Anyhow, this past Sunday’s episode of Leverage, written by Geoffrey Thorne, involved a death that occurs during a costume-party murder mystery that is staged at the home of an exceedingly corrupt businessman. At one point, the Timothy Hutton character, who has dressed like Ellery Queen, and Parker, dolled up like Nancy Drew, find themselves at opposite ends of a stairway, needing to get by a guard. They have to remain silent, so they read each other’s lips. There are subtitles for us non-lip readers, but the whole thing already has the feel of a silent movie when a tinkling piano appears in the show’s score to seal the deal — not to mention that the guard is wearing a bowler hat, straight out of a Charlie Chaplin flick. (Hutton playing Queen is an in-joke, because his father, actor Jim Hutton, played the character in the 1970s TV series.)

True Grift: The characters Hardison and Parker dressed, respectively, as a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew in an episode of the series Leverage that briefly flirted with the concept of “silent television”

The sequence is one of the longest wordless non-action/non-sex/non-people-in-labs-with-colorful-test-tubes scenes on television in recent memory. TV musicals, as series and as standalone episodes, have been the rage for some time now, and despite being a huge admirer of the late Dennis Potter (whose The Singing Detective is the ur-text for most fourth-wall-breaking, singing-and-dancing television spectacles), I’d say it’s high time that silent TV episodes had their moment. Being an intimate medium watched generally in the privacy of one’s home, television lends itself to the silent treatment.

What’s sort of funny, as a side note, is that neither Ellery Queen nor Nancy Drew has ever been the subject of silent movie, at least to the best of my knowledge. The two earliest Ellery Queen are streaming online for free and are titled The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) and The Mandarin Mystery (1936). The first Nancy Drew movie appeared in 1938, more than a decade after The Jazz Singer (1927) popularized the “talkie.”

If the fun Leverage sequence brings to mind the ctheory.net essay on “silent television” by Robert Briggs that I wrote about last September, the quasi-anachronism is straight out of this great xkcd.com webcomic:

There’s an episode recap for “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job” at tnt.tv, and in the next week the full episode should stream there for free.

Shhh! It’s a Theater: Speaking of silents, as well as of history as viewed through the lens of the present: it’s pretty genius that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival teamed up with the local public library. Read about it at examiner.com. Truth be told, though, this is one of those situations when words in common suggest correlations where they don’t necessarily exist. For one thing, the projectors that played silent movies were notoriously loud. For another, live music performances were part of the experience, and the music was anything but silent, as part of its role was to cover up projector noise. The showings could, reportedly, get pretty rowdy. We only call them “silent” movies in retrospect. It’s an example, as debcha (in a message from her twitter.com/debcha account) recently reminded me, of what is called a “retronym”: Until the introduction of the talkie, silent movies were simply movies, just as until the introduction of the electric guitar, acoustic guitars were simply guitars.

The recordings are, of course, anything but silent. Most are packed with talking and footsteps, while the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame features a fair amount of CSNY.

Get the full set at stasisfield.com.

No one told me Red was a comedy. I caught the play-about-Mark-Rothko yesterday on Broadway, the matinee performance. It’s a two-person show. There’s Rothko, performed with late-1950s urbanite-Manhattan sturm’n'drang self-hating self-aggrandizing ebullience by the irrepressible Alfred Molina, and there is his studio assistant, Ken, played by Eddie Redmayne with just the right amount of ingenue that makes it clear he’s as much an apprentice to Molina as his character is to Rothko. (Redmayne was born in 1982, the year after Molina’s mug made such an impression worldwide in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

The New York Times review of Red (nytimes.com) by Ben Brantley noted how Molina “makes us feel the necessity of an overweening, humorless vanity and — to use a word that for Rothko denotes a cardinal virtue — seriousness.” And Michael Billington, reviewing (at guardian.co.uk) the work’s earlier incarnation in London, praised it as “a totally convincing portrait of the artist as a working visionary.”

But for a show about one of the great stoics of abstract expressionism, Red, which was written by John Logan, sure seemed packed with punchlines, as Rothko and Ken went at it. Certainly there was bloodsport to their intellectual and emotional sparring, but the gravitas seemed repeatedly undercut by Seinfeldian laugh-lines. The audience at the performance I attended regularly guffawed, on cue — me as much as anyone else. I laughed along, but with each laugh felt more and more distant from the paintings that are the subject of the show. With each laugh, the character of Rothko became more and more a caricature of the sullen-comic city-dwelling rootless cosmopolitan of Jewish descent (yeah, guilty myself at times). Even one of Rothko’s great pronouncements was treated as a rim-shot moment:

“Silence is so accurate.”

