Some good work news
If you're keeping score at home, On Deadline hit the 60,000-comment mark last week and the 4,000-post mark this week. Also, as we move into our seventh month, prime-time blogger Steve Rubel has some nice things to say about us ("USA Today, with On Deadline, is changing journalism and with it PR").
Rubel is big on the power of writing short but strong, and you know I can't throw out a New Yorker without reading the front-of-the-book event listings. If you're interested in the same thing, you should check out Jack Shafer's piece about the art of the New York Times TV writeups. Gawker half-mocks it, and I like it too….
Speaking of
July 24 New Yorker, "Now playing" listings:
ORANGE LEMON EGG CANARY
Rinne Groff's latest play is a love story about a magician and his beautiful assistant. Directed by Michael Sexton. (P.S. 122 at 150 First Ave. 212-352-3101.)
I'm intrigued. I'm a sucker for magician stories. Not novels about the dark arts, but looks at the everyday lives of magicians.
After growing up in the area and never hearing about any magic shops — and I collected baseball cards and once went to a non-Union Station model-train store with my dad for some reason — a Post story a week ago about a magic shop possibly on the verge of closing still has me wanting to go there.
And a musical connection
The same New Yorker issue, in a feature on the year's Mozart anniversary, discusses dissemination and piece-by-piece recreation:
The festival has also commissioned an audiovisual installation by the Open-Ended Group, in which colorful abstract images generated by the coda of "Jupiter" will be projected onto ten screens in front of Avery Fisher Hall. Every half hour, computer software will set about "learning" the music, pulling out melodic and harmonic patterns and playing them through speakers, until Mozart's sixty-four-bar coda is heard complete; then the computer memory is erased, and the process starts again.
I read that one night and saw this article on News.com the news day, "One man's spam is another man's art." About the computer artist involved, the story says:
He recently completed a project in music visualization called Extrusions in C Major. The project creates images from Mozart compositions. To do this, the software analyzes the note characteristics of the music, including the tempo of various instruments, and then pairs them with colors: white for piano, yellow for violin and blue for cello.
But where he's going now is deeper into the word realm.
For the last several years, the Romanian-born computer artist has applied techniques in computational modeling and information visualization to invent a new form of artistic expression. One of his more notable projects involved creating what he calls Spam Plants. He wrote algorithms that analyzed various text and data points of junk e-mail to produce "organic" images of plantlike structures that spontaneously grew based on incoming spam.
Now he's working on a software agent that can "write" experimental graphical novels based on a melange of text culled from thousands of like-minded blogs across the Net. When finished, the agent, called Blogbot, will include algorithms that apply computational linguistics to the blog text, so that it extracts meaning from the text. That way, the graphical novel might strike on profundity.
Hemingway gets note. I'm curious to see how short sentences draw.
