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The Arts section of Orient Lodge
Street Angel 21
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/10/2013 - 20:53I sit and try to write, but start sneezing. I've got a list of things to write about, but I'm aching from some sort of virus exacerbated by too much shoveling after the great storm. I've tried to rest as much as possible, but I have a restless mind and have been thinking about a lot of different things. One is the 1928 silent movie, Street Angel.
The other day someone tweeted about a massive open online course, The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color. I signed up, watched the first two lectures and then started watching the first movie.
When I have more time, I'll weave this into a broader story about creative problem solving, tying in McLuhan and Papert. At another time, I'll reflect more on what we can learn about storytelling today by looking at early films. At another time, I won't be struggling to stay awake and write.
So, let me reflect, for a few moments on Street Angel itself. We start off with a daughter committing a crime to get medicine for her dying mother. Today, we have a safety net, but it isn't in the best shape, and I can imagine a young Latina born in Connecticut in a similar circumstance trying to get medication for her ailing undocumented mother.
Angelica, in Street Angel, becomes a fugitive, and their is no forgiveness for those who have broken the law. Again, we see parallels to modern day America. Some people broke the law a couple decades ago, coming to this country illegally. But too many people cannot forgive them, cannot give them a path to citizenship because they broke a law twenty years ago. Right now, there is legislation being considered that would ban citizens of Connecticut who have been convicted of drug related crimes from ever getting public assistance. No chance, ever, for forgiveness. Yet these are probably the people that need it most, and perhaps where we could have the biggest impact, lifting a person out of a life of crime and a circle of poverty.
A twenty-first century Street Angel, Street Angel 21, wouldn't be a silent black and white movie. It might be a mashup of graffiti, pictures, video, and social media, trying to address problems that have been around for a century.
The Inauguration
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 20:59The light snow was enough to turn the the minimal Martin Luther King Day evening commute into a traffic jam, so I sat in the car listening to reports of inauguration day. At lunch time, I watched President Obama's speech with coworkers who spend a lot of time focused on effective communications. It seemed like the pundits had heard a different speech, but perhaps that reflects the different frameworks we heard it from.
On the news, people talked about the speech in terms of the political conflicts of the day. Did President Obama extend enough of an olive branch to get us past the next debt ceiling deliberation or fiscal cliff folly? Will he be able to make headway on the legislative agenda implied in his speech? It all seemed so transactional, so petty, so caught in the moment.
I listened to it from a broader perspective, where did it fit on the arc of history, from the Gettysburg Address and Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech? I've often bewailed the lack of great speeches in modern day politics. Perhaps it is because of the focus on the soundbite and the immediate win. This speech did not have those flaws, or, as it seems some modern day pundits believe, those essential elements.
It fit well with the inauguration poem; 'One Today'. The poem, like the inaugural address was not part of some transactional moment, but instead took its appropriate place on the arc of history. As I watched Richard Blanco and thought of Chief Justice Roberts, I thought that Blanco had the loftier seat. Inauguration poems are something to remember, to savor, much more than so many of the Supreme Court decisions.
I remember the inauguration of a college president I attended. The inaugural poet was Denise Levertov, and her words have stuck with me for decades. I remember reading a story about about a farmwife heading to the county fair, and only seeing the quilts. For me, I'll remember the wordcraft. Later, I shall spend time reading Blanco's poems. Bu now, bedtime approaches. I'm tired, but still I must pause to practice putting words together and praise those who have do so, so eloquently.
Hacker, 2013
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/19/2013 - 08:11For Allen Ginsberg and Aaron Swartz
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.
The angry fix they sought was far different from that of Ginsberg's friends.
These hipsters were typing something other than 'starry dynamo' into the search engines.
They were Google mapping the seats of power at midday, not the negro streets at dawn.
They were fighting a in new revolution, a revolution that would take their life and liberty.
A junkie with a knife can be scary. He'll take the cash in your pockets and rush off for his fix,
leaving you shaken as you walk home. But a hacker with a mission, now that is dangerous.
He will shake the very means of production and distribution, the economy you depend upon
to get that cash into your pockets.