The line was employed in Red as a mock-appreciation by Rothko when Ken — who grows more talkative as their relationship unfolds — for a moment neglects to speak. Let’s just say there was a pause between “so” and “accurate” that owed a lot more to Mel Brooks than it did to Sam Shepherd.

The play centers on Rothko’s creation of works for the New York restaurant the Four Seasons, a commission he completed and then withdrew from. While painting the pieces, he repeatedly employs the word “chapel,” a knowing nod to the Rothko Chapel — the Houston, Texas, mini-museum dedicated to his paintings, and for which composer Morton Feldman wrote one of his best-loved works.

Given Rothko’s association with Feldman and his penchant for playing classical music in his studio, it’s worth noting the use of music and sound in Red. Both were accomplished by Adam Cork, whose score had an ambient brightness that seemed oddly contemporary (i.e., early-21st-century) for a play that otherwise extended significant effort to duplicate gritty late-1950s Manhattan. In that respect, Cork’s glistening drones, augmented by pointillism that at times suggested György Ligeti, provided regular comfort along the lines of the show’s insistent humor — a respite from Rothko’s unfathomably righteous anger.

But Cork’s score wasn’t entirely distracting. One thing he really excelled at was when his score combined with the music that Rothko (and, later, Ken) played on the in-studio turntable — Cork’s electronic tones alternately supplanted the classical music favored by Rothko (as well as one dramatically truncated Chet Baker tune initiated by Ken), and provided a lush base from which it emerged. There was a particularly remarkable instant late in Red when the score, and Ken’s hammering together of a canvas, and the on-set music all combined for a sudden burst of perfect timing.

… while the shooter sized up the competition or
focussed his solitary mind, and then the bomb-fuse ticktickticktick
while he feinted right, moved left, setting up the shot
and the listener (not trying to listen) and then the blank
space of the arcing quiet as he shoots. That silence
is also like the space between the reader and the page,
the little nation between the writer’s words and our
particular way of receiving them, or the blank station
we fill in between ourselves and passing strangers,
or between ourselves and people we presume to know,
but most achingly in the ones we try to know.

The combination of basketball onomatopoeia (“the bomb-fuse ticktickticktick“) and the description of silence is striking, in particular how Greenbaum connects the silence that follows the toss of the ball (“the arcing quiet,” as she puts it exquisitely) to the silence between reader and page — that is, between the reader and the very poem we’re reading. She cements it by having the “achingly” aspect of loneliness echo that “arcing quiet.”

Even though she’s written the poem as an adult, it contains the silence, which here signifies a distance from others, that she recalls from her youth.

Despite Prochnik’s framing of the overall situation as “this new noisiness” (in his book’s introduction), it’s quite a simple operation to look to the past 50, 100, 150 years (and further) and locate strong evidence of anxiety about the relative (aural) volume of the world at those times. He cites such examples himself throughout the book, but their existence doesn’t seem to diminish his certitude that the planet is today at its loudest. (Just to posit one example, I can’t help but think that the reduction of light industry in many cities has made certain neighborhoods quieter, not louder.)

Such examples from the past are as entertaining as they are illuminating:

“In summer the noise of city streets, the cars, the elevated, the cries of children, the hand-organs, the flies, are not at all conformable to the supposed dignity of the court,” wrote Justice Frederic DeWitt Wells of the Municipal Court of New York City in his book The Man in Court, published in 1917.

“The 20th century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them,” Aldous Huxley wrote in The Perennial Philosophy in 1945. (The quote came to my attention in Kyle Gann’s new book on John Cage’s “silent” piece, 4’33″. The title of Gann’s book essentially sums up the theoretical/philosophical framework through which I view Prochnik’s venture: No Such Thing as Silence. Gann attributes the insight regarding Huxley’s influence on Cage to Douglas Kahn, author of the excellent survey of sound in art, Noise, Water, Meat.)

