I have wanted to review MBD (aka Shara Worden) I am the Workhorse since I picked it up a few years ago (I still have not heard its follow up, and so far my only exposure is this one album). A decidedly focused but eclectic bit of chamber pop with a lot of almost kitschy cabaret touches. It’s orchestral post-folk pop…how about that for a subgenre name?

Seriously, it has a detached but earthy sound. Lots of strings in places, but in a smart way that shows a sharp attention to arrangement. The vocal melodies are languorous and sentimental, but not sappy.

She sounds sometimes like Jeff Buckley at a Kate Bush recording session, and sometimes like Jonatha Brooke trying to cover Björk.  Sometimes it even evokes a Portishead kind of melancholic darkness; that kind of simmering sadness that isn’t emo-trite but simply has an emotionally dark, seductive hue.

I have read that there are bits of opera in Worden’s music, but I don’t hear it; I hear the cabaret and the poppy bits, and the more out bits (i.e. Bark Psychosis is just ever so mildly evoked in a cut like Freak Out) but none of the operatic elements claimed by what I am guessing is by hipsters who think a strong voice is somehow operatic.

This energetic cut is from 6 and it’s a decently bouncy bit of funny groove that is somewhere between James Bond themes and the opening credits to a 60s era variety show, with costumes like a failed marriage of biker bar patron and 70s blaxploitation extras.

Went looking for some restocking of the wine rack, and ended up picking up mostly some unusual beers:

• J.W. Lee’s Harvest (matured in Lagavulin Whiskey casks)
• North Coast’s Old Rasputin XII Russian Imperial Stout (aged in Bourbon casks)
• Russian River Brewing’s Pliny the Elder, which Mr. Guntharp swears by and to my knowledge is not aged much at all (the bottling date is 10/21/09)

I need to find a place to procure stuff from Scottish brewhouse Harviestoun, as distribution in the US seems woefully limited.

It sounds a bit more developed but otherwise as equally ascetic in direction as his previous full-length, Blemish. But in the case of tracks like Small Metal Gods from new album Manafon, the spartan instrumentation and the cadences of the melodic fragments reminds me of some abstract marriage between a folky blues and the spare melancholic post-rock of solo Mark Hollis.

I will not lie, I miss the work David Sylvian did with Nine Horses and with his efforts that involved headier collaborators like Fripp and Sakamoto, but these later releases have a certain charm for very still, reflective moments.

To give you an idea of how open this part of California is, imagine a place that is nearly 100 miles in length (following the coast) and as much as 30 miles inland, with fewer than 1000 permanent residents.  If it wasn’t for Route 1, it would probably still be largely impossible to traverse, as it faces a jagged set of cliffs and microclimates going all the way into the Saint Lucia mountains.

It was a famous hangout last century for writers like Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Henry Miller (the latter of which even has a bookstore/museum right off Route 1, but was closed both times we drove by it).

I had first read about Treebones in the FT, and later the Missus decided this would be a great idea for our eighth anniversary.  She was right (she usually is), as its perfect for disconnecting.  Phone service is patchy for most carriers (there is a landline in the lodge, but we didn’t use it), and the whole point is to be away from everything anyway.  This place is not Blackberry or iPhone friendly, which makes it me-friendly by default.

This forces you to do things like hike the various trails  and look at the local flora and fauna; there are a multitude of birds (including hearing a raptor one morning), hares, and at least one lynx/bobcat.

I got to really put my Vibrams to task, and they get more comfortable with each use.  They force you to be aware of your footfalls and your posture.  The trails on the resort are limited in length, but nonetheless give you some variety of terrain and elevation.  Since the resort abuts two parks (one state, one national) it isn’t as if you lack options.  As a matter of fact, the area is teeming with parks and preserves; Los Padres, Limekiln, Pfeiffer/Burns, Fort Hunter Liggett, Point Lobos, Molera, and the Point Sur Naval Lighthouse.

It is easy to sit in your yurt and read (which we both did), walk the grounds and take trips to the central lodge for food, which includes an odd mix of rustic fare (their pork loin is pretty damn amazing, and they also have a decent lamb tagine) as well as a small sushi bar.  They grow most of the produce on the resort grounds themselves, which truth be told, seems to make a difference.  They also have something called the Nest, which is a structure that sits off to one side of the resort grounds and faces the ocean.

