The Sound of Space

There's no sound in space, you say? There's nothing to transmit sound, you say? Well you're (sort of) right, but that hasn't stopped people from listening. For instance, professors at the University of Iowa have posted sound recordings made by satellites and other spacecraft, recordings of everything from lightning on Saturn to the sound of the solar winds. Space is filled with all sorts of radiation, everything from radio waves to visible light and so on, and these recordings are made by translating these waves into audio.


Minimalist composer Terry Riley has even composed a string quartet performance based on these recordings, called Sun Rings

This dreadfully academic video explains the composition and some of the recordings. I'd skip ahead to about half way, or just skip it all together and just listen to these really beautiful sounds from Jupiter, via Nasa.


Caspian Sea Monster

Now that I'm both unemployed and out of school, I figured I should devote my time and this space to my hobby of amassing neat but completely useless e-junk.

So first up, this amazing, eerie soviet video of ekranoplans; ground effect planes/ships that fly just a few meters above the water, taking advantage of the ground effects that occur when a plane flies lower than its own wingspan. The video has a great drone soundtrack too, I can't stop watching it.


These things are some of the biggest planes ever built. The largest, dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster, was longer than a football field, could move over 1000 tonnes of cargo, and crossed the Caspian at speeds over 250mph. The soviets kept the project secret, so you can imagine the poor fishermen who undoubtedly found themselves in the path of these speeding behemoths. Keep in mind they never flew more than a few meters above the water.



The project ended sometime in the mid-nineties, and you can see a couple of abandoned ekranoplans in google earth at 42°52′50″N, 47°39′57″E



Commercial interest in ekranoplans continues, and several private companies apparently produce or plan to produce ekranoplans in the future. Interestingly, ekranoplans are considered a ship rather than a plane by international maritime regulations.

Ground effect is a complex phenomenon that involves the air underneath the wing and its relationship to the ground. If a plane has a wing span of twenty meters, then ground effect takes over when the plane flies lower than twenty meters. In regular aircraft, the effect allows for smooth landings, creating a pillow of air that dampens turbulence. It also reduces drag, so if you can fly low enough, you'll be able to fly further and faster using less fuel. And of course you'll be flying under enemy radar.

On the other end of the aviation spectrum, just last week WhiteKnightTwo flew for the first time in the California desert. This high altitude aircraft will launch SpaceShipTwo, the private spaceship that will carry space tourists into low Earth orbit. Check out Mojave Skies for a write up of last weeks test flight.


pic from Alan Radecki at Mojave Skies
The following is a series of paths that could be traced between North Platte, NE and St. Cloud, MN, following the rules of Feynman Diagrams.

North platte Oneil Vermillion St. James Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Plankinton Madison Litchfield St. Cloud

North platte Oneil Vermillion St. James Slayton Litchfield St. Cloud

North platte Oneil Vermillion St. James Slayton Pipestone Madison Litchfield / St. Cloud

North platte Oneil Vermillion St. James Slayton Pipestone Plankinton Madison Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Plankinton Pipestone Madison Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Plankinton Pipestone Slayton St. James Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Vermillion Slayton Pipestone Madison Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Vermillion Slayton Pipestone Plankinton Madison Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Plankinton Pipestone Slayton Vermillion St. James Litchfield St. Cloud

North Platte Oneil Plankinton Madison Pipestone Slayton Vermillion St. James Litchfield St. Cloud

Ways and Means

Chicago street artist Solve was murdered a couple days ago. Although I never met Solve, he lived (and was killed) just a few blocks from where I live, we probably knew many of the same people in the arts community, we probably even went to the same parties. These aren't, however, the reasons why his death hit me in such a profound way. It's because I knew his art so well. His work, like a few other prolific street artists in Chicago, followed me everywhere I went. It became familiar; I looked for it subconsciously wherever I went, and I often looked for it consciously too. It enhanced my life, made me smile, and made this already interesting city even more complex and beautiful.

Street art, graffiti, whatever, anything from tags all the way up to stuff like Solve's clandestine video installation on the blue line, these works take private property and make it public. It reclaims something lonely and gives it to the community. When I see a great piece of street art, it becomes mine, I own it, and I possess it in a way that studio art never allows.



