Raymond Scott Documentary Coming Soon

I was pleased to learn today that Raymond Scott’s son is producing a documentary film about his father. Here’s the trailer:

I’m happy to say that Audio Damage contributed to the funding of this project as soon as we learned of it.

If you’re thinking “who’s Raymond Scott?” that’s exactly why it’s important that this film is being made. Raymond Scott was one of the most significant figures in 20th-century American music, and he really deserves to be bettern known, even posthumously. The Wikipedia article provides a good overview, and there’s lots more information at the Raymond Scott website. read more

A Stroke of Insight

I’ve been meaning to track this video down for awhile; thanks go to Ann Blake for sending it to Tracie. It’s of a speech given by a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor. Ms. Taylor suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain and, as a result, achieved unusual insight into the operation of her brain and perhaps insight into the operation of the human species as a whole.


The Happening Ain’t Happening

We just saw The Happening, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan. Let me state up front that I really like his previous movies. The excellence of The Sixth Sense goes without saying but I loved Signs and The Village also and certainly enjoyed Unbreakable and Lady in the Water. Hence it pains me to say that his newest film is really not very good. Coming from any lesser filmmaker it would be so-so; coming from him it’s a major disappointment.

I’m not going to say much about the plot since I personally hate it when someone spoils the plot of a movie for me. I suppose, though, that this review is something of a spoiler in itself. What I’ll say is this: it has a (mostly) very good, strange, suspense-laden build-up, and then it utterly fails to deliver. In retrospect it comes off as a few interesting ideas and some resulting odd situations thrown together in the framework of two plots competing for supremacy, and the competition ends in a draw. read more

Nostalgia

One of the best things about music videos in the 80s (and probably other decades, but the 80s was when I was paying attention to music videos) was that some of them made no sense whatsoever. To wit:

New Order was one of my favorites at the time. Man, they were good.

Studio Nebula Photos

Not long ago Chris posted a photo on his blog of his current workspace, which generated some amount of interest and a thread of comments about why people find it interesting to look at other people’s gear and stuff. This included at least one query about my workspace. (Hi, Jeff.) So, here are a few photos taken earlier today. It’s possibly worth mentioning that the lighting in that room is a little dim (which is actually fine with me, under most circumstances) and my camera was struggling a bit. read more

MSN/Hotmail Idiocy

Here’s a nice example of the woeful state of affairs that the spammers of the world have created for us. Last night, Tracie’s email to her aunt started bouncing. Her aunt uses MSN Live Hotmail Whatever. The error message says that Tracie’s email is being rejected because either my domain has been blocked, or my IP (which is dynamically allocated, of course) has been blocked, or something. It’s kind of vague on the exact reason.

Now, just for the record: I’m not a spammer. I hate spam. This site doesn’t have any sort of mailing list and I don’t harvest any sort of information about who visits it. (Now and then I become curious and look at my server logs, but I’m looking only at information like total number of visits, not information about individual visitors.) To the best of my knowledge, none of my machines are being used as spam relays. My home machines are locked down tight as well as being behind a firewall, and I know from experience that my domain host comes down hard on any account that they even think might be compromised. read more

It Must Be Monday

It’s One Of Those Days, it seems. Nothing actually disastrous has happened, just stuff like having to go to the hardware store to exchange something that didn’t fit after the first trip and then going again to get something forgotten during the second trip–all on a day on which I’d planned to work and not go anywhere. Then there’s been some ongoing drama with the paper business that I won’t go into. Tracie’s been dealing with a migraine that finally seems to be giving up after a couple of days. Oh, and the power went out for six hours yesterday. Anybody who says that power outtages are times for old-fashioned family fun is crazy. Power outtages in a house with two businesses, six computers, and an electronic music studio are a royal PITA and no fun at all. read more

Encore Electronics Expressionist For Sale

I’m sort of rethinking and reorganizing bits of my studio, and I’ve decided that I no longer need my Expressionist MIDI/CV converter. I’ve never really used the LFOs and stuff in it, and I recently purchased an Omega8 poly analog synth, so the Expressionist is more or less overkill for how I use my modular these days.

It’s in nearly new condition. There’s sort of a smudge on the panel which is almost unnoticeable and I think it may have been there when I bought it. I have the manual and the original box. I’m asking $450. I accept PayPal only and ship only to U.S. addresses (sorry, I hate dealing with international shipments). read more

Water in Zero Gravity

Here’s a nifty video of someone messing with blobs of water in the microgravity of the ISS:

I was quite pleased to stumble across this video. I’ve always thought that if I were given the opportunity to float around in a zero-gravity environment, one of the things I’d want to do is play with blobs of water. The other things I’d want to do include seeing whether I could propel myself with my own breath, various basic-physics experiments like throwing things to propel mysel in the opposite direction or changing my angular velocity by pulling my arms in after giving myself a spin, and not throwing up. read more