MDM Broadcast - 2023

My favorite music released in 2022 has to be live recordings made in 2019 & 2021 by guitarist Jeff Parker and his quartet at a place called Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) in Los Angeles. The album was released at the end of October, and I've been listening to its four long tracks consistently ever since; they remind me what I love most about music -- when it's created live, in the moment, by people with exceptional talent out of the thinnest of air.

I saw Parker play with Tortoise in the 90s, and the music he's been making for the past few years has pushed me to keep my ears wide for sound astride improvisation's blurry edge. As a release, this live version is an auditory realization of discovering, in the moment, that the end result isn't the destination -- that the point of having a band like Parker's play live is to find what you need, and discover what moves you, with "the friends you made along the way," so to speak.

The tracks have a spirit & quality of rough drafts, where you can hear musical ideas quickly being born, and then dismissed, and occasionally the smallest of sonic gestures transubstantiate into something altogether different -- an auditory uniqueness of an otherwise ordinary Monday night in Southern California, for an audience who arrived not just to listen, but to be surprised.

My ears perk-up most when Parker is somehow able to sound like he's just picked-up the instrument, as if he's let go enough to achieve a pure state of beginner's mind. Didn't DeKooning mix his oils with mayonaisse? Isn't it a goal of many modern masters to forget everything they've learned on their way to said mastery?

My guess is the music biz is the way it is because one of the most difficult things for artists to do is give listeners what they least expect -- or give them what they don't want (and don't know that they need). Minute-by-minute, these recordings of a live performance in the back of a bar (42 seconds-in on track one, you'll think a bottle fell behind your left shoulder) gave me more than anything else I heard this year.

A writer at allmusic, Thom Jurek, ended his review with: "this is deeply intuitive, subtly detailed, endlessly grooving, holistic jazz-trance music that was improvised at at an extremely high level" which sums it all up better than I have, above.

Hear it!

https://eremiterecords.bandcamp.com/album/mondays-at-the-enfield-tennis-academy

“Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.”

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

https://pca.st/episode/7884fc14-efe0-4407-9c8c-12ff5979f4a9

I endorse this opinion, 1000%

It’s incredible how three or four nights in Los Angeles in December of 1983 can still generate such joy and amazement. A+ level stage-craft, theatricality, authenticity, pacing, cinematography, and good old-fashioned groove. Watched for the nth time last night and was surprised again again again.

(also fun how a guy did his own upscale 4k remastering on it, in true internet spirit)

(also now, in true internet spirit, three years later, seeing the guy's efforts hit with a DMCA notice, because he probably gave the studio the idea of remastering and re-releasing it themselves 😩)

Finally made time for "Fire of Love)" last night, a fantastic doc made entirely from an archive of existing mtl (like "Riotsville, USA") supplemented with a fantastic voiceover from Miranda July.

It's a non-fiction Life Aquatic, but with volcanos. It made it from the Oscar short-list to an actual nomination. Will be interesting to see if it can beat "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed".

A machine says it's on both Hulu & Disney+ right now, but tomorrow, who knows?

Watched "Navalny" last night, which, like "Fire of Love," made it from the shortlist into an actual Oscar nom slot, and while the film is a decent compendium of an awful situation, it also highlights how much of the story/drama played out in near real-time, via Navalny's own YouTube channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)

Which reminded me that the greatest acting performance of 2022 actually occurred in late 2020, when Navalny cold-called each of his Bellingcat-discovered assassins, and pretended he was a Kremlin official, needing to understand how the assassination plot went sideways.

Navalny is so convincing, one of the assassins gives-up the details of the plot, while Navalny's Bellingcat researcher and lawyer sit beside him, dumbstruck.

