Friday April 13, 2007

Hello and welcome back. This past Wednesday one of my personal and artistic inspirations departed this world for whatever lies beyond. Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels that were both fictional and full of truth. His humor was darker than the dark matter that fills the void between the stars, at turns satiric and cynical, and always a bit absurd. It was a balancing act that defied convention and definition. His books were often labeled as science fiction, but there was little hard science in them and the fiction had that persistent vein of truth that ran through everything he touched. I never read all of his works, but those I did read had a profound influence on the direction of my life and art. Slaughterhouse Five is considered by most to be Vonnegut's breakaway novel and drew on the author's experience during the allied fire-bombing of Dresden. That horrifying incident represented literally the death of art at the hands of war. What Vonnegut managed to do was nothing less than a resurrection of art in the form of the novel. The circle closed and the phoenix rose from the ashes. Art survives death and destruction and in doing so is a life force. Thank the fates for the bards and storytellers, players and singers, and above all those who can tell the truth, frame it as entertainment, and make us both laugh and find the truth within. I think I'll stick with writing for a while and see where it leads.

The picture of the week was created using Bryce
Click on the picture to get a full-sized view.

The loops of the week are going be delayed while I find a new host for the files. Those acidified WAV files take up a a fair amount of space, so I'm on the hunt for a bigger place to house them.

The website of the week is Jump the Shark, a page devoted to the moment when a TV show looses all touch with reality or the illusion thereof.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.

Bye for now!

Friday April 6, 2007

A very good, Good Friday to one and all. The topic for this week is music, and more specifically live performance. Every band or individual will eventually reach a point at which they've outgrown the garage or bedroom. The likely first gig for an aspiring artist will be a nice non-paying night at the local pub or coffee house, or an “open-mic” night. While playing for free or for beers doesn't seem very glamorous, you're slowly gaining the essential experience necessary to take it to the next level. It's a well known fact that the Beatles played a number of low-rent dives in Hamburg before hitting it big, and there is a persistent rumor in these parts that the band that would become Van Halen performed at Pasadena High School in the days before they were the toast of the Sunset Strip. It all goes to show you need to pay your dues and do the hard yards before you reach stardom. This past Tuesday I did my first live performance on guitar (rather than keyboards) at a local pub during a blues jam/open mic night. The house band was very forgiving and overlooked my beginner nerves and obvious flubs. It's a continual learning and growing experience that I would recommend to anyone with a love of making music.

I thought it would be appropriate for Easter to share some pictures I took of bunnies living in the park near my home. They aren't wild rabbits. They're domestic pets that were abandoned in the park. That bit of thoughtless cruelty nearly made me cry, but fortunately for the little long-ears there are some good people who have been putting out carrots and proper rabbit food. They have a comfy hole in the concrete wall to evade the numerous dogs and occasional coyote and they seem quite healthy. Happy Easter Bunnies!

Click on a picture to get a full-sized view

The website of the week is my old friend Mark Craig's Blog. It's something like the mathematical inverse of my highly artistic and largely unstructured blog.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.

Bye for now!

Friday March 30, 2007

Greetings my faithful friends and long-distance co-conspirators. I'm back after a bit of absence caused by a great deal of job stress and the stain of making the hard decision to resign. Old Mark the gray cat was being worked like a gray mule and continually underpaid, so I quit and decided to seek some other line of work. I'm currently looking for an opportunity to do some freelance computer consulting, and I'd like to start my own music production and software design business. I'll keep making the Mark's Digital Arts posts in the meantime, if only to keep some small semblance of sanity. This week is for recovery and transition and next week I'll be back to the usual mix of fun and enlightening stuff.

The picture of the week is one I took just down the street from my apartment. I liked the look of the neon and was experimenting with taking photos without a flash.
Click on the picture to get a full-sized view

I'll be back in a week or so with more of my skewed views and lyrical leanings.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!

Friday March 16, 2007

Hi all. Old Gray Cat Whiskers (Mark) is not feeling well tonight, so the entry will be postponed until tomorrow or Sunday. I'm going to bed early and we'll see if we can't have the usual week's worth of stuff here!

