In 1977, as NASA was preparing to launch two spacecraft as part of the the Voyager Interstellar Mission, they enlisted astronomer/astrophysicist Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, the creative director of the project, to create a golden record that would be sent into space on the spacecraft. It was to be the ultimate mixtape of the human experience, an audio introduction to humanity to whatever unknown life form listened to it; it included a kiss, a mother’s first words to her unborn child, greetings in 59 different languages, music from all over the world.
In the course of working together to find just the right mix of sounds and music, Sagan and Druyan fell in love, in a stunning, immediate and completely unexpected way. And that inspired read more…
We’ve gotten a little lazy of late, since we dislike going to the gym (yellow walls with black floors under florescent lights) and we spend so many long hours at our desks. We could get stymied by our slide into laziness by comparing ourselves to all those buff self-disciplined people that faithfully climb onto the treadmill at the crack of dawn. Instead, we took a cue from this New Yorker cartoon, and decided to improvise a workout for ourselves at home, to just START with something simple, and work up: a bit every day. We figure doing something is better than doing nothing. And who says we have to work out a gym: the right way is what’s right for us.
A trainer we know has been showing us exercises we can do at home, with no special equipment, using chairs, walls, floor, steps. (We’re planning to write a post about it, once we know more.) We’re amazed at what we can do at home IF we just get off our butts and start.
Which we did, today…doing a few reps of light weights, some squats and some wall push-ups, after we’ve warmed up with skipping-rope-without-a-rope. We’re going to try to build working out INTO our workday, read more…
In case you haven’t heard, Harold Camping, the 89-year old billionaire owner of Christian Evangelist Family Radio, says the apocalypse is going to begin this evening at around 6pm EDT. What to do? We found rock-and-roll to be a good answer and have been tweeting songs for the apolcalypse. We recommend playing REM really LOUD.
It’s the end of the world as we know it It’s the end of the world as we know it It’s the end of the world as we know it And I feel fine!
This clip from an animated Krazy Kat cartoon drawn by Charles Mintz Studio’s the 1930′s reminded us how music often opens the way in the creative process… read more…
Dangerous Minds posted this free hour-long mix of the now defunct band Kraftwerk’s pioneering electronic music. (It seemed revolutionary when it first appeared. Curiously, we read that they were heavily influenced by the Beach Boys, in addition to the German composer Stockhausen). It’s an example of what’s possible from MixCloud, a site full of free music mixes.
We find short doses of Kraftwerk good to work to, i.e. we can think and write while it’s on in the background…some of it makes our ideas shoot around in a nice way. Some of it makes us jump around. (We don’t know how to shift off a song we’re not crazy about without interrupting the mix, so we just turn the volume down way low.)
99% recently published a compelling post called the Power of Uncertainty. The gist (though it’s worth reading the whole thing):
Projects fail all the time because we unwittingly bake the end solution into our initial objective. Rather than enduring an uncomfortable (but highly necessary) period of ambiguity, we fall into the trap of limiting our creativity by setting a project goal that is too narrowly defined from the start.
Ambiguity. We’ve been feeling that A LOT lately, as we find ourselves on the way to something but aren’t sure where we’re going. It made us google “ambiguity/ambiguous” (It felt a little like googling “what are we doing?”). We stumbled on a couple of nuggets of gold, like the quote from Gilda Radner, above, and this great play on the Creative Commons Licence… read more…
This Saturday afternoon in New York City, The Calder Foundation is sponsoring a twelve-hour one-day event that presents a continuous series of artist film screenings, performances and music. It takes its name from Alexander Calder’s response to Work in Progress, his 1968 theatrical production, Maybe I should have called it ‘My Life in Nineteen Minutes’. An extraordinary group of artists will be showing work, Calder, Yves Klein, Eva Luna, and William Wegman to name only a few. Holton Rower, whose wondrous Pour Painting we posted about last week (the video went seriously viral) will be doing a “live pour”, guaranteed to be an unforgettable experience (we know, we once watched him make one).