And in Emily Thompson’s phenomenal The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (2002), she goes on at length about the experience of urban noise at the turn of the 20th century. She quotes one Dr. J. H. Girdner from his “The Plague of City Noises,” which he collated in 1896: “almost all the noises he listed were traditional sounds: horse-drawn vehicles, peddlers, musicians, animals, and bells.” Thompson then follows the elements of the sonic cityscape, and notes that within 30 years of rapid change, mechanical noise had largely supplanted what she terms “organic” noise: “Some were energized, others enervated; all felt challenged to respond to the modern soundscape in which they now lived.” Her book is cited by Prochnik in his book’s bibliography as one of the key texts that influenced his thinking, but my read of Thompson only strengthens my sonic relativism, while Prochnik seems to have come away from it all the more convinced that the world in which we live has never been louder. (An 1896 mention in The Review of Reviews of Girdner’s “The Plague of City Noises” refers to “the various sounds that tend to make metropolitan life unendurable” [emphasis mine].)

Here are some notes on recent entries from Prochnik’s blog:

He takes issue with a communal “boombox walk” to commemorate the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., even though it’s just a one-time thing and is relegated to an evening slot — today, in fact: April 3, 5:30 pm. (Prochnik’s take, “A Surreally Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come,” is at inpursuitofsilence.com; event details are at bluebrainmusic.blogspot.com.) The event seems to have its roots in the boombox meetup Unsilent Night composed by Phil Kline. Kline’s creation of secular quasi-choral music that replaces strong melodies with ambient tones might seem like a positive development, but I suspect Prochnik would view the involvement of boomboxes as a sure sign that sound is being unnecessarily introduced to a civic space. Now, it’s rhetorically suspect to criticize someone for an opinion they haven’t actually uttered, so to be clear what I’m really emphasizing here is Prochnik’s dismissive response to a one-time event, which others might see as simply an additional way to celebrate the arrival of cherry blossoms.

Prochnik’s blog’s coverage of the science of birdsong (“Songbird Genome Decoded,” inpursuitofsilence.com) is rightly concerned that increases in human-made noise have unintended impact on birds. (This isn’t merely true of sound. Birds have been discovered to follow highways the way they once followed waterways.) Yet his closing comment is evidence of the exaggerated language, the alarmism, he brings to such matters: “the tip of the language degradation iceberg our culture is now crashing up against.”

The In Pursuit of Silence blog launched in November of last year with a brief note about “No Music Day,” a daydream-turned-reality of former KLF member Bill Drummond. Since then the website has provided a steady stream of interesting subjects. They may often twist into opportunities for Prochnik to bemoan the amplitude of our age, but not always. He makes some great points in his critique of Choe Veltman’s recent New York Times story about sound installations in San Francisco (she focused on the Audium and the Sound Wave Organ, at nytimes.com), in particular her odd comment about how the relative size of eyes (big) and ears (small) in the Na’vis in James Cameron’s Avatar is evidence of how culture today places “a far stronger emphasis on sight than hearing.” (I’m not even convinced Veltman’s description of the Na’vis is accurate. But as a longtime San Francisco resident, I found the most peculiar thing about the article was that it appeared in what is purportedly a section devoted to local coverage for residents of the San Francisco Bay area. The same article would have made far more sense in the paper’s travel section.) Prochnik’s entirely correct when he writes:

Near the conclusion, the author notes, “As inventive as some of these works are, they have to compete with many other distractions. It’s possible to walk right through a sound-art installation without even realizing it.” But isn’t it precisely one of the keys to the beauty of works like these that they DON’T try and compete with all the other distractions — that they ask of the spectator sufficient attention and awareness of the environment NOT to just walk through them without noticing? There’s a hint of criticism here, which to me smacks of sighing that, when all is said and done, the problem with silence is that it’s not noisier.

On inpursuitofsilence.com the blog, as in In Pursuit of Silence the book, Prochnik’s extremism might best be exemplified by the manner in which he expresses something approaching jealousy of those who are physically incapable of — or at least hard of — hearing. In a gloss (at inpursuitofsilence.com) on a great post about the history of hearing aids (at hearingsparks.blogspot.com), Prochnik ponders how necessary hearing aids really are: “But with a third of Americans now suffering some degree of hearing loss, according to Johns Hopkins University, and more than a third of Americans inserting some sound-feed device into their ears for some part of the day, one would think that self-consciousness about hearing loss, let alone hearing aids, might begin to wan. The Deaf should be viewed as early adopters to a sonic landscape that, between rising noise levels and declining hearing, will be less and less coherently audible to anyone without technological enhancements.” When you’re so critical of unwelcome sound that you give the appearance of envying those who are hard, or even devoid, of hearing, I think you’re doing your business right along the line that divides essayists from polemicists. (I’m fairly certain that Douglas Kahn, who writes eloquently on all matters sonic, uses hearing aids himself, but I don’t recall him ever having written about his experience.)

