Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:
● Twittering from the DJ Booth (beatportal.com): Trainspotting DJ sets just got easier, thanks to DJ Richie Hawtin, whose laptop sends to his Twitter account (twitter.com/rhawtin) the name of the track he's spinning live at a given moment. Was Hawtin doing this when I saw him in December in Tokyo (disquiet.com)? "The Twitter app is so advanced,” reports Beatport, “that it inspired Native Instruments to add the functionality themselves to version 1.2 of Traktor Pro which will be released as a free update." So, howzabout a way for his Twitter to trigger Last.fm, to play an approximation of his set anywhere — live, or after the fact? There's something comforting and surreal about watching the set list appear in real time. As of this writing, Hawtin appears to have closed his May 2 set with an Alva Noto track off his new Xerrox Vol.2 album. (Via bytesizemusic.net, and numerous other places.) Brings to mind a mention at murketing.com about conductors tweeting from the stand, to which I added a comment (murketing.com).
● Nam June Paik Archive Goes to the Smithsonian (nytimes.com): The collected papers and objects (including "black-and-white television sets and 1960s record players; early video projectors and decades-old Polaroid cameras — things that were long ago relegated to the electronic graveyard") of multimedia artist Nam June Paik will land at the Smithsonian Institution, "'This will give scholars and a new generation of artists the tangible sense of the artist’s hand in transforming video and television into an artist’s medium,' said John G. Hanhardt, consulting senior curator for film and media arts at the museum." (Did the Washington Post not cover this? A search on the website of the Smithsonian’s hometown newspaper seems to come up null.)
● Cory Doctorow Defines "Geeky" (locusmag.com): One of the best descriptions of "geeky": "geeky inasmuch as it probably costs me as much effort as it saves me, inasmuch as it delights me, and inasmuch as it points the way to civilian applications that someone else might want to develop into products that the less geekified may enjoy." That's from the May 9 column ("Extreme Geek") for the magazine Locus by writer, copyleft proponent, and BoingBoing co-founder Cory Doctorow.
● The Sheet Music for ‘In C’ by Terry Riley (imslp.org): Just one example of the sheet-music files available at this excellent resource, the IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library. From Terry Riley's instructions, as reproduced in the PDF: "Instruments can be amplified if desired. Electronic keyboards are welcome also."
More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.
