Ideas For Dozens: October 2006 Archives

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October 28, 2006

I'm mp3 Blogging on Pampelmoose

So, today I'm officially an mp3 blogger. I just published my first post for Pampelmoose, a Portland-based record label, management company, and music blog run by the legendary British punker, and recent Portland transplant, Dave Allen. Dave's resume is pretty jaw-dropping, including, amongst other things, being the bassist for Gang of Four and a stint running emusic. And so it's cool to be working for him.

I'll be writing entirely about Portland music, sharing some of the great lesser known bands I've gotten to hear while working on PDX Pop. As I said in an email to Dave that I didn't quite realize he was going to post, "I have this theory that one in every six people in town is in a band. And in that pool is so much great music that not enough people hear. I will link to some of it."

Go have a look at Dave's post introducting me and my first post itself, Alan Singley: Portland's Burt Bacharach?, which is about some great new tracks Chris made recently with Alan. And let me know what you think.

Tagged: pampelmoose, music, mp3, blog, dave, allen

Posted by Greg at 4:22 AM | Comments (1)

October 20, 2006

learns_to use Expect for Easy Automation

One of the great hopes you might have in beginning to learn about technology and computers is that they will save you time and effort. This is such an obvious expectation that it almost goes without saying, but, in my experience, it is rarely fulfilled and really unrelated to the true joy of technological learning. That joy comes in gaining whole new abilities, not in slightly improving existing capacities. I've was motivated to learn what I have about the web and programming because I wanted to publish my thoughts and my music for anyone in the world to read and hear and there was simply no other feasible way for me to do that. As my technical capacity has grown, I've come up with new ideas for things I wanted to do and make that I had never even known were possible. And now these ideas themselves drive me deeper into the technology in order to realize them.

Given this dynamic, I was a little shocked recently to come across Expect. For once, here's a command line utility that offers a staggering productivity increase without the attendant black hole of necessary technical mastery.

Expect is a tool for automating interactions with other programs. Expect scripts allow you to start up a program and then have the computer act use it in your stead. In your Expect script, you write out a dialogue for the interaction, e.g. 'if the program says that, respond with this,' and then the script holds up your side of the 'conversation' with the program, providing feedback, entering inputs, making simple decisions.

Why is this useful? With Expect, you can write scripts that fire off relatively complex interactions with a single command, so you don't have to remember all the individual sub-steps. Or, even sexier, you can automate multi-stage tasks you've previously had to do by hand so that you can trigger them with cron so you never have to think about them ever again.

This may sound fuzzy and abstract so far, but Expect scripts actually turn out to be a cinch to write. As proof, I'll show you the simple script I worked up last night to automate my daily "production process" for Largehearted Goat. In my original post on the subject, I mentioned that the code behind Largehearted Goat required "just a little hand holding." Here's what was involved: (1) run the ruby script which reads the Largehearted Boy RSS feed, finds the Goats, and rewrites the html, (2) sftp into my web hosting and copy the new html file over the existing one being served up to Largehearted Goat. And here's Expect script I worked up to get it all done (paths and passwords have been changed to protect the innocent):

#!/usr/local/bin/expect -f spawn ruby /path/to/goat/script/goats.rb expect eof spawn sftp mylogin@myhost.com expect -exact "Password:" send "MySecretPassword " expect "sftp>" send "put /path/to/my/new/html/file/goat.html path/to/my/online/goat/directory/ " expect "sftp>" send "exit " expect eof

So, here's how this works. The first line is just a necessary invocation to allow the Expect utility to read a set of commands from a file. The "spawn" command tells expect to start up a process, in the case of the second line, there, I'm running my ruby script. Already here, we have a big advantage over some other shell scripting choices available out there. Step (2), which I described above, only works properly if my ruby script has already been run. Otherwise, it would send the old version of the html up to the web and www.largeheartedgoat.com wouldn't change. Expect makes it incredibly easy to wait for the completion of that script. All we have to say is "expect eof" (for End Of File). That line tells Expect to wait for control to be returned to it from the previous process that it spawned before proceeding on.

