I’ve been leaving Ryoji Ikeda’s MySpace up and running while I work.
I first started listening to Ikeda when the Microscopic Sound compilation came out in 1999. The rhythmic elements are built out of little squares of white noise, like turning a faucet on and off, or Suicide’s first album, or the old Ice Fever pinball machine. The arhythmic elements (I hesitate to call them melodic) are built out of high-frequency sine waves, basically like sonar pulses, or tinnitus, or icicles falling off your roof.
I enjoy keeping his MySpace up partly because it’s suited to my dime-sized laptop speakers—ideal for reproducing dog-whistle music—and partly because it sounds so neural, like what you’d get if you ran Flanagan’s high-tension tinfoil induction headphones in reverse. When your Swiss Army knife accidentally slices into the 220 volt line, these are the first sounds you hear.
To stop listening to Ryoji Ikeda, please see my Instructable on converting your halo device into a Faraday cage.
Stove pulls her jacket tighter. It’s a warm day, but the motion of the train makes a relentless gale.
She crouches with the fingertips of her left hand against the floor for balance and watches the yellowing fields flash by.
Something changes behind her.
She looks over her shoulder and sees the stranger standing by the doorway, his dead-seeming arms hanging by his sides. Crazy bastard must have been climbing from car to car.
She nods curtly and turns back to her view. Looks like rain. Clouds coming up. She feels him grab her shoulder, but she looks at him coldly and doesn’t bother to stand.
His head snaps back as if something has grabbed him by the hair. Then his legs go out from under him, his tailbone goes up in the air and his arms and legs dangle like rags. He’s spitting and shouting, but it all sounds like train to her.
As if his ass were a balloon and his body the string, he bobs red and foaming toward the door, takes one last swing back into the car and flies out the door and disappears down the grade and out of sight.
She nods once before returning to her cloud-gazing. “Thanks,” she says, but no one answers because no one’s there.
On the ectomorphic end of the musical spectrum, Joanna Newsom’s 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender showed up via interlibrary loan from West Duluth yesterday afternoon. I’ve been listening to it on headphones and wondering why it sounds so familiar. As track seven, “En Gallop,” began, I figured it out: The harp is similar in timbre to the kora. (I have spent much more time listening to Toumani Diabate than to harp music of any sort.) Newsom even sings (alarmingly) “from the head,” a technique I once saw Baaba Maal describe in an interview. This is meaningless coincidence, but all the same: When I get my three wishes, I’m going to put Newsom in a recording studio with Toumani Diabate and Ramata Diakite.
On the way back from town just now, I opened our mailbox and found a copy of saxophonist John Ellis’ new album Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow, with Gary Versace on organ, Matt Perrine on sousaphone and Jason Marsalis on drums. Tenor/drums/organ/sousaphone: There is a god.
As it happens, my father-in-law built sousaphone-sized speakers into the walls of this house ten or fifteen years ago. I never understood why until this moment.
The thought of breakfast had kept her moving the last five miles.
“Jesus, Stove, you been walking all night?”
“Howdy, Pete. You been stealin’ coffee again?” She sticks out her hand.
“Only when I find some,” he says. He half-stands and shakes her hand before returning to his squat. “Where’d you get the fire helmet?”
She squats silently beside the smoky fire and waits until Pete hands over his cup. She wraps her fingers around it and drains it off, even though it burns going down. “Any of you other fellers givin’ it away for free?” she asks.
“Every chance I get,” says a low voice. “Course, it’s only beans.”
Continue reading ‘Dawn’
The tiny electric spark had barely enough energy to ignite a speck of dust, and that speck’s pitiful flame was only large enough to ignite the two specks nearest it. The walls of the grain silo burst outward, and all the windows on this side of town cracked at once, leaving gaping holes that immediately let in the dry night air. A dog began to bark.
A hundred yards away a twisted pair of wires ran up under a truck’s battered hood, and inside the cab the young woman let her hand drop from the ignition. She opened the door, jumped down to the ground, and walked slowly away beside the tracks.
The Time Machine and I will be attending Make Magazine’s Maker Faire in San Mateo May 3-4, to film the Boggle and Sneak videobook! Read all about it!
GeekDad’s review of Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson innocently catalyzed the following rant:
The distinction between hacking and non-hacking is the distinction between repurposing and purposing. In order to tell one from the other, you have to have a clear and complete understanding of intended use.
Take a claw hammer. Two ends, two intended uses: Bash nails, pull nails. Open a paint can with the claw: Hacking.
Now take a hunk of software. The only clear way to state an “intended use” is with a reproducible acceptance test. The only complete way to state “intended uses” is to assemble a suite of acceptance tests. If a test passes, that’s non-hacking. If a test fails, that’s a bug. Any use not covered byte-for-byte and click-for-click by an acceptance test is an unintended use: Hacking. Every user is a hacker.