Overview from BBC in 2020:

There's a docu-crossover of sorts between Navalny's phone call and Joshua Oppenheimer's brilliant scenes with the two gangsters in "The Act of Killing," where they proudly reenact the methods and tactics of their 60s-era death squads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing

Incredible to learn today that Coretta wore pumps on the march from Selma to Montgomery in this zoom-in on a photograph from James Karales in his book “Controversy and Hope”

Just (re)discovered this video. Glad to see it's part of the Poetry Center's archive at University of Arizona. Always nice for a photographer. 😉

https://voca.arizona.edu/track/id/60146

Leave it to the golf podcasters to draw the obvs straight line through E. Palestine > Noah Baumbach > Don Delillo > Bhopal disaster

When Baumbach’s version of “White Noise” was released, I considered writing a piece about how it failed to convey reality in the way most popular period pieces in the last five years have failed, by flaunting the obvious seams of green screens and CGI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel)

The worst example in the film is the Airborne Toxic Event, and how digital the smoke looked, and how the shadow of the smoke spread across the farmland like a rendering (you could almost see the CPU cycles) and how so many films lean on the narrative crutches of these techniques, pushing audiences away from stories rather than drawing us in through actual, tangible details.

Like many, to see the actual smoke rising from E. Palestine’s controlled burn was to be reminded at how real life does not resemble cinema, and how fiction goes to such great lengths to render a kind of camouflaged essence of truth, while nothing is more astounding than real life horror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_derailment

I guess I’ll keep watching the Maysles?

Examination of causality and correlation in NyMag:

“Rather than habitual social-media use rendering girls depressed, depression may render girls habitual social-media users.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/teen-suicide-depression-girls-social-media.html

Mike Murphys know what’s up. Idealized perfection of our memories in leiu of “reality.”

Sure, every lens distorts, but digital culture (which is all culture, now) has pushed the influenced into a race for internalized, private likes, smoothing the bumps and blemishes (and beach crowds) of rough-hewn personal histories into a commercially-contrived product of the past.

And for an audience of one?

More piggybacking on Haidt’s ideas in NYT:

“The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/opinion/social-media-and-teen-depression.html

Best guess without the metadata is this is Merce Cunningham at a curtain call, nearly 20 years ago from the cheap seats, 02/2004

Really appreciated this summation and discussion about the life of Chris McCandless. It’s always surprising to hear how his influence has grown over the years, and to reflect on how our timelines overlapped. Both hosts here have remarkable perspectives on the many meanings of his journey.

Iditarod musher and non-fiction writer Blair Braverman is the guest.

https://pca.st/episode/cf2d1d36-ec19-45d9-897d-bb56673accba

Outrageous footage - 30min film of altitude paragliders riding the thermals in Pakistan up to K2.

20080202

If you're interested in AI, are on MacOS and want to experiment with OpenAI's Whisper, which offers incredibly fast and accurate transcriptions of audio files (thx to the port specifically created for Apple Silicon) I wrote-up dumb-as-nails instructions that should get you there.

Wish I could go deeper into all the use cases and errors you might encounter, but this should work. Familiarity with the Terminal is helpful, but not required.

When I installed whisper locally a few months ago, it took hours to achieve the same results that are now achievable in seconds, thanks to this port. Really incredible stuff!

The speed with which smart people are wrapping functionality around the ChatGPT API is dizzying and incredible to witness. Wild to try this iOS/shortcut implementation within an hour of the developer crafting it up yesterday. And a few minutes after that, it was working on a watch -- all while leaving a rooster tail of dust over Apple's Siri.

The allure isn't in seeing which company is up or down, it's in seeing independent developers get creative, illuminating how FAANG have failed while sitting on top of their trillions.

of course the scottish wee cow has heart hooves

Steve Earle, on Lucinda Williams, over a Zoom call. Five stars.

"I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing."

— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Appreciating how Lewis Hamilton (while prepping for F1 in Miami) draws a straight-line correlation betweeen the state-sponsored expression of intolerance founded via religious fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis Ron Desantis' reign of performative intolerance (for religious fundamentalists of the GOP) in Florida.

"“It’s not good at all,” Hamilton said, via The Associated Press. “I stand by those within the community here. I hope they continue to stand firm and push back. I’ll have the rainbow on my helmet. It’s no different to when we were in Saudi [Arabia].”"

I was today years old when I first learned about Fanny.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html

It's incredible how useful these 3d-renderings of real-life events are, and how powerful it is to sync-them to existing cctv sources. Really appreciate this visualization work via WaPo: https://shrtm.nu/cvA

More from the Visual Forensics team here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/visual-forensics/

In 2010, I started playing golf, but only because I'd been painstakingly creating video art that was golf-adjacent and figured I should probably try to play the game, which seemed like the most natural outcome of the art-making. So I did that (and look at me now).