TTFN and TGIF!

Friday March 9, 2007

Good Evening Friends! Life goes on and I continue to roll along with it. The topic for today is computer programming and what is often the first program you write. One of the simplest tasks that you can do in any programming language is to display a text message on the screen. What has emerged as a kind of non-standard standard is for that simple program to display the message “Hello World”. There are literally hundreds of examples in just about every known programming language of this simple program. The earliest known example of the “Hello, world” program was created by Brian Kernighan, the co-author of “The C programming language” book, the definitive tome on C. Check out this fairly funny list of Hello World programs based on age and experience, and this rather exhaustive list of Hello World variants (314 computer and 25 human languages).

This week’s picture was created using Project Dogwaffle
Click on the picture to get a larger view.

The loops of the week were created with Orion Pro.
Right click on the name of a loop to download it.

----- Bass 1 ----- Bass 2 -----
----- Drums 1 ----- Drums 2 ----- Drums 3 ----- Drums 4 -----
----- Ping 1 ----- Ping 2 -----

The website of the week is Dork Tower, a web comic that explores the lives of gamers.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!

Friday March 3, 2007

Weekend Greetings! This weekly post may be a bit late because the cable that feeds me TV and Internet was down. That’s right amigo y amigas, the old gray cat has been without cable TV and the ‘net since Monday. Somehow I’ve managed to maintain my fragile grip on sanity in spite of the sensory and entertainment deprivation. I suppose there are some who would consider the absence of digital input an opportunity for solace and growth. Pity I’m not made of that noble stuff, else I wouldn’t have been pacing and rambling like a crack-addicted lab monkey in search of his next fix. Well, maybe not so bad as that. I did have my DVD’s and I was able to check my email and do a bit of clandestine surfing from work. Next time I'll be a little better prepared for a dry spell.

This week’s picture was created using Anim8or and Terranim8or.
Click on the picture to get a full-sized view.

The loops of the week were created with Orion Pro.
Right click on a loop name to download it.

----- Bass 1 ----- Bass 2 ----- Bass 3 ----- Bass 4-----
----- Drums 1 ----- Drums 2 ----- Drums 3 ----- Drums 4-----
----- Synth 1 ----- Synth 2 -----

The website of the week is Nic Squirrell’s lovely illustrated blog.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!

Friday February 23, 2007

Buongiorno! It’s another chilly Friday and I’m tired but inspired. This week the topic turns again to music creation and I’ve lined up some choice PC music tools to share. The programs in question are from the AnalogX site, small, easy to use and, best of all, they’re free (!). There are a number of these bite-sized, stand-alone and plug-in apps available at the site, but my favorites are the vocoder, the speech synthesizer, and the auto-tune. The vocoder can be used to make a human voice sound electronic or robotic. The Cylons (in the old Battlestar Galactica TV show, not the new one), or any number of ELO songs used the distinct sound of a vocoder. A speech synthesizer can take a typed string of words and turn it into roughly recogonizable human speech. The auto tune simply can detect and change the pitch of a WAV format sound file. The downside to these freebies is that they’re mostly monophonic rather than stereo and limited in resolution to 16 bits of output. The good part is that they are free software tools that perform musical functions that used to require a rack full of costly equipment. Give them a try, and send me your own review!

There was some belated news from the blog tag of 2 weeks ago. This week I got a nice note from Disaster Gurl and she’s going to continue the chain and tag 5 others. For my part I was polite, lest it be said I was flirting with Disaster.

This week’s picture was created using Project Dogwaffle
Click on the picture to get a full-sized view.

The loops of the week were created with Orion Pro.
Right click on a loop name to download it

----- Bass 1 ----- Bass 2 ----- Bass 3 -----
----- Drums 1 ----- Drums 2 ----- Drums 3 ----- Drums 4 -----
----- Electric Piano 1 -----Electric Piano 2 -----

The song of the week is Hocus Pocus, originally by Focus and covered by Gary Hoey.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!