends (who I might through my interests in electronic and experimental music, hence this post noses itself into the “music” category) who were moving, from one side of town to the other. With so many of us coming out to help, we got the whole thing done in a fraction of a day. Would that friends and community got together for one another like this more open.

Below is a map of our home little seaside town.

On the lower left is the “West Side”, our side, of town. It's known for including the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), and scenic West Cliff Drive bookended by Natural Bridges state park and the main city beach. We moved our friends from nearby in the West Side over to the area called “Live Oak” on the eastern edge of the map and beyond the city limits. The area has quite a different feel, a flat patchwork of new homes, commercial buildings, rundown blocks and vacant lots. It might be strange that I like to explore places like this, but I do, it feels like being on the rundown edge of a large city. I have a similar feel when biking through the neighborhood near the main city beach, a mixture of old houses, tourist hotels and vacant lots.

It's easy to wax romantic about a place when you don't necessarily live there. Consider the fondness many artistic and cultural figures have for 1970s New York, a time when the city was verging on bankrupcy, infrastructure was crumbling and the (violent) crime rate was far higher than it is now. Daniel Henninger had a great article in the Wall Street Journal two years ago discussing this idea. Among those quoted:

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the '70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.”

For me, there is probably also a nostalgia for the images of childhood, like the graffiti on subway cars and crumbling concrete playgrounds (I don't think any of those exist any longer). By contrast, Giuliani's cleaned-up Times Square elicits little more than a shrug and a few seconds looking at the big screen…
Most of my recent trips to New York have been in November and December (though I did go back in June, 2005 as well). New York in winter does have its charm, but I miss the sweltering summers, the terrific oppression of the big city…






Standing with Cat

Per suggestion of regular reader “Kitty” in response to a recent post, I will present some more of my own graphic and video work on this forum. The above picture is entitled “Standing with Cat.” It was originally done over a year and a half ago using the 3D modeling software Poser (on which I have commented a few times in the past). Previous digital art offerings include Green Kitties and Music of the (Blue) Spheres.

Although this is an “early” work of mine in the medium, it still remains a personal favorite. It has elements of both abstraction and realism simultaneously, even within the female and cat figures (does that make it post-modern?). The pose of the female figure was inspired by a photo print in my collection by photographer and friend Luxe Zeigler.

Another element of note is the tabby texture for the cat, which was created by graphic artist Lyne of Lyne's Creations, based on her real cat Travis. Astute observers might recognize Travis in the CatSynth banner as well. Sadly, Travis passed away late last year. I passed along my sympathies to Lyne at the time, being a “fan” of Travis as well as his late brother Clancy, whose fur and eye coloring are quite similar to Luna's. Look for Clancy in some dark, surreal or abstract works in the near future.






Dorian Grey's Box: Art Installation at Pajaro Valley Arts Council

My sound art installation described in previous posts is now on display at the Pajaro Valley Arts Council as part of the current exhibition “The Human Condition: The Artists’ Response.” The exhibition is “an artistic articulation of the connection between
the individual and world challenges, the exhibit
brings together artists responding to political and social tensions in today?s world”, and features 22 artists (according to my best count). The pieces in the exhibi are all of great quality when compared to recent gallery exhibits I have visited. Many are overtly political or social, dealing with many of darker subjects in current events and recent history. Some are quite realistic, others more abstract.

Dorian Grey’s Box, the piece on which I collaborated with local artist Michael Carson, is one of the more abstract in the exhibition. The main element is a large black cube with newspaper clippings in various patterns and sections of redder coloring. Surrounding the main cube are several small wooden “alphabet blocks”, some of which have also been painted black.


The sound (my contribution to the piece) is on a continuous loop that visitors can hear via headphones. The material is primarily ambient noise, gitches, percussive effects and sounds that only “hint” at speaking voices, arranged in a collage inspired by the sculptural part of the piece.

]The exhibition continues through March 4, and I strongly encourage anyone in the greater Bay Area during this time to check it out. It’s great to see such quality contemporary art locally (Santa Cruz-Watsonville-Monterey area).

I have posted an excerpt from the sound installation on the podcast for those who are interested in the piece but unable to visit in person.










Zip visits MacWorld

I had an opportunity to visit the big MacWorld Expo this past Friday, and of course Zip came along.

Of course, the big news this year was the unveiling of the iPhone. Here it is:

Can you see it? No? Well, neither could I. There was never a moment when there wasn't huge crowd surrounding the poor little device.

