My DVD of Decasia arrived today. I’m watching it tonight with the sound off (I haven’t bothered repatching since the Bryston went back). Very nice, although the print has quite a few transfer artifacts, which is a little ironic. I had forgotten that I still had my active subwoofer connected, which adds a certain something a few minutes after the nuns…
For a couple of years, my main CD source has been my Theta Data Universal Transport — a laserdisk/CD player from the early 90s. Fed through a Meridian 518 for dejittering and upsampling to 24-bit, it has always sounded good through my Yamaha DSP-AX1 amp. But recently, I’ve started to feel it’s been missing something at the top end. Conversely, CDs played on my Arcam FMJ DV27 have sounded mechanical, with a lack of warmth in the bass, and overbright, unrefined treble. Assuming that the Theta’s failings at the top were probably simply masking the limitations of the Yamaha’s power …
I first saw Rybczynski’s Tango, I Can’t Stop and some of Orchestra on the ABC’s Sunday Spectrum strand on TV back in the 80s in Tasmania (the original Sunday Spectrum doesn’t even rate a mention on the ABC website, but it was really important at the time. I seem to remember the work of Rybczynski, Michael Snow and Ed Emshwiller all being shown within the same month. Revelations.) I’ve been hunting The Fourth Dimension since Tokyo. Tim saw it at (I may be wrong) Image Forum, and made it sound a thing worth tracking down. That was probably 13 years …
Compressed digital formats (mp3 and its ilk) are expedient: they save storage space and download time. But there’s something rather disingenuous about MusicMatch — the software accompanying iPod on the Windows platform — misrepresenting 128kbps mp3 as ‘cd quality’! There is a certain aesthetic to degraded digital audio — classic 12-bit samplers sell at inflated prices on eBay for their ‘authentic hip hop sound’ — but the post-Napster generation is being sold a lie by the music industry about the quality of the music they’re being offered by the ‘legal online music revolution’. It’s certainly quicker to download a compressed …
Me. Think I need to write something which spiders that into a desktop slideshow.
A selection of Zbig Rybczynski’s early films and his HDTV work from the 80s is now available on DVD. Shame it isn’t HD-DVD. And shame I don’t have an HD-DVD player. Oh well. Really wish I could find this stuff on Japanese HD laserdisc (and that I had one of those ancient MUSE HI-Vision decks to play them on…)Oh and Happy New Year. I’ve been very busy with work and thinking, and this is the first thing I’ve seen this year that I’ve wanted to post. More to come soon…
There’s a generation now, here on the island, which grew up entre deux guerre, as there was in the 1930s: after the Cold War, and before the Pervasive War, looking for a new way out of the old years. Towards the end of the 20th century — sold New Labour, sold Cool Britannia. Pop culture. Y2K the biggest fear. Borrowed cool (and not just the Wallpaper* elite). But the Millennium didn’t end the 20th century, any more than January 1 1900 was the start of it. C20 got off to either a very early start (Alan Moore’s take on Jack …
Just in case anyone missed it, a few of the requests that the US has made for protecting President Bush during his state visit to London this week: immunity from prosecution should any Secret Service agents kill anyone (or, indeed, everyone), shutdown of the London Underground system, use of miniguns for crowd control (!), and a sterile zone patrolled only by US personnel. These requests have all been turned down by the UK government. The jury is still out on whether they will shutdown the mobile phone networks to stop those sneaky terrorists using peer-to-peer to organise their movements. Given …
Tim points this one out. This is exactly what I mean by glanceware. That it is entirely non-linguistic is even better. Know that you know something, without necessarily being aware how you know it. Their Stock Orb is exactly what I was proposing here.