bookofjoe

What am I offered for Sean Dack's 'Future Songs?'

Something is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.

That's why a thirsty person will give any amount of money for a drink of water but turn her nose up at a sack of perfect diamonds.

Value depends on circumstances and perception.

So what is the perception of Sean Dack's "Future Songs" (above)?

Well, maybe we should back up a bit — who is Sean Dack and what is 'Future Songs?"

I thought you'd never ask.

Here's Randy Kennedy's August 16, 2007 New York Times story to explain it all for you.

No. 1 With a Bullet (or, Rather, an Apocalyptic Blast)

The pop singer Dionne Warwick and the paranoid, drug-fueled science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick are not often mentioned in the same sentence or even the same chapter.

But in a strange booklet of sheet music that was mailed out last week to more than 1,000 people by the Daniel Reich Gallery in Chelsea, Ms. Warwick and Mr. Dick share more than page space. They take the stage together in a kind of forced virtual duet, somewhere in the ether between a real and an imagined past. Above musical notes that once provided the heart-touching melody for Ms. Warwick’s 1986 hit “That’s What Friends Are For” (words by Carole Bayer Sager, music by Burt Bacharach), the sheet music substitutes words that Mr. Dick wrote in 1981, a year before his death, from a series of dire and sometimes eerily accurate predictions about the future.

Ms. Warwick sang: “And as far as I’m concerned/I’m glad I got the chance to say/That I do believe I love you.” Mr. Dick’s version might not have quite the same radio potential: Satellites will — key the music — “uncover vast unsuspected high energy phenomena in the universe indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe.” (He prophesied that this would happen in 1986.)

The artist who put together the cheap-looking booklet, Sean Dack, said he was not a card-carrying member of the Philip K. Dick cult, which continues to grow apace 25 years after his death. But when Mr. Dack came across the list of Mr. Dick’s Nostradamus-like sayings a few years ago, he could not get them out of his head and wanted to find a way to work them into his art, which, he said, is “about crossing multiple paths at the same time.”

So he decided to make a kind of pop-apocalyptic mash-up, pairing the predictions with the music for the Billboard No. 1 hit songs from each of the years that figure in Mr. Dick’s prognostications, from 1983 to 2000.

The result, called “Future Songs,” is described by the Daniel Reich Gallery as a “non event” or a mail exhibition, though there is also a bare-bones Web site, futuresongsexhibition.com. The book began landing in mailboxes (the old-fashioned kind) over the last few days and, at a time when late summer all but shuts down Chelsea galleries, it seemed to be almost an insider joke about the season’s low boil.

The 20-page booklet is free. There was no party to celebrate its mailing. And besides some copies of it, there is nothing at all to see at the gallery, on West 23rd Street (though Mr. Reich said someone came by Monday night wondering if he could hear the songs. He could not.).

Mr. Dack, 30, said his intention was to construct a kind of false past from spare parts and also to infuse mindless pop-culture products from a more carefree time — “Most of the songs are kind of soft-rock or pop hits, a bit schlocky,” he said — with some existential dread. It might not accomplish the task in quite the same way that David Lynch did with Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in the movie “Blue Velvet,” or that David Chase did with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in the recent cut-to-black finale of “The Sopranos.”

But there is something at least a little creepy about being informed to the melody of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that the Soviets have developed a particle-beam accelerator to render missile attacks futile. (Mr. Dick, as if to cover himself in the event of the Soviet Union’s demise, included a stray prediction for 2010 that foretold the invention of a device that could alter the past, meaning that the end of the cold war could still be erased in a few years by pro-Soviet guerrillas.)

Mr. Dack omits the names of the songs used for the project, meaning that readers must either play them on an instrument or be familiar enough with the notes to guess the original hits, many of them now in eternal rotation on the easy-listening part of the dial.

“It sort of lets the cat out the bag in a way if I name all the songs,” he said.

But he also liked the way that a project centered around music included nothing audible and relied instead on sheet music, a kind of Victorian vestige in an age of iPods and MP3s. (There is also, of course, the nice Dick-Dack element to the whole thing, like something out of Mr. Dick’s fiction.)

