CatSynth

This morning we revisit our favorite fat cat in the news.

Local TV in Porland, Oregon, paid a visit to Hercules at home, and found both the generously proportioned cat and his human friend Geoff Ernest doing well. Lots of pictures, like the one to the right. Not surprisingly, they have been approached for promotions, such as Purina's diet cat food…

In addition to happy and heartwarming photo-ops, the follow-up news coverage included this opinion in The Oregonion about the importance of spaying/neutering pets:

Let's consider the other side of this heartwarming story: that of a nice cat, who because he was not neutered and was let outdoors, acted with predictable behaviors of fighting, mating and becoming a stray.

The heartache of Hercules' ailing person thinking “he was dead” would have been prevented had Hercules been taken care of as a beloved pet by being neutered and preferably kept indoors. How many unwanted kittens were produced because of this one stray tomcat's life on the streets?

Although Hercules' story had a happy ending, it easily could have ended much worse. I can't imagine what it be like to come home and find Luna potentially “lost forever.” That's why she enjoys her warm spring afternoons safely indoors…

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Submitted by Knox Bronson at SunPopBlue:

Bronson has collaborated with Gustvo Lanzas (who provided the recent video of Apu the “Acid Cat”) on an interesting improvisation featuring the Serge (and an E-MU SP-1200!) called Where The Bees Are. Check out the free mp3.

And there is still more fun with Freddie at SunPopBlue. Check out his video Sleep (An Homage to Andy Warhol):

Ah, wasn't it only a day or so ago that we were again reminiscing about New York in the 1970s?

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The warm weekend here in California continues, and that's enough to give anyone a happy tail!

Actually, Luna often has a happy tail. But it's still extra fun when she gets to take in the sights, sounds and smells of a warm “spring” day through an open window. In fact, we at CatSynth are having a serious case of spring fever and opening all the windows today. Trying to rid our abode of the stale and bitter airs of this exceptional winter. Begone with ye, cruel season of pain and dispair!

Scamper over to Rosa's Yummy Yums for more Weekend Cat Blogging with fellow black kitty Maruschka as well as Fridolin and Rosa.

We're up for hosting next week here at CatSynth, so we'll leave all the windows open for our feline friends…

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Crack open a window!

It's been a lovely, warm day, one of the best since our recent deep freeze. Lots of patches of grey haze (probably fog rather than smog) amidst the blue. The melancholy beauty of California “summer,” except it's February.

it's starting to feel civilized again.

Speaking of civilization, many of us took time to help out friends (who I might through my interests in electronic and experimental music, hence this post noses itself into the “music” category) who were moving, from one side of town to the other. With so many of us coming out to help, we got the whole thing done in a fraction of a day. Would that friends and community got together for one another like this more open.

Below is a map of our home little seaside town.

On the lower left is the “West Side”, our side, of town. It's known for including the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), and scenic West Cliff Drive bookended by Natural Bridges state park and the main city beach. We moved our friends from nearby in the West Side over to the area called “Live Oak” on the eastern edge of the map and beyond the city limits. The area has quite a different feel, a flat patchwork of new homes, commercial buildings, rundown blocks and vacant lots. It might be strange that I like to explore places like this, but I do, it feels like being on the rundown edge of a large city. I have a similar feel when biking through the neighborhood near the main city beach, a mixture of old houses, tourist hotels and vacant lots.

It's easy to wax romantic about a place when you don't necessarily live there. Consider the fondness many artistic and cultural figures have for 1970s New York, a time when the city was verging on bankrupcy, infrastructure was crumbling and the (violent) crime rate was far higher than it is now. Daniel Henninger had a great article in the Wall Street Journal two years ago discussing this idea. Among those quoted:

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the '70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.”

For me, there is probably also a nostalgia for the images of childhood, like the graffiti on subway cars and crumbling concrete playgrounds (I don't think any of those exist any longer). By contrast, Giuliani's cleaned-up Times Square elicits little more than a shrug and a few seconds looking at the big screen…
Most of my recent trips to New York have been in November and December (though I did go back in June, 2005 as well). New York in winter does have its charm, but I miss the sweltering summers, the terrific oppression of the big city…

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Report from the first day on the RPM challenge:

The idea that I can spend a month, or even a fraction thereof, doing nothing but working on this album is laughable at best. There will be many distractions in the coming days, just as there have been today. Nonetheless, I made a point to take some first steps this evening..

Based on the “arc” and narrative form I am defining for the album, I went in search of samples to use for the introduction and some beats to use for the first full section. The intro should be an old clip from a big band or jazz recording from the 1940s/1950s – I discovered a really good collection of public-domain big-band radio recordings on The Internet Archive, and quickly settled on my intro.

Next up is selecting some initial beats for the beat-based / techo part of the album. I selected several drum-beat samples, and imported them into Emulator X. Using the beat-analysis (aka “Twistaloop” features), I created several seven-beat loops.

The initial rhythmic section will employ a 7-beat meter and combine drum loops and Proteus patterns inside Emulator X, as well as 7-beat/14-beat Indian thekas for tabla. This will probably also be the first opportunity to use the DSI evolver in a compositional setting (as oppose to live improvisation).

That will probably be all I get done tonite, as I take some time to relax while writing this blog entry and getting some “kitty love” from Luna (she's snuggling in on my chest as I write this).

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