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Click here to
play music. Click here for Black
Rose Imagemap. Click here
for slideshow synopsis.
3 November 2009
laurent: levi-strauss est mort - vive levi-strauss !
Nichelle: I filled out a complaint card at the store for the first time that I can recall. What kind of moron puts the back pain medication on the bottom shelf?!?!
SAGReiss: Which store?
Nichelle: Safeway
Murder: Ugh, Slaveway. I have
oh-so-fond memories of working at the Shadle Center store clear back in
1995.
SAGReiss: "J’étais très impressionné par l’étude des mythes dans Le cru et le cuit de Lévi Strauss, et par sa façon extraordinaire d’écrire. Par contre ses jugements en ce qui concerne la musique relèvent d’un manque de perspective et d’une étroitesse de vue. Ca me fait penser à l’homme qui consomme toujours de la musique, pour qu’il y ait du jeu de violon pendant qu’il fait l’amour. Et lui je crois, il écoutait de la musique pendant qu’il tapait à la machine," Luciano Berio.
11 November 2009
Murder: Berio is a genius. I play
his Sequenza I for Solo Flute quite a bit.
Date: 11 November 2009
Subject: Pic Updates
I am no longer sending ZIPs of pics. I am concentrating my efforts on my site, which has the happy side effect of helping me at work, since the solutions I find in Rose's slideshow, for example, I reuse in our commercial documents. As my wise uncle Arthur once said: "What difference does it make if you're taking a picture to earn money or to praise God? It's still supposed to be beautiful." OK, so he never said that. He said something vaguely similar, and he would have said that, if he had only known how. I know how. I am building a shrine to my daughter, incorporating new elements, photos, music, text, maybe someday video, if I can ever obtain the equipment and figure out how to use it. I am creating more reflections among the various photo albums, so that those who care and know how to read them will understand how the internal links support the whole architecture. Proust once said, with little hope of being understood, that his novel was constructed like a cathedral. Mine too. That was not a metaphor, by the way. He had alternate titles to the books and chapters that represented the wings and chapels of a physical church. The man may have done nothing in his life except remember and write, but his mind worked. I loved the way that Murder picked up on Safeway. Nichelle made one little mistake in a mindless Facebook post, that fucked up the rhythm of her sentence by omitting an effet de reel, and Murder turned it into a beautiful invocation of his memory of Slaveway. Don't worry, John, if someone ever cuts off your lips, you can always find a second career as a writer, a la Hugues de Montalembert. Speaking of music, which we weren't, Pierre Charvet of France Musique answered my e-mail harassment requesting that quotation from Luciano Berio on Claude Levi-Strauss with a curious post scriptum: "Votre site à l'air très intéressant ! Dès que j'aurais un peu de temps, j'irais le consulter." I guess he just had the curiosity to google the sagreiss from my address. Truth is, I do that too.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 12 November 2009
Subject: Black Rose Imagemap
Well, that was easy. God I love the Find & Replace command. Even
when it wreaks havoc and creates horrible mistakes, they're often
funny, especially if they don't cost too much time or money to fix.
While none of these pics is great, taking fifty-four good pics is very
hard, especially with this beautiful symmetry of color & theme,
black, red & orange, a dozen to fifteen each of feeding the ducks,
playing ball, running the streets, & painting Oliver. I'm still not
happy with the music. Can anyone come up with something better, in a
black or Halloween theme? I was going to use Eric Clapton's song of the
same name, but it's fucking awful.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 12 November 2009
Subject: Black Rose Publication
Announcement
Thank you for your kind & insightful suggestions, but I've decided
to go with La Vie en Rose by Louis Armstrong. I don't really care for
the version I've got, but I downloaded a dozen of them to no avail. If
anyone can mail me something better, it would be much appreciated. The
song is bilingual, like Rose, and, while it doesn't refer to black,
there is a polyglot pun on the color theme, so I think it's best.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 12 November 2009
Subject: Timing the Slideshows
I can set the slideshow intervals to between 1000 & 12000
milliseconds. Could one of you musicians please check the electronic
metronome and tell me the average beat in tenths of a second for Here
Comes the Sun & La Vie en Rose, so I could calibrate the image
transitions to the movement of the music? This might seem like a small
esthetic point, but I think it's important. Thanks.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 13 November 2009
Subject: Year of the Rose
OK, so they screwed me out of
35euros for five (one for C the G) paper copies, but I screwed them out
of an electronic copy, which I had to hack. The birthdays may be hard
to make out, but they are Rose's, her sisters', her parents', her
paternal grandparents', and both of her paternal aunt's. (Yes,
Nichelle, that's "aunt" singular & possessive and "both" dual. It's
a long story.)