It pretty much makes it impossible to not relax and feel like the world is ok.  That is frankly, worth the money spent.

Also, they have cool permanent residents like the really friendly Sammy the pitbull/dachshund mix (see above, who K and I met before a morning walkabout).

About the only downside to this whole place was the one young, inept hipster on staff that just did not seem to have it together – not when we checked in, not when we checked out, not during our first evening meal.  Everyone else on staff…totally cool, especially the manager and the sous chef.

Just the drive alone is relaxing. Route 1 can unnerve some folks, as there are parts where the high winds and short distance to a gravity-assisted demise off the cliffside can cause some slight increase in bloodflow to the panic gland.  Otherwise, it is a really idyllic roadtrip, and certainly an idyllic destination.

If you actually bother to leave the resort (we did not) you are in very close driving distance to the Esalen Institute , the aforementioned Henry Miller library, several galleries and Catholic retreat grounds.  And don’t forget, just another 30 or so miles south is San Simeon and Hearst Castle.

This is Cory, who was another colleague from my VA Linux Systems days. A really affable guy, who worked out of the DC Metro offices. Since then I hear he left after years of being in IT/Tech to do contracting/home interior design and building (and apparently quite good at it).

As the 10 year anniversary of Sourceforge and the LNUX IPO come up, I find myself recalling more of the various events and people of that crazy period more often.

This one has been sitting around for a while (at since at least February of this year) and it is based from a reference shot of the great Afrika Bambaataa in the book Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang, on the formative evolution of hip-hop.

I still listen to AB, since his early explorations that married street soundsystems full of dub and funk with the coldly precise discotectonics of Kraftwerk and an overall aesthetic that was equal parts P-Funk party groove and Sun-Ra cosmic have never really lost their appeal to me.

The man was a true game changer whose early efforts literally helped ignite what has become more than simply a genre of music.

I worked on this in small bursts when time allowed, and its Pentel brush pen, clutch pencil, gouache, acrylic paint, Pro-White, Pigma micron and PS7.

There actually is a more developed version in storage, but I suppose I’ll save that for material in the art book.

An interesting question about where there is some disconnect between the buzzword of ‘government 2.0′ and the actuality – especially in terms of conflict of interest(s) between the citizenry and the citizenry that are also government employees.

A recent BSA report again devolves into a series of questionable statistics based on an obscured methodology. When are these organizations going to realize that pumping out figures as if you just use a random number generator is going to very rapidly be picked apart by people who understand math and understand the technology at work? They make colossal gaffes at a rate that almost competes with SCO and MS.

Speaking of SCO, they fired Darl McBride. I’d like to say something professional and analytical about this, but given the jaw-dropping, frivolous-lawsuit inducing, FUD factory that the man has been, I think “good riddance” is actually the most honest and sensible response.

The group uses an extended lineup that let’s the tunes breathe with a muscular beat section, exerting all the tripped out dubwise effets and ethnic percussion between floating pads of sound and laconic vocals.

I probably should not have filled in the table in black (and may fix that later) as I just am too inert to expend too much effort on drawing wood grain.

The above menu was from one of the best dining experiences I have ever had, at Saison in the Mission. As this is part of K and I celebrating eight years together. Big ups to the Missus.

There is essentially nothing about the experience that was pretentious, as everything seems wholly focused on the food.  There are no requirements for dressing up, but it is a weekend only establishment, working out of the Stable Cafe building, of which you do not pick from a menu; you book (and pay) in advance, then arrive to a multi-course meal that is prepared, presented and paced impeccably well.

And while that menu shows five courses, there were actually seven, with segue courses consisting of a tomato-based jelly with melon and a scallop with chard in a reduction of some kind that was so much epic win.

And they freely promote seeing the kitchen at work:

Allen Spiegel himself (2nd from right)

Ended up spending far more than I had intended, but the pickings were really good for art books:

My regular pilgrimage spot is Allen Spiegel Fine Arts, which had a handful of The Marat/Sade Journals by Barron Storey. I picked up one of the slipcased editions, which are signed by Storey and were limited to only 100 being made. Also purchased at the ASFA booth was Postcard from Vienna by Dave McKean and the new Kent Williams retrospective, Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992 – 2007.

