ipod

more mac news: itunes4...includes itunes music store where you can download songs in AAC format- reportedly smaller and better quality than mp3. somehow seems all weirdly illegal.....but plainly states isn�t...

Bunker artists Legowelt, Orgue Electronique, DJ TLR and Bangkok Impact at Pianos in NYC tonight. Sadly I won't be able to make it out this evening, but this show is highly recommended. More info at Global Darkness, which has my favorite splash page in the whole wide world.

Mrs. Doyle and I will be flying into Detroit tomorrow to see conspirator Dave Runk join the ranks of married folk, which I gotta say is a very good gig if you can get it. I'll be swinging by Cranbrook Thursday to see the degree show and TWBTA's recent athletic building. Visiting Cranbrook is always an affirmation that true creativity knows not territorialism or pettiness.

Rant: Here, the 21st century, we still have to deal with prejudice and insecurities in the arts. I recently had a discussion with a couple of architects who proclaimed that architects may move freely between buildings, consumer products, graphics, or whatever field they choose because there is some [magical] element in architectural studies which does not exist in other design disciplines. I of course fully endorse and encourage multidisciplinary activities, but, being intimate with both architecture and industrial design, loudly point out that a good design education is a good design education, and to suggest that an architect may design a chair, but an industrial designer may never dream of designing a house is as preposterous as taking the old testament word for word. It's not a matter of scale, it is a matter of design process, and anyone with fifth grad education should be able to grasp this. The reason I'm so upset this morning is infact in defense of architecture from the even more intangible territorialism of fine art criticism. My personal heroes, Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller, have made a career of destroying the walls built by insecurity and frivolous title chasing. They simply do what they do, and do it with absolute quality, beauty and passion. Is it art or is it architecture? It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, my dear. Apparently art critic Jerry Saltz is so offended and threatened by this divergence that he wrote a scathing review of not only Diller+Scofidio's mid-career retrospective at the Whitney, but criticized every detail of their public persona, down to how they use punctuation. The critique reads like a temper tantrum by a spoiled child who's neighbor just beat them at their favorite game. Can we please fucking grow up and just appreciate good work when it happens? Lets reward people for breaking the rules and working in the spaces between the boxes, not be indignant because we blindly worked hard, according to the rules and found its a dead-end street. Following the rules is almost always a dead-end. I suppose it takes establishment defenders like Jerry Saltz to show what pioneers people like Diller+Scofidio truly are. Consistently, the best designers have a solid foundation in fine arts, and the best artists have a solid foundation in design. It's just sad that this argument still needs to happen. Mr. Saltz is a very good art critic, but clearly doesn't understand design or its capacity as a medium for intellectual exploration and social commentary. I appreciate that he doesn't throw up academic credentials to defend his opinions, but his fixation with the Art World (note caps) is the core problem with this most recent crit. The Art World is BS: there is only Art, and just like design, often the best comes from unexpected places.

fire away: mike@burnlab.net

Anyway... thanks for the great DEMF scoops, Josh! [below]

In their infinately wisdom, Urb Magazine has decided to make my article on Dinky the featured Next 100 piece for their website. Kinda funny that so many Burnlab conspiritors know her, yet I'm the one dropping 250 words on the girl.

In DEMF:Movement news, it was announced today that Jeff Mills will be headlining the festival. A good choice considering he's never played the fest before. The rest of the line-up will be announced on May 2nd, but scouring artists websites has already found that Speedy J, Ghost Cauldron, Adam Jay, Rolando and Pole will be make appearances somewhere that weekend.

Not bad for four months of preparation.

"Every man has inside himmself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage." �
-William S.Burroughs

I'll be guest DJ'ing TONIGHT at the BQE Lounge in tragically hip Williamsburg with fellow freak Trisha McBride. 300 N. 6th at Meeker and Metropolitan, just under the freeway from the Lorimer L stop, 11:15pm - 4ish.

"DJ'ing" may be too strong a term and disrespectful to people who do this for a living. I'll be playing records in some meaningful order, but with no attempt at mixing beyond iTunes' crossfade function is more accurate.

Either way, come on down and drink to dirty electropunk with good friends on this lovely Tuesday night.

is your pad just not goth enough? scarefactory can help, with wide range of haunted furniture.

