joeface

Hehe, in the first vid I can tell that's Omar Hakim on drums just by the very flexible grip. Definitely one of my faves from the usually annoying "pop/fusion" realm.

You've never laughed so hard... trust me... watch all 10 minutes Asian Game Show

couw already summarized the difference. House is the beat focused, groove infused, sample heavy dance for the sake of dance. No pop story like disco might have. I prefer deep house because it's usually the most sonically interesting to me. British DJ John Digweed is a great practitioner, though he can get dark as well as saucy. His method of mixing is the smoothest in the world. I like his Bedrock compilation, Fabric 20, Global Underground mixes, etc. Keep in mind this is a direct descendent of acid house and both come out of rave culture, but it's still quality in its own way, imho, if done right.

I Was Wrong But I Wanna Make it Right - Wynton's tribute to the Electric Miles What a Wünderfuhl World - Kraftwerk Remixes Satchmo

Prince on SNL recently, Prince on SNL recently I think this somehow redeems the recent Sly experience?

I heard (from my dad who grew up a big fan of Rich) that at one point he wanted to hang up the sticks and take up tap-dancing.

and here's a knee i though came out pretty good, just letting light values reveal the form and going easy on contour lines... sort of a personal breakthrough i guess. i cropped it from a larger charcoal drawing which i won't post because the foreshortening and proportions are wacked

these are my first attempts at conte+wash from life drawing class last night... i'd like to say i'm getting the hang of it but i'm not. . . i used the paintbrush as little as possible, conte's a mess enough as it is (now that i think about it... that's supposed to be a hairbun not a kippah)

I suscribe to the AM. The articles I've read by James Fallows have been worth the price alone, in my opinion. He avoids the ham-fisted perspectives you can tend to get when it comes to the war on terror, national security, Iraq, etc. He seems to have many contacts within the military and intelligence community which allows him to write a worthwhile analysis that deals with the nuances and complexities of the topic at hand. And love or hate him, regular contributor P.J. O'Rourke's humor is addictive. I also like how with the subscription you get access to their website, which not only archives all the magazines of the past ten years but also posts selected articles from their vaults from over the past 150 years. Maybe that's typical for magazine subscriptions now, I don't know. So far I don't find AM to be too east-coast centric. A lot of the topics are of national interest. A couple of issues ago their cover article was on the talk radio phenomenon, and most of the reporting came from interviewing and observing hosts at a major talk radio station in Los Angeles.

the last three I've acquired and watched:

here's my foot totally nude. about a 15 minute sketch. this drawing stinks... these are my feet in the raw. this one stinks twice as bad as the first drawing . . .

I love art and I'm slowly diving into it in my spare time. No painting for me yet, I've just gone through a beginning drawing class and am now starting up life drawing, which is a pain in the arse. The drawing below is based on a "grid over a photo" type project from my beginning drawing class. It took a while to get this far but I lost patience and didn't finish. here is my photo on which it was based: joe

Anyone have insights as to which jazz artists were fond of which visual artists? (i.e. painters, draftsmen, sculptors, heck even architects?) Or jazz artists that somewhere just mentioned a specific work they liked? joe