Having been an acquaintance of Jonathan Wayshack since about 2003, I always stop by his booth. At this point, it’s the only time of year we speak, but he always remembers who I am, and I always pick up whatever he has that is new; in this case, Toner IV. Even as his clientele gets bigger and more mainline (DC Comics, Nike) his work retains a very underground edge. His use of pro-white is always intriguing.

The last item was Process Recess vol. 3, The Hallowed Seam, which is a collection of work from James Jean. It has a great simple die-cut cover concept and the Giant Robot folks only had three left by the time I made it to their booth.

The lead off is Volcano, and the video is somewhere between retro-kitsch on meth and just plain off the wall loud and freaky. Check the spandex body suits and neon CGI effects.

Anti-Pop Consortium “Volcano” from Okayplayer on Vimeo.

…can sometimes result in slitting ones own neck.

This pithy little axiom is something that burrowed into my skull after spending the last week on a combination of sleep dep, overbooking of personal and work projects, and generally reaching that mindspace that is equal parts delusions of profundity and deranged enjoyment at totally banal observations about inane kruft.

The magazine section at Kepler’s is actually pretty thin, and all they had of interest was Jazzwise (the UK answer to Downbeat, only less editorially coherent).  What was a great catch, was a copy of the recently translated collection by António Lobo Antunes, The Fat Man and Infinity & Other Writings. I generally do not read fiction, but there are a few authors I will read, of which Antunes is at the top of the list. His work is dense, often labyrinthine examinations of the human condition, and I have loved reading his work in both English and the original Portuguese.  I still have extensive notes on a pet project of mine to adapt his book Manual dos Inquisidores (The Inquisitors Manual) into a graphic novel.

Speaking of graphic novels…The other item I picked up was by someone whose work I enjoyed years ago, David Mazzuchelli. When comic books were starting to really allow some expressionistic approaches to illustration, Mazzuchelli (who often worked with Frank Miller) brought a really unique, rich set of visuals that used a subdued palette. He did some independent work then kind of disappeared, but I was informed by K that he had this big graphic novel called Asterios Polyp that had just come out.  It looks stylistically nothing like his previous work, but I am still digging its stylish, ascetic feel.   It reminds me of work from editorial cartoonists (think Otto Soglow, Rea Irvin, or any number of other top-line New Yorker contributors in spots, except without the self-absorbed banality).

Now, onto the food. K wanted to try the new seafood joint near the Ferry Building, Waterbar, and I am always up for good food. That, and valet parking when you are going to a place that is not convenient to anything except pedestrians who live on or near the Embarcadero.

The short of it is that it’s upscale, but not overly snooty. It has very well prepared seafood dishes; K had some sashimi presented on its own inch-thick slab of pinkish Himalayan rock salt (pretentious yes, but it still looked cool and apparently tasted great) and both of us gorged on some Hawaiian Ono* that had this curried Thai style thing going on.

Oh look....all gone.

Their dessert menu is solid, and they get extra points for having both Harviestoun Old Engine Oil, and a Cossart Gordon Bual Madeira on the beverage list.

It also has some serious Captain Nemo style fish tanks inside.

(no relation to Yoko, who looks like something caught out at sea, but shows no taste whatsoever)

I think it is safe to say they are not celebrating in Teguchigalpa tonight.

It is a WIP and a free print of the final iteration to whomever can guess what the reference stills for this come from.

Thankfully, a stream of the performance is still up, and the band is pretty darn good. I had heard frontman Avery Burke solo at Barefoot enough times that I anticipated correctly; Corpus Callosum has self-described themselves as ‘Post Industrial Folk Noir’…and I suppose that is as good a label as anything else. It is a nice, crisp, agile bouillabaisse of quirky suburban interpretation on a certain slip of gothic Americana and adherence to an eclectic sound palette and a fairly relaxed ambience. It was really one of the better local bands I have seen in a while.

I also dug the short puppet show, which was a surprise seeing as it never occurred to me I could enjoy a puppet show.

