i’d rather be in haena   

The making of 77 Million Paintings.

MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files have been posted at The Long Now Foundation’s website:
http://seminars.moose.cc/salt-0200606-wright-and-eno/salt-0200606-wright-and-eno.mp3
http://seminars.moose.cc/salt-0200606-wright-and-eno/salt-0200606-wright-and-eno.ogg
and a summary of the event appears here:
http://discuss.longnow.org/viewtopic.php?t=122

The Long Now Foundation sponsored a talk with Brian Eno and Will Wright tonight at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.
The appearance was sold out. Eno sat at a table behind a Powerbook, a portable CD player and what appeared to be a small mixing board. Sims creator Will Wright sat behind two laptops.
After (and during) a somewhat rambling and disjointed PowerPoint presentation from Wright, the two began riffing about “Playing With Time.” Eno vaguely touched upon generative music theory during repeated interruptions by Wright. Wright’s geek-programmer tangents were corralled more than twice by a gracious (and often bemused) Eno, who kept reminding Wright about something called “Spore.”
The bulk of the talk turned out to be a product presentation about Wright’s next computer-game diversion, Spore. This particular segment was guaranteed to provoke rabid word-of-mouth about the project. It’s a single-player game, but an aggregate online universe will be created by all users, where participants form and populate their own worlds and visit other planets and galaxies.
Spore will be huge, especially with kids. The ability to elaborately mold avatars and beings (“it took me three minutes to create something it would take someone at Pixar two weeks to do” said Wright after constructing a particularly goofy mutant animal) will instantly addict children and adults.
Eno’s contributions weren’t exactly groundbreaking, but were characteristically thoughtful and wonk-y. He concluded with a truncated version of his “Culture is everything we don’t have to do” speech.
All told, it was a worthy way to spend $10 on a foggy Monday night. Downloadable audio and a purchaseable DVD of the event will soon be available at The Long Now Foundation website.
[UPDATE 6/28/06 5:32pm: read what others thought].

I love this place. It speaks to the connect-addicted geek in me. I’m glad I got here 90 minutes early.
Everglades today: a drive half-way across Alligator Alley, turning around at Big Cypress/Seminole reservation.
Soundtrack:
Harmonia Deluxe (inbound)
Brian Eno Another Green World (levee road to Big Cypress and back)
Holger Czukay On The Way To The Peak Of Normal (outbound)
Then I drove to Ft. Lauderdale Beach to kill an hour before returning the car. Let’s just say it was Pure Hell and leave it at that.

Hope it will at least be worth a listen. Anytime Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno get together, I’m interested.