We decided to instead focus our attention on the well established and ubiquitous iPod:

You can barely stretch out your hand at MacWord and not come in contact with an iPod or something attached to an iPod. Indeed, much of the exhbition floor was devoted to iPod accessories and peripheral devices. I was most impressed with a device from Belkin, a six channel audio mixer that can record directly to an iPod (as well as to a computer if one so chooses). They expect to release it sometime later this year.

Among the more prosaic iPod accessories were numerous speaker systems:


Aesthetics and good design are key to Apple/Macintosh experience, so the emphasis is always on appearance and personality. This is true for speaker systems as much as for carrying cases and fashion accessories.

I quite liked the design of this offering from Harmon-Kardon:

And of course the extremely cute iWoofer from Rain Design:

This seems as good a time as any to discuss the use of the letter “i” for anything and everything at MacWorld. This is not only true for software and hardware offerings from Apple, but from the accessory vendors as well. You cannot escape the “i” in either the product names or the marketing surrounding them.

In reflecting on the “i”, I found myself thinking back to a favorite story of mine, Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar…. The community in which much of the story was set was called iDEATH, complete with leading lowercase “i”. There was also the somewhat villainous character inBOIL.

On the subject of modernist art and culture, there was also this ad from the good people at Roxio for the latest versions of Toast, which evokes the art of Lichtenstein and Warhol:

HP also offered modern-culture icons at its large digital photography presentation, including large-scale prints from photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Among them were several photos of 1970s New York. New York in the 1970s epitomized the crossing of high culture and urban decay, and the photographs capture that mix of the sleek and modern and the slightly rundown…

…but time to get back to the expo. I suppose I did get bored with the whole “digital lifestyle” thing, but I would be remiss if I closed without mentioning our friends over at Creative Technologies. They made a big push into the iPod and Mac space this year with several “designed for iPod” gadgets, including the oddly named Xmod. It seems that even when Apple makes it embarrassingly easy or accessory makers to be hip, Creative refuses to get it. Note to the folks at Creative marketing: the “i” is supposed to go at the beginning!

I do have to give them credit for letting E-MU Systems at least have one table at the show to present its Macintosh-compatible products, including the 0404|USB and 0202|USB with recently released Mac drivers.

It's actually a pretty decent audio interface for the Mac, and of course certain people busted their $#%es to make it OSX compatible, so you should check it out.

Well, that will wrap it up for our brief visit to MacWorld. I would try and leave you with some pithy remarks, but I'm still stuck on my whole “nostalgia for the big city” line of thought, and on the intersection of high and low culture afforded by Apple's vision of “digital lifestyle.” I doubt this is the last we at CatSynth will have to say on such matters…






Bruckner Interchange

Traveling between my family's home in Westchester and the major airports in Queens often requires passing through the massive Bruckner Interchange. This rather impressive interchange in the Bronx connects the Hutchinson River Parkway (aka “the Hutch”), the infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway (I-95 and I-295), the Bruckner Expressway (I-278 and I-95) and I-678 (The Van Wyck Expressway) to JFK Airport.

One does not usually associate New York with massive freeways like those here in California – but remember that New York is the largest city in the U.S. and the traffic has to go somewhere. Much if it is carried on large aging freeways in the outer boroughs, such as the Bronx.

There isn't really much of a “statement” here – I just think large highway interchanges are cool. However, I do recommend for those interested reading up on the rather harsh history of highways in New York, most notably the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the never built Lower Manhattan Expressway.









Worthless Kitty Musings: Brakhage and Bast

I have been viewing on and off a collection of short films by Stan Brakhage. Brakhage was a very prolific and influential maker of short experimental films. Most of his films have little or no narrative, and in many cases are made from images created directly on the film (i.e., not filmed with a camera), as in the case of thethe frame from Resurrectus Est shown to the right. Most of the films are also silent, leaving the viewer to focus exclusively on the images.

One of the films that intruiged me was Cats Cradle, originally done in 1964. Basically, it consists of a series of clips of a black cat interspersed with separate closeups of a man and a woman (apparently there were two couples in the film, but was not able to see this as I was watching). The cuts are frequent and the lighting/tinting is an amazing shade of red/magenta. It really is hard to describe, though you can find a better attempt here. An interesting suggestion is that the film can be seen as the “cat's perspective” on the couple.