“….Influenced by Calder’s investigations into improvisational performance, appropriated materials and continual change through the development of his iconic ‘mobiles,’ Maybe I should have called it ‘My Life in Nineteen Minutes’ will traverse history by reading it through the present moment, zigzagging through different scenarios via the slippage of time and space. It will engage an active audience through different media and temporalities via numerous set-changes, playfully interrogating life’s intermissions.
…Inspired by the long history of improvised DIY art performances as cultural strategy read more…
The Fun Theory is a website dedicated to the idea that “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different…”
It issued a challenge, inviting the public to submit ideas for the best way to make good-for-us things – like throwing trash in the bin, or recycling glass bottles - fun. Check out the videos of General Entrees and Finalistst, which include a Diet Elevator and a Future Ex-Smoking Helper. Our favorite: this video illustrating how to make walking up stairs more fun than taking the escalator: make the stairs into a giant piano!
We just discovered BBC’s World Routes, a new archive of world music, an eclectic and unusual collection of indigenous music. You can sample the sounds of more than 40 countries, from Brazil, Corsica, China, Cuba, to Iran, Mozambique and Turkey. We’ve just spent an hour listening to Appalachian music, much of it acapella, and the Bambara Blues of Mali.
Commentators from BBC Radio 3 traveled through each country, including several conflict zones, to record the music. They set the scene with cultural details and history of the music you’re listening to. If you’re not in the mood to hear the interspersed descriptions or interviews, you can just move the music player’s slider to jump to the music.
This is an exceptionally rich archive, perfect for listening to when you’re driving, cleaning, cooking, crafting, hanging out on a weekend…
Whenever I find myself struggling to write and imagining harsh scrutiny and criticism, I listen to Anita Ellis singing Anyone Can Whistle. (Click to play in a separate page while you read.)
Steven Sondheim‘s lyrics about the desire to overcome one’s limits echoes Ellis’ own story. She was a vocalist of great renown in the 40′s and 50′s whose stage-fright was so overwhelming, she rarely sang in public. Instead, she sang on radio shows where no one could see her, and was the “voice” behind non-singing stars like Rita Hayworth and Shelley Winters. And she would sing privately, often a capella, for friends.
I was lucky enough to have been at a rare concert she gave in the 1980′s when she attempted once again to overcome her paralyzing fear of performing publicly. On stage early into the first song, she froze as she looked out into the audience, the moments passing in silence. Suddenly, her brother Larry Kert rose from his seat in the orchestra and called out: “Somebody lo-v-v-v-es you!”.
As though woken from a dream, Ellis began to sing. read more…
We’d never heard of Marni Stern before we read about her in the New Yorker last week, in Sasha Frere Jones’ “Note by Note: Marni Stern’s rapturous guitar“. Something she said made us go to Amazon to check out her music:
“The idea of potential and possibility is the only thing that drives me to keep going with music.”
We can totally get with that.
Stern’s music is loud, wild, nervy and powerful (be warned); she’s known as a guitar shredder because her playing is so FIERCE. At first she can seem like a tidal wave, then you begin to notice what’s going on INSIDE the music. Yet her lyrics are full of little gems like…
We were sad to read that Don Van Vliet, once known as Captain Beefheart, passed away recently. He was a complete original, a rare being in any era. Coilhouse described him as “one of the most singularly strange, goading, galvanizing musicians of the 20th century”. His band broke every rule in the ’70s and laid the groundwork for much that came after. His music, epitomized by the epic album Trout Mask ReplicaTrout Mask Replica, would at first seem impossible to listen to, and then suddenly illuminating. It is still wild stuff.
Cara de Silva sent us this fab video as a gift after watching our Ode to Joy post. It’s the great Django Reinhardt performing “Christmas Swing” (December 1937, Paris) set to footage from “The Night Before Christmas,” a television special from the 1950′s, sponsored by the Bell Telephone Company, PA., featuring the Mabel Beaton Marionettes. Dig that swingin’ Santa!
, a phrase borrowed from Alan Watts, the great 
and you can check it out 