My new Friendster and 1/3 of AUDC, John Southern runs an excellent design, music and culture site out of LA called Drowning in Culture. Everything you need to know about architecture, biking as a political act and punk shows (real punk shows) under one cybernetic roof.

Speaking of AUDC, Kazys ponders urbanism and network centric warfare.

Oh, and speaking of culturally insensitive humor (ref. yesterday's post), Get Your War On updated. Thank goodness for mnftiu for putting everything in perspective.

Stole this link from Rob, after laughing for about fortyfive minutes... even though its stupid and culturally insensitive on several fronts. (Touch�, sir.) The British never cease to amaze me.
Be sure to look at the TV commercials, and don't forget to meet the Doodys. Yes, its all too real.

Just another Saturday night in New York City. Despite Tadd's mentoring and unrivaled experience eating Chinese food, Sam Valenti's chopstick form still needs much work (left). Study aid here. Matthew, Sandimal and Paul Martin from the LA office getting rowdy on the Lower East Side (right).

My eurotrash self stumbled across this page. Sweet.

swiped from NewsToday: DACAFE.PHOTOGRAPH
A refreshing and beautiful site, full of Japanese kids smoking cigarettes, delicately grungy texture and superb English. Love it.

m-nus.com updated with Rich and Magda's tour schedule and a slew of new releases, including Matthew Dear's FALSE project. Speaking of Matt, our friend Will has updated his photo archives with some ridiculous pictures from Mr. Dear's birthday party in Detroit. [scroll down]

Lots of good music happening this weekend:

Tonight at midtown goth haven Downtime is the return of Motherf*cker, New York's most outrageous party. Rock, punk, glam, industrial, new wave, electro, you name it. The kids are beautiful, and the sound is good. Collapsing New People to the tee.

Standing Still Contest Saturday night at Frenchie's bar in Ypsilanti, MI (the quaint yet somewhat sketchy town just outside of Ann Arbor) features Todd Osborn, Blank 00 Soundsystem and our buddy Rob Theakston. "An Evening of Downtown Disco and Pogo for Punks in Pumps with an Ironic Title." (+ you should really read Rob's blog.)

Of course, if you're more of a city cat, UNTITLED is the place on Saturday in Detroit. The Motor City's most successful weekly club night with the coolest sponsors *cough* just gets better and better. Blackbx always throws a high quality evening of debauchery with pleasant surprises and this week is no exception. Brand new flyer right here. (Yeah, pretty much the only thing that's changed in the life of that jacket is my ability to grow facial hair.)

After a devestating hack a couple months ago, CranbrookDesign.com is back up and better than ever. Burnlab's commercial division ENGRAM is linked up in the alumni firms section. We're quite humbled to have more hits than Studio Libeskind.

Apparently I'll be DJing with my Salt Lake girl Trisha this coming Tuesday night at BQE in Williamsburg. More info to come soon.

Brand new Memory Systems poster, hot off the PowerBook and on its way to the printer as you read. Look for this all over New York in the coming weeks.

Patriarch to Detroit ex-pats in Brooklyn, corporate spy, brief star of the Fischerspooner documentary and punk-rock statesman Odell Nails celebrates his 3Xth birthday today. Please join us for casual cocktails and the always outrageous Hong Kong Counterfeit at Luxx this evening, starting around 11pm.

Uh, I posted that two weeks ago Karl, but good to have you back on the Blogging! ;) The Cog ad is so good it deserves the extrea attention. (Also see Rube Goldberg.) + you can buy The Way Things Go from MASS MoCA for $19.95. That's a savings of $240!

admittedly trying to catch up as a non-electro fan,i bought the "lectroluv" compilation, only to find that two of my favorite tracks were on a mix i already had by barcelona dj sideral (by toktok and fischerspooner). in the process of mixing the music for a party for the upcoming barcelona motorshow i figured i should update myself, but after listening to the lectroluv compilation and revisiting my own music i rediscovered a few things: mouse on mars�s niun niggung is a creative, sound-loving,weirdly danceable beauty, while giorgio moroder has to be recognized as a possibly cheesy but undeniable forfather of techno et al.....