The film definitely has a sexual feel to it, though there are no explicitly sexual images (discounting the fact that juxtaposing images of a woman and a man usually adds some sense of sexuality). How does the cat fit into that overall sense? Juvenile word-associations aside, cats have a history of association with (female) sexuality and fertility, most notably through the Egyptian goddess Bast. Bast is definitely a goddess for my personal pantheon, and I've been looking for an excuse to use her in a post on this forum. Bast has quite a resume, as the protector of cats, women and children, also associated with perfume, fertility, love, music and dance. It is interesting to consider Cat's Cradle in the context of Bast, even as a tribute of sorts, although I have no basis to assume Brakhage had such an association in mind. Though looking through his filmography, i think he was fond of cats.






Weekend Cat Blogging #67

Luna blends in perfectly with her dad's decor while getting warm on a table above our main heater. The temperature this morning was 49F (10C)! That is a travesty in September, usually the hottest month of the year along the California coast. It's not helping my recovery from whatever ailment has befallen me this week, either.

Anyhow, being stuck home gives me plenty of time to host Weekend Cat Blogging #67, taking over from last week's host, chefsarahjane. Assuming I'm feeling better over the weekend and things warm up a bit, I'll be spending as much time as I can outside – but that shouldn't stop me from posting updates.

So send us your feline articles and photos; either leave a comment on this post, or send me a message. Bonus points if you can fit into the cats-with-music-and-art theme of this forum.







The Logistic Function and its Discontents

This article explores the mathematical and more specifically the musical products of a very simple equation. In that exploration, we touch not only mathematics and music, but art, architecture, nature and philosophy; so those who are usually squeamish about mathematics are encouraged to read on.

Most readers who made it through high school algebra should be familiar with quadratic functions and the parabolas described by these functions on the x-y plane. For those who have forgotten, a parabola looks like this:

Parabolas are seen not only in high-school math classes, but often in nature as well. Among the most exquisite uses of parabolae can be found in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. I had the priveledge of seeing many of his buildings and spaces in Barcelona, including this magnificent example of parabolic architecture:

But (as usual), I digress. For the remainder of this article, we will focus on a particular class of these functions, called logistic functions:

f(x) = ax(x-1)

Logistic functions have roots and 0 and 1, and describe a downward facing parabola (or “water-shedding parabola” in the parlance of my high-school pre-calculus teacher). The peak of this parabola depends on the value of a, and as we will soon see, this is the least of the interesting properties dependent on a.

Now, instead of simply graphing the function on an x-y plane, apply the output of the function back as the next input value in a process known as iteration:

xn+1 = axn(xn–1)

This is a fancy way of saying “do the function over and over again.” What is interesting is that for different values of a, one will get different results. For low values (where a is less than one), repeated iterations get closer and closer to zero. If a is between 1 and 3, the it will end up at some value between zero and one. Above 3, things get more interesting. The first range bounces around between two values, as characterized below:

As a increases, eventually the results start bouncing among four values, and then eight, then sixteen, and so on. These “doubling periods” get closer and closer together (those interested in this part of the story are encouraged to look up the Feigenbaum constant). Beyond about 3.57 or so, things get a little crazy, and rather than settling into a period behavior around a few points, we obsserve what is best described as “chaotic behavior,” where the succession of points on the logistic function varies unpredictably.

It is not random in the same way that we usually think of (like rolling dice or using the random-number generators on our computers), but has rather intricate patterns within – those interested in learning more are encouraged to look up “chaos.” This chatoic behavior can be musically interesting, and I have used the chaotic range of the logistic function in compositions, such as the following except from my 2000 piece Spin Cycle/Control Freak.

One can more vividly observe the behavior I describe above as a graph called a bifurcation diagram. As the values is a increase (a is labelled as “r” in this graphic I shamelessly but legally ripped off from wikipedia), one can oberve vertically the period doubling where the logistic map converges on a single value, then bounces between two points, then four, then eight, and so on, until the onset of chaos at approximatley 3.57.

There are tons of books and online articles on chaos, the logistic function, and its bifurcation diagram. Thus, it’s probably best that interested readers simply google those phrases rather than suffer through more of my own writing on the topics. However, I do have more to say on my musical interpretations of these concepts.

Given my experience in additive synthesis and frequency-domain processing (if I have lost you, then skip to the musical excerpt at the end, it’s pretty cool), I of course viewed this map as a series of frequency spectra that grow more or less complex based on a. I implemented this idea in Open Sound World. using the logstic function and its bifurcation diagram to drive OSW’s additive synthesizer functions. The results were quite interesting, and have been used in several of my live performances. I use my graphics tablet to sweep through different values of a on the horizontal axis as in the bifurcation diagram:


Photo by Tiffany Worthington

The resulting sound is the synthesis of frequences based on the verticle slice through the diagram.

