The migration of whites out of communities has also left many public school districts in cities made up overwhelmingly of minority students. In Lawrence, just 6 percent of this year’s public school students are white. In Chelsea just 8 percent are, according to state Department of Education figures.

Sigh.

The average American born in 2007 will live for 77.9 years, according for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Humans weren’t always so long-lived — even just a century ago, the average lifespan was 49.2 years. Clearly, technology has dramatically altered aging in humans.

Leaving aside the (apparent) confusion between Americans and humans (heh), uhh… what? The CDC knows the impact of future technological and medical breakthroughs on the lifespans that today’s 4 year-olds will enjoy? Maybe they can tell us how long the average American born in 2264 will live while they’re at it?

But given that TJIC calls about nine times a day, that would bump the the number of daily f-bombs my 1.5 year old is subjected to up by something like 10 or 20 percent… so I’m kind of still on the fence about it, because you’ve really got to draw the line somewhere, or at least that’s what someone once said, or wrote, or whatever. I think?

(NSFW audio, even though it’s totally fucking true and you should be able to scream it to the heavens in the middle of your weekly departmental meeting if you’re so inclined)

was an Irish-born colonel best known for attempting to steal the Crown Jewels of England from the Tower of London in 1671. Described as a “noted bravo and desperado”,[1] he was also implicated in one attempted kidnapping and one attempted murder of the Duke of Ormonde, had switched allegiances from Royalist to Roundhead during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and later, despite his notorious reputation, found favour at the court of King Charles II and succeeded in eventually dying of natural causes.

The last bit, and its implied improbability, really makes it.

Be warned that the levels of violence are cartoonish but still very gruesome, even by the blood-drenched standard of contemporary action films. And like any good B-movie, there’s a respectable amount of gratuitous nudity, and prolific levels of cursing rarely seen outside of movies set in Boston.

Do people around here swear a lot or something? I’m mystified.

Great FB recommendation from rare reader ScottH. I guess I need to start picking up all his post-Pixies stuff.

(the subject matter is pretty interesting, I hadn’t heard of it)

Three things I like! The Fun Years, container shipping, and general weirdness.

More here.

English sound artist / composer Janek Schaefer offers downloadable MP3s of two of his performances for sale: the recent The Sporting Guide to The Speed of Sound and the slightly older Recital in the old library. I’m not much for writing music reviews, but this guy got to attend the performance of TSGTTSOS and had good things to say about it:

I’m an indie kid at heart, but entirely open to all sorts of music and unique musical experiences. And this one was really unique. “Sound artist, musician, composer and sound designer” Janek Schaefer, who I’d never heard of, was performing a specially commissioned work relating to sport at nearby Loughborough University. I had to be there.

[...]

He had also brought along his instruments – most importantly a mixer, plus several minidisc players (with samples and field recordings loaded up), effects pedals, and his home-made record player with two arms (so that two parts of the record can be played at the same time). For an inexperienced tech geek like me, this was all great stuff.

[...]

And then it was straight into the rest of the work. Long, brooding, warm electronic sounds were merged with all sorts of other material, looped and warped, speeded up and slowed down. Highlights for me included a wonderful repetition of noises of cars driving past, which after a while started to sound like people playing musical instruments. Also Schaefer’s live xylophone was sampled and looped to become a beautiful chiming section. There was a baffling extract of speech from ex footballer Jackie Charlton. And at the end there was a great looped bit of Ravel’s Bolero (the piece of course being famous in sport for the Torvill and Dean connection), followed by looped and warped cymbal sounds.

There’s an interesting interview with Schaefer at rarefrequency:

I moved to London to the final two years of my M.A. at the Royal College of Art, which was a very fine establishment, which had a broad emphasis on creativeness, rather than anything technical, I suppose, or at least it enabled me to do that. When I got there, the program wasn’t functioning very well, but you were also encouraged to do whatever it was you wanted to do, so, while everyone else was moaning about the program not functioning very well, I just started to do stuff. I was very interested in music. I studied classical music as a child and was a DJ in the college bar, but I thought about sound and how important it is to us and, because I studied architecture, of course, sound is space. It’s a very simple sentence, but that’s what all my work is about: that we experience space through our ears and I started doing projects with architectural designs, where I turned the acoustic nature of a building inside out, or I’d make solid structures invisible, or transparent to sound. You’d think you were going into this big, solid concrete block, but actually it sounded exactly like it did on the outside, as if it were made of sheet material, like a tent or something. So I did all these experiments and that went very well. They appreciated what I did, those people that focused on it then.