It also sucks because apparently Solve was super nice guy, and his name was really his message- solve. Solve the problems our community faces.

photo by Joyful Morgana

We're computerizing and we just don't need you anymore

Well, to my surprise, the reading went rather well. The not-so-cheap cheap beer helped, certainly, but I think I'm actually getting the hang of performing in front of crowds. Seemed like most of the people in attendance were teachers (probably because one of the other writers performing was a teacher at columbia), but still, when SAIC hosts readings, we're lucky if even one faculty member shows up. Furthermore, everyone I spoke with was friendly and down to earth, except for the one fellow SAIC student, who was the most awkward, withdrawn artist type in the place, and she told me my work "paired object with emotion" and then quickly meeked her way out of the room. Oh artspeak, blessed artspeak; anyone care to decipher what 'pairing object with emotion' actually means? Cause I haven't a clue.

Our living room looks like some sort of meth lab gone wrong; we've got blenders, fans, tarps, tubs of murky water, shredded paper, sawdust and cement dust, a few dozen beer cans... more on this later.

Here's a picture I took last fall. The sepia bugs me but not enough to change it or anything. Just visualize it color-balanced.
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Somehow

I completely forgot that I'm giving a reading tonight at Manhattan's Bar in the south loop. I guess it's part of Columbia's grad writing program, or at least organized by one of their students. I don't know how, but I almost missed it completely, I just woke up in the middle of the night and realized it was today. I'm not exactly prepared...

Wow

31 people were shot this weekend in chicago. And the crazy part is this- that's not much more than normal apparently.

Only two people were stabbed though. What happened to a good knife fight?

Huh

I kid you not, just yesterday I spent a good half-hour reading about mid-west earthquakes- the New Madrid fault and whatnot, you know, in southern Illinois, where this earthquake thing just happened this morning.

And I won poker last night. I'm pretty sure this makes me a certified clairvoyant, if not all out soothsayer.

Oh 7th grade vocab words.

Elsewhere, here's proof that my home town Colorado Springs is the only place home to crazies a notch crazier than those silly mormons in texas.

How it feels to be something on

I'm not sure why blogs seem to come and go. This is my fifth blog in as many years, and they've all followed the same trajectory- in a creative fit i'll start one, spend lots of time designing it to look half-way not shitty, update feverishly for a time, then get bored with it, then comes that strange embarrassment phase where I wish I'd never started it, then I delete it.

well I'm not going to do that with this blog, yet, although I've already stopped updating very often. I sold my little digital camera last week because I was broke and figured my digital SLR was enough for one man, but it's so big that I never take it anywhere- hence no pictures these days. Oh well.

On the bright side, this week is rather fantastic. Tuesday was the joint BFA/MFA reading at the Joan Flasch Artist's Book Collection, which scared the shit out of me since I was collaborating with someone I'd never met, and his work was the exact opposite of mine- he had these odd poem things that were loud, screamy, almost rap, almost scat, almost slam, and I had my whimpy little regular poems. We read side by side, alternating after each poem, so this exaggerated the contrast. Surprisingly I think people liked it.

Then tonight at SUGS I'm in a show about the suburbs, mostly painting and photography, and then there's my poem- in vinyl on the wall. The curator called me last week freaking out because even at one inch letters the poem was 14 feet long. 14 feet! talk about compensating...

Plus we finally broke 70 degrees for the first time in half a year. That's the third longest span of sub 70 degree weather in chicago's history.

And the blue line was fucked on tuesday, people were trapped for hours, smoke, evacuations, thousands of angry passengers yelling, fun fun. The funny thing is that I'm really glad stuff like that happens, it brings the city together and shows us how much we need public transportation, and also how fun it is for half the city to be three hours late for everything.

I owe my roommate a third of a bottle of cheap champagne and some grape soda on top of that, but let me say- yay for grape soda mimosas before class.

Oh, and one last thing, my friend mike and his awesome awesome awesome band the Jack Trades called me up last night and asked me to design them a flier. Thoughts?

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The Fabulous Destiny of... (how it ends)

More artists should be like Peter Doig. Down to earth, humble, good sense of humor, and also a great painter. He deservedly has a big show at the Tate right now. Check out this video of him talking about his work.

Memorie Dal Futuro

hilarious, if a bit heavy handed, article in the Onion.

the temple

I like this photo because it's sort of like time travel.