Mr. Dack said he had not sought permission from record or music-publishing companies before appropriating — or sampling — their sheet music. “I’m not making any money off this book,” he said. “We’re giving it out.” He added, “I guess maybe it’s something I should worry about a little.”

He also said he was considering some kind of free event in which Mr. Dick’s Mostly Terrifying Top 40 Hits might actually be belted out somewhere, although Mr. Dack would probably not do the belting himself.

“I really don’t think I could play these songs well enough for anyone to want to listen,” he said.

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Okay, then — more than 1,000 copies of "Future Songs" were mailed out last week.

What is the value of one of those copies?

$1,000,000?

1¢?

Nothing?

Flautist?

Cliff?

Anyone?

Space-Saver Hanger

Because closets aren't what they used to be.

From the website:

Space-Saver Hanger

Maximize closet space while banishing bugs!

Hang 5 garments in the space of 1 on a cedar-scented Space-Saver Hanger.

Sturdy plastic releases aromatic cedar for up to a year, keeping moths at bay.

Minimizes wrinkles and unpacks jammed closets.

10"L.

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Four for $12.99.

Sometimes it's fun to be a TechnoDolt™

Look at the image above.

What do you see?

Is it joe channeling Duchamp?

No, at least not intentionally.

And besides, she's clothed.

But I digress.

I happened on the original of this image — a Chanel ad — on the back page of yesterday's New York Times Styles section.

All I originally intended to do was reproduce it as published because I thought it was very kicky and fun.

But problems with the Times Newstand Reader software (long story short: it doesn't work at all on Camino, my default browser, and on Safari is painfully awkward and unpleasant to manipulate — but I digress once again, don't I?) led to a first cut of what you see above.

I was about to start the very wearying process of making the image look "correct" but then thought, wait a minute — I like mine better.

So that's why it appears as it is.

And no — I don't do Photoshop so don't even begin to go there.

I wonder if Chanel will send me a cease and desist letter....

Well, a man can dream, can't he?

Experts' Experts: World's Best Slotted Spoon

This is one of those cases where there's a disconnect between quality and price.

The only unbiased critics of things culinary in the world — the folks at Cook's Illustrated, where no advertising is accepted — have tested nine models of slotted spoons and the winner is in.

Here's Elizabeth Bomze's story, from the just-out September/October 2007 issue.

Slotted Spoons

A slotted spoon is indispensable for fishing food out of boiling water. But damaging delicate gnocchi and dropping dozens of green peas as we tested nine models, we learned that not just any combination of handles and holes would do. Our testers preferred lengthy handles, deep bowls, and enough small slits or punctures to quickly drain water without losing as much as one petite pea. A stainless steel spoon from Calphalon ($9.95) and nonstick nylon models from Messermeister ($2.95) and OXO ($5.99) all met our demands, though the slightly flimsy Messermeister was downgraded for its smaller capacity. With its lighter weight and slimmer price tag, OXO just edged out Calphalon for top honors. For complete testing results, go to www.cooksillustrated.com/october.

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The OXO spoon is $5.99 here.

Manning Leonard Krull will sort you out

He (above) sure did me when I happened on his blog and read a few of the hilarious entries.

Examples:


Then last night I was out with my friend Beth in my old stomping grounds around Rittenhouse Square and we stopped for a drink at Rouge. It was dark and crowded and noisy and I was already half drunk, and I noticed Beth saying hi and shaking hands with a middle-aged guy in an extremely nice suit. I assumed he was a colleague of hers or something, and then he turned to me and shook my hand as well, and in mid-handshake I realized he was Philadelphia mayoral candidate Michael Nutter! Ha. Since I didn't know who he was at first, I had totally already given him the hey-how-ya-doin'-yeah-okay-take-care brushoff when I figured it out. Sorry, Michael Nutter! I'll still vote for you from France if there's some sort of absentee ballot thing for Philly mayoral elections. I kind of doubt there is.