From: SAGReiss
Date: 13 November 2009
Subject: The Purloined Life
Some of you, not my regular
readers, may not quite understand what
we're doing here, so I will undertake to explain it again. What
sprouted on 22 February
1996, taking root in what had been growing in
the minds & work of Nichelle, Joy, Cor(r)in(n)e, the Johns (Murder
& negatron), laurent, and myself, flowered in the breakdown of the
cursed distinction between art & life (real & virtual, in
whichever order you wish) that has created the environment in which I
can show Rose what Benedicte in 1990 called: "le monde magique". The
natural & human worlds, transformed into words, music, &
images, become themselves works of art, what John (Please keep your
scarf on.) Keats called truth & beauty. All you have to do is read
"The Real Thing"
by Henry James. Rose already understands this. She
will read "The Purloined Letter"
by Edgar Allen Poe and recognize it
implicitly. She is my daughter.
From: Murder
Date: 14 November 2009
Subject: Re: Timing the Slideshows
Gabe, according to my metronome I
get 70 beats per minute for La Vie en Rose. So that would work out to
.857 of a second for each beat. Here Comes the Sun (the Beatles'
version, which I assume you're using) fluctuates a bit (the bridge is
slightly faster than the chorus), but I get 130 BPM on average, which
is .462 of a second for each beat.
From:
SAGReiss
Date: 14 November 2009
Subject: Re: Timing the Slideshows
I see, you're getting all technical on my ass, using words like "bridge", of whose meaning I'm not quite sure in this context. I think it's related to "hook", but I don't know what that means either. Well, Rose knows what a bridge is. It's something to drive over or swim under, and we make them out of stone arches here. I'll use your measurements, of course, accurate to the thousandth of a second, and if anyone complains, I'll just send them to your website, indicating that you've just lost some kind of wet tee-shirt contest to a twenty-year-old boy, if I understand properly. If it was a twenty-year-old girl, then I understand even better, although I thought these were blind taste tests. To my uncultured ear the beats sounded much slower, about a second for the Beatles, a little longer for Satchmo. At least I got the hierarchy right. I guess I'm just a slow dancer. No one but Rose ever wants to dance with me anyway, and the feeling is mutual. Thanks, John. Um, I've just done this, the software was lying about limiting me to a minimum of 1000 milliseconds, but this seems insanely fast, hard-on-the-eyes fast. Before I publish these changes, I'd like to understand why. Maybe the unlearned ear needs a slower speed. Actually exactly half of the respective speeds is about what I was expecting, and looks more sane to me. Is there something relevant that I'm perceiving at about 1.714 & 0.924 second intervals respectively?
From: Murder
Date: 14 November 2009
Subject: Re: Timing the Slideshows
It makes sense that your ear
perceives the rhythm of these tunes exactly twice as long. I was using
a quarter-note pulse for my calculations, whereas in this context it
makes sense (especially for the Beatles tune) to use a half-note pulse,
effectively doubling the amount of time between "beats". So it would be
65 half-note beats per minute for the Beatles and 35 half-note BPM for
Satchmo, yielding 0.923 and 1.714 beats per second, respectively.