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I don't know much about the older building, except that it houses an anachronistic Sears department store on the first four levels and a bunch of empty offices on the upper levels. It looks to date to the same era as the Carson Pirie Scott building across State Street, which would put it at 1899, although I'd bet it was a built a few years later. I could see into the upper floors of the building from my old residence in the Chicago Building, and they were mostly empty offices and rusty stairwells. The cornerstone of the newer building, One South Dearborn, claims 2005, so I'd bet there's a hundred years between these two buildings. When I took this photo there was this group of thirty-something secretaries huddled in the alcove smoking, and one of them asked me if I painted, and if I would make a painting for her. I told her i was an excellent painter and gave her my number, but she never called. She could probably tell I was full of shit.


anapple
I like sunday afternoons with roommates baking apple pies and me learning how to play the mandolin and all the windows open for the first time in six months. I like Madison and her puns like apple pi. I like not having to kill time, I like being satisfied just looking out the window and seeing people on the corner and kids playing in the street. As Jayme said once, don't think of it as killing time. Just don’t think of it that way. She’s right.

I like mathematicians. I like them because they always wear shirts that look like graph paper, and sometimes they make beautiful music, especially if they're also canadians, like Dan Snaith...



I also like this video and this documentary of the same guy.

I like not being cynical and not being a jerk but sometimes this is hard for me. I like being chipper.

asunset
aface

I like geology because it's one of the best story tellers we have, and I like the megafloods in the northwest that must have been amazing to see.

I like Logan Square. I like Pilsen. I like Chicago; a lot.

I like making lists of things I like.

Amarillo by Morning

my bank got robbed. by a woman. a woman who weighs less than me, and i'm quite the dandie. she had no weapon, just a note. I should point out that this is the branch I use weekly, across the street from where I lived last year. I'm kinda sad I wasn't there.

Kiss me on the Bus

I've been following the Children's Museum issue for a while now and I didn't have much of an opinion until I read this post at the Beachwood Reporter.
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I don't want another building in Grant park, but come on, it's not pristine open space. Half of the park is already paved with tennis courts, skating rinks, and ego-fueled architecture. The Beachwood points out, though, how much other neighborhoods would benefit from the Children's Museum. Not to mention how much money they could save and put towards better causes, like maybe keeping our kids alive long enough to go to a museum?
bar
Anyway, last night we ventured towards the Map Room, but the Armitage bus had stopped running by 8:30 (wtf?) so we hit the Green Eye instead.
findumonde
Fin Du Monde isn't as good as I remembered, I like beers with lots of alcohol, but this time it just had too much of a liquor aftertaste.
veggies
That bountiful feast just showed up on our kitchen counter yesterday. I'd eat it, but I think maybe my roommate is a... what's the word for people who have sex with vegetables?

Special Collections for special people

Once again, I’m blown away at the access schools and museums give a clumsy chump like me. Last month I got to flip through an original printing of Napoleon’s Description de l'Égypte at the Ryerson Library, and yesterday I browsed the University of Chicago’s special collection of Poetry Magazine’s early archive. They have the original manuscript of T.S. Eliot's first published poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, typed by Eliot, with his scribbling all over it. They’ve also got hand-written letters and rough drafts of poems by Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost (who haggled over $50 with Moore in a long series of letters), Wallace Stevens, and so on. And they let me hold this shit! Pick it up, make paper airplanes, etc. I don’t know who else they let in that place (I got in because one of my professors has the hook up), but if you can make it happen, it’s a top-notch place to geek out. I also recommend stopping by the bar at the bowling alley next door beforehand; they’ve got huge baskets of fries for cheap, ensuring you’ll leave your greasy thumbprint on history, like I did. And come on, you need a few strong drinks to handle some of Pound’s bullshit.

p.s. I just spent the last hour messing with the template, hopefully everything on this blog looks good to you faithful readers out there?

