Across the Transom: May 2022

“All of these characteristics mean that if they are in the right place they can persist over long periods of time.”

The highlight of the album, though, might well be “ko‘u inoa” by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, a piece about homeland that the composer wrote about her native Hawaii and that resonates with Gailey, who notes her struggles in finding her own sense of home.

As a production assistant, Burtt sourced costumes for the Cantina sequence and accompanied a young Carrie Fisher on a day’s worth of hair tests. But his most important work was done with mixer and microphone. Wielding a bulky, 25-pound Nagra tape recorder, he embarked on a 22-month sound safari, roaming around Los Angeles, completing about 200 distinct sound projects, for $150 a week. He marked his finds on a large map he’s kept to this day: a “hum hum” in Canoga Park, a “chuga chuga” in Ridgecrest, a “blam titzow” in Angeles National Forest, a “mroow,” and a “zoom” at small airports in Buena Park and Orange County.

The two sockets located on either side of the Mixer Socket are the same line input as found in the ACC socket. Although some people mistake banana style sockets for a pair of RCA or Mini connectors, both of the banana jacks constitute only ONE input. Positive audio goes into one hole, and negative audio goes into the other.

SM468 is considered a +3 tape, SM911 +6, and SM900 +9. SInce I don't do live recordings, I can tailor how "hot" I want to record a dub. The hotter the recording, the better the signal to noise ratio. So you can get a quieter background level with a hotter tape. Of course your tape machine has to be able to take the higher bias tapes.

How does the music sound? Picture the stark, elegant Side Two of David Bowie’s 1977 masterwork Low; spacey, somber vintage–video game soundtracks for Atari and Nintendo; mesmerizing sci-fi film scores, like the original Tron from 1982; the lyrical electronic romanticism of Tomita and Vangelis.

Even the remaining 10% of households who truly cannot afford homeownership are eligible for rental units offered by HDB at subsidies rates, through the Public Rental Scheme. Assuming that the poorest 50% of all households reside in 4-room or smaller HDB flats, they own around 25% of the nation’s housing wealth.

The five laws of stratospheric success

1. The Law of Value: Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.
2. The Law of Compensation: Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.
3. The Law of Influence: Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first.
4. The Law of Authenticity: The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.
5. The Law of Receptivity: The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.

‘How-to’ books would seem to chastise Lam because the entrepreneurial spirit provides only one explanation: a failure to correctly innovate.

Yet they tell us case numbers don’t matter in this new wave. The CDC’s risk map is still green as can be, even as infections rip through the country, with counted cases up by nearly 60 percent and hospitalizations 25 percent greater and ICU occupancy 17 percent greater than they were two weeks ago, according to the New York Times tracker.

These works are among the nearly 400 examples of sonification that constitute the ever-growing collection indexed at the website sonification.design. The online resource is maintained by Sara Lenzi and Paolo Ciuccarelli, both from the Center for Design at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

I think you find the cost-cutting comes in subtler, more dangerous ways. For instance, look at the movie Rust. A non-union production. You look at the DP who got shot to death on that set. They were having the armorer double up as an assistant to the props person. That’s a way to save money that’s also guaranteed to make sure that something fucked up happens on your set.

Entrepreneurship books combine notions of hard work with DWYL [Do What You Love (and you'll never work a day in your life)] as providing a path towards a financially and personally rewarding career. In such books, ensembles appear as outside-institution ‘start-ups’, a form of creativity given a privileged place within neoliberal capitalism (Sim, 2019). These models are used as ways to map out the labour market of music, a move that in some ways directly rebuts the anti-commercial stance of older musical curricula. By adopting an entrepreneurial ethic, readers are assured they can overcome any possible challenges. At the same time, the challenges of developing musical skills are only briefly acknowledged and quickly dismissed. Cutler writes in his book The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, and Making a Difference (2010, p. 4) that ‘this book assumes you are taking steps to develop into the strongest musician possible’. In Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music, Beeching (2010: 10, emphasis original) asserts that ‘Talent plus hard work are necessary but are not sufficient by themselves to yield career success’. Nytch (2018) demonstrates how musical training failed to provide him with a career through an extended personal account of working in a basketball arena concession stand after having completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition. These books rightly critique a lack of professional development common in musical higher education (see further Munnelly, 2017). However, glossing over the acquisition of skill hides the collective labour required to train musicians and social systems that create barriers to such training.