Kazys is one step ahead of the game with his own Fischerspooner video. Heed this though: "It's absolutely and completely stupid. The kind of thing you'd only do if you had a bright new Canon GL2 and a three week old baby. Varnelis.net's just a G4 running X on a dsl line so if you're stupid enough to download this, it'll take ten minutes."
Dr. Varnelis' modesty aside, I doubt many will be able to top it.

Create your own Fischerspooner Emerge video and you could win an Apple eMac with Superdrive and have your work prominently featured on iFilm.com, Fischerspooner.com and more. Details here.

may 1st, 2nd, + 3rd barcelona hosts offf3, online flash film festival, which showcases the best in web design as well as experimental audio and audiovisual trends. the theme the work is based on for this edition is "who is your superhero?"...i confess to not recognizing any of the guests besides tomato (the guys from the group underworld) but hopefully after the weekend i�ll be able to give a more informed report

It's always sad that the creative people are the first to hit hard times. One note of solace, most of the creatve people I know aren't bogged down with loads of debt- cars, houses, kids, etc...
When you live on the fringe, at least the weight of society doesn't come crashing down so hard.

On that note, music journalist needs more work as well.

No smooth way to say this, and perhaps we are too good at giving the appearance of success, but war, economy and all things considered, Engram/Burnlab is seriously looking for paying work right now. Interior design, exhibit design, graphics large and small... All the pro bono projects and lectures are glamorous, but tax day is putting major hurt on the operation here. Consider this a rare and humble plea, and an offer of high quality design services for you and yours. You have things to be designed - I want to design things for you. I need your money. You need our services. Everyone wins. Write to: mike@engramdesign.com

The Dia:Beacon
Call it the anti-Bilbao, New York's highly acclaimed Dia Center opens the doors to the new home of its permanent collection in the sleepy Hudson valley town of Beacon, New York on May 18th. Situated between the Storm King Art Center and the sprawling MASS MoCA, Dia:Beacon will house a stunning array of work from what the NY Times calls "the Dia generation", including Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Michael Heizer. The building itself is a 300,000 sq. ft. former printing factory donated by International Paper, and received a very modest renovation with a great deal of input from the artists themselves.

Token suckers.

Not smooth.
Japanese electronics giant Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term "Shock and Awe" for a computer game. It is among a swarm of companies scrambling to commercially exploit the war in Iraq, which has killed more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians in the space of three weeks.

illustrator, graffiti artist, "bimbosculptor" ?? barcelona-visiting, berlin-based boris hoppek�s website is worth taking a look at..refreshing

"In case of emergency, when you find yourself in a scene, possibly involving a biologic or chemical agent (1), you should try to protect your airway. Our consumer neckwear may be important when moments count in an emergency"

Speaking of the future, after giving only a handful of interviews over the last 20 years William Gibson now has a Blog. The protagonist of his latest novel Pattern Recognition is a freelance trendspotter with an allergy to corporate logos.

A cool site that reminds me home much cooler the future used to be.

New message from the other Mike from Michigan, now living in New York. Stupid White Men was back at #1 on the NY Times bestseller list last week, and Mike has been asked back to network TV. Love Mike. We need more Mikes.

Friendster at work: Check out DJ Loveless' web radio program. Anyone with pictures of Nick Cave and Morrissey on her home page gets an automatic link here at Burnlab.

Fun with monsters and more, form ANARTIST(E)zine. Very nice!

Because you need more distractions in your life.
Mike Servito got me into Friendster a coupled days ago. This is a really well designed service that connects you with your friends, and their friends, and their friends' friends. With detailed profiles and the ability to search people based on interest criteria, it collapses the time involved to create a network of like-minded freaks dramatically. If you're not sure your real world friends are on the service, you can search for their e-mail address. Security seems to be very good, but I have to wonder about the fallout if this collective data were to fall into the hands of the CIA or an advertising agency....

EngramDesign.com and Burnlab.net have had very heavy traffic the past 24 hours or so from AvantGo users: apparently a PDA-based web service. This is the first I've heard of it, and am just curious about the origin of the increased traffic. The only three things I can think of are 1) something to do with the above post, 2) a project for Invisible Records I'll talk about later, and 3) Richard Perle is preparing to sue me for blaming him for yesterday's snowstorm. Drop me a note: Mike@Burnlab.net

Could it snow any bloody more in New York today?
Somehow this is Richard Perle's fault.