Night Windows

view from my window
nightwindowsweb
So i know that photo probably looks all blown out and whatnot but I can't
figure out how to make the photo look as good online as it does on my camera or
on my hard drive. meh, I still like it a lot.

nightwindows2web

here's one katherine took...
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anyway so earlier i went for a walk/train-ride/bus-ride and was gonna take
a thousand pictures of my adventure but ended up with just this sad one of
candy hearts:
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oh, and here's my ass being retarded:
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AND... after the rain set in, one last one for the night.
nightwindowsweb3

Too nice a day to read a novel set in England

Well it's rainy and feh out and I skipped class for no reason so i've been in bed
all day listening to NPR with my hood on like i was actually gonna go outside, which
I might soon...

but NPR was interviewing people in the suburbs about how much it must suck to live
in the burbs if you're trying to be green, and of course how much better the city is
for the environment, and how chicago is supposedly trying to be the greenest big city in america.

then we should have decent recycling, right? how come we have almost no
public recycling program, like the kind san francisco has (recycling thingys on top
of every trash can), and how come my school only just this month started installing
recycling bins in our buildings? Well I'm pretty shitty at this anyway, seeing
how much recycling I tend to generate in bottles and cans, and our building doesn't
have recycling (only a big dumpster) and I haven't even thought about doing anything
about that until now.

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yup, threw all that away.

Step into my office, baby

I got really excited for earth hour so I ran around unplugging stuff and glaring at neighbors who still
had their lights on and i even turned out the lights on madison as she was putting on make up and she got pissed.
But there weren't any stars, as Nikkita was wondering. The chicago sky looked just as orange and empty as ever. I
miss the west...

gog
Photo by pilgrims

p.s. that wass my back yard, like really, I could walk there in ten minutes.

The sound of settling.

What's with chicago this week? everyone I know is in a slump, myself included. ugh. The weather sucks, i know,
but spring is almost here. I'm broke but that doesn't normally get me down. I've got a gallery show coming
up and a couple readings, but that's not helping stay excited for school or writing.

Maybe a silly picture of me will help?
DSCN02033

Anyway, tonight's earth night or something and the hippies are making us turn off the lights which is actually
really awesome, I can't wait to see the skyline dark and maybe even stars! I miss stars.

Don't Fool Yourself

This hip new "restaurant" opens sometime around april first, but you'll
never get to eat there... as the Reader says, don't fool yourself.

So very cold in the mansion after sunset.

"I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house." -Edward Hopper

edward_hopper_empty_room

I've fallen in love with the Hopper show at the AIC. There’s something about the way he painted simple scenes; he captured an emotion I can’t put into words, which is exactly what painting should be- a medium to express all those emotions beyond words.

Hopper was "a master whose poetry was light and paint."

Slate has a good photo essay, but the work needs to be seen in person- the crux of Hopper is so subtle that photography seems to fail it.

Hair: Debatable

Now-
Photo 273
Once-
9
in between-
Photo 235


Time for a cut? Or go for long-haired glory?
Jayme and Nelson were the best hosts ever jayme bought us beer and dinner and drove us
EVERYWHERE in all of california i'm pretty sure.

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San Francisco's winos are hard core. And believe in pyramid power.
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Kiki really isn't this fat. the internet adds ten cat pounds.
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Nelson draws just about all the time, it was awesome to see someone not so jaded about art n stuff
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whats up with the bay area and all the crack heads?
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Jayme demanded that we paint something on the walls before we left. I was trying to
get katherine to paint something since she's the painter between the two of us, but
they tricked me and got me drunk and handed me paint so this is what they have in
their kitchen:

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A How-To Book

Back from San Jose/San Francisco. Really awesome trip; more on that later. The camera
I rented from school broke, so no pictures for now (soon), and I took the thing back
today and told the media center boss that I'd pay for repairs and he still felt the
need to scold me and call me a liar. Why do middle-aged balding men with fucked up
teeth and a menial job at college have to be so bitter?

In better news, America's best brew pub will soon be bottling their beer, saving me
from the impossible trip to the burbs. The bottles look goddamn great:

As for other things white people like, hulu.com has every episode of Arrested Development.
I think I'm gonna fire up a fresh batch of hot ham water immediately.

Travel is Dangerous

We decided to go to evan's house between loads of laundry, so when we finally got around to packing for california at two in the morning we were pretty up to the task.

evan and his compensatory camera:
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Wii tennis makes me feel like arthur fuckin ashe. this is wii baseball though, which I
suck at.
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in our front yard:
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Scott misses spooning me. We used to be roommates, so naturally we did this every night:
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And one final gem...
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