Once the ruby script is done running, then it's time to go ahead and ftp it the new html file into place. Since my host requires ssh for login, I've got to use SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), which I invoke with the next spawn line. From here on in, all I'm really doing is alternating prompts I "expect" to see from SFTP with commands I want to "send" to it. One of the best things about Expect is that if any of these "expect" conditions aren't met, the script won't just go ahead with the rest of the interaction running roughshod over your files, but will instead shut down without taking further action.

So, yeah, it's pretty easy. If you can do this task once by hand using SFTP, you can write this Expect interaction no problem. The only clever thing going on is the use of the new line when submitting a command, like so:

send "MySecretPassword "

Think of this line break as hitting 'return' in order to actually submit the command.

Now, once your script is written, all you've got to do is make it executable by running 'chmod x' on it and then actually call it like

$ expect my_new_script

You should see all of the normal output of your commands scroll by in the terminal. And once you've got it working, you can check out this great crontab tutorial to set it up to run automatically!

I've only barely scratched the surface here of what Expect can do. It's a real programming language, allowing branching based on the response of the program you're interacting with and a full vocabulary for logic and variables, etc. But even with just this limited Expect vocabulary, I bet you can save yourself a ton of time. Is there a simple process like this that you have to do everyday? Automate it. Is there a complicated interaction you only have to do every once in a long while whose commands you always forget and so have to spend an hour re-googling? Next time you do it, capture it in an Expect script, save it somewhere and then just run it when you need it. Could you spend a long time fiddling with all the different options, improving your Expect chops? Sure you could. But why would you? This one's easy. This one's for getting things done.

Tagged: expect, shell, scripting, osx, mac, terminal, automation, crontab, sftp, ruby, largehearted, goat

Posted by Greg at 6:00 PM | Comments (4)

October 18, 2006

Immense Miniatures: Saltz on Toba Khedoori

"Untitled (Table & Chairs)," 1999, oil and wax on paper, 469.9 by 350.5 inches

Thought:

I've had Toba Khedoori sitting in my inbox of interesting artists for more than a year now, ever since I first saw her work in Vitamin P. I've often thought about writing something up about her for this blog and she was high on my list of candidates as soon as I started this current art-writing sprint. Trouble is pretty soon after I discovered Khedoori, I found Jerry Saltz's essay about her work, "Immense Miniatures," from the Village Voice. And since Saltz just totally nailed all of things I'd thought of to say about Khedoori's work, I was left without anything further of value to add.

So, in the spirit of this lots-of-artists project I'm doing here, I thought I quote some of Saltz's essay here and simply point you towards the rest of it. Enjoy:

Three facts of biography seem pertinent to Toba Khedoori's giant, space-filled drawings. First, she lives in Los Angeles, although she was born and raised in Australia. Second, she is an identical twin (her sister is Rachel Khedoori, an artist who also lives and works in Los Angeles). A distant but fascinating third (and -- like the other two -- one the artist might find objectionable) is that her family is originally from Iraq. Her cultural heritage includes the Persian miniature, fine of line and exquisite of detail.

[...]

Khedoori is a visionary minimalist -- an artist who depicts minimalism's three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. She draws on enormous sheets of paper that have the effect of immense miniatures, or mirages, shimmering in and out of sight: you do a lot of blinking and eye rubbing around her work. Her subjects are man-made places and things: doors, rooms, furniture and buildings; all of them strikingly devoid of any sign of life. Although her pared-down images can be likened to the big, empty space of Ed Ruscha (without the irony), or the uninflected expanses of Vija Celmins, she is emerging as something like her generation's Agnes Martin: an artist of metaphysical refinement and restraint.

"Untitled (doors)", 1996, oil paint and wax on paper, 11 by 19.5 feet

Links:

"Untitled (doors)" detail

Tagged: toba, khedoori, jerry, saltz, village, voice, art, painting, Vitamin P, miniatures

Posted by Greg at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2006

The Final Utilization of Tank: Hankang Huang's Unfunny Paintings

"Help", 2005, watercolor on paper, 31.5 by 44.5 inches.