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My old job from before I moved to France has hired me for three or four weeks of solid nine-to-five (and then some) full-time-ness! After two and a half years of freelance and working as little as possible, I can't even begin to express how weird it is to be working in an office and chained to a desk again. I'm not at the old place in Rittenhouse Square this time; they've opened a second office in the top floor of the Wanamaker Building, right next to City Hall. Our workspace is a vast sea of cubicles under a high, pointy, church-like ceiling, with dozens of windows letting narrow beams of sunlight in. I can hear the clock on top of City Hall chiming the hours and half-hours. There's so much open space and the place is decorated so nicely, all warm tones and modern and clean and design-y, I actually like working here. After all that time away, I'd almost forgotten about the free Coke machine. Wow.

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I don't have my own cube/computer yet, so I'm working at the desk of a lady who's not here today. I can see from the photos she's hung up that she has bright pink hair. I guess this is where they keep the freaks. I only know about half of the people here nowadays, and the other half have come up to me one by one to tell me they've seen my pictures hanging in the other office. They know my name and know I lived in France and know I make really really good webpages. It's like being the lamest rockstar of all time.

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I'm going to my best friend Marilyn Manson's concert tonight! I don't want to make him nervous before he goes on, so I won't tell him I'm there and I'll just watch the show from my seat with the rest of the audience. I'm going with Steve. He's Marilyn Manson's other best friend! Slayer is opening. Nobody is friends with them.

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I've been drinking too many Vanilla Coke Zeros. Like, about a hundred a day, something like that. I think part of it is that I'm stressed out about their inevitable disappearance, like when they discontinued Diet Vanilla Coke a year or two back, and I had to get my sister to smuggle six bottles into France for me after they weren't even making it in the States anymore. I'll always remember carrying her ridiculously heavy suitcase through Charles de Gaulle airport and asking her, "What the heck do you HAVE in this thing?" and she said somewhat conspiratorially, "It's a present for you," and I said, "... Oh."

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Manning Leonard Krull might well be the best name of 2007.

What is it?

Answer here this time tomorrow.

Computer-generated Beethoven that fooled the experts

Below, the sidebar to Jacob Hale Russell and John Jurgensen's May 5, 2007 Wall Street Journal article headlined "Fugue for Man & Machine."

Can You Spot the Fake?

Listen to samples of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 and see whether you can tell which of the excerpts is computer-generated.

We played four samples of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 for two professors of music.

Three were recordings of orchestra performances conducted by Roger Norrington, Fritz Reiner and David Zinman; the fourth was created on computer by Paul Henry Smith. We asked the professors to guess which was the computer recording.

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4


The Results:

David Liptak, chairman of composition department, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y.

First guess: Incorrect. Picked the live performance conducted by Mr. Norrington as the computer-generated recording; Mr. Smith's was his second guess.

Verdict: Mr. Liptak zeroed in on the "false" tone of the clarinet in Mr. Smith's recording. When he heard a longer sample, he said that it was easy to catch evidence that it was synthetic.


Stephen Croes, dean of music technology, Berklee College of Music, Boston

First guess: Incorrect. Mr. Croes also picked Mr. Smith's as his second guess.

Verdict: "I'm not surprised at all that I could be faked out," he said. "The modern musician has tools that are so powerful, and they're looking for how to defeat all those giveaways."

Rite in the Rain Notebooks

Steve Leckart reviewed them in Cool Tools, as follows.

Rite in the Rain Notebooks — Water-resistant writing pads

Whether you're a hiker, biker, backpacker, camper, naturalist or simply someone who's ever been caught in the rain, you'll treasure these classic all-weather notebooks. The cover is Polydura and the pages are made with a substrate, giving the paper a wax-y feel. The effect: water beads off them, meaning no pulpy mess and no bummer over any lost thoughts or data. They are not a new invention by any means. Back in the 1920s, they were developed for Pacific Northwest loggers. These days, the manufacturer makes both bound and spiral bound books in an impressive array of sizes and types (e.g birding!). I keep a pocket-size, 24-page, staple bound mini-book in the small pack I take cycling and hiking. In the event of a downpour, all my ah-ha moments are safe. If you plan to be in really harsh conditions and want to go the extra mile, you might try one of their all-weather pens. Note: I have not used them — a pencil or standard ballpoint does the trick for me.

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$1.99.