The Tree of mrcury

Earlier tonight I came across this great article by Rob Sheridan which covers the topic of music distribution in a market led by major labels’ interests, after the murder of the great filesharing community OiNK.cd. I wasn’t part of the OiNK community, but I wish I had. The original announcement on the shutdown website couldn’t have depicted it further from the truth.

If you’re ready for a long read, take it away. There are also some worthy links in the article. Yeah, so much to make you spend the night reading blogs and news posts like I happened to… I was discussing the possibility to translate it to italian and let it spread a bit like it deserves to. I think I will, maybe with a little help.

Coming up next, a cross-blog post where I explain why I’m pissed at Radiohead.

There isn’t much to write, there is a lot more to read.

Music is not a product.

Let me repeat that for you: music is not a product. Read it aloud and listen to the sound: music is not a product.

MUSIC IS NOT A PRODUCT.

Yes, I haven’t been updating anything these past few weeks. But there’s a lot of stuff coming up! Band photoshoots, live photography, a ton of instant film for my two new (old) Polaroid SX-70s ready to be scanned, design work, music, et cetera - here, a small appetizer: Cult of Luna @ Siddharta Club, Prato. The entire set is available on Flickr. Enjoy!

I’m passionate about what I do. Such passion can be seen by other people as compulsive behaviour. And that’s probably what it is. But I really enjoy crafting marvelous CSS designs and admin areas - still pretty basic features, but I’m learning new stuff all the time - for hours. I’ve recently taken into account many useful resources as to how succeeding in getting rid of procrastination. Last night I surfed the internet compulsively as I’m doing more and more often, but among the usual dozen sites that don’t carry the frequent updates I wish they did, I found guides to overcome this big monster haunting me. The fact that I didn’t simply print the webpage out but instead delved into a “quick” half-hour typesetting job is relevant to my general attitude towards everything. That is, seek for perfection by all means. If I don’t like something or feel it could be improved, I just get my hands dirty and improve it. And it’s often on useless things. Maybe more the useless than the useful ones anyway. Procrastination is rooted deep in me because, being a perfectionist, I always focus on the results. I’m always trying to get praise or recognition. Which isn’t really a bad thing per se. What’s really ruining the magic is the fact that I can’t stop thinking about failing. I’ve had my fair amount of success and my fair amount of failure, but the latter is just more powerful to me. It has a grip on my stomach. It tells me to stop, and when it does I just have to. I just do it. So here I am with stomachache, my spine hurts and my ass is most likely flat for having been sat all day. Oh, I was forgetting my elbows. They hurt too. So the sun is up and I haven’t slept a wink. I haven’t been sleeping properly for months. Forget the bad dreams, those I can forget. It’s about the life I’m not living, that’s what it is.

That’s what I’ve been doing all day. I have some experience with mod_rewrite on Apache, but not quite enough to get a website’s redirects working in little time. I’ve gone back and forth trying different combination of rewrite rules to get user-friendly URLs for a website I’m working on. The structure is made of five different pages, each of which loads chunks of text according to the selected language. For instance,

website.com/lang_1/section1/

actually points to

website.com/section1.php?language=lang1

This process is completely transparent to the end user, so even the hyperlinks use the clean URLs rather than the complex ones. This transparency also helps not to reveal the technology the website is built on, and to ensure scalability and expandability in case future developers decide to change the development framework.

User-friendly URLs are also search-engine-friendly, so it is not only in my interest to develop a site structure that is easy to grasp at first glance and to comprehend at an intuitive level, as the client has a consistent advantage if their site is easily indexed by search engines (being a company website). It is also because I prefer order over chaos (tidy URLs good, messy URLs bad), and because I need to practise programming massively if I’m going to design more often and more intensely (oh yeah) as I’m planning to be.

So, this is a great day for I tamed the mod_rewrite and I have tidy URLs to work with. I’ll post something here when the final webiste launches.

Please, someone give me something that makes me feel better.

Mondays are just appendixes of Sundays. The real beginning is on Tuesdays!

Check this Pitchfork article out: photography and electronic music compared, intertwined, deconstructed, glorified. Kind of.

Electronic music and photography have more than a few things in common: crucially, both genres’ dependence upon mechanical, electronic and/or digital reproduction. Perhaps more importantly, both genres have lagged behind their older “siblings” (painting or traditional acoustic or electrically amplified music) in becoming fully recognized and validated on their own terms. Far from being a coincidence, their shaky reputations are wholly wrapped up in their reproductive methods.

And

Electronic music– especially in its popular, club-oriented forms– remains a second-class citizen, the black sheep of the musical flock, for many of the same reasons that photography was denigrated for so long: Mediated principally by machines, it’s often believed to be inauthentically expressive– the expression not of the artist but of the automatic device he or she wields.

I’m drooling. I’ve also found out about Gabriel Ananda. Nice minimalist techno. I want to do electronic music so bad. It just sound easy! I love it. I miss the good days when I used to compose electronic pieces with ReBirth. That was so fun and easy. That’s what makes it for me: you can basically have a finished product in few hours. I heard Aphex Twin saying how even back in the mid-90’s he had some 150 hours of completed music. Think about it.

As I’m stuck most of the time in the process of deciding when I have to choose between alternatives, I think I’ll better start practising this rule pretty much right now.

I can’t help but hopelessly follow the hype after every Apple event. This time, they put out new iPods and my wallet itches more than ever. Add the fact that you can never know for sure what they’re going to release. I just get rabid about it, every time. Please stop this! No, give me more.