danbruno.net/blog

This is a must-see for winter break: MoMA has a Pixar exhibit that goes up December 14th.

In keeping with the Museum’s long tradition of presenting animation, this is the most extensive gallery exhibition that MoMA has ever devoted to the genre. Featuring over 500 works of original art on loan for the first time from Pixar Animation Studios, the show includes paintings, concept art, sculptures, and an array of digital installations. These works reveal the intricate, hands-on processes behind Pixar’s computer-generated films—including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and numerous shorts. The exhibition also includes a complete retrospective of Pixar films. Demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between traditional and digital media pioneered by the studio over its twenty-year history, Pixar: 20 Years of Animation is a tribute to the artists whose work has reinvented the genre.

Patrick of Plunkthumping fame (blogged previously) dropped me a note to say that his site has moved to howandtao.com. There’s a much heavier focus on blues guitar now, although there’s still a bit of banjo in there. Check it out.

Posting has been light because of the holidays, and will probably continue to be light as I finish up the semester. Bear with me.

One of the things I’ve been working on is a class project on bluegrass. Basically I’m making a mini-website, and halfway through realized that I don’t know how to do anything remotely interesting with CSS. I pieced together a simple two-column layout after mucking around in some random peoples’ page sources (thanks, random people), but I later found two tutorial sites on Digg with much more elegant solutions. If you’re starting out in CSS, like I am, I recommend taking a look.

Xooglers is a fascinating new blog/serial autobiography by an ex-Google employee. It’s well-written and has lots of quirky insider info. Definitely a must-read.

I have no words.

FREMONT — The ancient Greeks worshipped it. Sigmund Freud said women envy it. And on Tuesday, a man pulled a truck with it.

Yes, you read that right.

He pulled a truck with his penis.

Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng, best known for his Iron Crotch, attached himself not once, but twice, to a rental moving truck and pulled it several yards across a parking lot in Fremont. In lace-up leather boots and a black tank top, the 50-year-old tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles and tugged to make sure it was on tight. An assistant kicked him hard between the legs before he lashed himself to the vehicle.

Emphasis mine. Apparently pulling the truck didn’t hurt, so I’d assume that the kick was pretty okay too.

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I just got back from a family Thanksgiving gathering. Unusually, it was just for dessert, and even more unusually, I didn’t eat anything there. Still, I got caught up on things: my uncle invented a new method of packaging air fresheners which made his company several million dollars; my cousin, who already stars in his own TV show, has now recorded a single with a rapper named “J-Kwon,” and may star in a movie; and my other cousin, who was on “What Not To Wear” a couple of months ago, still seems to have the same wardrobe (which I consider an accomplishment — they’re mean on that show).

Meanwhile, I told everyone that I’m majoring in English and music, and that if the professional musician career doesn’t work out, I always have freelance writer to fall back on.

Grateful Dead fans have long been, well, grateful for the Live Music Archive. With over 1000 shows in lossless, CD-quality audio, it’s effectively obsoleted the need for trading.

Apparently the band was unhappy with that, because on Tuesday this policy update was posted on the LMA’s forums:

Audience recordings are available in streaming format (m3u).

Soundboard recordings are not available.

Additionally, the Grateful Dead recordings will be separated from the Live Music Archive into its own collection. The metadata and reviews for all shows and recordings will remain available.

We appreciate that this change will be a surprise and upset many of you, but please channel reactions in ways that you genuinely think will be productive. If we keep the bigger picture in mind that there are many experiments going on right now, and experiments working well, we can build on the momentum that tape trading started decades ago.

Who made this decision, I wonder? If it was the LMA, fine; I suppose reserving hundreds of gigabytes for just one band seemed a tad unfair. But if it was the Dead, I’m disappointed. They’ve always been close to their fanbase, as evidenced by their willingness to allow audience recordings of concerts. And now they’re to weasel out of it? No Deadhead is going to be consoled by marketingspeak like “What we are optimizing for is to bring as much access to great works as we can and give all involved time and space to learn.” Talk about misunderstanding your audience!

Well.

I just spent several hours trying to set up a local mirror of this website, so I can edit it on my computer and not have to make live changes to the site. This guide helped me immensely, but I have no MySQL experience so I still really had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Still, I persevered, and it (finally) works. Unfortunately, I configured all of the links to be absolute rather than relative — meaning that, even though I’m viewing the site on my computer, clicking on anything takes me to danbruno.net/whatever rather than localhost/whatever. The upshot is that I can only view the homepage, which is not particularly useful…I guess I can use it when I decide to revamp the theme again, though.

We’re thinking of doing a little camera shuffling.

Right now, I have a Konica Minolta Dimage G600, and my parents have a Canon EOS 300D (also known as Digital Rebel). However, they don’t use the Rebel because it’s too big, and my dad wants my camera to take on bike rides.

So, my mom is buying a Canon Powershot DS450 (and you can too, via the handy Amazon link!), my dad is taking my Konica Minolta, and I’m taking the Rebel back to school. Sounds like a good deal to me!

This is awful:

A Tufts University senior from Bulgaria was struck by two cars yesterday and killed while she was walking near Davis Square, police and a school official said.

A Tufts spokeswoman identified the victim as Boryana Damyanova, 22, of Sofia, Bulgaria. Damyanova was at Broadway and Wallace Street about 6:22 p.m. when she was struck by the vehicles, police said.

