Monday

Analog:

Interview with Mr. Aaron Draplin, Draplin Design Co. and Field Notes Brand
In a world where things are more and more compacted, complicated, sped up and digitized, a regular old wood pencil is always there for you. Never needing to be recharged, you know?

The more I think about it, the more pencils—on some weird level—represent “complete freedom.” Freedom from digital ubiquity and predictability. There something cool about how you feel human when using a pencil. […]

I like feeling one with the paper. Like this odd sense of “get it down now, or it’ll be forever gone” fills my head and hands, and I just go to work. Impermanent. Graphite can be erased. Imperfect. My hands screw up all the time. Interesting. The lines vary and never come out quite like you expected them to.

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Just a matter of time…

TSA officer pleads to $30k theft | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/24/2011
TSA officer pleads to $30k theft — with boss’s OK

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Singularity:

Singularity: Kurzweil on 2045, When Humans, Machines Merge – TIME
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

Thanks for the link LW. Not a bad article, I think. Author shows both sides. My personal feeling about the Singularity is that I can’t get worked up over it one way or the other. Will computers become faster and more powerful? Of course. Will they get smaller? Certainly. Will computers be implanted into humans? I have no doubt of that. But will real AI happen? We’ll see about that. I am just not that excited about the old zeros and ones, especially since they are hamfistedly applied to everything. The old off ‘n’ on works well for writing and communication and accounting and so on… but I am not so sure about music and design.

I think the coming bio-tech age will actually create more change more quickly than the changes digital computing wrought. It’ll be a bumpy ride, for sure.
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Picked up my red Blueroom House Pods, which had the tweeters replaced, and talked to the store manager about CRTs versus flat-screens (LCD, Plasma etc.). I explained that I think that tube-TVs seem to smooth out the pixels, much like tube-amplifiers seems to bring life to digital music. He said he felt the same way, but that people want huge TVs, and therefore they sell a ton of giant flat-screens. He also explained that serious gamers prefer CRT monitors for the very reason I stated, because they smooth out the pixels in video games, especially when there is movement.

Since you asked…

Since you asked… I was certain that I wrote about both of these photos before, but all I could find was this entry.

This first photo appeared in the booklet of Euphoria in 1995. It was also used for the Havana Club 12″ Vinyl in 1997. The photo was taken by Eric Swanson on the old Camino Real, south of Santa Fe, in 1995 or perhaps the year before. I believe we had two guitars for this shoot, a $25 pawn shop guitar Eric had picked up and a guitar that I had received because the manufacturer wanted me to endorse it. People seem to think this image was photoshopped, but that is not true. The photographer picked a great angle for the shot and I really did get some decent air with several of the throws. We assumed we would only have one chance (per guitar) to get it right, but guitars, perhaps especially cheap guitars, are much sturdier than they look. I had always been very careful with my guitars and was so tuned into every scratch that appeared on them that I was quite surprised by this.

The whole experience was pretty interesting. The feeling was not unlike a Christian hearing a blasphemous Jesus joke… that strange feeling in the stomach. (((I speak from experience since I was an altar-boy))) But it was also exhilarating and freeing – perhaps also like a Christian hearing a blasphemous Jesus joke? (((when one notices that the world hasn’t ended…)))

The second image was photographed by Ashkan Sahihi for the weekend magazine of the German paper Die Zeit. A year later Ashkan came back to Santa Fe to take all of the photos for the Opium abum. (((He also took this cover photo)))…

I just went to Ashkan’s webside and noticed this amazing series of images called What I Want. Powerful.

I am not sure what kind of guitar we used for this image. I think we used the left-over pieces from one of the guitars from the first shoot. The location is Diablo Canyon north-west of Santa Fe, very early in the morning. It was very cold.

Related: music from the Havana Club single

Harp

Saw a bunch of Aeolian Harps at a Canyon Road gallery this afternoon. When the wind kicked up an eerie sound filled the air!

The day we took this photo I noticed the same effect and fingered different chords for the wind to play…