michael pulsford etc

Help me write an email to my MP about live music in Victoria

2010-02-24T09:09:00.002+11:00

I'm writing an email to my local member of parliament Lindsay Tanner, asking him to clarify his policy on live music in Victoria. I think the below is a good start but I'd like it to be better; if you have any feedback can you leave it in the comments?

I keep talking about live music being a 'good', and I don't know if it makes sense. What I'm trying to say is, there are things in society which we recognise as intrinsically valuable, and we try to limit negative impact upon them from other things. An example might be the right to vote, or access to education, or healthcare. I'm trying to argue live music is an important part of Melbourne's culture, that it's intrinsically valuable and we should take it into account when any kind of legislation is being introduced. Am I being clear or unclear? I can't tell.

Feel free to use any bits of it in an email to your own MP, if you like. If you're not sure who your local MP is, Open Australia will take your postcode and tell you who they are. I'm in Carlton, so mine's Lindsay Tanner.

The Accord I mention is here: NEW ACCORD TO SECURE THE FUTURE OF VICTORIA’S LIVE MUSIC SCENE

The quote from Paul Kelly comes from Marching to the top because they want their rock'n'roll from the February 24 edition of The Age.

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Hi Lindsay,

I'm a Carlton resident and a musician. I'm pleased by the Accord Tony Robinson announced yesterday, which seems to stop live music venues from being classed by default as high-risk with respect to violence. I'm disturbed that it took the closure of several important music venues to bring the Accord about, though. I'm disturbed that the Brumby government seems not to have a policy on live music in this state which recognises its value.

The Victorian live music scene is a good in and of itself, internationally recognised for its energy and vibrancy; it should be protected as such, and the potential impact on the Victorian live music scene is one of the things which should be considered when debating any kind of legislation. It's an important industry and an important part of our culture both locally and nationally: many iconic Australian bands started their careers in Melbourne pubs and bars. As Paul Kelly said at yesterday's SLAM rally, "I didn't learn to write a song at school - these places were my university".

While the music scene is energetic and vibrant it is vulnerable if its value is not recognised, and if it is not treated as a good. Sydney had a comparable music scene in the 1980s; it's now a fraction of the size. This happened because a culture of live music wasn't treated as a good, and a combination of changes to licensing laws, noise complaints and the introduction of poker machines drastically reduced the number of live music venues.

No-one in Sydney set out to damage their live music culture. They simply failed to properly take into account, when various pieces of legislation were changed at different times, the impact on the culture of live music. I'd hate to see the same thing happen here.

I've been a Labour voter and I'm uncomfortable about voting Liberal but this issue represents my livelihood and my culture. I'll vote for whoever has the best policy for live music. What is your policy?

Battlesnake invisible in Google

2009-04-29T22:38:00.003+10:00

(The following probably won't be that interesting to anyone who isn't in a band or doesn't care where their page shows up in Google)

So, I'm used to my band Battlesnake not showing up on the first page of Google searches for "battlesnake". But today I decided to see just how many pages away we were from the front page. I gave up after about page six or seven. We basically weren't there at all.

Part of this might be our fault: we've changed URL a few times. First we were http://www.myspace.com/battlesnakeaustralia, then Gus changed it to http://www.myspace.com/battlesnakemusic. This led to some confusion. Once we'd sorted that out, I followed the Imp Of The Perverse and changed it again, to http://www.myspace.com/battlesnake. I figured whatever confusion it caused in the short term, long term it was better to have something easy to remember.

But anyway: not showing up in Google is a bit like not really existing. I use Google to find pretty much everything. If I could Google my keys when I misplaced them I would. It's become an extension of my nervous system.

What to do? I understand why we're not near the top, but I don't understand why we're not there at all. The new URL is all over the place by now. The problem with things as they stand is that someone needs to know our URL to find us. Without that, we're invisible. But speaking personally, I probably Google a new band name once a week at least, some name I've heard on the radio and want to check out. If someone tries to do that for us, they find nothing.

What gives?

