Archive for October, 2007:
Bargain Bin Reviews: Tammy Fletcher & The Disciples
Live at the Mad River Festival
Tammy Fletcher & The Disciples
Price: $1.76
Verdict: Lots of energy, lots of fun. A good mix of rock and country-like melodies, instruments with a hint of traditional music. Tammy Feltcher’s voice is pretty darn good. A nice listening experience but not good for background music or broken up in a playlist. Worth the $1.67, maybe even $5.
This is part of a sequence of reviews on CDs I found at bargain piles in the local CD stores, thrift stores or some other place that sells really cheap CDs. Want to read more bargain bin reviews?
Let’s get this straight: I hate verbatim recordings of live concerts. Most of the time these things should be experienced as events and not the reasonable but arbiturary segments that the CD player divides them into. That said, when listened in a row this is a very solid CD. Especially for $1.67.
Subscribe to the comments for this postProcessing, the New Logo?
I should be writing a syllabus on a one-week programming and art workshop I’m teaching in December. Instead, I’m blogging about it. How very effecient! For the workshop I’ll be introducing kids to programming using art as an excuse. The language we’ll be using is Processing. I’m thinking of having the kids to either doing a simple/small network visualization or an iterative or randomly generated art piece as their ultimate objective.
In pitching this project I needed examples. Lots of examples that I thought of immediately were very new. Things like fractal art and tag clouds. But I forgot one very, very crucial example that most computer people from my generation actually know quite well: Logo.
Logo is old. But computational art existed as long as computers were around and ways of outputting images from computers were available. Norton Starr, one of my old professors, once showed me a computer generated image of a beautiful and symmetric graph he made in the 70s—a graph as in the graphical representation of a network. (<a href=”http://www.amherst.edu/~nstarr/graphics.html”>Here</a> is a more famous piece he did back in the 70s.) Granted, the images were made using what amounts of a primitive robotic arm holding a fountain pen. However, they were made possible using only the precision and computational power that only computers could provide. That’s what makes them computational art and not just art made on a computer.
Knowing When to Say No
This is a draft of a letter I’m writing to a colleague about the nature of progressive education. The final product will probably be less florishing and not fit for public consumption, hence you are only seeing the draft.
So, you asked me a month ago what I thought “progressive education” means. I didn’t have a good answer for you back then because I was hungry, tired, and had never thought about it until then. May I reiterate the fact that I was tired and hungry? My answer for you was quarter-hearted and vague; it was like a review that called a piece of art interesting and post-modern. So here’s a better answer.
Bargain Bin Review: Megachurch Gospel
Megachurch Gospel
Various Artists
Price: $1.76
Verdict: It’s not bad. Also, it teaches the lesson that one machine can provide a lot more spiritual energy than an entire choir. I wouldn’t pay more than $3 for it, though.
So, I have a pile of cheap CDs that I got from the bargain bins at record stores and other random places that sell CDs. Every week (or so) I’ll unwrap one of them, listen to it and then write a little review about it. Since these are cheap—often crappy—CDs it’d be unfair to review them like normal CDs. The chief criterion I judge these CDs with is “was it worth it?”. So in every review I’ll start with how much I paid for the CD, and then instead of saying whether it sucks I’ll just tell you how much I’d be willing to actually pay for it.
Now, what better CD to start this out with than Megachurch Gospel, a collection of the best gospel tunes from megachurches in the United States?
Ladies Chained
Let me explain the title of this weblog. If you are familiar with contra or square dancing you probably giggled when you first saw the domain name or the title of this site. If you aren’t, then you probably were expecting to see examples of domestic abuse or erotic photos of damsels in distress. Sorry, neither of those things are available here.
“The Ladies Chained”, or simply “ladies chained”, is a pun on the ladies’ chain, a figure in contra and square dancing. Two couples face each other before performing this figure. The ladies of both couples will eventually end up in the others’ place. Then, depending on what you consider a ladies’ chain should be, they either stop there or “chain back”. That is, they perform the exact same figure to get back to their original starting place.