Everything is Interesting
Charles Bronson (1921 – 2003), born Charles Dennis Buchinsky was an American actor, best-known for such films as ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ ‘The Great Escape,’ ‘Rider on the Rain,’ ‘The Mechanic,’ and the popular ‘Death Wish’ series.
He often cast in the role of a police officer or gunfighter, often in revenge-oriented plot lines.
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15 minutes of fame is short-lived, often ephemeral, media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. The expression was coined by Andy Warhol, who said in 1968 that ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ The phenomenon is often used in reference to figures in the entertainment industry or other areas of popular culture, such as reality TV and YouTube. It is believed that the statement was an adaption of a theory of Marshall McLuhan, explaining the differences of media, where TV differs much from other media using contestants.
The expression is a paraphrase of a line in Warhol’s catalog for a 1968 exhibit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 1979 Warhol reiterated his claim, ‘…my prediction from the sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.’ Becoming bored with continually being asked about this particular statement, Warhol attempted to confuse interviewers by changing the statement variously to ‘In the future 15 people will be famous’ and ‘In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.’
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Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, ‘a friend of a friend’ statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.
It was originally set out by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare.
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Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The phrases in her works often include use of pronouns such as ‘you,’ ‘your,’ ‘I,’ ‘we,’ and ‘they.’ Much of Kruger’s work engages the merging of found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark white letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read ‘I shop therefore I am,’ and ‘Your body is a battleground.’
Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. Kruger juxtaposes imagery and text critical of sexism; the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in her work. A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. The importance of appropriation art in contemporary culture lay in its ability to play with preponderant imagistic and textual conventions: to mash up meanings and create new ones.
A lava lamp is a novelty light that contains blobs of colored wax inside a glass vessel filled with clear liquid. The wax rises and falls as its density changes due to heating from an incandescent light bulb underneath the vessel. Briton Edward Craven-Walker invented the lava lamp in 1963; it was originally called the ‘Astro Lamp.’
The wax is transparent, translucent or opaque mix of mineral oil, paraffin wax and carbon tetrachloride. The density of common wax is much lower than that of water and would float on top under any temperature. However, the carbon tetrachloride is heavier than water (also nonflammable and miscible with wax), and is added to the wax to make its density at room temperature slightly higher than that of the water.
The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is an annual four day music festival created and produced by Superfly Productions and AC Entertainment, held at Great Stage Park on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee. It hosted its tenth annual event in 2011. The main attractions of the festival are the multiple stages of live music, featuring a diverse array of musical styles including indie rock, world music, hip hop, jazz, bluegrass, country music, folk, gospel, reggae, electronica, and other alternative music. The festival began with a primary focus on jam bands, but has diversified greatly in recent years. The festival features craftsmen and artisans selling unique products, food and drink vendors, a comedy tent, a silent disco, and a cinema tent, and a Ferris wheel.
The word Bonnaroo, popularized by New Orleans R&B singer Dr. John with his 1974 album ‘Desitively Bonnaroo,’ means ‘a really good time.’ It is a Ninth Ward slang construction taken from the French ‘bon’ meaning ‘good,’ and ‘rue’ from the French ‘street,’ translating to ‘the best on the streets.’ The name was chosen both for its literal meaning and to honor the rich Louisiana music tradition. The first Bonnaroo took place in 2002 and took inspiration from music festivals like Coachella in California and Glastonbury in England.
Patrick Nagel (1945 – 1984) was an American artist. He created popular illustrations on board, paper, and canvas, most of which emphasize the simple grace of and beauty of the female form, in a distinctive style descended from Art Deco. He is best known for his illustrations for ‘Playboy’ magazine, and the pop group Duran Duran, for whom he designed the cover of the best selling album ‘Rio.’ Nagel would start with a photograph and work down, always simplifying and removing elements which he felt were unnecessary. The resulting image would look flat, but emphasized those elements which he felt were most important. Nagel’s figures generally have black hair, bright white skin, full-lipped mouths, and the distinctive Nagel eyes, which are often squared off in the later works.
According to Elena G. Millie, curator of the poster collection at the Library of Congress: ‘Like some of the old print masters (Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, for example), Nagel was influenced by the Japanese woodblock print, with figures silhouetted against a neutral background, with strong areas of black and white, and with bold line and unusual angles of view. He handled colors with rare originality and freedom; he forced perspective from flat, two-dimensional images; and he kept simplifying, working to get more across with fewer elements. His simple and precise imagery is also reminiscent of the art-deco style of the 1920s and 1930s- its sharp linear treatment, geometric simplicity, and stylization of form yield images that are formal yet decorative.’
Derek Vincent Smith (b. 1983), better known as Pretty Lights, is an American electronic music artist. Smith wrote and produced hip hop music while attending high school in Fort Collins, Colorado, but the music of such artists as Aphrodite attracted him to American raves. After graduating from high school, he attended University of Colorado at Boulder, but dropped out during his freshman year to focus instead on his music. Smith’s music relies heavily on digital sampling and crosses many genres, forming a combination of ‘glitchy hip-hop beats, buzzing synth lines, and vintage funk and soul samples, sometimes grime.’
Pretty Lights’ sound is generated by synthesizing samples and organic beats using the Novation X-Station, monome, and the Akai MPD32. Smith uses these digital controllers to program the music production software Ableton Live 8. Due to the sample-based nature of his music, Smith releases all his music for free with a recommended donation, so as to avoid having to clear samples. When performing live, Smith uses two Macbook Pros running Ableton Live 8 and two Akai MPD32s.
The term Groovebox was originally used by Roland corporation to refer to its MC-303 mobile music synthesizer, but the term has since entered into general use. It refers to a self-contained instrument for the production of live, loop-based electronic music with a high degree of user control facilitating improvisation.
A groovebox consists of three integrated elements: one or more sound sources, such as a drum machine, a synthesizer or a sampler, a music sequencer (recorder), and a control surface, i.e. a combination of knobs (potentiometer or rotary encoder), sliders and buttons, and display elements (LED and/or LCD).
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Livetronica, a portmanteau of the words ‘live’ and ‘electronica,’ is a sub-genre of the jam band movement that blends such musical styles as rock, jazz, funk, and electronica. It consists primarily of instrumental music. The terms ‘Jamtronica’ and ‘Trance fusion’ are also used to refer to this style of music.
Artists like the Disco Biscuits, Lake Trout, and The New Deal are credited as founding fathers of the genre, but recently up-and-coming bands such as The Werks, Pnuma Trio, and the Histronic of Minneapolis have started to inject new life and young blood into the scene.
In music, a fugue [fyoog] is a compositional technique (in classical music) in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition.
In other words, a fugue is a piece of music written for a certain number of parts (voices). The word ‘fugue’ comes from the Italian ‘fuga’ meaning ‘flight.’
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Musical improvisation (also known as Musical Extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate (‘in the moment’) musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians. Thus, musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music, and indeed many other kinds of music.
Because improvisation is a performative act and depends on instrumental technique, improvisation is a skill. There are musicians who have never improvised and other musicians who have devoted their entire lives to improvisation. Thus, a musicians technical ability is not necessarily related to their improvisational ability, though both skills can complement each other.
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