In which I renounce lowercase

2009-03-11T10:55:00.003+11:00

Ok: I haven't written here for a while. I like writing but it was distracting me from making music, and I wanted to focus on making music again. I feel ready to try writing more and seeing if I can keep the two in balance a bit better this time.

A couple of things will change, though.

First, I want to use this space to write longer pieces with a bit more thought in them. This doesn't mean every post will be long, but that I'll use this space to develop longer arguments. That's the dream, anyway.

Second, I hereby renounce the use of all-lower-case. It's a habit I got into. The problem with said habit is it makes you look eight years old. Some people can manage to make intelligent arguments in all-lower-case and have their intelligence be apparent despite it. (Darrin Verhagen is the first person who springs to mind here.)

I have a feeling I am not one of these people. There's no real problem with that, except that I'm interested in moving debate forward on a few topics, and it's easier to do that when one is taken seriously. And it's easier to take someone seriously when they don't present themselves like an eight-year old.

gothic death

2009-01-31T10:12:00.002+11:00

A band I started in year 12 high school.

sound candy: you can strap it to your dog!

2008-09-11T08:30:00.001+10:00

via ../mediateletipos)))

so much awesome, so little time

2008-07-27T21:03:00.003+10:00

link (via poor mojo newswire, a great great blog i just discovered last week)

zoetrope turntable. or turntable zoetrope?

2008-07-20T22:16:00.000+10:00

have a look at this bunch of zoetrope-style animations atop a turntable. you can hear the builder explaining it in the background, seems like it relies on the shutter speed being just right.

it's very lovely.

found via binary load lifter

i've been looking for this for fifteen years

2008-07-11T18:42:00.004+10:00

back in the very early 90s someone gave me a card with this picture on it. i loved it and stuck it on my wall. somehow or other i lost it, and have tried many times since then to track down a copy.

anyway: today: great success!

the image is called fantasy castle with men on zebras. the artist is squire vickers. he doesn't have a wikipedia page yet: maybe i'll start one. he is mentioned in the article new york city subway tiles, though: he did a lot of mosaics in the new york subway system.

i found the image in an article called an imagined metropolis, by eli spindel. i haven't read the article yet but i will. i am very very pleased.

i regret that my own weirdness

2008-07-09T09:03:00.002+10:00

from william gibson's blog:

I regret that my own weirdness made me a fascist about people who were not weird.

--Lynda Barry, interviewed in Giant Robot #54

link

matmos move to baltimore

2008-07-01T09:28:00.003+10:00

not only that, they give an interesting interview over at (baltimore music blog) altered states and say things like:

I decided if were to [stop] getting beat up I need to grow my hair long and start listening to heavy metal music. And I did. Oh and smoking. I programmatically embarked on a course of growing my hair long, smoking Marlboro cigarettes, and I was like “I’m going to find out about this rock music thing.” I believe that is what’s called being a poser. But when you’re 15 or 16 you can engage in a pose so sincerely that you are it. So in a year I wasn’t a poser anymore, I was a fucking Hessian, or whatever they call them now.

link

wikipedia is a bureaucracy, not a website

2008-06-30T13:02:00.002+10:00

People tend to think of Wikipedia as a website, but as Clay Shirky points out, it's better to think of Wikipedia as a bureaucracy for arguing about edits that happens to produce a website as its byproduct.

link

"artists shouldn't repeat themselves" is a new rule

2008-06-23T16:32:00.004+10:00

nice quote from a new yorker review of twyla tharp's latest work:

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the principle that artists shouldn’t repeat themselves. It’s a new rule. Nobody told Fra Angelico that he should stop painting the Virgin. Only in the early twentieth century, with the advent of modernism, did people start saying that artists should constantly “reinvent” themselves. Implicit in this notion is the belief that with every replay, like every dub of a videotape, there will be a loss of power, of definition. That is true in some cases; Paul Taylor is now working by formula. Conversely, however, when Merce Cunningham sought and found a mechanism that would prevent him from repeating himself—a computer program called Life Forms, which suggested to him movements that he himself could not have imagined—he weakened his work, because those movements were so strange. They looked like something out of a computer.

link

artist teaches robots to love punk, but will they pogo?

