Hey Everyone,

So all is good. Last week (maybe it’s two weeks ago now?), we went to see the Homosexuals play at the AS220 which was amazing. Met Bruno Wizard (frontman) who was crazy/entertaining and bought their/his new Love Guns EP which is quite good. He says he’s working on a full length with his original guitarist in London so I can’t wait for that to come out. I asked him for a band name to use and he said Mongolian Milkman which is okay, I guess. Last night we went to the RISD Museum for one their regular Music Fridays. The music was, eh, a covers band, but we both really liked the Dale Chihuly glass exhibit. Here’s some photos:

Dale Chihuly at RISD Museum #1

Dale Chihuly at RISD Museum #2

We missed the David Macaulay show so we’ll have to go back. It was great finally getting to see the Chace Center now that it’s done. I’ve been listening to the excellent new Deerhunter alot this week (”Microcastle”). I really love Bradford Cox’s voice. Also been listening to Gang Gang Dance’s, “Saint Dymphna” and Von Südenfed’s, “Tromatic Reflexxions,” both of which I love.   So anyway, the web is just filled with great stuff this week. I thought I would share some of the things I came across.

1. The New York Times Magazine Design and Living 2008 issue came out last week along with a sweet website. Highlights are:
   • “A Home For New Chinese Art” - Photos of a gorgeous modernist house in upstate New York.
   • “Artful Lodgers” - Wealthy artists photographed in their lovely houses. Particularly of note: Fia Blackstrom’s very awesome and uncomfortable looking seat.
   • “Beijing Modern” - A profile of the artist Shao Fand
2. On election day, the New York Times featured a piece of web art that allowed users to type in one word that described how they felt. The word was then added to what they were calling a “word train.” Very cool. I wish they would keep it up permanently.
3. Also, this cool image by David Huffman.

Okay, that’s all that comes to mind right now. There will be more.

Best,
R.K.

Providence is beautiful and it feels like fall. The air is crisp and it bites at my fingers when I go down to take out the trash. I bought some Lillies as well as a few Mums–a Rhode Island falltime favorite–and their sweet fragrance fills the entire apartment (something I notice especially each time I emerge from the bedroom after having been in there working on music with the door closed). I spent the late evening going through old unfinished songs, splitting them up into folders with names like “bridges and choruses, etc.”

So it’s Monday morning and here in my cluttered, remote office I’m battling back a tidal wave of infrastructure catastrophies, customer support requests, and a backlog of unfinished work and unresponded to emails from last week. There are files that need parsing; parsers that need fixing. But things are not so bad. I have Atlas Sound to listen to. I have my coffee from Blue State. And I just discovered this awesome, awesome skate video.

I’m not so much into this skate porn genre necessarily but I am a sometime camera fetishist. This video was shot with a “Red” which is apparently some sort of high frame rate video beast. I don’t know exactly how they intend to depict a 120fps movie on a computer screen which can only hope to refresh 60fps max and I think the top actual frame rate for Flash is 30fps.

Okay, more later.

Excerpt from an interview with Dustin Long, author of Icelanders:

What tips would you give to aspiring writers?

This has been true for me, at least: If you want to write novels, write novels. By this I mean two things.

1. Don’t concentrate on writing short stories, thinking you’ll build up to a novel. They’re completely different animals. I still can’t write short stories very well, and I don’t feel that writing one has ever taught me much about the craft of writing a novel.
2. Actually write a whole novel. Don’t begin a novel, decide it’s bad, and then begin another one. Finishing a novel, however bad, taught me much more about novel-writing than beginning a novel ever did.

Taken from an 8/31/06 interview at Notes of a Defeatist.

Hi Everyone,

Some days the world is just filled with cool stuff. Here are my picks for this morning:

• This gorgeous New York times drawing by Lauren Nassef.

  Found here: http://www.laurennassef.com/ny-times-showing-the-patient-the-door-permanently/

• This profile of Alvin Lustig who designed the cover art for countless classic albums from the 1950s. A sample here:

  I have a bunch of these that I enherited from my grandmother so I seeing these brought back some nice memories. Also, I’d never bothered to look at the cover art.

• Amazing long exposure photographs of St. Petersburg by Alexey Titarenko.

  It’s an old technique. People have being doing this forever but I don’t think I’ve ever seen photos of this type that produce quite this effect. That smokey mess that you see going up the stairs is hundreds of people passing over the same spot.

• And finally…some sort of amazing diorama.

  I didn’t really bother to investigate this much but I really, really like architectural dioramas. Always have. Little toy trains, too. Growing up in Switzerland everyone had those little N and HO-scale model trains. I had a Lionel which was pretty cool, too.

Okay, that’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed your weekends.

Best,
RK

as you may well know, “photos from tiny showcase’s contacts” is my all-time favorite rss feed. feed:

actually. as a tribute i am going to be posting a feed viewer for this feed right here very soon. hold your breath.

atb,
rk

theCobalt_small
Originally uploaded by little drawings

hi everyone,

i’m just posting to say i love this drawing. this could be artwork for the “the city”–a song I wrote a long time ago but never released. “the city” was supposed to be the basis for an entire album on which many of the songs i have released subsequently have been based. since i am in archive mode, i will probably did up “city” and post it here fairly shortly for your listening pleasure.

later,
rk thornwell

Just sitting back, sipping my coffee, and listening to the soothing sounds of …disappearer… They’re playing in Providence tonight at Easy Axxess which seems to be a new venue / showspace. Tonight’s tinyshowcase 4-pack is most delicious. This one in particular I like:

Eh? It’s by Nigel Peake. For more of his stuff check out his online gallery. Some days are just like that: everywhere you turn you see something great that makes you want to make something (although admittedly the thing I most want to “make” in this case is a thirty dollar purchase). Wow, this band, …disappearer…, is really winning me over.I’m using this much needed break from my job and recording to sell some old music equipment on eBaY.

norse tale
Originally uploaded by Irina Troitskaya

I’m loving this.