I wrote this a while back when I first heard about the idea of this Tommy Lee show. A Crude Hypothesis on Reality Tee Vee I haven't watched much reality Tee Vee in my time (or much Tee Vee in general for that matter), but I believe I have seen just enough in passing, and read enough commentary about it, to find in it a brilliant concept in how it achieves an unstated aim. All these shows seem to have the same purpose. But to give credibility to my theory on this purpose, general groundwork needs to be laid. (disclaimer: this is in no way a final statement, or completetly accurate, comprehensive, blah blah blah. These are initial thoughts open to other insights and corrections. I haven't studied much in communications theory, marketing, psychology, etc. so my assumptions may very well be naive or outdated). We live in a peculiar age in terms of how people might understand themselves. Not just an age of self-expression, but one characterized by introspective self-construction. In large part, people believe that they are responsible to define themselves at very basic levels. Many think or assume that our identities, our respective personhoods, are in some part an empty holding space until each of us fill them in on our own, and then complete a definition of self. To some degree or another all mediums of art and entertainment, but most especially and blatantly the Tee Vee medium, keeping in step of the social climate, seek to facilitate this personal task for us. Every package delivered through television, regardless of its content, has bent to this ultimate goal for the viewer, even though the proximate motives and goals of Tee Vee programming will vary. TV commercials, sitcoms, news programs, religious programming, televised political events, the mini drama, and so on ... all of them by simple virtue of being television-based, labor under overarching assumptions regarding the ability of a human being to redefine oneself (in this case the viewer) through the right conditioning (in this case the meta-message of the television medium). For more on this, check out a little book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, whose analysis is more relevant now than when it was first published in the 1980's. Now more recently, through competent marketing campaigns, the Reality TV phenomenon has convinced many that this trend is 'alternative' television. In other words, even though we are still processing images and information through the Tee Vee box just like the sitcom and the drama and the commercial, this is fundamentally different from all other Tee Vee because the content is raw and unfiltered data reported from reliable sources coming from the very same world we exist in, not engineered characters from some script writers' theatrically fabricated world. Well I would argue that this is an illusory effect, it is still a theatrically constructed world with the same aim as every other show and program on Tee Vee. More than that, the reality Tee Vee show exists to promote the reality-relevant nature of all other Tee Vee prorgamming. If we are the compliant audients which the ratings pollsters need us to be, we become convinced of a constructed reality's relevant realism, mostly because of some variables involved that are emphasized - - The characters that populate the reality show's constructed world are non-performers (or performers appearing to take on very normal, non-performance roles, like Tommy Lee), - they have been given a certain space of improvisation to fill with speech and actions and (somewhat) autonomous free will decisions. - The situations and/or environments which the characters must navigate through are portrayed as being taken from either very ordinary layers of society, - or on the other hand extremely contrived scenarios which are supervised by very ordinary professionals. But from here, it becomes obvious that there's very little 'reality' actually occuring. A program divided up by commercial breaks are edited down and framed in ways very similar to any other show. Speech, behavior, and scenarios must be edited and filtered in such a way as to convey the familiar progress, developments, and flow of drama which characterizes staged plays. Miniature scenarios and challenges are highlighted. Personal accomplishments or failures are arranged and structured to fit into their given spaces, so that the viewer can enter the commercial break in the exact same frame of mind they are in during other Tee Vee show commercial breaks. And they will return to the next episode of the reality show for the exact same reasons they will for any other drama or theatrically constructed show. The viewer is being conditioned to learn the pace of life according to television: everything is broken down into intermittent lessons between commercial breaks and between episodes. Nothing is left unresolved ultimately, unless for further dramatic effect. And like the characters in any other dramatized Tee Vee program, some ultimate goals are accomplished. This ultimate goal, I believe, is the entire justification for the existence of the reality show from the perspective of those in positions with the most control and supervision over the direction and success of their television business. And that ideal goal is this: At the end of it all, a reality show participant is given the opportunity, or I should say responsibilty, to be interviewed directly by the camera, outside the 'matrix' of their constructed reality/fantasy world, to provide direct meta-commentary. Specifically, this character mostly describes what sorts of feelings they have about particulars. But here is the ideal climax of these kinds of shows: we are told by this character how he or she has learned something new about himself/herself that he/she will carry well afterwards (for the rest of their lives perhaps). In that sense, for any reality show whose participants have to achieve some external concrete goals yet fail, that is immaterial to their purpose. The participants' personal lessons and express feelings are most important. They need to prove to us that a television show changes us all for the better. And this is the inductive proof: it has changed at least one of us. This is brilliant!!! This is marketing as performance art, soaked in a very pure form of irony. Look at what's going on: the television producers have given back to the faithful television viewers a volunteer from among the very same television audience - ordinary people or people in non-actor roles - so that they can explain to the rest of audience how we are supposed to redefine ourselves through the structured format of television programs. This must appear very uncontrived -- and it does! because the non-actor participants are oblivious to most anything being communicated outside of their own performance -- in order for us to accept the idea that we are simply getting raw and unfiltered, emotionally pure communication of information without an agenda. And so we are especially vulnerable and malleable at this point. Thus, the hypothetically receptive viewer has either gained tools or have their existing tools re-enforced, by tools I mean something like a low-level mode of submissive cognition necessary for passive conditioning of self through an aggressive medium. I would call television an aggressive medium because its programming is designed to relay disconnected series' of information faster than we can thoughtfully absorb on a real-time conscious level. But often times, the seeming disconnectedness exists in order to obscure the big picture coherency of television: a medium assigning itself the responsbility of providing for the audience a redefinition of self. True this is exploitive, because the express purposes of television shows are not stated in so many large letters. But on a psychological level it is key to relate to viewers at lower levels of cognition so that the impact is lasting. This redefintion of self is not an end in itself, from the perspective of television producers. It serves the purpose of maintaining an attentive audience week after week, where we discover our world fresh and validate (or challenge) ourselves. And I know this is cliche but still no less true -- the upkeep of an attentive audience serves the purposes of many business alliances involved: fuelling a vibrant consumerism. Reality Tee Vee, therefore, is the national treasure of the TV syndicates. Because they (purportedly) understand us better than we understand ourselves - we the general public will invent reality where we don't already see it. We will invent identity where we don't already have it.

Years ago I rented this indie film from the early nineties called "Giant Steps", with Billy Dee Williams as a jazz pianist. Strange little film but actually deals with some elements of music intelligently. Has anyone else ever see this? I can't remember much about the music itself, I wasn't as much of an acoustic jazz fan back then. I'd love to track it down again but I don't think it's ever been released on DVD.