Online video chat by Ustream

What happens when you take three core individuals who are responsible at turns for the production of the first NIN record, the house sounds of the Sugarhill Rap and On-U Sound labels, and sessions for people like the Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Jeff Beck and put them with a few buddies in a studio? In this case, you get a live show of a variation of the Tack>>Head sound system; in this case Little Axe, which focuses on a dubwise Delta blues with ethno-electronic overtones.

Their debut album , The Wolf that House Built (a reference to essential bluesmen Howlin’ Wolf and Son House) was a big influence on among others Moby, who subsequently sanitized it considerably before making a boatload on the result.  Subsequent releases have bounced between a more gritty natural sound to more dubby and electronic, but always with the core four keeping a strong focus on musicianship and a solid pulse.

Starting Monday, issues dating back to 2000 will be available at Data.gov in a form known in the Web world as XML

The ‘web world’ makes it sound like they are moving the register to a planet of hyperactive arachnids (lets face it, layman English copy about tech topics always sounds slightly inept), but the point is the same, that it is an improvement over the rather clumsy way to currently navigate the voluminous daily postings.

They quote one staffer, “the changes online may inspire someone to find the next best way to publish, display and distribute the Register.”  Well, how about an RSS feed system that you can setup via keyword (a la the clean setup SimplyHired has)?

This invites all manner of possibilities for content analysis/visualization projects.

But from time to time, one will state something very important, even if it is completely obvious to anyone who isn’t living in a cognitive convenience bubble.

Joe Scarborough often shows the personal grace of a stevedore after a root canal and the objectivity of a hack (case in point, his somewhat flat drubbing at the hands of Zbiegniew Brzezinski, who simply operates at a different level altogether and is not prone to falling for infotainment people trying to goad him into a useless soundbyte exchange) but at the very least he has the excuse that he was a former member of Congress and his views on MSNBC are largely in line with his voting record.

However, he does seem as of late to take issue with the corrosive partisanship that has turned every single topic into bipolar political trench warfare by small groups of very loud people talking and behaving badly. Very very badly.

In a piece that starts about President Obama and his failed bid to get the Olympics in Chicago for 2016, he states emphatically that he finds the attempt laudable, “…not for the sake of his city, but for the good of his country. The fact President Obama failed makes me respect him more for taking the chance, and the fact many right-wing figures opposed the President’s mission shows just how narrow-minded partisanship makes us all.”

This is a ruse, as his real point -and a valid one- is in what the “narrow minded partisanship” indicates.  His focus is on the last two decades; and even though partisanship has ebbed and flowed since the very first administration, there has been an ascending level of shrillness and myopia since the Clinton/Gingrich battles of the early 90s that seems to keep churning out ever larger batches of angry and stupid.  The title of this post is based on his quote about how bad things have become:

…NBC News Legend Tom Brokaw remarked to Pat Buchanan about how the level of partisanship is even more intense today than during the depths of the Watergate crisis. Brokaw was commenting on Congressman Grayson’s comments, but he could have easily
been talking about Joe Wilson or death panels or the bizarre claim that the President “hates all white people.”

His follow up is fairly dead on also:

Some of the rhetoric is dangerous. But what we saw from some conservative corners regarding the President’s failed Olympics bid was just plain stupid.

Why limit it to just this event? I cannot even begin to explain how disenchanted with humanity one becomes when watching people making colossal jackasses of themselves trying to accuse and inveigle anyone who will listen with indictments of words no one seems to know the definition of anymore: Socialist, Marxist, Fascist, Racist, Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, etc.  People just apply them with a sneer and extra helpings of vitriol in the hopes of making their otherwise intellectually malnourished memes carry the right emotional turmoil.

He seems to be of the impression that “…there are a growing number of Americans who believe we cannot continue going on this way” but unless we actually decide to make the concerted effort to stop giving immense airtime and mental bandwidth to these folks (and the commensurate gravity it exerts on elected officials who feel obligated to pander to these wingbats) we will be stuck with the crippled discourse we have.

This will almost certainly not be the last you see of this one, since I already have a template based off of this to load into Inkscape and/or Illustrator for further processing, but here is the latest thing I dug up from the archives.

Many years ago, when I first arrived at DA, one of the first people to give any notice to my random toilings was Matthew Woodson,  who has long since abandoned his account there (since about 2005 or so) and whose work I generally found well developed and stylistically his own.  He now runs Ghostco.

