On Sunday, I spent a couple of hours playing shakuhachi in a group session organised by the Australian Shakuhachi Association. I’d been to one earlier this year, after some time away. This one featured the same teacher (Riley Lee) and a couple of new faces I hadn’t seen. I was excited to take part, partially because I like any excuse to use the Association’s abbreviated name (an ASS meeting, natch) but also because in the previous week I’d seen a concert of largely shakuhachi music, and was feeling inspired to play.
I’ve just completed the PS3 version of Deadly Premonition. It’s as uniquely addictive as everybody says.
It’s a game I’ve followed ever since this trailer was released. Originally, it was called Rainy Woods, was due for release for PS2/Xbox and was swiftly thrown into the doldrums because of the obvious rips from Twin Peaks. I mean, watch the trailer: midgets, a red room, a sheriff who looks like Michael Ontkean with a dye-job… the thing was hardly subtle. I suppose that’s why the game was almost cancelled four times.
Nope, no David Lynch stuff going on here.
The game finally dragged itself onto the X360 with its current title, and later to the PS3. The set-up is basic: you’re an FBI agent (Mr Francis York Morgan, but call him York, everyone does) who visits a town called Greenvale (presumably in the Pacific Northwest) in order to solve a murder. It’s the sort of game people love or loathe – but as someone who has a big thing for Twin Peaks, I’m in the former camp. It’s amazing, sort of like technological Twin Peaks fanfic, written by a Japanese teenager. Destructoid’s review of the game probably covers most of why I like it, and you should read it even if you’re not a gamer.
I spent part of last night at a performance of shakuhachi and percussion works at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music. The players ranged from student to shakuhachi master (and grandmaster) level, and while the event did have some slightly off-target moments, it was good to see how a casual approach to programming and execution – and at a free concert! – can yield rewards. Continue reading “Shakuhachi concert, 28/5/2014”→
Lately I’ve been listening to Kirin J Callinan‘s album Embracism a lot. It’s a bizarre thing, all spiky and full of what could be joking but likely isn’t. The filmclip above should give a good overview. It’s very weird, kind of sweaty and sexual and puts me in mind of an electro Dave Graney in the way that nobody can really figure if it’s serious or not because it’s so honest. Or is it?
Regardless, it’s great. Particularly when you get to stuff like this:
I think the appeal is in that it rides the line between like and dislike so adroitly. There’s always a question in mind – do I like this? – while listening, which to me is a mark of an artist (if not good) then worth investigating at least. Doesn’t strike me as much preaching to the choir going on here.
Anyway, the reason for this post is that Kirin is currently seeking some funds to continue touring the album and making some more music. It’ll receive funding but he’ll still make a loss, so in the last twelve hours why don’t you go and help out? The list of rewards is worth a couple of bucks alone. Arm-wrestling anyone?
This article is great, because it details the process by which an algorithm – called TransProse, no less – can take the ’emotional temperature’ of literature and generate a piece of music on the results. Such as this, gleaned from A Clockwork Orange.
I’m kind of thrilled about this because I’ve always loved the way computers can take stuff we’ve created and make things from them. When I was younger, I used to play around with a DOS program called MARKV, which would eat any text you fed it – the longer the better – and then return output based on Markov Chains. It was random but it also relied on statistical examination of what pieces of data sat next to, so you’d receive something back which followed the kind of rules required for construction of lucid text… but in a very strange way.
“I actually like it, it does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else. I don’t want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don’t want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.”
I was pleased to note that George R. R. Martin (whose mammoth tomes I’ve just begun to read) is fervent about something other than wearing that cap. He is one of a dying breed – the DOS user! More particularly, he uses WordStar to crank out his lengthy bestsellers. Not for him the (now Clippy-free) white screens of Microsoft Word or its free replacements. He eschews the fancy writer-friendly face of Scrivener. Instead, he spends hours facing this:
I said ChKWord, goddamnit.
Nice. Of course, this isn’t the first time he’s mentioned this method of working. This LJ update provides more information on his working process, most notably this:
I’ve often shared this video on Facebook and thought I’d give it a whirl here: Kraftwerk in 1970.
If you only know them as the nattily-dressed man-machines or mocap-outfitted dudes apparently checking email in front of outstanding 3D visuals, you really don’t know them. Continue reading “Kraftwerk: before they were robots”→
Jackson’s Booker-shortlisted book is a real gem. It’s a strange amalgam of fictionalised history, memoir and gothic horror – gothic body horror, come to that.
It takes its genesis in the life of William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland, but rapidly diverges from the accepted record. Using a combination of diary entries and testimonies or statements, the mole-like additions to his home at Welbeck Abbey are described, as is his increasing infirmity. There’s a lovely turn of phrase in the Duke’s private reminiscences, and the reader if left wondering if it’s the result of a poetic soul, or of dementia. Continue reading “Book review: The Undeground Man”→
Well, not quite. That’s the date I first registered this domain, many moons ago while living in London. There was a whole other weblog here for a long time – called |lukelog| – which was my first introduction to the public eye, I suppose. It didn’t always look as it does on the left, mind.
I set it up after seeing my flatmate Meg’s blog, and it pretty much consumed me. I wrote a lot, much of it terrible, and much of it presenting a pretty ropey portrait of my mental health and self-confidence levels than I ever would have thought at the time. It’s probably a hint as to why the archives for |lukelog| aren’t to be found here: it’s a little like reading diaries from your teens. It all seems a bit facile and innocent now, somehow.
It was fun, don’t get me wrong: being the kind of odd addition to the GBlogs stable, knowing some people who’ve since gone on to work in Important Web Things And Organisations. Hell, I was even nominated for the best European weblog in the inaugural Bloggies! (I didn’t win, though I should add it’s an honour just have been nominated and gee, shucks, I don’t know what to say.)
But at the same time, I was sort of beholden to the thing. I continually picked at it. And I ended up hating the sound of my own (typed) voice, as well as feeling weird about the whole concept. (Though I must admit, it was particularly great when people I’d never really met bought me replacement albums after I’d had my bag ransacked by some fuckhead at the Green Park Hotel on a trip back to Sydney.)
So I stopped. And now I’ve started again, though for slightly different reasons. It took a couple of false starts to arrive where we are, and I’m still unconvinced it’s a wholly worthwhile idea, but as long as I have reviews to add (or to save from the digital dustbin) I suspect I’ll keep going.
Anyway. 14 years. Cripes. Happy birthday, CaptainFez.
Two book reviews for the price of one. Read before a re-watch of David Fincher’s Zodiac because these were instrumental in its creation. My advice? Stick with the film. There’s a little repetition in the reviews because REPETITION IS WHAT YOU GET FROM READING THESE BOOKS, BUCKO.
Cartoonist-cum-chronicle Robert Graysmith has a pretty decent retelling of the Zodiac killer story here. As well he should, given he was working at one of the newspapers to receive ciphers and cheery letters from the murderous astrology fan. Continue reading “Book review: Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked”→
Yeah nah. 