Category: Links

Well, a party that I gave at my house influenced me. I gave a Christmas party last year—well, two Christmases ago—where I did a Sam Cooke show. I didn’t perform as R. Kelly. I performed the Sam Cooke show from 1964, when he performed at the Copacabana.
OLDHAM: You performed the whole set?
KELLY: I did the whole set. I invited, like, 1,000 people out to my house, and everybody had to be dressed like it was the ’60s. People had the long-stem cigarettes and the zoot suits and all that stuff, man. It was just a good time.

You can’t yet buy E85 cellulosic ethanol anywhere because no one is making it in commercial quantities, though plenty of companies, like Mascoma and partners DuPont  and Danisco are working toward commercial production. POET, the big ethanol producer based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, provided the cellulosic ethanol for Holm’s cross country trip. Holm has to bring this advanced fuel with him, so when we were driving around San Francisco he had 200 gallons of it in the back of his truck. That should be enough to get him to South Dakota, where he can pick up some more corn-cob ethanol from POET before heading further east.

This is a new piece I started this weekend. Tentatively titled Conductor, it recreates the New York subway system as a musical instrument. It’s currently built in HTML5 + Javascript. SVG was very useful, as I could create the design in Illustrator, then import the coordinates into Javascript. 

As an accomplished street photographer, the late Vivian Maier discreetly chronicled life in Chicago’s Loop and surrounding districts for decades. After immigrating to the United States as a refugee from World War II France, she eventually ended up in Chicago as a nanny to wealthy North Shore clients, but her passions ran much deeper. Over 100,000 negatives and more than 3,000 prints of her massive body of work were discovered in an estate auction shortly before her death in 2009.

Leave it to an investigative journalist to dig up the dirt. Nora O'Donnell's recent essay on Vivian Maier delves deeper into her backstory than anything else I've seen. Thanks, Chicago Magazine.

While the basic outline of her life life is now fairly well established, Maier still remains something of a mystery. For me the most intriguing questions center on her photographic skill. How did she gain such a sharp eye? What training did she have? Which photographers or photographs did she come in contact with? Who if anyone helped her develop? Or was she a pure autodidact?

The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart is a BBC documentary from 1997, on the late, great Don Van Vliet. Its presented by the also late and lamented DJ, John Peel, who was once tour driver for Captain Beefheart, and contains contributions from Frank Zappa, John French, Ry Cooder, and Matt Groening.

Factory Records founder Anthony H Wilson died in August 2007. Just over three years later, a memorial headstone designed collaboratively by Wilson's long-term associates Peter Saville and Ben Kelly with Paul Barnes and Matt Robertson, was unveiled in The Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester.
The black granite headstone carries a quote, chosen by Wilson's family, from The Manchester Man, the 1876 novel by Mrs G Linnaeus Banks (aka Isabella Varley Banks), the story of one Jabez Clegg and his life in Victorian Manchester. The quote is set in Rotis.

A profoundly enigmatic musical poet, there have been many documentaries about Glenn Gould, but they were typically sidetracked by his eccentricities, focusing on the pills and gloves and scarves – missing the man, the magic and the message behind his music. American Masters artfully pierces through the myths and misconceptions about this humming and hunched figure, whose fingers glided across the piano as no one’s before or since in Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould. Watch the full film, available online until January 11, 2011 here online.

“While the growth of incarceration took many dangerous offenders off the streets,” says an introduction to the website, “research suggested that it reached a point of diminishing returns, as recidivism rates increased and more than one million nonviolent offenders filled the nation’s prisons. In most states, prisons came to absorb more than 85 percent of the corrections budget, leaving limited resources for community supervision alternatives such as probation and parole, which cost less and could have better reduced recidivism among non-violent offenders.”

Citizen Action of Wisconsin had been spreading this message as much as it could prior to the election and following Walker's win, calling the move "economic treason," but it and others on its side were unable to keep Walker from canceling the project (which was already under construction). In addition to the rally, a bipartisan group of local communications professionals has gotten business leaders to sign a letter to Walker expressing their frustration and disappointment over this matter, as well as a request for "greater thoughtfulness, civility, creativity and compromise in the future."
In all honesty, I don't think they can expect much of that. Cancelling the high-speed rail project in Wisconsin is actually going to cost the state considerably more than operating the line would have cost it, strictly looking at direct funds (not even considering the jobs and economic growth that were lost).
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South Carolina’s favorite lifelong bachelor and former military prosecutor, is always reliably against homosexuals having any basic human rights in America because Lindsey’s a Republican, y’all. Anyway, famous outer-of-self-hating-queers Mike Rogers says he’s got pictures of one of Lindsey’s boy toys leaving Lindsey’s house. This would be SHOCKING because come on, everybody knows Republicans cannot be gay because Jesus did not make gays.”….A pair of tweets on Saturday from Michael Rogers, who claims a perfect outing record, suggests Graham – who continues to serve in the U.S. Air Force Reserves – might soon be deflecting more questions about his sexuality.“I wonder if Lindsey Graham knows I have pictures of a man who spent the night at his house. pls RT,” Rogers messaged his followers.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's transition to minority leader comes an interesting bit of news. The California Democrat, vilified by Republicans in the last election, has turned to director Steven Spielberg for help rebranding House Democrats.
Lawmakers say she is consulting marketing experts about building a stronger brand. The most prominent of her new whisperers is Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood director whose films have been works of branding genius

In an unsigned solicitous message posted on the Delicious blog, the company declared: "No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is [an] ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."
"We're in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now," it added. "And we'll share our plans with you as soon as we can." Or, considering how the original news reached the public (a leaked slide from a company Webcast) until another embarrassing revelation occurs.