We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: artist

  • Stewart & His Constant Search for Patterns in Randomness

    Three consecutive tracks in today’s the automatic podcast from “& His” artists:

    1. May Flower — Mike Shaw & His Alabama Entertainers
    2. Call On Me — Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
    3. Reset — Casper Fandango & His Tiny Sick Tears

  • for Paul Carter

    for Paul Carter. Paul died a year ago today.

     The above are static images of the installation.

    (more…)

  • snarky van graffiti

    “if the sale of spray paint to minors was banned, I’d be dealing drugs and killing your kids. Now I’m an artist …”

  • definitely clean

    iTunes 'clean' marker

    iTunes‘ clean/explicit labelling worries me. Shouldn’t I, at the age of Dennis the Communist Peasant, be able to decide what’s good for me? Not merely that, but it takes up a bunch of the song title entry, and they label songs by artists who don’t produce bowdlerised versions. Gah!

  • house concert!

    We went to a house concert last night to hear Chris Coole & Erynn Marshall play some Kentucky duets. Erynn’s back from BC to record with Chris; today’s a long day in the studio.

    Great music, nice venue, excellent evening. Maybe we’ll eventually get enough money to buy Chris a new banjo head; his current one looks stricken with some dread skin disease …

  • spider in the house

    Ole! Tarantula is in the house, but where’s the promised bonus CD?

  • Paul Carter, 1970-2006

    Paul Carter died in a car crash yesterday near Edinburgh. We were inseparable as kids.

    He was an inspired artist, even when I knew him. I’ll never forget him asking of his ZX Spectrum: How do I get more colours from this?

    Stewart and Paul, 1983

    This is me and Paul (right) in the summer of 1983. Paul was wearing his Beatles t-shirt, as usual; I think he’d just painted his bedroom wall with scenes from Yellow Submarine. We were just about to set out on a sponsored cycle. We belted round the track at Crookfur Park until everyone else had gone home, leaving one poor hapless lap-counting volunteer waiting in the dusk.

    Some of Paul’s artwork on the web:

    Update, 21 Aug: Paul’s funeral is this Friday in Joppa at St Philip’s Church, Joppa Road at 10.30 am. There is a wake in the church hall after until 1pm. Thanks to Chris Hill and John Beagles for finding this.

  • RE Imaginations – Renewable Energy Art

    I was about to rush off and tell Emma Jane about RE Imaginations – Renewable Energy Art, when I discovered she exhibits on it already.

    (They had a nifty display at AWEA, and I just bought an Aleksandar Rodic print.)

  • timely quotation

    Anent George W. Bush’s “God Told Me To Do It …” revelation, was it purely coincidence that the week’s quotation in Catherine‘s Women Artists Datebook is:

    I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

     — Susan B. Anthony
    ?

  • batch renaming iTunes directories

    In partial response to the Ask Metafilter question “How can I rename my music folders on my Mac based on ID3 tags?“:

    #!/bin/bash
# itunes_sanity.sh - fix dir names created by iTunes
# only works for mp3s, and not actually tested on a Mac
# created by scruss on Sun Sep 4 22:05:00 EDT 2005

find "$@" -type d -mindepth 1 | while read directory
do
  artistdir=$(dirname "$directory")
  firstfile=$( find "$directory" -type f -iname '*.mp3' | head -n1 )
  year=$( id3info "$firstfile" | egrep ' TYE ' | sed 's/=== TYE (Year): //; s/[^0-9]*//;' )
  album=$( id3info "$firstfile" | egrep ' TAL ' | sed 's,=== TAL (Album/Movie/Show title): ,,;' )
  echo mv \'$directory\' \'$artistdir/\[$year\] $album\'
done

    So if you were in the terminal, in your music library (one up from the individual artist directories), and you did:

    itunes_sanity.sh Dan\ Jones Tripping\ Daisy

    you’d get:

    mv 'Dan Jones/Get Sounds Now' 'Dan Jones/[2005] Get Sounds Now'
mv 'Dan Jones/One Man Submarine' 'Dan Jones/[2003] One Man Submarine'
mv 'Tripping Daisy/Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb' 'Tripping Daisy/[1998] Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb'

    If that looks okay, run the output through the shell:

    itunes_sanity.sh Dan\ Jones Tripping\ Daisy | sh

    and all should be well.

    You’ll need id3lib, which is probably most easily installed from Fink. Also, this only works for mp3 files; I can’t grok the tag info for AAC files. And finally, this might go seriously screwy on weird characters in filenames. You know my feelings on that …