Thought:

Hankang Huang's paintings are about humor, which is not to say that they're particularly funny, or meant to be. Instead of aiming for laughs themselves, Huang's delicately drawn and deliberately textured watercolors explore the logic of diverse kinds of jokes.

The first and most obvious kind is the pun. In speech or text, a pun is "the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words."¹ Translated into the visual realm, then, puns can be found in images used in humorously inappropriate contexts or the replacement of one image with another that shares a similar shape.

Huang's "Help" (pictured above) is a virtual illustration of that definition.

Nowadays, puns are associated with an antiquarian comedic aesthetic. They bring to mind the Borsht Belt and early television variety shows. Two other, more contemporary, Humor Strategies also find their way into Huang's work: the anarchic surrealism of characteristic of 60s comedy typified by Monty Python and the dry, detached, raised-eyebrow irony of the recent concluded Seinfeldian era.

"Run into" is a great example of Huang's take on 60s anarchy:

"Run into", 2005, watercolor on paper, 31.5 by 44.5 inches.

The painting's imagery combines with its title to imply an action: a lion running running between the legs of a woman and up into her body. This little surrealist haiku of a picture incorporates many of the most used parts of the Python vocabulary: violation of the body, hyper-sexualization, gender ambiguity, etc.

By contrast, "The final utilization of Tank," is very 90s:

"The final utilization of Tank", 2005, 31.5 by 44.5 inches, watercolor on paper.

At first glance, this picture looks like a simple visual pun: the tank's turret standing in for a clothesline. But there's something in the particulars of tone here that makes the situation more complex. Handled differently, a picture of (children's?) laundry hung out to dry at the end of a tank's gun could be overtly political. It could be played as agitprop. Huang's take, however, is totally detached. The Tank looks like a crumpled paper toy. The colors are all equally faded and the brushy, liquid texture of the watercoloring is even across all the objects. The completely flat white background denies us any clues that could even suggest a political context.

These strategies echo the mundane, deflating comedy of Seinfeld and its 90s brethren. Potentially 'heavy' issues like race and discrimination aren't distinguished from trivia like looking for your car in a parking lot or waiting in line at a chinese restaurant. No part of the world seems to touch the characters much and the biggest response a situation can gleam is a knowing chuckle (with an eye towards the studio audience).

Just as critical academic writing about comedy tends towards the jargonic and highly conceptual, Huang's pictures have an abstract self-referential quality to them. Whereas successful humor pulls us immediately past the artistry of its means and into the physically uncontrollable act of laughing, Huang's paintings keep us stuck doing the serious and difficult work of examining its mechanism.

Press Release:

With his masterful handling of the medium of watercolor and his unconventional view of the world, Hankang Huang has created a body of work typified by the use of unexpected and compelling subject matter inspired by his experience of daily life in Paris. He gathers and transforms visual information from advertisements, the internet, television, magazines, newspapers and street life itself. Huang combines these elements in surprising juxtapositions that employ the use of metaphor and personal narrative. They include both social and political commentary, poignantly and often ironically rendered. For example, Final Utilization of the Tank suggests a peaceful alternative to warfare by using the tank’s elongated gun barrel to hang drying laundry. Run Into portrays a roaring male lion and a recumbent woman with legs spread in a carnal and unambiguously erotic moment. In an entirely different vein, On Evolution is a powerful image of a post-Darwinian, vaguely prehistoric skeleton, combining a human head and the body of a beast. While a Chinese influence is not immediately apparent in Huang’s choice of imagery, there is a pervasive, poetic stillness and a delicacy of touch in his use of watercolor that is reminiscent of the spiritual and philosophical qualities often associated with Asian art. Hankang Huang was born in 1977 in Suzhou in the Jiangsu province of China, and emigrated to Paris in 2001 where he currently lives and works. He attended the Art College of Suzhou University in China and the École National Supérieure d’ARTS, Paris-Cergy.

link

Stampology: Jonathan Herder's New Western Sublime

herder_stampographic_panorama(detail).jpg
"stampographic panorama (detail)", 2003, collaged stamps, ink on paper, 60 by 16 inches.