Anyway, I’ve got the MP3s of both performances and think they’re great. If you like this kind of thing (JMD? NZC?), I recommend you go buy ‘em. Also outstanding is the CD release In The Last Hour.

(and… a John Byrne mouseover?!?)

Funny! And apparently for sale.

(some of these are slightly photoshopped)

Rise|Set|Twilight did a sort of sound collage thing that wasn’t melodic enough for me, but it was interesting. Listenable, and somewhat enjoyable, but not so much that I’d seek them out. At least, based on the one piece they played. The guy playing the mac reminded me of NZC a little.

Asher had this sort of layer of quietly crackling static going, like when an album has played out and the needle’s still on it, and snippets of barely audible conversations and operatic singing would rise up out of it and fall back in. Very quiet, very cool. I bought a CDR (haven’t listened to it yet), which I hope is as good as his performance.

During the show I was happy to see that we weren’t the oldest folks in the room – there was a guy who was five to ten years older than me, and a couple who were probably in their fifties. After a while it dawned on me that they were probably someone’s parents, whom I could imagine saying “Son, we support what you’re doing, even though we don’t quite understand it”. Just before Asher’s set, a bunch of people came in, including two young women with sleeping babies strapped to them. The emcee mentioned Asher was recently relocated to Somerville from Brooklyn (I think) and apparently his whole family had dropped in for the show. It was pretty cute – wish I’d snapped a picture, but it would’ve felt intrusive.

The Fun Years was more my thing. This bit from a Rare Frequency review:

[...] The Fun Years create a long, oneiric mix of melodic, crackle ‘n’ hum ‘n’ buzz-filled drones that flow leisurely one into the other. [...] The Fun Years are not about stylistic sea changes or harsh musical juxtaposition, preferring to explore the pleasures of slow evolution, repetition, and decay.

pretty much captures what I like about their music. I bought a new CDR from ‘em – the crippling paranoia of flourenscent quinine. It’s great.

By the time TFY was up, I had been screwing around with my camera enough to be able to take some photos with deliberate effect (earlier ones were just lucky):

I also took some pics wandering around Union Square in the rain after the show, which I’ll post seperately.

I still need to get their new CDR.

It’s 31 mins / 36mb of cool sounds, the sort of thing I love listening to when I’m working or doing something else requiring creativity*. Even better than the set (in my opinion, anyway) is their CD now that’s what i call droning, vol. 4 – which doesn’t seem to be available through their site.

* a rare treat now that The Delta Factor is no more (although the good news is Cleary says he’ll notify me if he gets himself a new show-that-streams in California).

Some… “instruments”. Needless to say, no one was in any danger of breaking a sweat.

Local band The Fun Years. Bad name, great sounds – I bought their excellent home-made CD for five bucks, and it’ll be replacing Casino Vs. Japan as “the-only-music-in-my-car-for-the-next-six-months”. I also picked up Hecker’s My Love Is Rotten To The Core, an entire ablum made up of sounds plundered from Van Halen songs and interviews (the inside sleeve says “You only thing you have to lose is your hair.” LOL!).

Geoff Mullen was OK. He played something a little too discordant and full of fast, weird clicking for my taste, though.

Tim Hecker, er, playing the laptop. I was curious about how “live” music might differ from the stuff on CD, and it turned out to be really interesting to listen to (OK, so I’m not slick enough with the language to be a music reviewer). It seemed to be improvisational, built from the same sounds that he wove the more melodic pieces on Mirages (some MP3s there) from. The sounds were great, densely textured, and they just washed over you.

I really admire these guys who are so into what they’re into that they can produce so much cool stuff, so unlike most of the junk out there, whole little worlds. Damn.