I did the pencils to this in 2006 or 2007, and last week I started fidgeting around with what I would do with this, having never figured it out otherwise.   I am not fully pleased, but am hoping it prints on matte as well as I plan.  Some of the textures in the skin are only visible blown up (I used brushes that help flay the paper surface) and in that regard, I found the execise interesting.

I added the ideograph bubble and the raven’s head after the fact (the bird was actually drawn while sitting passenger side on a drive to dinner with a Pentel brush pen onto a small sketchbook some months back). The rest is acrylic paint, gouache, water soluble colored pencil on bristol and final assembly and torquing digitally.

I keep looking at this hoping that I conveyed more stern self-assurance than malevolence, but the palette and tone is admittedly a bit Edgar Allen Poe.

Last week the missus and I headed up to the Regency Ballroom and caught Fishbone & Living Colour, a double bill I had wanted to see since 1991, when both bands released albums that left indelible impressions on my ears; The Reality of My Surroundings and Time’s Up.

I had not seen Fishbone in at least 8 years, and had lost interest in seeing them live after the lineup had deteriorated to only having two of the original six members, Angelo Moore and Norwood Fisher.  Something in me was always partial to the fully expanded septet of the early 90s.  I really loved the soulful coolness of Charlie Dowd and the solid backup of  Dirty Wal Kibby III on vocals and pocket trumpet as counterpoint to Angelo’s constant manic lunacy, and I definitely missed Philip ‘Fish’ Fisher.  Very few drummers can play the span he does, with the sustained  intensity.  He’s Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Dennis Chambers and a cyclone all rolled into one tidy package.

This lineup held up though; not enough for me to not still pine for those earlier incarnations, but enough for me to say that if you had never seen them previously, you would still marvel at the fantastic energy they could still give off.  Angelo is still very much in high form, and his ability to dance, prance, dive, careen and spaz out on stage has few peers; he did numerous cartwheels, stagedives and otherwise did his best impersonation of a superball.  He also expanded his own sound palette – he has moved from just alto/tenor sax and quica to also add a baritone sax which he wielded like it was nothing and theremin in a manner that evoked a serious ‘mad scientist’ vibe. Yes, I said theremin.  The brass section included John McKnight on trombone and Fernando Pullum on trumpet (who later stood in the crowd to watch LC right behind us) with Moore, and the big, booming horns were appreciated.

The set focused on a lot of material from the last decade (including Alcoholic and Shakey Ground) and a few great older chestnuts I was happy to hear live for the first time, like Cholly.  There was a less funk-metal vibe and more ska-punk-slackness fun to it.  It was a great opening setup for headliners Living Colour.

I’ve  talked incessantly about LC before, as recent as just a few weeks ago over their new album, The Chair in the Doorway, which this tour is in support of and I’ve had on very steady rotation.  But as much as I love their records, it is live where they at worst do pretty good, and at best outshine anyone else on a stage.  They are loud, intense, dynamic, and can always pull out some surprises.  This gig was no different, as the band started with some familiar chestnuts from the first two records; Middle Man opened the set and built up speed into the angular riff pummelling of Desperate People, both from the debut, Vivid.  Manic and heavy Go Away from Stain was there, and the amphetamine crush of Time’s Up and Type helped keep the show going full tilt.

I would have liked a few more cuts from the Stain album (Wall and TV News especially. None of the Pride-specific extra cuts were there either, and I am really fond of Release the Pressure and Visions.  There was also a total absence of material from C0llideoscope, which I think is unfortunate.  The album itself may have been their weakest in terms of the overall recording, but some of their best tunes are tucked in there: Nightmare City next tour plz.

Pretty much everyone got to stretch out; Vernon had all the expected guitar solos there (even if what he played was often unexpected and enthralling) and a few instrumental bridge sections.  Corey’s ringing introduction into Open Letter to a Landlord let him go into an inspired full Reverend Al Green mighty gospel mode, as well as a section covering Papa Was  Rolling Stone.  Corey’s voice has gotten fuller, more powerful and resonant over the years, which makes his ability to belt and change gears as he does in a show quite remarkable.

