Mike McCracken

This release from CultureMob.com is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. In addition to expanding from Seattle into Denver and Portland with it’s event-finding magics (with, of course, the world to follow), this release includes the fruits of my labors: editability!

We’ve released this with an experimental ability for anyone with an account to make edits to the data. This should make my wife Keely very happy, since the poor categorizations of dance performances have bugged her.

I’m in the middle of this crazy deference of decision making. I really want to go to burningman, but I told myself that I would only go if I could bring my project (currently referred to as ‘Avatar’, but looking for a better name). So, I am scrambling to see if I can get it in shape for burningman over the course of the coming week.

There’s about an 18% chance that it will happen, because there are a lot of logistics to work out: how will I power it, how will I get down there, what will I use to get four channels of audio out of supercollider (and will my old laptop support it) and what will I use to get button signals into MAX (hey, a really cheap solution might just be a disassembled mouse!), how will I keep the whole thing 30 feet off the ground?

Whether or not I go, it is good to be focusing like this on it, as I still plan on bringing it to robodock.

Just bought the ticket to go to Robodock in Amsterdam. Hooray! I hope to bring my yet-unnamed soundscape installation doohickey that needs a ton of work.

Man, what hard news to hear that Floyd died. Even now, over a decade since he was my high school jazz band teacher, he frequently comes up in my mind so fondly: the essence of chill. His grace and calm in earnestly dealing with a bunch of goofy teenagers has emerged in my heart countless times as an inspiring model of good natured patience.

One student, a pianist, seemed to have some sort of defect that prevented him from exerting the necessary self-restraint to not snatch the sticks and play on the drums while Floyd was talking. It wouldn’t take long for this to interfere with class at which point Floyd would stop, look at the pianist (who would be now be looking up at Floyd, absently persisting with the drumming), shake his head and say, “be cool, man, be cool”. And this worked, the pianist, realizing that he was being uncool, would stop playing and listen. “This is a jazz class, not a social skills class, you’re supposed to have learned those somewhere else.” Funny, to the point, and good natured. I will miss you, Floyd Standifer.

Floyd Standifer: 1929-2007: ‘Personification of a jazz musician’ (Seattle P.I.)

(photo taken by cathycracks and used with permission)