Alarmism is its own form of noise — and that idea is something that appears to be lost in the often strident language that Prochnik employs. He’s aware of this issue himself. In the book’s opening, he writes “To effectively promote silence, how does one avoid becoming louder than the sources of noise one is protesting against?” There’s an almost Jekyll/Hyde quality to Prochnik — one moment he can write with stunning beauty about how Zen, along with other spiritual traditions, teaches us that noise is a mental construct, and the next he uses derisive language to mock portable MP3 players and the people who make a routine of carrying them (“a little round dial that fits seductively in our moist palms”).

The unfortunate thing is that Prochnik’s extremism may muffle the otherwise insightful observations that fill his book, such as how many domestic disputes are often actually about matters of noise, and how John Cage’s supposed experience of his nervous system in an anechoic chamber at Harvard was more likely an incident of tinnitus (something Gann notes in more detail in his book, if that’s of interest), and how military veterans who take solace in religion after experiencing war may not be seeking God so much as feeling the need to escape a world that doesn’t live up to the ideals of the one they had been fighting for. That last lesson is the one that lingered with me as I came to wonder, as I mentioned at the outset, whether Prochnik is moving concertedly toward silence, or running angrily from noise. (I mentioned in my previous entry on Prochnik’s book, at disquiet.com, how he points out an interesting debunking of a certain myth about Pythagoras.)

I need to clarify that I am fully sympathetic to Prochnik’s personal concerns about noise, despite what my above statements might suggest. Like Prochnik’s, my hearing is sensitive — or, more to the point, I am sensitive to what I hear. Like him, I am very much the sort of person who is aggravated by sounds as seemingly tiny as the hard drive chatter on the Tivo in my living room, and by the throb of one particular fluorescent bulb that’s recessed into cabinets in my kitchen. When I bought my first iPod, I was stunned by how “loud” the hard drive was when I first turned it on (I was also a little unnerved by the device’s physical vibrations). When I switched from a desktop to a laptop years ago, my primary motivation was the relative quiet of the laptop’s internal fan. When I moved from one part of my neighborhood to another a year and a half ago, the noise level of the street was a deciding factor. (I liked one other house, until I noticed that a neighboring yard had a large cement structure that turned out to be a giant fish tank — just the thought of the sort of constant sound inherent in maintaining such a system nixed that option immediately.) I am very much the sort of person who has been kept awake all night thanks to a radio on a neighboring construction site that wasn’t fully turned off. But in the end, I simply don’t think of noise and silence as polar opposites, perhaps because I’ve read too much Cage and believe silence is an illusion.

Also making the top 10 were entries on (8) a cassette tape re-purposed by Marc Fischer as a tape loop (no doubt due to welcome coverage over at murketing.com), (9) one of the site’s weekly twitter.com/disquiet roundups (perhaps because of a mention of the Shutter Island soundtrack?), and (10) an excerpt from Kyle Gann‘s recent book on John Cage‘s 4’33″.

The most popular post of the last 60 days was the Mark Harris piece mentioned above.

The most popular post of the last 90 days was an MP3 of sound art produced from recordings made at an Indian call center.

The most searched-for words of the last 30 days were, in declining order: performances, laptop, ito, vinyl, arty, rss, dgmlive, no country for old men, npr, seeming, souns, and topic (the last handful were tied, which is why this list has more than 10 entries).

Prochnik is, by all appearances, a curious and creative reporter — he accompanies a patrolman in Washington, D.C., who responds to noise complaints, and visits various religious sites, including a Quaker meeting in Brooklyn and a monastery in Dubuque, Iowa. He tells a funny anecdote about seeking out an accomplished astronaut, only to learn that the experience of the silence of deep space mostly involves being inundated by instructions from mission control.

Early on in the book, Prochnik talks about a friend of his, a painter, who as a child was deaf for a period of months. The friend is named Adam (no last name is given, which is an unfortunately common occurrence in the more personal anecdotes in the book, should you want to learn more about the individuals), and Adam believes that the experience is a key reason he pursued visual art; he says of his deafness stint:

“Sound imposes a narrative on you … and it’s always someone else’s narrative. My experience of silence was like being awake inside a dream I could direct.”

