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”
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 …
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 …
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. …
I just posted an update on Kickstarter about how today is the day. We’re filming, we’re recording, and we’ve got well over half a ton of stuff if you count the people. Earlier in the week, the forecast said cloudy, rainy and gross. But the sun’s come out, so if our luck holds you can …
We’re recording on Saturday. Sean and I are rehearsing every couple of days, and putting the finishing touches on his performance. If I could focus only on that, this would be easy. But we’ve got to sort out a film crew that seems to get new members every day (we’re up to five now). We’ve …
Emily H is one of those brilliant people who winds up running the government (and she’s got a recipe blog!). She’s a civil servant, working for the NSF, NASA, and now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so just remember: she’s on your side, and she’s good at it. This spring, though, every couple of weeks …
Greg put us over the top on December 13th, and to a great extent he’s still largely a mystery to us. His Kickstarter profile lists him only as Greg D., but also shows him to be a prolific supporter of a huge range of creative projects – they’re really quite fascinating if you want to …
Sarah Wheaton is a great cook who cut her teeth as a political blogger for the NYTimes right out of college covering the election in D.C. Now she’s back at the mothership in NYC and has made reading the times into an addictive game of Spot Sarah’s Byline. Sarah’s cocktail is light and fizzy, matching …
