dentite

today i went to the dental hygenist. they really name that in such a way that if you don’t know what it is, well, i don’t think i would have gone if it had been called “dental scraping”. my mouth bled a lot, there was lots of blood, and flakes. shards flying around the room!

“calcified yuck” they said, is what the shards were.

the train home

on the train home i made this:

using a cassette recorder, the op-1 and the wired heart which i got with a voucher for doing a marketing interview with bitwig.

op-1 split drum

the drum kit on “teeth scrape teeth” is the op1’s built-in AWA Beef kit, which i fed through the tape recorder and back into the op-1 and chopped it up.

i wanted to share the kit with kara, but the op-1 stores kits as a single AIF instead of separate samples for each drum. luckily people have reverse engineered the drum format plenty. it has some embedded json in it, a bit of (standards compliant!) trickiness with the AIFC spec. the json has the start and end points for each sample (as a frame. like, you take the start value (big number) and divide it by 44100 (for the sample rate) and divide that by 4096 (for the block size) and that’s the start time in seconds).

so i threw together a scrappy script to parse the json and extract the segments with ffmpeg.

if you want it, here it is:

• extracted kit
• original op-1 ready aif

I’m going to charge my ipod nano, and fill it with mp3s and audiobooks. then i’m going to buy a digital camera and a feature phone with a hardware keyboard for texting.

Drawing room

we went to a small art gallery for the last time this year. it was full of automatic drawing and ghosts. https://drawingroom.org.uk/exhibitions/not-without-my-ghosts-the-artist-as-medium

There was a William Blake drawing of the ghost of Voltaire he probably saw in Peckham. always seeing ghosts, wasn’t he, blake. in peckham. on the rye.

Anna Mary Howitt

anna mary howitt burnt all her paintings and started drawing these complex pencil drawings that often centered a lady Christ. i’m trying to read more about her in a public domain biography that’s been digitized by a computer, but:

The desire being generally expressed for these brief “ Reminiscences” to be expanded and amplified, my mother commenced grarlmllv making the neorlfnl preparations.

• PORTBAIT OF ALuiY HowiTT [from a photograph) . Frontispiece
• PAOR
• The Home at Uttoxeter . . . . . . .12
• The Eey. /\JS’^3 CL0rES 36
• Mes. Clowes attended by two Gextlemex of the Towx . 37
• AxNA Bothvm at Croydox . . . . . . .45
• Home of William Howitt at Hkanor 73
• AcKWORTH School 76
• Thomas Howitx of Heaxor (William Howitt’s Father) . 89
• Jubilee of George III.
• Birds and Flowers “ — Failure of the Conslitutional—ThaceTeLj and Dickens

Ithell Colquohoun

how come i never heard of this british surrealist occultist author? really excellent surrealist art and automatic drawing stuff with watercolours. and MAGICK. she was expelled from the british surrealist society, just because she wouldn’t renounce the occult, even though she had all this wheat:

is that wheat?

plenty of tasty grass of some kind anyway. they’ll be embarrassed when the Æon of Ma’at comes and they have no grass.

that one was painted in cornwall. i’ll ask glynn about it.

Ann Churchill

https://www.richardsaltoun.com/content/feature/220/artworks-19400-ann-churchill-blue-oval-drawing-1975/

morris interview

Chris Morris is very good in this interview. the interviewer keeps trying to get him to say “you can’t do satire these days mate what with trump and all” but he won’t, and he’s very elegant about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8

time for bed

tomorrow is the last day before the nightmare begins. remember to enable 2fa then log out of twitter, then log in as an account that only follows natalie imbruglia, then block api.twitter.com in your hosts file and delete the app from your phone. remember that you can read books instead of the news. remember that takes won’t help, only eggy bread will.