Click here to listen to an example.

In the periods of chaos, the sound is extremely complex and rich. Below 3.57 and in the observable “calm periods,” the sound is simpler, containing on a few components forming somethin akin to an inharmonic chord. In true chaotic fashion, small movements along the horizontal axis result in dramatic differences in the spectrum and the timbre. The leads to a certain “glitchy” quality in the sound – one can practice control over time to make smooth transitions and find interesting “islands of stability” within the timbral space.

I have used this simple but evocative computer instrument in several performances, including my 2006 Skronkathon performance as well as my work last year with the Electron SAlon series. I have really only scratched the surface the possibilities with this concept, and hope to have more examples int the future.

A perfectly clear day…

Today was a warm, perfectly clear day, notably absent of the fog, cold and wind of the past week…

It seems like September 11 is always a bright, clear day, both here in northern California as well as back in New York. It was certainly a clear day five years ago as well…

There are certainly a lot being written online on this fifth anniverary of 9-11 – some of it genuine (particularly from New Yorkers, though not limited to them), a lot of it propaganda, or phony sentimentality or “patriotism.” I would stay clear of the whole thing if I didn't think I had something unique to contibute…

I begin with quote from this view from the WTC plaza that I read this afternoon:

I arrived in Lower Manhattan at about 8:38. Walking up Dey Street I decided to stop for coffee and walked across Church Street onto the Plaza of the World Trade Center. I called my father on my cell phone and we were talking which kept me from entering the building. I was on a bench right in front of the WTC 1 and turned slowly for no real reason and saw the entire plane hit the tower. I saw the wing extended from the building on the south side and a large explosion. Then smoke. Then everything was frozen, very still, with a perfect New York blue sky framing the backdrop of explosions. I ran when the glass and metal begin to fall from the sky hitting all around me…At that point I began running north. I got to East 4th Street completely dazed. On Houston St. I saw the WTC 1's needle crumble to the ground and heard on blasting radios that both of the towers had fallen. From there I made my way to the Williamsburg Bridge and made my way back home. Tens of thousands of people were walking across the bridge, a surreal exodus no one was quite prepared to cope with…
I never thought I would work in the World Trade Center. But I enjoyed my work there. Like all artists, I needed the money, but I also made many friends and learned a good deal about other parts of life, other skills that I never knew I possessed.
The views of the harbor were magnificent and inspirational. I remember ending long days by looking out the windows and feeling so very refreshed and glad to be in such a beautiful city like New York.
But that view is gone and so much has changed. Though I have felt such anger and frustration, more that ever in my life, I know I will survive. I made it out alive for a reason.

At the same time, I was 3,000 miles away in the totally boring and pathetic Bay Area town of Fremont, arising from bed an hour or so later to face an ordinary day at work 40 miles away along with daily challenges of my unravelling relationship. That was all, at least temporarily, swept away by what I saw and heard on CNN (only after receiving an email exhorting everyone to turn on the news). I didn't get into work until sometime in the afternoon, and then spent much of the day online looking at photos; I continued to wade through photos well into the night after returning home.

Things like this were not supposed to happen, not to New York, not to its iconic and familiar skyscrapers, not to the indistructable momunments of the modern world. Whether it was during my happy years in Berkeley or the miserable year in Fremont that was only beginning, I'd always be able to go back to New York – and suddenly that was no longer something I could count on, everything was mortal, and I was “guilty” somehow for not being there…

I did make it back to New York in Novemember, 2001, and of course had to see ground zero for myself. This is a photo I took looking into the site, from the north (Varick Street, I think):

In the longer view, the thought I have kept coming back to was the idea that something so beautiful (the World Trade Center complex, the New York City skyline, the emblems of 20th Century modernism) were destroyed by something so ugly (Islamic fundamentalism, the tribal and primitive past). Having not lost anyone personally on 9-11, I am able to think about things like this, and how what I want in return is the restoration of modern ideals. I will leave the political and cultural aspects aside for another post (I'm sure I'll get back to it again), and focus for this anniversary on the aesthetic and architectural.

