Tomorrowland

Chad Van Gaalen: Molten Light

RIP Francis Billotti-Wood

Bollywood Dreamer

 

Rahul Dev Burman: Ishk Ishk Ishk (1974)

Fabulous collection of Bollywood soundtracks and album covers at mp3 blog Music From The Third Floor. They also host a Flickr account for easy access to the visual goods.

Powaqqatsi, 20 Years Later

The highway as graveyard, a static perversion of progress and industrial speed.

Godfrey Reggio's 1988 film Powaqqatsi is more than just the second installment in his trilogy of dreamy, technological critiques. It's a rare overlap of the experimental and the popular, a commercially successful portrait of Third World poverty with a rocking soundtrack and zero words.

Deliberately paced, impressionistic, nonlinear, it's not the kind of film that endears itself easily to mainstream audiences. It has not plot. No dialogue. No narration. Roger Ebert called it a "feature length New Age music video" back when it came out; Siskel wasn't much kinder. Its sumptuous if bleak vision of Third World life can be hard to take. The title is a Hopi term for "life in transformation," benign enough until you look at the roots: "Powaqa" is negative sorcerer; "Qatsi" is life. Translated another way it means "parasitic way of life." Definitely not the feel-good flick of the summer.

The film's strongest "pop" element, however, comes from Philip Glass' hypnotic, pulsating score. I recently saw Powaqqatsi in an ideal environment: outdoors in Brooklyn at the Prospect Park bandshell, accompanied by the Philip Glass Ensemble. In that setting the score is more than just arty sonics: its essential bombastic nature is revealed, auditory fireworks that dazzle the park goers sprawled on blankets, nursing their Bud Lights. It's pop music through and through, as spectacular and panethnic and traditionally beautiful as our neighborhood, Park Slope.

Odd to think that Glass' experimental days were behind him at this point. Gone are the dense, hi-speed arpeggios of 1971's Music With Changing Parts and 1976's Einstein On The Beach. He retired those bliss-out masterworks for kinder, gentler, more commercial prospects such as George Lucas-funded films like Powaqqatsi. The film score reassures the audience and compliments the film, never daring to plunge head-first into the Farfisa vortex that drove so many critics and record buyers insane. (When I saw Glass in 1997 at the University of Florida, a well-dressed, older gentleman stormed the stage screaming, "This is NOT music! Get your money back!" Poor guy didn't even know he was 20 years late to the game. Fortunately, Glass just ignored him and kept on playing.)

Powaqqatsi survives, but it represents an end of experimentation more than anything else. It's a bittersweet cocktail that reminds me of what it should have been, daring and blazing, an indictment of First World interests, rather than the National Geographic travelogue it actually is. Fortunately, it holds up better than Reggio's other work in that it asks some interesting questions, silently, suggesting that the life in transformation—the parasitic way of life—may be our own.

A Muxtape Grows In Brooklyn

Introducing Chromosones, the latest output from Tomorrowland labs. (Yes, we realize it's spelled wrong: consider it a Joycean liberty with the Engrish language.)

Twelve tracks of international pop from several dead decades, hand-picked for your listening plexure.

Where Are My Words?

Printed matter, the illusion of permanence, via Lamosca.

They seem to have escaped me. Cats up a tree. Petals to the wind. Does it help that I've been distracted by other bloggage, also of my own creation? More on those soon. Although, in the meantime, if anyone has advice on how to save a lumbering giant with a blog 3.0 liferaft, please please let me know. (I have suggested to colleagues that the new site be like Kokomo, a place where readers can get away from it all. B-boy bizdev for the blogitorially minded.)

So this Tomorrowland, it is quiet, yes? Ghost town syndrome. Deadbeat dad neglecting the digital offspring. I've been short on time and long on ideas, with nary a moment for long-form weblounging and link-clicking. The words are still here, they've just migrated to other properties. Come back soon for updated Muxtape (which is sadly offline at the moment) and more dispatches from the Brooklyn frontier.

The Lazarus Treatment

Here It Is, collage on wood, 2006

Brooklyn artist Michael Lazarus trawls the psychic catacombs of the urban unconscious. (He's also a really nice guy and a great dad, too.)

Lots of collage, freaky serpentine action and hypnotic pop art radiation. Oh, and skulls—lots of skulls, those vessels of cerebrospinal fluid and vehicles of the transcendental gaze. Get illuminated, people!

I Could Not Make That Creature Disappear

Clip from Louis Malle's excellent 1981 film My Dinner With Andre, starring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.

An Encyclopedia of Radio Waves

Bluetooth waves, aka Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae.

Amusing visualizations of radio waves from students at AHO, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Inspired by old botanical and zoological field guides, the class created fictional renderings of radio "species" such as WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID. Check out the free PDF poster of all documented specimens.

Fractal Africa

Wow-inducing presentation from ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash on the fractal structures of African villages. Non-linear scaling, self organization, sand divination and search engines all factor into the show. Highly recommended.

Incaps Are The New Swoosh

Nearly as ubiquitous today as the swoosh was back in the late 90s, incaps—those quirky little capitalizations occurring inside a word—are destined to become the poster child for clichéd, trend-humping, web 2.0 design mania.

Just look at those logos. Playful, efficient, compressed and connective, they speak the visual language of our times in a dialect we can easily understand. Incaps are a way of orthographically "baking in" a design attribute without having to necessarily rely on decorative iconography. I like that minimalist approach toward branding; it's ascetically noble and trim. But by now, in early 2008, we're beyond the incap tipping point. It's time to learn from the swoosh and collectively resist the temptation to use an incap in our designs. It's beginning to stank like the worst kind of party cheese.

Incap backlash, anyone? 

John Maeda Designs For iGoogle

iGoogle theme by John Maeda.

MIT Media Lab professor John Maeda has contributed some lovely textures to the iGoogle cause. His elegant designs revolve around an amoebic motif and regularly change throughout the day. Add his theme at the iGoogle profile page.

SeeqPod Playable Search

Next-gen search engine SeeqPod offers more than just playable search results: they also feature a slick drag-and-drop playlist builder that outshines every other web 2.0 search tool I've seen. (Take that, SkreemR!) SeeqPod is also available as an iPhone widget.

Plus, as Techcrunch reports, they have the honor of being sued by Warner Music. I honestly doubt the lawsuit will amount to anything, as I don't see how SeeqPod results constitute "public performance," as WM claims.

Ian Anderson Wuvs The Cats

English flautist/codpiece aficionado Ian Anderson offers kitten advice and a guide to Indian cuisine at the official website for Jethro Tull.

(via Brie)

Here Comes The Hypertablet

Dubbed "The Looking Glass" by tech blogger Yanko Design, Mac Funamizu's slick little hypertablet would tell you anything you need to know about, well, anything you see. For now it's a prototype, but man, wouldn't this be amazing?

oSkope Visual Search

There's more than one way to find stuff online. oSkope is a visual search tool that lets you search content from sites like Amazon, eBay and Flickr, but in a refreshingly new way. Search results show thumbnails of the items which can be tossed around, stacked in a pile, "biggified," arranged on a cool x-y axis and dragged into a folder for later comparison. Definitely one of the slickest web applications I've used in a while.