class-A space/ classy space

• I love a good trestle table. Thomas Alonso (of my personal favorite Okay Studio) has an especially notable trestle table design. While you're there, be sure to check out his other projects. I especially like the DNA edition of the 5 Degree trestle and the Clothestree.
  


• One minute you're cruising down a sunny street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. You cross an intersection, and suddenly all hell breaks loose.
  
  
• Steve Reich is amazing. Music for 18 Musicians is one of my all time favorite albums to get lost within. Today I was amazed by Clapping Music:
  

  "Clapping Music (1972) was Steve Reich's attempt to write a piece of music requiring nothing but the human body -- two performers that hand-clap. His first attempt at translating phase technique from recorded tape loop to live performance was his 1967 Piano Phase for two pianos... As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth-note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Although Reich's original intent was for Clapping Music to be a phase piece, he found that the idea of phasing was not appropriate for the simple ways in which to experiment with sound using the human body. Instead, he employed a shifting technique -- still cyclic, like phasing. Reich states that the piece is "to have one performer remain fixed, repeating the same basic pattern throughout, while the second moves abruptly, after a number of repeats, from unison to one beat ahead, and so on, until he is back in unison with the first performer." Clapping Music is intended for performance in a large space where the echoes and reverberations of the clapping create "a surrounding sensation of a series of variations of two different patterns with their downbeats coinciding."

  Watch it. Too conceptually obtuse? Don't get it? My friend Michael sent "Reich Meets Wonder"-- a much more funky and totally more visual version.
  
  
• THIS FLYING LOTUS MUSIC VIDEO IS BATSHIT CRAZY AND AFTER 45 SECONDS IT GETS ABOUT AS NSFW AS YOU CAN GET WITH OUT BECOMING FULL-ON PR0N.
  
  
• Junior Boys - Work. One of the hotter tracks off the new Junior Boys record. Ah, the cold & melancholic upbeat of an impending Spring season.
  
  
• The Dark Side of Dubai - An epic article on the ugly underside of Dubai, which the global economic downturn is starting to reveal. A few excerpts:
  

  "He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor"
  
  "Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American."
  
  "Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day, she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with intensity: "Don't judge us."

  4/10/2009