clap clap blog: we have moved

Saturday, September 11, 2004

Walking home from the subway last night in Washington Heights, the sidewalk on one side of 177th street was blocked off with garbage bags from the elementary school. I could have squeezed by if kids hadn't roped it off by running unspooled casette tape between the poles of the scaffolding there. (The kids love that scaffolding--usually when I'm walking by there's a group of them hanging off the bars, ducking back and forth and trying to catch each other.) I cut through the street instead. When I reached the other side, it became apparent that the school had cleaned out their library, and, what's worse, I hadn't known, because if I had, I surely would have scavenged the educational records and filmstrips and outdated posters before they could be carelessly, and OK sensibly, tossed. (I'd done this four years ago with a school library upstate and came up with, among other things--I actually made an album in the library that summer with my four-track and manipulated media--these old issues of a magazine meant to promote Soviet Russia in the US. Awesome!) For a moment there, before I remembered again the densely-packed state of my apartment, I was filled with a sense of missed opportunity when I saw the broken LPs and tape boxes. Oh, the samples I could have grabbed! Oh, the collages I could have made! But then I remembered that, eh, I probably wouldn't have anyway. I almost did scavenge, but I'm a little leery of filth these days given the invasion of roaches we're currently experiencing in Miss Clap's abode, and I wasn't entirely sure what was in those garbage bags besides mixed media.

As I approached the corner, I saw that the kids had gone a little Halloween with the magnetic tape, breaking open the plastic cases and throwing it over wires, around poles, and in the barren, stunted trees beside the street. I wished that I had a machine that I could run over these tapes as they lay exposed and hear what was on them, run them back and forth like a needle or a scanner and play as they lay, at whatever pace their arrangement allowed. I wondered, too, what other magnetic fields it would pick up and what those would sound like mixed in with the narration of the pioneers' progress, what tones the power lines overhead would produce, what countermelody the cars' electronic guts would play against their bassy chuff as they sped by, whether cell phone interference would play out as a pleasing drone or simply a cacaphonous din, and if the voices would be intelligable or manifest as something else.

I am tripped up by these wires in their loveliness, by the bits of beauty in this mess. I don't know what to do with them; I can't catch them and keep them, I can't really even explain them. So I move on and go home and do what I usually do, and that's OK too.

posted by Mike B. at 4:36 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

A while back Fluxblog posted a track by this dude performing under the nom de demi-nude I Hate It When You're Pregnant called "Stuff in This World." I liked it, then gradually grew to love it. Well, another track of his, "Gary Sinese," just popped up on the ol' Winamp, and man, I am loving it even more. "GARY SINESE! GARY SINESE!" My typing does not do it justice, so go download it here. (It's actually the track right after "Stuff" on his second demo.) He sounds like the dude from The Divine Comedy and a hardcore singer dueting over a Legowelt production or something.

You can get all of his CDs here.

No, I hate it when you're pregnant.

posted by Mike B. at 6:21 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

I know there's not often a lot of interest in these sorts of things, but nevertheless, here's an excerpt from a letter that just came over the wire.

***

EMI has recently been engaged in discussions with Microsoft on a variety of issues of mutual interest. During the course of these discussions, an important development occurred: Literally in the last few days, Microsoft indicated a willingness to support an industr-wide copy control platform that will enable individual labels to set their own DRM rules (number of burns etc) within an industry pre-defined framework.

[...]

Microsoft are very rightly focused on the consumer and so one of the issues they have flagged up is that they want to know label intentions about offering consumers additional "value" as a quid pro quo for adding effective DRM into the consumer experience. This information would be provided to Microsoft one-on-one or via RIAA, as would label intentions regarding consumer education on how this content protection would work.

RIAA and IFPI are fully in the loop and with their lawyers have agreed that we can respond to Microsoft's request as long as we do so in a way that is inclusive of relevant industries. The first step is to determind if there is a consensus on high-level functional specifications defining what functionality labels want in a DRM. If so, we can communicate that to Microsoft on their timetable, and we would make the same information available to other interested industry participants. Should there be interest in developing technical specifications, we would involve the other industry participants in any such effort.

***

What follows is a set of specifications I'm too busy to type in right now. More later if there's interest.

BRIEF UPDATE: The specifications, from what I'm seeing at a quick glance, would allow consumers to pick their own format (as long as it fell within the DRM specifications) and transfer it to wherever they wanted (again, as long as it fell within the DRM specifications) subject to whatever options the individual label/artist wanted. In return, the DRM-protected music would have "enhanced content," defined as it usually is these days--websites, videos, etc. The DRM options would be transferred along with the file and so it would stay protected even when burned or moved.

posted by Mike B. at 5:10 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 05, 2004

A brief overview of my weekend thus far:

Went to Coney Island on Saturday. Ate food, sat on the beach, rode the Wonder Wheel in the cars that slide back and forth, closing my eyes on the first spin 'round and keeping them open on the second (at Miss Clap's insistance). Which was good, as the sun set just as we came around and we saw it dip into the clouds behind the housing developments and the minor league ballpark. Walked on the pier in the closing dark and listened to a bunch of folks playing around with percussion and unaccompanied vocalisations and then watched other folks pull their crab traps up with twine onto the uneven boards. Later, someone came by with fishcakes fresh off the grill, free to whoever wanted them, cooked right there on the pier. Looked over the rail for a while at the ocean and the cruise ships. Settled on a bench halfway down the pier, a little ways down from a French hipster couple (the girl was wearing cowboy boots) and an older man playing music from a stereo, nothing but 70s dance music, and there in the cool air the girl got up and danced to it, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Somehow the music sounded better, maybe best of all, coming from a boombox on a grocery cart, and while normally I wouldn't really even like something you'd describe as "funk/soul/disco" very much, in the context of Coney Island and a casette mix of "Can't Get Enough of Your Love Babe" and "Don't Rock the Boat" it was perfect. The older man said things like "I had all of these on 45" and "I was working down in Dallas, drunk when I got in, drunk when I got out" and in general regaled the french hipster couple. Got up and walked back to the beach and as we passed the percussion people an lady was standing on a bench and dancing. That's maybe my definition of good music: whatever makes awesome old ladies dance on benches.

On Sunday, was riding the train and saw a dude wearing an army jacket with a patch that said, no lie, "I [heart] Rasta." It was awesome. It was the ultimate anti-trustafasarian move, because it was so insistently inauthentic, like an "I Brake For Crips" bumper sticker or an "Amish 4-Eva" notebook doodle.

Later on Sunday, ended up in the apartment of an older lady "in high fashion" who'd been on the cover of the Metro section of the Times because a bunch of orthodox Jes were trying to kick her out of her rent-controlled building and she wouldn't let them. Old New York, or at least Old Rich New York, always unnerves me in the few times I've come in contact with it--the lady had a tiny kitchen and a huge bedroom and 100 pairs of shoes in individual plastic boxes and black and white pictures in her immaculate bathroom and Anne Coulter and Bergdorf Blondes in her living room. Maybe I'm limiting myself with the Old or the Rich--I've been freaked out by the movie exec's place apart from the Natural History Museum with all the modern art, too--but Old and Rich without fail.

posted by Mike B. at 11:23 PM 0 comments

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