[...]

Damyanova, according to her profile on facebook.com, a networking website for college students, had expected to graduate in May with majors in finance and international relations.

A profile written for a Tufts international relations colloquium in which Damyanova had participated in 2004 said that she planned to pursue a career in corporate law.

It literally could have happened to any of us — most of the Tufts student body walks to Davis Square by going along Leonard and Wallace Street, crossing Broadway in the middle. I was at that exact intersection about three hours earlier. A very sobering and very sad story.

The MPAA is rumored to have struck a deal with Bram Cohen, creator of the filesharing protocol BitTorrent. They’re holding a joint press conference at 2PM PST.

UPDATE: Okay, I spoke too soon. So far, the “deal” is just an agreement to work against piracy — something that we already knew Cohen was against. Where’s the digital movie retail outlet, guys? Where’s the internet-based Netflix, the Napster for movies? Where’s the opportunity for snagging classic films at low, low prices?

There has been, it has come to my attention, a lack of updatage.

I spent all day yesterday judging at a debate tournament in Lexington. I did Lincoln-Douglas when I was in high school, so it actually wasn’t that strange to have a little kid in a suit implore me to extend it across the flow and make that your first voter. Whatever, little kid in a suit.

I also judged a new form of debate, “public forum.” Public forum is interesting because there is not any real way to adjudicate the round. In LD, the debaters offer values, like justice or governmental legitimacy, which they try to uphold with their cases; public forum judges are to award victory based on, well, whatever, I guess. (Also of note is the “Grand Crossfire,” in which four people attempt to ask and answer each other’s questions simultaneously. Perhaps the activity was created with the entertainment of the audience in mind.)

After the debate I popped over to Government Center to eat at Bertucci’s and see the Tufts Symphony Orchestra at Faneuil Hall. That was fun and all — Bertucci’s is a great Italian chain, and the TSO puts on good concerts and sells cheap tickets — but the real highlight of the night was this poster at JP Licks:

That’s right. Booty Vortex. Apparently that guy and his turkey have each developed some kind of funk-induced black hole, deep within their respective booties.

[See also my first impressions.]

It may not seem like it at first glance, but Why Should the Fire Die? is a natural evolutionary step for acoustic trio Nickel Creek; each subsequent album has a little less country twang and a little more pop-rock oomph, and this one continues the trend. However, they have dumped long-time producer Alison Krauss, who developed the band’s early sound, in favor of Eric Valentine, best known for producing Smash Mouth and Good Charlotte’s records. Needless to say, the genre-bending is somewhat accelerated with Valentine behind the mixers.

To be sure, there are still vestiges of the old Nickel Creek sound. “Jealous of the Moon” is a gorgeous country waltz, “Stumptown” is a vanilla bluegrass instrumental, and “Scotch and Chocolate” is a down-home jam session. Other tracks, though, are less familiar. “Somebody More Like You,” “Can’t Complain,” and “Best of Luck” sound more like covers than Nickel Creek originals — the delicate acoustic instrumentation contrasts sharply with the rocking power chords and screaming vocals.

The teetering between genres is encapsulated in the penultimate track, “Helena.” It’s ostensibly a rock song, built upon an agitated ostinato of eighth notes and mandolinist Chris Thile’s pseudo-emo vocals, but the band holds back; the song builds in intensity only to regress into a peaceful violin solo. Finally, in the last minute and a half, the intensity boils over and Valentine jumps in on drums for the first (and only) time on the album. Rock and roll has won the battle.

“We’re not genre-hoppers,” claims Thile on Nickel Creek’s website. “If we’re going to blend genres, we’d like it to be genre soup, where you can’t see what’s in it — as opposed to genre stew, where everything is very defined.” Perhaps, but if they aren’t careful, the soup will be too thin by their next release.

This fascinating interview with former Phish frontman Trey Anastasio lends insight into the real reason Phish broke up.

“We got through the ’80s and ’90s without encountering hard drugs — which is pretty miraculous considering what those eras were like — and it is a testament to the guys in the band, in how intent we were from keeping those type of drugs away.

“Once we let our guard down around 1998, the scene started to eat itself and there was a massive loss of perspective. … The whole thing was being crushed under its own weight. The germ of the thing — that feeling between the four of us — is still there, but we were getting unhealthy and tired,” he said.

[...]

The band went on hiatus in the fall of 2000, and didn’t return to the road until the end of 2002. “We came back and it was even worse,” Anastasio said.

Yikes. I was disturbed by that, and I’m not a hardcore fan by any means. Hearing Trey admit that drugs tore his band apart must be almost nauseating to Phisheads.

And, if that wasn’t enough, the article closes with this:

“Everybody just needs to get their feet back on the ground. … My dream would be that everybody gets to a place where their own lives outside of this, that all four of us are standing on our own two feet.

“And then who knows? Maybe we could all play together again. I’d love it.”

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A couple of jazz blogs for your perusal:

Blog-O-Jazz: “A sharing of jazz experiences through concert photos I’ve taken and autographs I’ve collected, plus a few random thoughts.” Updated pretty infrequently, but some interesting stuff nonetheless.

Straight No Chaser: “A blog covering all things jazz – the music, the artists, the critics, the performances – from both yesterday and today. A source for links and podcasts. Enjoy a weekly podcast and timely postings of MP3s.” Updated frequently with lots of great content.