Doug Wimbish’s solo was the first to involve a certain amount of ‘theater’: it involves going through an opening section funk jam that segues into a walk into the crowd and more scorching playing, including a Hendrix-esque bit with him playing the bass with his teeth, as he does in this video (come on, just watch it once all the way through) playing the head to jazz standard My Favorite Things. It is not too unlike this.  From our vantage point all we could see (if anything half the time) was the headstock of the bass as he walked around an lit it up, but it sounded great.

Last up to bat is Will Calhoun, whose solo(s) was both the most out in terms of doing a lot of improvisation and veering closest to avant at times;  from trap kit, to Korg wavedrum to trap kit with glowing drumsticks, which turned all his movements into a hypnotic set of multicolored arcs of light set to his ritual beating, itself showing elements of African, South American, Jazz and electronica influences – often at the same time.  Here is something that hints at it, if only tangentially.

The last section of the main show was a huge slab of the new album, and it translates to the stage as I anticipated;  this is a band with fresh material that is itching to play it live, and keeps the momentum going just as well as it does with the older tunes.  For me, The Chair and Method were serious standouts and should just never leave the setlist.  Behind the Sun translates really well live (check out this perf from the Jimmy Fallon show) and was made all the more poingnant by the images of New Orleans playing on the stage screen.

The closer was  Cult of Personality, a track which two decades on has lost none of its greatness, and if anything in this day of polititainment, all the more accurate in its message.

The show never lost steam, even during the two song encore (Love Rears its Ugly Head and Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic), and afterwards the band came out for autographs.  K noted that she thought all of them looked decades younger than their ages would make one think, and that they seemed fully alive and engaged both onstage and with fans; a band that seems fully resurrected and running on all cylinders.  LC has never been laggard or half-stepped on stage, but one would think a quarter of a century in, that some of the drive and fury would be gone…but it isn’t.  This is a band well worth seeing at any opportunity that presents itself.

^{As a small aside: at a random point, there was a couple in front of us…well, sort of a couple.  It was a guy with an over-active desire to get a kiss from this woman he seems to have brought to the show on a date, and her desire to avoid that. Her romantic aikido defenses were too powerful for his weak ninja Don Juanishness.  Oddly, I recognized him as someone I last saw many years ago in high-school.  He notably had the same hairstyle he did then.}

• It did not have the good sense to do what Adobe did with InDesign with respect to migrating users from Quark:  get very granular key-mappings/lexicon so as to make transitioning users much easier.
• It had a general user interface experience that I would put barely above Blender and slightly below MS Windows 3.1.

The former (and a small part of the latter) was partially addressed by the advent of projects like GimPhoto and GIMPShop, but these were effectively forks, and not the most actively supported and stable.

Finally, it seems that GIMP itself is getting a real makeover with a single window and clean menu system closer to Photoshop, without losing the strengths it inherently has, and in a way that will allow users the choice of UI layout. FOSS wins again.

Let’s face it, I paid a hefty sum for my Adobe license (I waited years to go to the full CS3 suite from version 7.0 of just PS, and am still not sure if it was worth it for the PS upgrade) and if I can get an app that gets me what I want in a manner that is easy to transition to, you have a test case to win over a lot of other users.

The idea of having an application that has the bulk of features PS does, for zero dollar cost, smaller resource footprint, and is built to let people test the waters easily, is a big step in the right direction.

Here is an image from my time at Damage Studios, working on the Rekonstruction MMOG, which made use of GIMP to some degree:

p.s. yes, I still think the GIMP is a completely asinine name (recursive acronym or not).

The reference images were a bunch of cephalopods and one of DA’s own stock image providers, Meltys.

Clutch pencil, Pentel brush pen, Pigma microns, gouache, acrylic paint, copic markers, watercolor + Photoshop

His political predictions could sometimes be way off the mark, but could also -as when he won the Pulitzer for his writings on Jimmy Carter’s OMB director, Bert Lance- produce quality investigative journalism.  It was his musings on language however, that he consistently was a good read.

He represented a dwindling class of political commentator that -regardless of whether or not you agreed with his positions- had at least something that resembled cellular activity north of the neck, in an age otherwise dominated by talk radio blowhards, online conspiranauts, and TV ‘news’ pundidiots, all venting endless high-volume columns of vacuous drivel.

He passed away today, aged 79.