We went out to see Silver City on Saturday night. This film has received unfairly negative reviews. It’s not John Sayles’ best work, but it’s quite good. Check out Chuck’s review from last week. Afterwards, we went to the Plaza Art Fair which was fun–big crowds, good food, good beer–but not that interesting. When I got home, I stayed up late adding some music to a sound file of Weez reading the first stanza of The Goblin Market. Neither one quite works. Weez IM’d me to say she thought something like a carnival organ grinder on crack would be appropriate. Here’s where I ran into a limitation of GarageBand: it has a paucity of loops and beats for 3/4 time. (You know, 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3) Experimentation will continue as time allows. This creative collaboration is loads of fun and helps keep me sane. If anyone else wants to play along, all you have to do is ask. (Actually, you don’t even need to ask, unless you want the GarageBand files; then I’ll send them or post them.)
Sunday, it was back to work at the office. It’s nice and quiet there on the weekends. Wrestling with the article. Working up towards putting various proposals and applications together. Listening to the cicadas through the open windows. Above is a shot of what my desk looked like right before I left for home. One laptop is mine, and one is the school’s. My notes are displayed on the one in back, and the draft of the article is on the one in front. I love a small laptop, but I have a hard time tracking my way through a big piece of writing by looking at a small slice of it on a 12″ screen, so I’m trying to expand the 2-D space upon which the article is represented: two laptop screens and an entire (real) desktop. It’s easy enough to move the cards around to rearrange chunks of the argument, and I can stand up and get a picture of the whole thing, see what’s missing and what’s there.
As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the cards are lined up like the little bits of data in a GarageBand file. Here, take a look at what “Gimme Gimme (Angry Chicken Remix)” looks like visually (warning, big pdf, 430K). I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to the GarageBand interface (no firm conclusions, yet) and I’m trying to mimic its form in writing this article. We’ll see.
