Hank's Blog
Friday, January 30, 2004
Vogner - Where Everything Must GO
a Video Weblog by Tim Hall
a Video Weblog by Tim Hall
This is my vog, or video weblog. My tools are a Canon PowerShot A70 digital camera, Apple iBook, and iMovie. Welcome to the brave new world of lo-vi, guerrilla micro-vilmmaking.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Tomara que você volte depressa
que você não se despeça
nunca mais do meu carinho
E volte, se arrependa e pense muito
que é melhor se sofrer junto
que viver feliz sozinho
Tomara que a tristeza te convença
que a saudade não compensa
e que a ausência não dá pé
Que o verdadeiro amor de quem se ama
tece a mesma antiga trama
e não se desfaz
Que a coisa mais bonita
desse mundo
é viver cada segundo como nunca mais.
(Vinícius de Moraes)
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
salon.com:
Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno unveil digital "manifesto"
By Angela Dolan
Jan. 26, 2004 | CANNES, France (AP) -- Rock veterans Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a provocative new musicians' alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels.
With the Internet transforming how people buy and listen to songs, musicians need to act now to claim digital music's future, Gabriel and Eno argued Monday as they handed out a slim red manifesto at a huge dealmaking music
conference known as Midem.
They call the plan the "Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists" -- or MUDDA, which has a less lofty ring to it.
"Unless artists quickly grasp the possibilities that are available to them, then the rules will get written, and they'll get written without much input from artists," said Eno, who has a long history of experimenting with technology.
By removing record labels from the equation, artists can set their own prices and set their own agendas, said the two independent musicians, who hope to launch the online alliance within a month.
Their pamphlet lists ideas for artists to explore once they're freed from the confines of the CD format. One might decide to release a minute of music every day for a month. Another could post several recorded variations of the same song and ask fans what they like best.
Gabriel, who has his own label, Real World Records, said he isn't trying to shut down the record companies -- he just wants to give artists more options.
read more...
Monday, January 26, 2004
TheFeature.com:
Content Deliverance
By Douglas Rushkoff, Sun Jan 25 07:45:00 GMT 2004
Content Management is for losers. Young people may have discovered the dark truth about digital media: the person who wins the right to store a piece of data has actually won the booby prize.
A good friend of mine in the user interface business, Mark Hurst, has argued for years that we should all keep our hard drives free of unnecessary data. Although internet industry experts always disagreed with Hurst (they were in the business of manufacturing hard drives, after all) those of us working in the PDA sector and on early cell phone databases realized that he had a point.
In the old world of physical stuff that most of us were raised in, it made sense to collect things. Things have inherent value. He who dies with the most toys, wins. And where has this credo gotten us? End-stage consumer capitalism has rendered the United States a wasteland of 'mini-storage' facilities where the middle class pile up the merchandise they don't have room for in their mortgaged, pre-fab homes. We are, for the most part, as overbought as our stock market, and as consumptive as we are obese.
This is why it was our tendency, in the early internet days, to save and store pretty much everything that passed over the digital transom. Many of my colleagues are proud to have saved every email they ever received, multiple draft versions of every article they have ever written, and full-page saves of website articles they once used, or may someday use, as resources.
The Napster era seemed to confirm that this consumerist attitude towards digital content would survive another generation.
read more...
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Friday, January 23, 2004
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Legendary trombonist Roswell Rudd and Malian kora musician Mamadou Diabate exquisitely blend West African textures with jazz in the first live North American performance of MALIcool. Performing original compositions, traditional Malian folk songs and jazz standards, (including a cover of Thelonious Monk Jackie-ing, Rudd and Diabate display their virtuosic abilities in a repertoire of uplifting songs that fuse swinging melodies with playful improvisations colored by African rhythms. Joined by Barry Altschul (drums), Lassana Diabate (balafone), Jay Clayton (vocals), Henry Schroy (bass), Ivan Rubenstein-Gillis (guitar) and Fode Bangoura (djembe, percussion). Rudd's dexterous trombone and Diabate's versatile kora are a fresh combination of unusual beauty and poignant tenderness... a real fusion and not just a superficial merger. "It cuts across so many borders that you don't have to be a fan of jazz or world music to appreciate it."
-Steven Israel, Times Herald Record
To purchase tickets now: TICKETWEB.COM or BUY TICKETS through our Box Office 718.254.8779
Tickets also available at Other Music 15 E. 4 St. NYC
212.477.8150 (cash only)
PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
Photograph: Verna Gillis
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Monday, January 19, 2004
Festival in the Sahara Desert 2004
from Living on the Planet:
West Africa: Mali - Essakane, January 2004. The site of the 4th Annual Festival in the Desert.
I feel lucky to have participated in this extraordinary event (performing with Roswell Rudd), hosted by the Tuareg people of Mali. Taking place over three days, the site in Essakane is a three hour drive north into the Sahara desert in a 4x4 vehicle from the ancient city of Tombouctou, the site of the closest airport.
Well known African and International artists performing included Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, Manu Chao, Cheick Tidiane-Seck, Amadou et Mariam, the Gangbe Brass Band of Benin, and the Navaho American band Blackfire. Other inspired performances included Tuareg and Songhay trance music, Wodaabe singers from Niger, and the group Baba Djire of Bamako. It seems the massive undertaking to host this festival was largely a volunteer effort. I can't imagine how long it took to get the tractor trailer out there full of lights and audio gear.
a group of Wodaabe singers perform.
for more pictures from my trip go here...
from Living on the Planet:
West Africa: Mali - Essakane, January 2004. The site of the 4th Annual Festival in the Desert.
I feel lucky to have participated in this extraordinary event (performing with Roswell Rudd), hosted by the Tuareg people of Mali. Taking place over three days, the site in Essakane is a three hour drive north into the Sahara desert in a 4x4 vehicle from the ancient city of Tombouctou, the site of the closest airport.
Well known African and International artists performing included Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, Manu Chao, Cheick Tidiane-Seck, Amadou et Mariam, the Gangbe Brass Band of Benin, and the Navaho American band Blackfire. Other inspired performances included Tuareg and Songhay trance music, Wodaabe singers from Niger, and the group Baba Djire of Bamako. It seems the massive undertaking to host this festival was largely a volunteer effort. I can't imagine how long it took to get the tractor trailer out there full of lights and audio gear.
a group of Wodaabe singers perform.
for more pictures from my trip go here...
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Leon's Samchillian is causing a stir at NAMM...
Friday, January 16, 2004
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Brain Works
NATURAL PLANS
from Mark Buchanan's NEXUS:
Above the door to Plato's academy in ancient Athens was an inscription that read, "Let no one enter who does not know geometry." For Plato, as for the followers of Pythagoras some nine centuries earlier, geometry was not simply a means toward practical ends. Its spiritual promise lay precisely in its refined pureness and abstraction away from all practical concern. According to Plato, if a man were to contemplate the absolute truths of geometrical reality, in so doing he would touch near the heart of the universe, brushing against a reality that is deeper than the reality we usually know. In this sense, geometry was a spiritual enterprise meant in part to better the man and to educate the soul torward perfection.
Or as Socrates put it in Plato's Republic, "The man whose mind is truly fixed on external realities has no leisure to turn his gaze downwards upon the petty affairs of man... but he fixes his gaze upon the things of the eternal and unchanging order, and seeing that they neither wrong nor are wronged by one another, but all abide in harmony as reason bids, he will endeavor to imitate them and, as far as may be, to fashion himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them..."
Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Cheick Tidiane-Seck, who will also be playing in the Desert. Also Roswell and Toumani Diabate met again. Too bad this is a pre-USB machine or I would upload some pics.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
