Tech, Philanthropy, Composing
I've been meaning to write about this for a while. The tributes to Steve Jobs, and this recent blog post from Ian Moss on usability studies in arts programming seem like a good jumping off point. The thing I've always loved about Apple products, and the thing I've sometimes found irritating about Apple products, is …
Continue reading "Steve, Usability, and the Gradient Audience"
Commence the heresy: art and marketing are fundamentally the same. There's a reason that Jim Henson's work flowed so easily from commercials to purely Muppet-based stuff. Both the artists and the marketers are trying to make awesome experiences. But marketers are trying to get you to buy stuff because of that experience (or recommend a …
Continue reading "More thoughts from the FMC – intersecting art and marketing"
It's still day 1 at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit 2011, and I'm sitting in the conference hall as I write this. Talking to Glenn from ReverbNation, and listening to this morning's panel on ticketing has me thinking about software. Specifically, I'm thinking about how text analytics (machines that can read and understand …
Continue reading "Fantasy Software inspired by the Future of Music Coalition 2011 Policy Summit"
Journeyman is a fantastic restaurant. If you haven't, go eat there. In the bathrooms at Journeyman you won't see signs that say "Employees must wash hands". You'll see some pretty damned funny haiku nicely framed on the wall which meet the same legal requirement. When I read these haiku I thought one thing: Classical music …
Thanks to the hard work of a lot of brilliant and talented people Cucumbers & Gin is now complete! This project has been an incredible experience, from our Kickstarter campaign, working with backers, through pre-production planning, the incredible day we shot and recorded the project, and through post-production as well, creating an interactive way for …
The film version of The Seafarer is complete! Thanks so much to everyone who's worked on this from concept to shooting through post-production. We did it!
A couple days ago I got an IM from Victoria Nece: "Can you set this to music?". She had linked me to the text of Newt Gingrich's hysterically epic press release. I thought for a moment, and replied that yes, yes I could. Next I e-mailed Jason asking if he could turn around a video …
Tomorrow night, Sean-David Cunningham is going to perform Cucumbers & Gin live! After all our work on the Kickstarter campaign, on the recording, and on the film, it's easy to forget that you can also just go up to people and perform for them. The concert's at the Exapno New Music Community Center, where I'm …
Continue reading "Cucumbers & Gin, live at Exapno tomorrow night!"
We're done! We've created seven different custom cocktails each featuring cucumbers and gin for awesome our Kickstarter backers. It was harder and more rewarding than I expected. Both ingredients have very distinctive flavors, and coming up with seven different recipes that a) aren't horrible and b) aren't identical wasn't easy. We created a lot of …
Shoot my brother. please! Basically, I'm morally obligated to taunt Dennis with his custom cocktail. He's my brother - I have to. The name of the drink is one thing, but my favorite part is that he has to cut fiddly grapefruit supremes and wrestle with obnoxious plating requirements! This petty triumph, dear reader, is …
So, my day job is to run the MTC Studio, which we launched last November at Meet The Composer. Since before that I've been working with six fantastic composers to commission new works to premiere on our festival, the Three City Dash. We're two concerts in, with one to go - tomorrow at the Morgan …
To Sean for his performance, to Zach for his recording, to Alan, Mike, Kate, Gill, Dave and Ben, our fantastically talented crew, to Gramps and Maxine for welcoming us into their home with all the gear and the noise and the interruption, and to all our backers on Kickstarter for making the whole thing possible. …