It's all well and good when they take down an Arab dictator.
It's tolerable when they change the news media and political process, as long as it can be co-opted by the press and politicians.
But when they start threatening the profitability of the legal and academic presses in the greatest democracy of the world, they must be hounded, driven underground, labeled hacker and felon, until they kill themselves.
Spoken Word Blogging
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/06/2013 - 09:17After college, I moved into an old cinnamon factory with a bunch of aspiring artists in New York City to be a writer. I was most interested in writing poems and short stories. I also had dreams of writing a great novel, but end up writing mostly computer programs.
Fast forward three decades, and I'm sitting in a nice house in suburbia writing blog posts on a laptop computer; a writing implement and genre that didn't exist back in the spice factory days. My online writing style continues to evolve. There have been times that I've written daily, sometimes, not very eloquently, in an effort to hone my craft. Other times, I've just been too busy to write regularly.
I'm starting off 2013 with a good string of blog post, but I've got a busy week ahead. I have to get non-blog writing done for other projects as well.
I'm also spending time trying to find things to inspire me and stimulate my creativity. Yesterday, I ended up on Sarah Kay's Ted talk, If I should have a daughter …
It got me thinking. Should I start hitting some of the poetry open mics? Should I start writing some more poetic blog posts to be read allowed, and then make a video of me reading them which I could share on YouTube? NPR has been doing an interesting series of having poets visit their news room and write poems about the experience and the day's news. Could I do a spoken word poetic news recap, perhaps drawing from other experiments in creative news, from the Daily Show to Autotune the news?
For politics, could I, a former, and perhaps future, political candidate, deliver spoken word poetic stump speeches?
I hope to give some of this a shot, perhaps even today, Epiphany, if I get the time.
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SuperCollider, Middletown Remix and Raspberry Pi
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/05/2013 - 10:49At work, I've been speaking with people involved with Middletown Remix. As part of the project, I met with Ron Kuivila, who teaches electronic music at Wesleyan. His biography on Wikipedia mentioned SuperCollider, "an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition". So, last night, I downloaded Supercollider and started playing with it.
I downloaded the Mac OSX universal image version 3.6.2 and started it up. It comes with documentation built in and it was fairly easy to get started. On my Mac, I had to use Shift-Return to kick off snippets of code. The server didn't appear as described in the documentation, but using s.boot; did the trick. The instructions saying to use Cmd-. to stop the sound weren't exactly clear. That's the command key and the period key.
Once I got that far, things started to come together really nicely, and I had my computer making some interesting sounds. Another bit of documentation that I found very interesting was How to Program in SuperCollider. It explained PBind which gave me the ability to play some tunes.
It took a little bit of remembering music theory, to get a scale that sounds half way decent.
(
Pbind(
\freq, Pseq([ 1/1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3, 15/8, 2 ] * 440, 5),
\dur, Prand([0.2, 0.4, 0.3], inf)
).play
)
The next subject it looks like I need to explore is SynthDefs.
With all of this coming together, the next obvious question was, what other devices could I run SuperCollider on? There is a great blog post on SuperCollider on the Raspberry Pi. I plugged in my Raspberry Pi, loaded the SuperCollider program on it and tried to get it to run. It seemed to run okay, but the instructions talked about using Overtone to control the SuperCollider server, and I haven't gotten that far. Nor have I done anything with Synths yet, which is what I read about in the
It does seem like an exciting project would be to use a large number of Raspberry Pi's running SuperCollider, and perhaps some sensors to make them react to what is going on around them. This could be used to create a sound installation, perhaps similar to what Ron spoke about with his rainforest installation.
I also started playing with SuperCollider for Android. I got it to start and make a sound, but not do anything subsequent. Their page, How to control SC Android remotely didn't seem to work with my Android. and server remained listed as inactive. However, using the same commands to my Raspberry Pi, I did manage to get indication that the Raspberry Pi SuperCollider server is running properly.
That pretty much captures where I am with SuperCollider, Middletown Remix and Raspberry Pi this morning. It's time to get about my chores. If've you're playing with SuperCollider and/or Raspberry Pi, let me know what your up to.