As an exercise, I wondered if I could re-create some of those earlier pieces, using code. I didn't completely manage it -- the pieces are structurally and functionally different (but to highlight their subtle differences would dull any desire to read this.) The wild part is that I was able to do it all without a non-linear video editor, with Python and guidance from OpenAI's GPT. From scene selection to clip aggregation, to building the composition, everything was done without Final Cut or After Effects.

This is a 2x2 example, in which the ball has the greatest legibility (on a small screen), but I can quickly scale-up to any other kind of grid, because it's code. Each quadrant is a randomly-ordered aggregation of 99 clips of footage from Sunday, April 12th, 2015.

Was defending champion in a stroke-play tournament at Athens Country Club, a favorite place of mine - conditions are always immaculate. It’s a classic old Donald Ross design.

I had a 58-yard wedge for my third shot into a back right pin on a small ledge on a par-5, and I jarred it on the fly, but the ball bounced hard out of the cup and flew 20 ft. away. I two-putted for par, and ended-up losing by one shot. Tied for 2nd.

What a game.

No 🎣.

I wondered what Thursday's record-setting rounds of the US Open would look like side-by-side, so I made it and then uploaded it to the internet.

60 years ago this August, a 22 year old kid from Hibbing, Minnesota stood in front of 300k people at the March on Washington and sang a song he'd just written referencing a murder in Mississippi that had happened in early June.

While the march will always be remembered for another speaker at the rostrum, the performance of this particular song (with this particular message) for this particular crowd at this particular time still strikes me as jaw-droppingly transcendent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medgar_Evers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_on_Washington_for_Jobs_and_Freedom
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/only-pawn-their-game/

Very much worth reading, even if it leans too heavily on McWhorter at the start:

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-wokeness/

Stronger unions, tax reform and legislation will steer us from the 9th circle of piety and puritanism, I swear!

"My favorite bit is an inspired mountain-out-of-a-molehill joke about how Apple manipulates you into giving up personal data by offering these choices when you try to download an app..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/arts/television/john-early-now-more-than-ever.html

Such great, antagonistic (art)work being done by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain https://twitter.com/sam_lavigne/status/1678836211253760004

"Cold Call is an installation that takes the form of a call center. Audiences are invited to connect by telephone to executives in the fossil fuel industry and instructed to keep them on the phone as long as possible. The cumulative time stolen from these executives is then quantified as carbon credits using an innovative new offsetting methodology."

aahhhh, that "soft-hand feel vegan P.U. material"...

Love Chidi’s story of more or less accidentally wandering into the fake electors meeting in the GA capitol at the end of 2020.

From June: "Websites for mental health crisis resources across the country—which promise anonymity for visitors, many of whom are at a desperate moment in their lives—have been quietly sending sensitive visitor data to Facebook, The Markup has found."

https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2023/06/13/suicide-hotlines-promise-anonymity-dozens-of-their-websites-send-sensitive-data-to-facebook

good saturday morn new gecko in the new blueberry bush

Appreciating Nikita Gale's "Marmi", a marble cassette tape that contains a recording of its own making.

https://www.nikitagale.com/marmi#2

"The property is now appraised at $0. By rendering it legally unusable, this restrictive covenant eliminates the market value of the land. These restrictions run with the land, regardless of the owner. As such, they will last indefinitely." https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/cameron-rowland-depreciation

Had forgotten, until last night while seeing the remastered Stop Making Sense, that there's a moment during "This Must Be The Place" where the towers are projected on the backdrop.

What would the Wyeth Foundation think?

"the key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html

eclipse lookin good right now from tattoine

Came across another example last week of a film where the script was entirely taken from a court transcript: The Trial of Klaus Barbie. (Akin to this year's Reality Winner film too, mentioned above, where much of the script was from transcribed audio.) Really appreciate this kind of creativity under self-imposed constraints.

"A team of stenographers was employed to record the court proceedings and the transcripts were dispatched to London, where the creative team compared notes every morning before Ray Jenkins thrashed out a raw script. French-speaking director Gareth Jones was sent to Lyon to watch the conduct of the trial and came back with detailed notes on the appearance and performance of all the main players.