[Musical] gear, especially when the groups were new, came from their various alma maters, as did sheet music and coaching, rehearsal space and workspace. Such production requirements constitute significant stumbling blocks to any group, and having access to free rehearsal space was a major advantage.

For black people in the 1960s, even less welcomed as full-fledged members of society than we are today, yarn-spinning presented a rare American ritual in which we could freely participate. Other venerable traditions, like burning our neighbors alive, casting a ballot, or taking communion alongside white Christians, had long been denied us. But lying, now that was an equal-opportunity activity. With roots in stories about Aunt Nancy, Brer Rabbit, and John Henry, our inventions were small-scale variations on the African American experience, more about outwitting the powerful than manipulating privilege at the expense of the weak.

To recap, we have a highly unfavorable picture of: (1) accelerated evolution of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new variants; (2) progressively higher transmissibility and infectiousness; (4) substantially less protection from transmission by vaccines and boosters; (5) some reduction on vaccine/booster protection against hospitalization and death; (6) high vulnerability from infection-acquired immunity only; and (7) likelihood of more noxious new variants in the months ahead

An emotional vibraslap band playing sul tasto, recorded using a binaural dummy head in a castle in London, with 8 truly awe-inspiring articulations to choose from.

This meant that unlike a capital good, such as a hammer, knowledge could be consumed simultaneously by multiple people. It could be copied without being taken. The consequence of this property of knowledge was profound. It meant that knowledge could grow in per-capita terms in ways that physical capital could not. Knowledge was the essence of economic growth.

…

Let’s take a step back and consider a world of fungible knowledge. How would it look like?

In that world, knowledge would behave as a single factor. In the alphabet analogy, this would be a world in which the only thing that matters is the number of letters involved in a word. In that ‘world,’ the words dog, bet, and log are the same, since they all require three letters.

In an economy where knowledge is fungible patterns of specialization are simple. They can be described as segments in a line. In a world of fungible knowledge predicting the development of new activities is also easy, since it involves entering the activities that are next in line. Countries, cities, and regions move to products that require one more letter and exit few-letter products. In that world, the space of similar products, or ‘product space’ (24), is a chain of beads connecting one letter words, to two letter words, to three letter words, and so on.

The percussionists scourge their instruments with sledgehammer blows, while echoing bells and frenzied lines of high woodwinds and strings paint a picture of a crowd that fearfully ducks away.

What starts out as contemplation soon becomes manipulated into a carnival of power, leaving only a sense of what could have been and the dawn of a new reality.

Finalist: with eyes the color of time, by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. Premiered on August 6, 2021 at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York, N.Y., a vibrant composition, inspired by works in The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.

“From what I gather…” is a fragment of an interview with Robert Abia Moore, words harvested from the original context and used as a guiding philosophy for the soundpiece. The title references a coming together, an accumulation of disparate parts to create its own unique whole, much like the way the Osibisa story itself is an assemblage of disconnected (but connected) parts, collectivised to create an “all new” sonic arrangement. The mythology of the invention of Afrorock, Afrofunk, Zamrock, Zimheavy etc. all influenced the structuring of the piece, as much as Pan African ideas around Black Liberation, decolonized perspectives on African rhythms, sounds and practices which were deeply informed by anticolonial movements at the time.

there is a self-identification of artistic labour with the type of capital extracting it. In the metaverse artists are not just artists, they are crypto-artists. They don’t make just art, but crypto-art

…

This is the part of the text where I am supposed to cite Walter Benjamin and complain about how the concept of aura is misinterpreted. I am sure that blockchain technologies and the attempt to normalise the tokenization – or assetization – of reproducible art, would have been his worst nightmare; as Esther Leslie shows in her biography of Benjamin, he “was keenly aware of the ways in which the production of culture within the property relations of capitalism acted to constrain the progressive, democratic potential of culture.” On the other hand, as Magritte wrote too, we can’t pretend that “there have been no valid views on art formulated during the course of capitalist domination.”

Leigh Claire La Berge uses the term decommodified labour to describe a “new configuration of value-extraction, in which the wage is diminished but the formal organisation of work, its rhythms, commitments, and narratives remain” . Here it must be emphasised that among artists and cultural workers, there is a great deal of artistic labour that is decommodified. Fees exist but these are usually the side-effect of much larger amounts of unremunerated work. With this backdrop it is not hard to see how unwaged artists were low-hanging fruit, ready not only to be picked and eaten by the aggressive market mechanisms of the ownership economy but also ready to be instrumentalized as the perfect promotional tool. The fictitious ownership of art – the NFT– makes up for non-existent wages for artistic labour, or what La Berge also refers to as “wages against artwork.”

