Damn, Robert Doisneau and now Richard Avedon (others too)… Bad year for photography.
Then again, neither could be said to have been cut in their primes, but it’s a loss all the same.
You know you are getting old when you start spotting familiar names in first page obituaries every other day…
Despite my past as a nazi war criminal, my many arrests for international drug trafficking and convictions on multiple counts of felonies in more than 13 US states, the Japanese consulate just granted my new visa without so much as a personal interview.
I tell you, they really do let anybody in, these days.
今日領事館はかけた：新しいヴィザをもらいた！もうすぐ日本に返る。
Just when I thought Tokyo might be an expensive choice of a city to live in, all I need to do is go back to good ole blighty to realize that 800 yens is a cheap price for a drink compared to the 10 quids you’ll have to cough up at your average semi-hip London tavern. And the worst part is not the price, it’s the sudden and sad realization that I don’t care so much about mindlessly spending in a day what I used to live on for a month less than ten years ago, in the same city.
Granted, that warehouse we occupied was mostly… “rent-optional”. and candles do not make for high utility bills…
South is the way to go… good riddance Parisian clouds, Bonjour Mediterranean sun!
Getting there was something else…
Suffice it to say that, a close second behind French universities in terms of administrative bondage and institutionalized pointlessness, comes the French national railway company (SNCF).
Those who know both may start suspecting that I only do all this because I enjoy pain and suffering. Which might be true, though I’d rather it be mixed with a fair amount of sensuality, leather and eye-pleasing nakedness, certainly not inflicted by a bunch of middle aged counter zombies wearing faded green suits and stern faces. Or worse yet, involving getting whipped into submission by an army of cold faceless iron machines supposed to be spitting our tickets for a train departing exactly 4 minutes and 30 seconds later.
I am told that, were I to leave this page untouched for more than a few days, all you ritalin kids, invested with the attention span of your average lab rhesus monkey, would leave this oasis of hipness and insanely cool writing for the next happening spot in the blogosphere, expunging it from your bookmarks without ever looking back, you ungrateful sons of a jackal (I am also told that it’s bad manner to refer to your readers as the progeny of a desert carrion-eating pest, but I assume that, if you have been voluntarily subjecting yourself to my laborious grammar and approximative metaphors so far, you are of the masochistic kind, so I guess that makes it ok).
My friends Kristy and Tara have resumed their traveling around the world and are traipsing around South-East Asia and India at the moment.
Kristy has been regularly sending emails accounts of their (mis)adventures, and I thought it’d be nice to get her to start blogging these for a wider public.
So I made her a blog account and gave it a start by importing her past emails. Hopefully, she will be able to regularly add to it, net access permitting.
Eventually, she should also be able to upload pictures (as soon as I have time to finish the setup).
These girls are definitely not following your average chartered touristic path and their tribulations are filled with lots of weird and comical moments…
Anyway, if you are curious to know how two slightly crazy girls, yet seasoned travelers, are managing the bumming-around-Asia experience so far, go check out: http://WhereIsKristy.com !
A not-so-mini Mix to cap the series before it goes on a month-long hiatus (not like I have been very active on the music front recently anyway).
Since I’ll be away from my little home studio starting Friday, and busy as hell until then, there won’t be any opportunity for recording until I come back in October. Unless I end up being able to record one of my sets live somewhere, but I wouldn’t count on it too much.
This week’s mix is much longer than usual. Actually it doesn’t really fit the original “Mini Mix” guidelines… but do we care?
Also, I decided to make life easier on me, you and google, by adopting a “keyword” format for each mix… Not exactly a tracklisting, but as close as I care to go at the moment. I’ll be progressively adding this to older mixes too.
Keywords: deep, funk, jazz, afro, japanese house, sax orgy, Miles Davis, James Brown, Cricco Castelli, Charles Schillings, Femi Kuti, Dajae, Misia, François K…
[updated: added links to mp3 previews for each track]
Yea, I was not kidding when I said blogging rate was gonna be substantially lower for the weeks to come…
Just thought I’d come by and dust off the the place a little…
And since I do not have time to commit one of these mind-blowing pieces of apical intellectual content you have grown to expect from this blog, I have instead decided to shoot for the other extreme and stoop to an all time low in my personal blogging ethics: let me introduce our new “Playlist of the Week” feature.
Because the mere idea of joining the plebeian blogging masses by use of this all-too-common content filling artifice makes me physically ill, I have added a twist to my approach. Instead of vainly trying to slim down my rich musical tastes to a clean and ordered Top 10, I decided to make use of that crazy feature every iPod comes equipped with: Shuffle Mode!
Hence, the 10 songs listed below are randomly fetched by my iPod out of the rough 2500 it contains… which, if I may say, is quite a brilliant idea (I’m surprised I haven’t seen it anywhere else so far, but I can see it becoming a trend).
Why brilliant, you ask?
So, this time of the year is approaching again (well, round two of “this time of the year”) and I am trying my best to find interest in endless strings of exciting problems involving decks of cards being shuffled and drawn randomly (that’s the warm up part, nearly fun in comparison to the rest), Gaussian distributions and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests (that’s the part where you wish every Russian great minds had focused solely on refining vodka filtering processes instead of coming up with barbaric statistical formula)…
All these coins tossed a million times, checkmate combinations, statistics and game theory stuff reminded me of something I used to read with much more passion (back when I could still summon some sort of enthusiasm for math-related stuff): MIT AI Lab Memo 239 aka HAKMEM.
The HAKMEM is a compilation of tips, tricks and riddles for the math and computer geek.
Some of them are very outmoded (unless PDP-10 programming is your thing), but most are still entirely relevant (notably a handful of small theorems and empirical results, some of which still haven’t been proven to this day, afaik). There is also a lot of small numerical tricks, à la TAOCP that can be really useful in [near-]everyday software development.
Anyway if geeky math is your thing and you feel bored, then you should probably check it out. And if that sounds like rather uninteresting stuff, let me assure you that what I’m reading right now is a thousand times worse.
This, also to announce that post frequency on this blog is going to be lowered dramatically over the next 15 days (by a forecasted 58% ±6.3%, with a posting average standard deviation of 0.276), due to intensive last-minute efforts to reverse the adverse effects of a life of mind-altering substance abuse and cram two years of university Math & Physics program in whatever’s left of my brain.
After that, expect to see a lot of pretty pictures of European cities including many depictions of yours truly in miscellaneous advanced states of drunkenness, celebrating either his miraculous success in this venture or, quite possibly, his utter failure and ensuing humiliation at the hands of a hord of vicious French university scholars.