Thought:

Jonathan Herder collages together thousands of US postal stamps to produce large scale landscapes that playfully tweak the traditional image of the iconic American west. Treating each stamp as a single unit of color, Herder makes of himself a kind of physical pointillist or, better, a DIY digital photo-mosaicist. He even emphasizes this transmutation of stamp into pixel by leaving large ragged holes throughout his pictures and giving many of them irregular frayed-looking edges, both of which qualities recall the 'stair-stepping' and dropouts of lossy image compression.

The coloration of the source stamps serves Herder's western imagery perfectly. Most of these stamps are washed-out, translucent shades of brown, pink, and green and their combination perfectly evokes the plains and desserts of the American west. This color combo also happens to look a lot like the recently introduced forgery-proof color currency, pointing out a visual resonance between two major pieces of Americana that is hard to shake once you've noticed it.

Herder's compositions -- low slung, flat, and sparse -- also serve to place his work clearly in relationship to a particular tradition of American landscape painting. Whereas Thomas Cole and the other well-known romantics of the Hudson River School glorified the lush and dramatic landscape of the Northeastern seaboard, painters who traveled out west, such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran (who made the first paintings of Yosemite), trafficked in a harsher and more restrained vision of the American sublime: nearly featureless yellow plains interrupted by craggy outcroppings of rock.

This version of the American landscape evoked in Herder's work is home, not to Emerson's pantheistic Nature, which "always speaks of spirit," but to the rancher's homestead and the frontiersman's log cabin. This is the American mythical landscape where purification comes from pitched struggle with ungenerous climates and success scratched out by hard labor on poor land.

This is a strange and strident legacy to find sitting around on a simple postage stamp -- especially one that is vector drawn, digitally printed, widely retailed, and marketed through tie-ins with trendy electronic pop music.

Artist's Statement:

My current work is born of a fascination with the postage stamp and the desire to liberate its graphic potency from the mundane confines of bureaucratic purpose, so as to allow a less gravitational flirtation with the seductive states of certainty, the sublime and the heroic.

link

Links:

"Night Desert", 2003, Postage stamps collaged on paper, 14 by 17 inches.

Tagged: jonathan, herder, art, postage, stamp, panorama, postal, service, hudson river school, sublime, americana

Posted by Greg at 4:01 AM | Comments (2)

October 10, 2006

Lullaby Land: Amy Chan's Anxious Nintendo World

"Mall of America", 2004, gouache on paper, 38 by 50 inches.

Thought:

Amy Chan paints the universe you might find in the imagination of an especially nervous video game designer -- as if Philip Guston had somehow been made to serve as art director for Super Mario Bros. 2. In her work, the familiar surroundings of suburban America fracture into isolated islands separated by oceans of neutral space. With a running start you might be able to leap from one strip mall franchise to the next, but you'd probably need to be playing as Princess.

While her vertiginous way with architecture and landscape may also recall Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki (particularly 1986's air-faring fantasy, Castle in the Sky), Chan's heights imply falling much more clearly than flying. Buildings and land masses both threaten to slump down around us at any moment in a fit of Gustonian shlubbiness.

Chan also has a sharp eye for the portion of the color palette shared between Mario backgrounds and suburban surroundings; her paintings are mostly flat greens, muted browns, and dull grays punctuated by the occasional rich red and golden yellow. She applies this palette with a thin scrubby facture that is a far cry from the shiny perfection or physical insubstantiality that are the hallmarks of so much video game inspired art¹.

This is an interesting little friction point Chan's found between the most abstract concerns of mid-century High Modern painting and the aesthetic of an ascendant form of adolescent pop culture.

Artist's Statement:

My paintings use humor and appropriated imagery to convey the loneliness of the modern American landscape. My painting style is influenced by cartoon backdrops and decorative pattern, which gives the work an orderly yet fantastical quality. The combining of disparate imagery relates directly to my experience growing up in Connecticut, where nature, suburban development and historical remains closely crowd each other, but seldom mix.