Post-collapsists: the collapse is inevitable and therefore we must act now to build conceptual, technical, and social tools that will serve us during and after the collapse in order to minimize long-term consequences.

Sensitive equipment like microphones belong in closed windshields and should be protected by foam covers or windjammers. Windjammers need to be dried after the recording. If the hairs are sticky, you can use a comb to get rid of the salt - no different than brushing your cat!

Battiato is a figure I’ve always been interested in for various reasons. One certainly was his ability at crossing borders between avantgarde and pop music, between high culture and entertainment.

Where Chivo may have had minor unexpected success is in banking the unbanked. Researchers say that those who continue using the Chivo Wallet are using it to hold and transfer dollars, El Salvador’s official currency, similar to how one uses any digital wallet or bank.

“I think it’s shit. They won’t stop until they have sucked the life and value out of every remaining shred of organic life and every last gasp of analog craft or thought and crammed it into Elon Musk and Grimes’ patented space dildo, headed for Mars to reauthor the future of sentience in their own psychotic and ethically bankrupt likeness.”

This means whoever created the art had to crouch or crawl through the chamber -- and the drawings can only be viewed by lying on the cave floor.

”They are so large that the makers had to create the images without being able to see them in their entirety," the researchers wrote. "Thus, the makers worked from their imaginations, rather than from an unimpeded visual perspective."

How could an audience not see their own value in the evolving exchange taking place at a live gig? Or did they only see value in terms of the ticket price. They paid their money, and then felt they could do as they like – even if it meant making the performer sick – because that’s the only value they could imagine contributing to the show.

This wouldn’t surprise me because it mirrors the extractive relationship listeners have to online platforms providing them with music. Music is even free, if you want it, so long as you accept that structure to the exchange – the platform gets your time, attention and data, and you get music. It’s not even a purchase. It’s more a mining operation, with the listener as object.

Passivity is cultivated by this relationship, to be sure. But there is enough room for directed action within these platforms to create fan armies, for example. What there isn’t room for is any kind of value generated by actions of the user. All value goes to the platform. It’s like the ultimate capitalist dream of labor: work generates no value for the worker at all. Once we submit to data extraction, our value is measured simply by our time on the platform.

The ban on the Hawaiian language wasn’t lifted until 1986, and today, according to census date, those who identify as at least part Native Hawaiian constitute just a fifth of Hawaii’s population. Yet they make up nearly 40 percent of the state’s prison population and suffer from poverty at disproportionate rates.

Another area in which The Replacements were decidedly unlike The Ramones was in the pacing of their shows. They didn’t blitz through their sets but rather would play a song, pause and mumble among themselves, then tune their guitars for a while. (Endless between-song tunings were common during the band’s first few months.)

Step One: Set your taking lens to infinity

…(bunch of steps about attaching and making sure the anamorphic is straight, using bokeh and/or lens flares to check, my lens doesn’t do flares and my shooting arrangement is pretty non-standard so I skep to the next part).

Step Four: Calibrate Infinity Focus
To calibrate infinity focus, you will need to focus both the anamorphic lens and the taking lens. Start by making sure that the single focusing anamorphic component is set to infinity. On our single focus attachment, infinity is all the way to the right.

Then, focus the anamorphic lens (on our Isco Micro, far focus is left). On almost all anamorphic lenses- actual infinity distance will actually be before the lens reaches the end of the range. If you have turned the focus ring all the way to the left, you will have gone too far.

Once you see perfectly round bokeh in your DSLR viewfinder, your anamorphic lens is in focus. Adjust your prime lens. This should bring the full image into focus. Double check and make small adjustments and tweaks to both lenses if necessary. Focus peaking helps greatly.

Once calibrated, you can now focus with just the single focus rangefinder.

Additional notes:

Although we have set the anamorphic lens to infinity, we can set it to whatever point we like. So if we calibrate our taking and anamorphic lenses to 10 feet, our focus range on the rangefinder will now be 10 feet to inches. This can be an effective technique for achieving very close focusing with anamorphic lenses.