2008-06-23T08:37:00.003+10:00

fiddian warman built some robots controlled by a neural network. neural networks can learn, so he's been playing them classic punk records in an attempt to turn them into robotic versions of his younger self. the robots are 2 metres tall and have the ability to pogo.

it all culminates in a gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in london (3-5 july 2008: bring your friends!). the artist has formed a punk band (neurotic and the pvcs) for the occasion: they're going to play to the robots and the audience and see if the robots dance. (support acts include scrotum clamp and the devil's hotpants: should be a hoot!)

if the gig sounds scary and you'd rather just discuss questions such as

In the robots we also see the possibility of a socially value free enjoyment of music – these robots have no heirs and graces, no normative social beliefs that would prohibit the enjoyment of any form of music. They don’t have cultural baggage – is their judgment objective as a result?

.. you can do so at a blog dedicated to the aesthetic and philosophical issues arising from the experiment, here.

(i hope they post videos after the event.)

link
found via networked_music_review

code_swarm - visualising the life of an open source project

2008-06-19T12:32:00.002+10:00

check out this beautiful time-lapse visualisation:

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

the creator describes it like this:

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

..which is a fair description but doesn't hint at the organic beauty of it all. you get to see a software project (development of the python language, in this case) pulsate and throb like a living thing.

found at o'reilly radar

"create more value than you capture"

2008-06-15T10:13:00.003+10:00

six words which nicely summarise what i've been thinking recently, thanks to tim o'reilly.

At O'Reilly, we always say "Create more value than you capture." All successful companies do this. Once they start capturing more value than they create, their market position erodes, and someone displaces them.

link

phoenix puts mosquito-eating fish in abandoned pools to prevent west nile virus

2008-06-15T09:42:00.007+10:00

Authorities in Arizona are stepping up a program to put mosquito-gobbling minnows into the stagnant pools of foreclosed or abandoned homes to prevent an outbreak of West Nile virus.

found via bruce sterling, who says

Man, only in 2008. They're the Ballardian empty-swimming pools of West Nile stupor-breeding death!

link to planet ark article
link to bruce sterling's blog

cory doctorow: blog = outboard brain

2008-06-15T09:38:00.002+10:00

(via moneybites)

stabilised video collage

2008-06-14T23:24:00.003+10:00

um. ~~i'd like to make a music video like this~~. correction, i'd like someone to make one like this for me.

link
(via lifehacker)

christopher hitchens on bohemia

2008-06-14T18:09:00.002+10:00

In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran

.

found via kottke.org
link

grandmaster flash on his dad's record collection

2008-06-14T18:08:00.001+10:00

The book kicks off with you as a kid desperate to get into your dad’s record collection. Can you talk about that time?
Oooweee. How can I explain it? My dad was highly feared, as you read in the book. He happened to be the brother to 1957 flyweight champion of the world Sandy Saddler, so he was really good with his hands. And he had some cardinal rules: Never go into the living room where the stereo is. Never touch the stereo. Never ever go into the closet where his prized possession, his records, were. Now I heard the rule, but I had this uncontrollable urge. So I would drag a chair to the closet because I was so little and the knob was kind of high. I would climb up and open up his closet. It was like gold or something. I would take out a record and put it on and just dance around the living room, and then I would try to put the record back in the same place where the record was originally living in the closet. But my father was very meticulous and he always knew it was me. So I got beat, beat, beat, and after he would beat me, next morning I’d get up, he’d get up, I’d hear him leave for work, and I’d do the same thing all over again. And it got the point that where he would beat me to almost where I was unconscious, but the next day it would be the same process. So what he would do then was take my hands and put them on a hot radiator to burn them, but of course they would heal and I would get over it and I would wait for that clink and the door slam and I would sort of go back to it again. I just had this uncontrollable urge.

link

i don't know what's going on here

2008-06-14T18:06:00.000+10:00

but i know that i like it. (the artist is yoshihiko satoh.)

link

yeah, what he said

2008-06-11T16:17:00.001+10:00

it's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place.
- cory doctorow

link

mexican jumping bean dance party

2008-06-11T15:23:00.000+10:00

Peter Coffin
Untitled (Symbiotic Relationship / Dance Party)
2007
Drum, Mexican jumping beans, stool, headphones, contact microphones, amplifier, effects pedal, heating pas, string lights

i'd love to know how this thing sounded! (and what a 'heating pas' is.)

link

blogging, like rock music, is usually voluntary work

2008-06-03T13:08:00.007+10:00

here's a model. tell me where it doesn't apply, or where i haven't followed through on it far enough. tell me also if i've replicated something someone else has said without realising or remembering that that's what i'm doing.