And so it begins. URB Magazine recently released their 9th annual Next 100 list, featuring a handful of talent from the Burnlab extended family, including Magda, Matthew Dear and Dinky. Way to go! It promises to be huge year for all three.

Graphic designer Steven R. Gilmore has a new site (new to me at least). Gilmore's groundbreaking work for Skinny Puppy and other Nettwerk Records artists in the late 80s placed him in league with the likes of Vaughan Oliver (Pixies, etc.) and Peter Saville (New Order, etc.). Check out the extraordinary With Love card collection, and his work for the Holy Body Tattoo dance company.

+ Some of Steven's demented art bookmarks:
Mark Ryden
Camille Rose Garcia
Merry Karnowsky Gallery

Short term nostalgia, research, any reason... a few old Burnlab favorites always worth a revisit to maintain humility:
Jennifer Sterling
[+ISM]
Reverend Yohan
Golan
Droog
Williams+Tsien
Mark Romanek

Off the screen and into your hands: Mike and Mike (a.k.a. WWFT) present One, "a Book+CD-Rom containing interactive versions of Designgraphik, TrueisTrue, and Submethod from 1998-2002."

Dutch electro master I-F's site cybernetic-broadcasting is back online and streaming electronic 56k love. You can tune in using Winamp, iTunes or Real here.

Honda: "the cog ad"
Deus ex machina! Beauty.
Thanks to Kris via Eric at Core77.

This is a good start.

Growing up in Detroit, everyone made cracks about the master manipulator and career thief (I mean politician) that was Mayor Colman Young. But I gotta tell ya, nothing prepared me for Chicago and the viscious, blatent and down right hilarious political thuggism (word I heard on CNN) under the Mayor Daley regiem. This guy does whatever he wants whenever he wants, and he proved it last night when he sent dozens of bulldozers to destroy the runway of Meigs Field without any public debate or even notice- (This link choosen because of the great picture on the right). I don't really have an opinion on whether this is good or bad, but damn is it crooked.

For all you NYC dwellers, my roommate Atomly will be performing at Open Air this Friday. Go check out some grade-A
laptop techno, jungle and Midwest hardcore.

Information Clearinghouse provides uncensored and hard to find news about the war. This article written by a UK journalist traveling with US Marines is so explicitly detailed and horrific, I couldn't finish it in one sitting. (Please try to look past the sensationalist headline.) How many days are we into this? And its already this bad? So much evil at the top. Let the cowards in Washington and Baghdad tear each other apart with their bare hands at a UN sanctioned smack-down, and leave everyone else out it. If Bush, Hussein and all their psychopathic henchmen, from Uday to Cheney, aren't strung up side-by-side for tomato lobbing at a Hague tribunal after this mess is over, we have indeed fallen to one of the lowest points of human history.

I never really truly believed in evil until now. Thank you Mr. Bush for destroying the integrity of the country I love and cherish, and quite possibly bringing decades of terrorism and hatred upon us. Enjoy your last days in prison, while we're still getting attacked with poison gas, hijacked airplanes and god-knows-what years from now and Wolfowitz, Perle and Rummy scratch their chins muttering, "Well.. that didn't work as planned..." No shit. Even 41 thought it was a terrible idea. How did a handful of delusional and amoral 'conservative thinkers' (who aren't even liked by most republicans) get to decide the fate of the world in the first place? This country's political system has been corrupted in a way that makes Enron look like an honest mistake and Richard Nixon look like a pretty good fella.

Here's one foreign policy suggestion: Stop giving people reasons to hate us.

If anyone hasn't seen the Fontline special reports on the origins of the war in Iraq, please turn off the CNN and do so. PBS even has entire streaming programs online. PBS is definitely one thing I love about this country. (I'm sure its on the administration's hit list.)

*sigh*

meanwhile...



Our new friend Will [top left, foreground] served as official paparazzi for Ghostly International during the Winter Music Conference. "For your awe and horror, the definitive collection of Miami photos."