Mike McCracken

This weekend, shake off soggy Seattle fall gloom by treating yourself to an artistic double feature - Manifold Motion’s Miscellanea II and Hazard Factory’s Smash Putt. I have contributed to both productions and while they are both very different, they both have bars, arduinos and pneumatics.

Miscellanea is the second showcase of Manifold Motion artists’ work. Both shows involve an impressive breadth of types of work. Mostly performance, but with some visual art and installation as well. The show is an excellent forum for fans (that includes everyone in the company as well) to sample other styles of Manifold Motion’s artists. I am a creator and performer in the big music and dance finale, and created the installation “Untitled Box with Connector”.

Showtimes are Nov 20th @ 8, Nov 21st @ 8 and Nov 22nd @ 7 (Updated from 9, oops)

Canoe Social Club
409 7th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98104

Smash Putt was conceived when Hazard Factory’s Jeremy was traveling across the country and stopped to play a little mini-golf. He saw how many people - and types of people - were enjoying the game, and also saw how much better the game could be made. He also knew that Hazard Factory were the folks to “fix” mini-golf. Six weeks later after many many hours of work by Jeremy, Rusty, Josh and Ben, Smash Putt opened. Many other contributors were involved, including myself - I built the electronic sensing and control systems that work with the saw, drill, ferris wheel, foosball and other mechanisms the guys built. This is an exciting and original take on mini golf.

Open nights the last three weekends of November for 21+ shows, and family friendly Saturday matinees.

Smash Putt Fairway
912 12th ave. Seattle, WA 98122

So please come and enjoy!

Here’s a little story about a special birthday treat that happened. The day of my birthday was spent in large part driving on a road trip. I was just fine with that seeing as how the trip was to Berlin. Part of the way into Germany the driver got tired of driving and I offered to do some. I was excited to drive on the autobahn and didn’t know when I’d have another opportunity. It was going fine, and it was fun. The car wasn’t thrilled with the speed we were going, but plenty of cars were zipping past me.

I then, in a moment of cheeziness (which I felt allowed to have, as it was my birthday) I requested that my friend who was DJing put on Kraftwerk. Autobahn, naturally. For maybe a minute and a half I was basking in the perfectness of careening along the listing to a song I love driving on its namesake. It was about that long before we hit traffic and came to a dead stop. For the next two hours we were in painfully slow stop and go traffic, utterly obligerating my romantic ideals of the autobahn, to an ironic soundtrack.

The experience, however, was a very good one. When we first hit the traffic I popped the door open and touched the famed highway with my hand. The irony of the situation was glorious, and I completely appreciated it. It was an excellent birthday treat.

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)