I Kill Spies

Julie S Porter is basically a genius, but the obscure kind of genius few people will ever know about. She has been online for years with her page about Adelmous Fey, her automaton doll which she built.

Since the late 1990’s I was reading a lot about early computing, specifically Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analysis Engine (Cal has a really nice set of books with all the notes written by Lady Ada!), Ms Porter’s page came up in web crawls a lot.

For future reference, the Babbage books were volumes 2 and 3 of the (11 volume?) set, “The Works of Charles Babbage” edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly in 1989.

I have met her in person once… I think she was in a cloisonne class I took at Palo Alto adult school. She was teaching herself enamel painting in a corner of the room, while the beginning students like myself learned to pack powdered glass into the little metal wires… I believe she was making a music box of some sort.

She also is a costuming enthusiast and is active in the Dickens Fair, and all sorts of other artistic societies… in half of these things I find online, I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about, but here are the acronyms she drops, with their probable translations:

• MBSI is the “Music Box Society International”
• NAWCC is the “National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors”
• BHI may be the “British Horological Institute”

Notice she’s not merely collecting these clockwork things… she’s building them. Like making the little cogs or something. Hard core!

Ms Porter also translated some obscure text on “Jaquet-Droz Automata” which looks to be a type of musical clockworks.

But that’s not all. The same Julie S Porter writes all kinds of crazy, technologically-intense tinkering material, like:

• “SMT Tips” (advice on soldering LCDs?) – look at her working model with the color bars.
• a postscript font for the Voynich Manuscript, which coincidentally I was interested in as well… only I just bought the D’Imperio monograph off of Amazon, rather than write entire fonts for the thing! Incidentally, mine is the only customer review on that book, even though the review dates back to 1998. Not exactly a best-seller!
• postings on debugging ghostscript, a postscript viewer on UNIX

I was stalking Julie S Porter online again and found a posting she made to this society a few years ago.
Web link of note: Mechanical Music Digest
(At http://mmd.foxtail.com/)

Making a custom rubber stamp is pretty easy and relatively cheap- you make the artwork, send it to the factory in a digital format, and cut them a check!

• Simon’s Stamps
• Rubber Stamp Man – this is who I used before- they are very quick and cheap… the 3″ square stamp I had them make for Burning Man was pristine and cost under $30 including shipping!
• Rubberstamps.com
• Stampman.com
• eRubber Stamp.com
• The Print Box

Notice a trend on the names of these sites?

• directory of stamp sites

It’s a Japanese sitcom about a family of mannequins who decides to live in Japan. Bizarre!

If you’re looking for episodes of OH! Mikey, there is a DVD available at jlist.com.

They also have a DVD of the show OH! Mikey came from, “Vermilion Pleasure Night.”
Web link of note: OH! Mikey
(At http://www.fuccon.com/)

I looked for protest music a little more seriously, and found some actual results this time,
including that hip-hop record I was looking for a few weeks ago.

Since a lot of these seem to be singles, or a special release that will not be reissued, I think this list is a really good candidate for assembling with iTunes or the new Napster.

Or just listen to more college radio for free!

Notice I don’t even mention downloading these songs and making a Ultra-Cool Modern Protest Music Sampler Box Set, because that would be illegal and therefore I wouldn’t dream of doing that. Not even as holiday gifts for all my friends.

• A pretty damn good CD is Peace Not War, which has a lot of really famous people on it, including Public Enemy, Ani DiFranco, Chumbawumba, Massive Attack, and Sleater-Kinney. Available at Amazon and most decent record stores, but if you are interested, please buy it from one of the peace groups listed on their site, because more of the proceeds will go towards peace efforts.
• Another good starting point is The Return of the Protest Song, an article by columnist Jeff Chang in the Boston newspaper Weekly Dig. He lists:
  • Blur‘s We’ve Got A File on You! (pop-rock)
  • Beenie Man (club music) brought us Terrorist
  • Calypso artist Andre Tanker with Food Fight
  • Lenny Kravitz (rock) gets extra points for We Want Peace because it’s a duet with Iraqi artist Kadim Al Sahir. You won’t find this one on Amazon, because it’s only played from the Rock the Vote site… maybe it will be on Kravitz’ new album.
  • Good luck finding “March of Death” from Rage Against the Machine and DJ Shadow (rap metal)… Amazon doesn’t have it, which doesn’t faze me, but neither does Rasputin’s…
  • Yo La Tengo (latin alternative) with Nuclear War (a cover of Sun Ra)
• NOT on the list was Radiohead‘s album Hail to the Thief. Duh!
• I think the one I was looking for was from Urban Box Office– their album is Raise Your Hands High… Say Not In Our Name and comes in 3 different volumes. Go directly to their site and do a search there, because their database is a little tempermental and won’t let me save links to particular items
• Supposedly Reverend Run (Run DMC) is doing an all-star record… haven’t found it yet though.
• This list wouldn’t be complete without The Beastie Boys. Those guys crack me up. They recently released “In A World Gone Mad” but damned if I can find it…
• Michael Franti and Spearhead did a great song (getting some good airplay on the college stations here) U Can’t Bomb the World to Peace, featuring beatbox artist RadioActive and remixed by Sly and Robbie. The Spearhead site is pretty nice! On a side note, Michael Franti‘s previous group Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy has
  some pretty wild stuff, including an album with William S Burroughs.
• What’s Next? Operation “Hood” Freedom on Planet Hiphop, written by the slightly wacky Minister Paul Scott of the Messianic Afrikan Nation.
• …actually the whole site of Planet HipHop is pretty interesting… You’ll note they have an entire online radio feed devoted to “conscious” hip hop, i.e. protest music.
• Guerilla Funk is the label of “Paris” and is devoted to news as well as his brand of angry progressive hip hop
• “Sub Verse Music Inc. is first and foremost about the tenets of hip-hop culture and a supporter of underground initiatives.” So they say!
• KRS One published The Hiphop Declaration of Peace
  on the Temple of Hip-Hop site.

• Davey D’s Hip-Hop Corner has a bunch of news on hip-hop and progressive issues
• Musicians United to Win Without War is a group of artists against the war- no album from them yet though! I like how the first name on the list is Laurie Anderson. She is a nut.

Viva!

It’s a short about film extras- the people in the background. It’s pretty funny; I saw it at Cinequest.
Web link of note: Back 2 One
(At http://www.backtoonethemovie.com)

Web link of note: Stumble Upon
(At http://www.stumbleupon.com/)

Web link of note: ReadyMade Magazine
(At http://www.readymademag.com/)

The “Starve” concept is interesting, but the execution on the website is terrible- if I didn’t know what this was already, I would not put any energy in finding out more! It’s a good anti-demo for me.

Michael has a DVD somewhere with his short videos, starring himself, acting out various novels or something. I wonder where it is?
Web link of note: Michael Trigilio
(At http://www.starve.org/)

their “lobby” on their home page looks like BART… because it is!
Web link of note: montgomery pfeifer
(At http://www.mp.com)