The Skyscraper Museum in New York, which is hosting a commemoration of what it labels the “original World Trade Center,” lends its support the idea that the age of the vertical metropolis is far from over. In that spirit, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) unveiled the latest design for the new World Trade Center complex, including the new major buildings and the memorial:

Having followed the redevelopment story over the past few years, I am used to the new design, and I am mindful of the controversies around the original Twin Towers in the late 1960s as being too “boring” and somehow an affront to New York's skyline, and in the long run nothing could have been further from the truth. The building designs have attracted a certain amount of controversy, but nearly as much as the design for the memorial. Any design certainly has it's imperfections, but as it stands it is perfectly in harmony with the modernism of both the original and new World Trade Center complexes, and it includes the most important generally-agreed-upon elements such as preserving the footprints of the original towers, and even incorporates a piece of the original retaining wall (illustrated in the picture to the right). Certainly, the criticms have their place, notably the concern by 9-11 families for the victims' names. But that's where their “rights” end, at least as far as the restoration is concerned. I mean no disrespect to the people who lost loved ones, but if we followed the advice of some outspoken victims' relatives and the opinions of many unaffected people in Middle America, such as the author of this article (he can't even get his dueling memorial-advocacy websites straight!), lower Manhattan would be overrun with kitch, over-sentimentality and insipid tributes to phoney patrotism. That may be fine for Oklahoma City, but not for New York! It's bad enough that we have to live with middle America's patron saints of mediocrity as our leaders along with their policies that make our great cities targets for more terrorism, let alone have to deal with their ideas of what makes a good memorial…But, I did say I'll save the politics for later. So for now, I leave with with another quote from that original site I references that discusses what not only it's author (Sami Plotkin) but indeed many New Yorkers might have wanted:

None of us wanted to see [the twisted structure of the 500 foot wall] go. We have been comforted over the past two weeks by its presence. We have marvelled at its strange beauty, as it rose from the ruins, an intricate lacy network of sheer strength; a stoic remnant that survived the blast and struck us with its splendor in the golden light of sunset, as bright rays glanced off the building behind, glinting between its metal beams and through the great accidental window which was rent through at just the right height. It was an image of alarming beauty, and the serendipity of its perfect composition was significant to us. In the most simple and sentimental way, the evening light shining through that accidental window was for us a ray of hope. Although we all understood that for now it must come down, whispered questions eddied through the crowd as we wondered, would the pieces be saved? Does the Mayor know that we have already begun to see this as our monument? For we have. That mangled and beautiful skelet! on was a monument that spoke more poignantly of New York's pain and resilience than any artwork we could have devised.







Thoughts on last night's performance

In this article I review my performance last night at the plug:dos headphone festival in San Francisco.

First, the venue itself. 5lowershop is in a warehouse near the junction of highways 280 and 101 in San Francisco. It’s at the edge of the Bernal Heights neighborhood.


The venue and its surroundings have that seedy edge-of-the-city feel that I probably wouldn’t want to live in but nonetheless often find intriguing and romantic. It’s just another part of the quintessentially “modern” world.

The interior matches the exterior, a jumble of areas within the warehouse, including the main performance area. The space is quite porous with the outside, and I noticed several cats wander though, including the grey fellow and a small black-and-white kitten. They were presumably feral cats attracted by the warmth, activity and possibility of food. Feral cats are an inevitable part of urban environments, but it’s still heartbreaking to see them this way. I was also concerned for them because of the dogs that were present, fortunately the dogs seemed to be pets and quite mellow.

The atmosphere of people crowded in a warehouse listening to headphones was quite unusual to say the least. Some of the performances were quite interesting, including a serinate for voice and hammer-dulcimer, and of course several acts mixing guitar, analog synthesizers and turntable. The analog synths didn’t strike me as a good fit for headphone performance, and thus avoided them myself (as described in my article on the preparation), but they did a good job of keeping the sound within a reasonable range.

Despite the best efforts of the organizers, whom I liked and thought did a good job overall, things tended to run rather late, and I ended up going on 9:40PM, two hours after my scheduled performance. But I think it went well musically, pretty much meeting my expectations for mixing ambient and rhythmic/punctuated material while keeping things mellow for the headphones. I did bounce around and repeat elements more than I expected, but such is the nature of improvisation, reacting as things unfold.

The equipment (Dell Laptop, Emulator X, E-MU 1616m, E-MU Xboard 25) performed flawlessly. I did make a direct recording on the laptop, and will be posting that shortly. I am also planning to make that the first release in my planned podcast series.

UPDATE: you can now listen to the audio from this performance. Enjoy!