The result was to be neither drama-documentary nor docu-drama but an entirely new genre: an abridged reproduction of the trial in a massive replica courtroom erected in BBC Studio One, cast with look-alikes, scripted solely with words that had been spoken. Courtroom drama as it had never been made before."

These two are good reads, back to back.

Was interesting to see another example of how Sheryl Sandberg leaned-into (not) making her company's products a safe(r) place for girls and young women.

First link is WSJ gift-link.
The 2nd, a story about kids & phones in Westfield, NJ, isn't, so it's an archive snapshot.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/instagram-facebook-teens-harassment-safety-5d991be1?st=5spbca8ijxj4qnm&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

https://archive.ph/mTakj

Rewatched the archival footage doc on Apollo 11) last night, and out of all the incredibleness of how beautiful the footage is, and how mind-bending the space program's achievement, I still cannot believe that during launch, Buzz Aldrin's heart rate was a cool 88bpm.

Photo editing perfection.

Charlie Warzel is grt here on the Sphere:

“The Sphere is a distillation of an evolving relationship among art, artist, and technology—somewhere between a warm embrace of and a final surrender to screens. It is an acknowledgment and maybe even a tribute to the ways in which our screens have become extensions of ourselves and the way that documentation via these screens has become its own form of consumption and participation. Seeing is believing, but what the Sphere suggests is that documenting has become inextricable from living.”

I didn't know Radcliffe, but whenever our paths crossed, it was great to greet him as if we did, and tip our hats at each other, and our city will be less without him. Was thinking about him yesterday.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/radcliffe-bailey-dead-1234686877/

A slice of real-life horror from Cade Metz's book on the genesis of AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Rosenblatt

"In the summer of 1971, on his forty-third birthday, Rosenblatt died in a boating accident on the Chesapeake Bay. The newspapers didn’t say what happened out on the water. But according to a colleague, he took two students out into the bay on a sailboat. The students had never sailed before, and when the boom swung into Rosenblatt, knocking him into the water, they didn’t know how to turn the boat around. As he drowned in the bay, the boat kept going."

Thankfully returning to Maggie Nelson.

Cleanly combine a sequence of pod episodes into one long file, with Podcast Episode Combiner.

Public repo on GitHub

In looking back at the films I saw in '23 that were released this year, there are few standouts, mostly because the releases from December '22 (which I watched in Jan/Feb) were so strong. "The Mission" and "A Tiger in Paradise" were the most inventive docs I found. Both leaned-into the flexibility of filmic techniques to express (or relive) situations that would have been otherwise impossible to capture.

Gerwig & Baumbach's script for Barbie was sharp and joyful. Oppenheimer was somehow better on 2nd watch, and Killers of the Flower Moon felt like another overstuffed late-Scorsese, where he forces all the characters and CGI he can into the frame because no one at Netflix has the brass to tell him no.

Best were all the films that weren't released in '23 that offered lasting amazement. As a fam, we went deep on docs about the Apollo program this year, and it's hard to personally quantify what it was like to spend a few days re-watching "Shoah" (and the docs made from its outtakes & extra footage) and to finish it right before Oct. 7.

Maybe the best experience I had was realizing last week that Mark Cousins had created a follow-up to his incredible 15-part "Story of Film" during the pandemic that escaped my radar completely. And to find it, and follow his stroll through familiar examples from Castaing-Taylor, Varda, Hogg, Aster, McQueen and more was a reminder that great things are still being made, they're just (oxymoronically, in our streamable-era) harder to find.

Hard to express the quiet pleasure found in watching "Past Lives," the first feature written and directed by Celine Song, based on her own life. Such beautiful slow pans, the nuanced score (with wind chimes) by two guys from Grizzly Bear, the fantasticly understated performances from the three principles, the ambitious decades-long arc of the plot and how it involved a lot of recreated tech from 2010-era computers, how the scenes in New York looked like scenes in New York, and not scenes on a lot where they painted-in the background.

Just fantastic, naturalistic cinema with a huge, bilingual heart. Loved it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Lives_(film)