(link)

Passing Shadows: Adia Millett's Photographed Miniature Interiors

Note: This post inaugurates an experiment I'm trying with the hope of assuaging the growing group of readers and friends I've heard from in horror lately as the proportion of technical content around here has grown. On each weekday, I'm going to attempt to write briefly about one artist whose work I find interesting. I'll provide relevant reproductions and links and hopefully just enough of my own take on the work to prevent the posts from deteriorating into mere pointing. If they're what you're here for, Ruby/Rails tutorials and longer essays will continue apace simultaneously. Enjoy!

millet_passing_shadows(chairs).jpg
"Passing Shadows (chairs)" 2006, 20 x 24 inches, c-print.

Thought:

Millet's work resembles the series of dollhouses constructed by millionaire heiress and master criminal investigator Frances Glessner Lee to resemble actual real life crime scenes only stripped of their narrative encrustations to reveal a gothic essence.¹ There's something that miniature subjects do to the depth of field of photographs that gets me almost every time. The closeness of the camera exaggerates the distance between fore- and background so miniature interiors often seem even more immersive than would equivalent pictures of real-sized spaces. (The effect is especially noticeable with low or direct lighting.) This kind of exaggeration of space is a mainstay of the gothic aesthetic (think of The Shining and Disneyland's Haunted House) and it is a welcome relief in a photographic idiom dominated by the pseudo-narrative approach of a thousand junior Crewdsons.

Another Red Day: Largehearted Goat Follow-Up

Well, I'm proud to say that because of me today was red:

If you mouseover that Goat, you'll see that the most recent edition of Shorties quoted at length from my post introducing Largehearted Goat. Since I mentioned The Mountain Goats in there it was the quote itself which qualified that Shorties post for a red square.

How ironic!

Thanks to David, the Boy himself, for having such a good sense of humor about the whole thing. It made for quite a pleasant little episode.

Tagged: largehearted, boy, goat, mountain, goats, indie, rock, mp3, blog, idfdz, ruby

Posted by Greg at 3:27 AM | Comments (0)

October 4, 2006

Largehearted Goat?

Here's something ridiculous.

Like many people who find themselves both music- and blog-inclined, I read Largeheared Boy with some regularity. It's amongst the more influential and more professional members of the mp3-blogosphere, replacing the conventional diary-driven individual record and song responses with regular daily postings that cover a wide swath of indie culture from book reviews through music.

By far the best feature produced by Largehearted Boy is a daily segment called "Shorties" that rounds-up the best web coverage of the authors and musicians in LB's pantheon. It's a great way to make sure not to miss the newest TV on the Radio interview or the most recent entry in the debate about mp3 blog aggregators and online music sharing.

After reading Shorties for a while, I began to notice that it contained a mild irritant which, over time, really got under my skin. LB couldn't seem to go for more than a day or two without mentioning long-standing indie rock stalwarts, The Mountain Goats. Now, I have nothing in particular against The Mountain Goats. Mostly, I couldn't care less about them one way or another. But something about the absolute consistency with which LB covers them -- as if they and their new record were the single most important thing happening in the world of music right now -- started to make me crazy.

And so, eventually, I came up with a plan that was also a little crazy. The result of that plan (and just a half-dozen or so hours of work), I now present to you: Largehearted Goat, a web app that tracks the obsession of indie rock mp3 blog Largehearted Boy with the band The Mountain Goats. With just a little hand holding, Largehearted Goat watches each day's new Shorties post and indicates whether or not it, in fact, mentions The Mountain Goats, by displaying the words "Goat" or "No Goat" (on a red or green background as appropriate) with links to the relevant LB posts. On Goat Days, hovering over the box will display the relevant excerpt (works best in Safari; Firefox, it turns out, truncates title tags after the first dozen or so characters). As the days accumulate over time, the app gives a quick-glance view of LB's Goat activity over time.

Anyway, I hope that this app serves as a balm to others who share my irritation, or at least as a mild distraction.