Prochnik gets deeper into Adam’s experience in this paraphrase:

“His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he saw could be woven together with much greater freedom and originality than he’d ever known.”

This portion of the book appears midway through the introduction, and it’s wisely placed. Much writing on silence after John Cage has focused on the word’s inherent contradiction: there isn’t any true silence — the absence of formal evidence of sound (conversation, music) is in fact an illusion, a thin scrim that amounts to little more than a consensual societal hallucination. Through that scrim of perceived silence the full world of sound (nature, industry) can be heard, at least by those who make the effort to pay attention to it. The reference to deafness, and it’s the first of many in In Pursuit of Silence, provides a tabula rasa for the subject that many books on sound neglect. (There’s video of Prochnik speaking on deafness and related things at MIT at techtv.mit.edu.)

My primary critique of the book at this juncture is that the title seems misleading — the book is, at least at the halfway point, less about pursuing silence than about escaping noise. This isn’t merely a matter of how the book has been packaged. Prochnik’s sensitivity to sound as an irritant (“I’m scared of becoming a noise crank,” he writes on its first page) leads to situations in which zealousness may have yielded mistaken, or at least less-than-nuanced, interpretations. For example, the omnipresent iPod is seen here as a symbol of society’s embrace of 24/7 sonic immersion. However, I believe it can just as easily be read as evidence of a pursuit along the lines of the one that Prochnik himself has embarked on: an entirely personal attempt to block out the noise that the world imposes on us.

His book-related blog, inpursuitofsilence.com, features tidbits about the energy produced by noise and the apparent genetic predilection among humans for beats. If the stats in Google Reader are to be believed, I am as of this evening the sole RSS subscriber (via Google Reader) to his blog, and I highly recommend signing up.

Note: I usually post my “Quote of the Week” on Disquiet.com on Saturdays, but I took yesterday as a computer-free day and, entirely coincidental with the activist tone of Prochnik’s book (I didn’t start reading it until after lunch), a recorded-music-free day, as well (except at the gym, where I played Fescal’s forthcoming album, Lethal Industry, for at least the 20th time, a familiarity that to my mind qualifies it as background listening). It was a TV-free day, too, until about 10pm, when I succumbed to the wiles of a documentary about Sun Studio.

New Yorker critic and The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross visits the John Cage exhibit currently at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and writes, in part:

The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing huge crowds in museums, Cage is still often treated as a freak or a charlatan. The distinction makes no intellectual sense, but there it is.

The conclusion that Ross draws has its parallel in the argument that is the substance of David Stubbs‘s recent book, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen. The photo of Cage, above, circa 1958, by Aram Avakian, is taken from the free downloadable brochure for the exhibit (PDF). Cage had his own battery of defenses, and one such axiomatic comment opens the PDF: “If this word, music, is sacred … we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.”

Full Ross post: newyorker.com. More on the exhibit at the museum’s website: macba.cat.

● On the Making of Brian Eno/Peter Chilvers iPhone/Touch Apps Bloom & Trope (usoproject.blogspot.com): Interview with Peter Chilvers on his development, with Brian Eno, of the iPhone apps Trope and Bloom, and the app Air: “It was something of a two way process,” he says of the development process. “I came up with the effect of circles expanding and disappearing as part of a technology experiment — Brian saw it and stopped me making it more complex! Much of the iPhone development has worked that way — one of us would suggest something and the other would filter it, and this process repeats until we end up with something neither of us imagined.” Story by Matteo Milani. More information at generativemusic.com, according to which a revised Bloom (version 2.0) will be released in early October: “New features include a sleep timer, stereo panning, two additional sounds, three new moods, and two new operation modes. The update will be free to anyone who has already purchased Bloom.”

● The Chimes of New York; and Their Ringers (nytimes.com): “Simple rope pulling it ain’t,” goes coverage of the North American Guild of Change Ringers recent convergence in Manhattan. “Change ringing is a surprisingly difficult and subtle art that involves a series of coordinated hand movements and a sensitive touch. Ringers time their strokes partly by listening, partly by watching the movement of the ropes around them. A sense of timing is essential because of the one-second gap between the pull of the rope and the sound of the bell. The ‘music’ consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls.” Why the article’s author, Daniel J. Wakin, or his editor saw it necessary to put quotation marks around the word “music” is unclear, but the enthusiasm of the bell-ringers interviewed in the article is infectious — you come to imagine a religion in which the ringing of bells isn’t ceremonial, but the ceremony itself.