I - VOLUNTARY WORK
1. blogging, like playing in a rock band, is voluntary work most of the time for most people.

2. like other voluntary work, it may lead to
a) Better-Paid Things Later On, or
b) burn-out.

3. like other voluntary work, it's especially likely to lead to burn-out if one's only motivation for starting is Better-Paid Things Later On.

4. as with other voluntary work many of the rewards are non-financial. instead they're things like
a) getting practice doing something: writing, or design, or analysis (for example).
b) meeting people with similar interests.
c) getting better-known in a certain field.
d) making a contribution to the rest of the world.

this last point - that blogging is some kind of contribution to the rest of the world - is least-recognised, largely because we don't think of blogging as voluntary work very often. it's not really a big part of how bloggers think about themselves at the moment.

what kind of contribution? well, that depends on what kind of work blogging is. i'd argue it's voluntary intellectual work, of at least the following (non-exclusive) varieties and maybe more:

entertainment: making people shudder enjoyably, either with amusement (lol!) or indignation (wtf!) or amazement (zomg!) or in some other way.

reporting and publicity: telling people about stuff that happened, whether one's own activities or someone or something else's.

secondhand dealing: filtering through the seething mass of stuff we call the internet for attractive and interesting items amidst the junk.

analysis: making sense of the seething mass of stuff we call current events, or the internet, or technological progress, or anything else.

archiving: keeping a bunch of similar things in one place.

rabble-rousing: motivating readers to do something or other - organise their sock drawers, for example, or form vigilante-style gangs.

II - PAID WORK
1. like playing in a rock band, blogging can be paid work some of the time for some people.

2. as with rock music, most of the practitioners who get paid produce a sea of insipidity. (why? see III - ADVERTISING, below.)

3. as with rock music, there are a few exceptions. instead of a sea of insipidity they produce a sea of wonderful things. they wear capes and we worship them as gods.

4. as with rock music, no-one agrees which practitioners produce the sea of insipidity and which produce the sea of wonderful things. there are clusters of preference which sometimes covary reliably, but that's about it.

III - ADVERTISING
1. to the degree that any blogger starts to chase advertising dollars, the quality and content of their output will more and more closely approximate that of network television.* why? because

2. advertising dollars are to network television what eucalyptus leaves are to koalas, i.e., the only available source of food. the supply of and competition for advertising dollars is the strongest evolutionary pressure on network television, and it has adapted to fit. network television is what screen-based content turns into once it's chased advertising dollars for long enough.

3. the last metaphor could be better, probably if koalas were replaced with some kind of flower.

* except, for some reason, there will be a lot more lists.

today's word is 'sonification'

2008-06-03T09:52:00.004+10:00

today's word is sonification, a word i didn't know existed before today. according to wikipedia it's "the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data".

the best-known examples of sonification are the geiger counter, which ticks more frequently as radioactivity increases, and medical equipment that goes ping when things are ok. or in some cases, when everything goes very very wrong.

hmm, interesting. partly because i've seen a bunch of pretty data visualisation recently, much of it via boingboing. and in some ways we can read science as the endeavour to make more and more things visible which weren't.

it's also interesting to me because as someone who uses computers to make and record sound, i spend an awful lot of time working with visual representations of sound. sometimes you can get so used to working with these visualisations of sound that you stop listening, start lining things up and drawing volume curves according to how they look.

anyway, thomas hermann's page has an overview of the field, and sonenvir are working on making a generalised software environment for data sonification. oh, and here's the international community for auditory display. (why did they have to use the word 'display', though? wasn't there a less visual word they could have used?)