Along with Talking Heads’ Remain In Light and Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is an album that helped redefine artrock in the early 80s. These releases helped bring international musics to the relative mainstream and simultaneously bury twiddly late-70s progressive rock bombast (full disclosure: I still listen to a lot of the latter, at high volume…especially when it’s late at the office and no one else is around).
A justifiably big deal is being made of the Nonesuch label’s March 28th reissue of Bush Of Ghosts (new album art shown at left). Those who know me well know me as nothing if not a Brian Eno apologist, so I’m looking forward to the project– especially the seven bonus tracks and MPEG video of “Mea Culpa.”
Yes, Byrne and Eno were and still are a couple of rock’s pre-eminent eggheads. Bush Of Ghosts is a classic in most senses of the word, and it’s aged well (unlike a lot of Eno and Byrne’s subsequent work. Sorry, I just had to get that in). The album works on a gut level: you can dance to it, and the found middle-eastern vocals and TV evangelist rants give the album a perverse neo-gospel feel. You can overintellectualize the irony of the latter, too, if that’s the sort of thing that blows your dress up.
Much of the Bush pre/re-release hype seems based around David Byrne’s gee-whiz-we-were-so-ahead-of-our-time quotes, while few of the journalists involved mention an album that was issued over two years before Bush: Holger Czukay‘s 1979 release, Movies.
Movies is absolutely amazing. The melodies are insidiously stellar, the rhythms (courtesy Can’s Jaki Liebezeit) metronome-perfect, and every song is woven with found sounds from Czukay’s shortwave radio. “Persian Love” is possibly among the most gorgeous tunes ever composed, and represents Czukay’s career high point (although the sidelong “Ode To Perfume” from 1982′s On The Way To The Peak Of Normal is a close second). Czukay speeds up the guitar, giving it an African highlife pitch, and middle Eastern vocalists (guesting courtesy the shortwave) trade solos as the beat shuffles and canters.
Everpresent, too, are Holger’s eccentric basslines, familiar to any Can fan. Where Bush seems to be suffering a disco hangover during some of its more pedestrian grooves, Movies soars with instrumental backing best described as indefinable. “Czukay-like” might be the only appropriate simile. Movies is one of those early 80s Eurock curiosities that will always date well.
Completionists and comparison-ists will also need to track down Canaxis. Czukay is joined by co-producer Rolf Dammers on this 1968 (!) LP. There are some very perceptive reviews of the album on Amazon. It’s arguably one of the first LPs to meld field recordings of vocalists with studio instrumentation.
Listening to Canaxis, Movies and On the Way To The Peak Of Normal just wants to make me laugh at David Byrne. More than usual, I mean. “Gee, we didn’t even have samplers back then.” Uh huh. What next? “Cardboard boxes? I would have KILLED to live in a cardboard box! When I was studying Bauhuas Theory at the Rhode Island School of Design, I had to sleep in Wendy’s dumpsters and eat gravel!”

Snapper first perfected the post-Neu/Harmonia keyboard drone later copped by Stereolab. Just sayin’.
As long as I’m keeping score of artrock influencers and influencees, please read this chapter as your homework assignment for Wednesday night. For extra credit, write a paragraph explaining who– two years before Eno and Byrne released Bush of Ghosts– put out an amazing record utilizing found vocals and world-spanning musical cross-hybridizations and stitched the whole kaboodle together with some luscious melodies and spontaenous composition.
For very extra credit, name the 1968 LP associated with the above mystery artist that predated Eno/Byrne’s 1982 “ethnological forgery.”

I was preoccupied during the last few months (like, the last 8 or 9, actually) of the 2005 and didn’t feel passionately about contributing a List.
I have since been suffering post-no-list remorse and need to be clear of this negativity.
I came really close to listing the Kate Bush CD Aerial but I need to hear it a few more times. I’m fairly certain it’s not as uninspiring as The Red Shoes. Yes, I am getting more and more into chick music in my old age. Sue me.
CDs:
Brian Eno Another Day On Earth
Phutureprimitive Sub Conscious
Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine
Films:
Me And You And Everyone We Know
Serenity
MirrorMask
DVDs:
Brian Eno 14 Video Paintings
Bill Hicks Live
Hot Chick Stoner BBQ
Songs:
Cat Power “The Greatest”
TV:
Six Feet Under
Reliable Sources
Extras
Frontline
NOVA

Older Artifacts, But New (Re-)Discoveries:
DVDs:
Lain
Haibane-Renmei
Appleseed
Ghost In The Shell
Arrested Development
Mr. Show
The Larry Sanders Show
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Mayor Of The Sunset Strip
Firefly

Songs:
Handsome Boy Modelling School with Cat Power “I’ve Been Thinking”
Sigmatropic with Cat Power “Haiku Ten”

The current issue of Arthur magazine (Brian Eno cover, issue #17, July ’05) isn’t available for online reading yet but there’s a worthwhile Douglas Rushkoff essay called “Be Your Own Guru” inside.
I found this quote illuminating:
Transference is a … terrific technique for engendering loyalty. Back in the ’90s, I did some studies on coercive tactics. From the CIA Interrogation Manual to one of Toyota’s sales handbooks, I found the same basic strategy: confuse or disorient the subject until they regress to a childlike state, then step in as a parent figure and offer relief by accepting a confession or sale.