● Kind of Bloop Update; Participant Critiques Time Magazine Coverage (ocremix.org): Musician Sam Ascher-Weiss was quoted in Time 's coverage of the Kind of Bloop compilation, an album that rendered Miles Davis's classic Kind of Blue, on its 50th anniversary, as "chiptune" music — that is, as if it had been programmed for ancient arcade video games. Ascher-Weiss, whose music moniker is Shnabubula, feels that he was quoted out of context about the limitations and potential of this sort of music-making. Original Time piece at time.com. Kind of Bloop available at kindofbloop.com.

● Book Review: Sara Maitland on Silence (nytimes.com): From Dominique Browning‘s review of the new non-fiction book by Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence: “The first kind of silence requires an emptying out of the self in order to be receptive to God; the other fortifies the self in order to be inventively godlike. ‘Silence has no narrative,’ she concludes. ‘Silence intensifies sensation, but blurs the sense of time.’”

● Video-game Website Joystiq Interviews Nine Inch Nails‘s Trent Reznor (joystiq.com): Says Reznor: "Rob [Sheridan, NIN Creative Director] and I are working on a project together that's moving forward and focuses on the creation of content from a developer's perspective. Would I do music for an everyday game? Meh. I'm not thrilled about the idea, but if someone cool came to me and had this great game, then I'd consider it." The interviewer posted quotes that didn't make the Joystiq cut at superdunner.blogspot.com.

● The Art of Turntables (interviewmagazine.com): Overview of contemporary artists making turntables as art, including Simon Elvins's paper cone (image below, top), Dennis de Bel's sewing machine, Sean Duffy's triptych (image below, middle), Yuri Suzuki's five-armed mutant (image below, bottom), and Tom Sachs's presidential podium. Story by Fan Zhong.

● Tauba Auerbach‘s Organ as Art (nytimes.com): It “requires two players, each pushing foot pedals to pump bellows for the other. Every afternoon at 5 Ms. Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser — hence the name of the instrument, the Auerglass — perform a transporting, specially composed duet.” Photo below by Adam Reich for the New York Times:

● On Rock and Joysticks, the Beatles and Nirvana (nytimes.com): The online version of the paper’s lengthy piece about the making of Rock Band – The Beatles, “While My Guitar Gently Beeps,” lacks the intention of the title the article was given when it appeared, originally, as the cover story of the August 16 issue of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine: “The Music Will Matter to You Because You Are Pretending to Make It.” Story by Daniel Radosh. A few week’s later, the paper’s video-game critic, Seth Schiesel, brought some sanity to the hysteria that has followed the appearance of Kurt Cobain, of the band Nirvana, in the game Guitar Hero 5: “Assuming that Activision got [Courtney] Love to sign the proper contracts, it appears that the main potential legal issue (if Ms. Love actually fulfills her threat to sue) is whether having a digital Cobain re-enact songs by other artists in some way damages his image. I am as big a Deadhead as my generation was able to produce (Jerry Garcia died when I was 22, and I had already seen about 90 Grateful Dead concerts and a dozen Jerry Garcia Band shows), so I know what it’s like to be a fan. Hypothetically, would it be weird to see a digital Garcia playing a Jimmy Eat World song? Of course, but after about 15 seconds of shock, I’d find it totally hilarious.”

● Help the Duo of He Can Jog & Always Tokyo Fund Their Planned November 2009 Tour (kickstarter.com): As of this writing, they're about 20% of the way there. Funders get great benefits, like downloads of rehearsals sessions, a promotional 7", and more.

● The Rare Music Story to Quote DJ Mark Farina and Dream Theater — on the iPod Touch as Instrument (sfgate.com)

● Attention, Phonographers: Entomologists Say Cool Nights May Mean Less Insect Chatter (nytimes.com)

● Interactive Music App RjDj Holding October 2-4 Workshops in Its London Office (rjdj.me)

● Lifehacker Queries Readers on Best "Sounds for Getting Work Done" (lifehacker.com)

● The Kohler VibrAcoustic Bath Introduces Sonic Hydrotherapy (kohler.com)

● Artist Hugh Livingston Introduces the “Sound Landscaping” Installation: Sonogarden

● While We Wait for the Gristleism Box, an Interview with Genesis P-Orridge About Using Plastic Surgery to Look Like His Late Wife (nymag.com)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.