TITLEOFMAGAZINE
All-you-can-eat brain mulch. The creative process stripped open and the wires fiddled with. Free chunks of media: animal, vegetable, musical, printed and tangible.
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Getting Riced on Chhaang
Monday, February 15th, 2010
If the Yeti was going to step out of seclusion and make a little coin endorsing some hooch, it’d likely be chhaang. It’s a mountain-man good times and ceremonies kind of beverage from the Himalayas and one of the mighty drinks to claim the title Nectar of the Gods. Even the recipe is kind of mystical, yet casual, basically amounting to showing off some rice and then letting it hang out and think deep thoughts in a bottle. Via Momo Tours:
1. Cook 5 kgs. Rice
2. Spread cooked rice on large sheet
3. Take off clothing and roll around on it
4. Wait till rice becomes room temp
5. Take 3 pieces of tibbo yeast and crush
6. Spread evenly on the rice
7. Close up cloth, make into bundle, and keep covered with blanket, to keep warm
8. 24 hrs. Later wake up and smell the godly whiff
9. Put fermenting rice into plastic bucket by hand (not the cloth too you drunk.)
10. Leave if possible,for one month
11. Open lid of tightly sealed bucket
12. Take out as much mix as required
13. Mix with cold water
14. Strain
15. Mix brown sugar according to taste
16. Drink and proceed to hold conversation with tibetan gods.
Alternate recipe here: Chhang
Back in my Osaka days, I hung around with some righteous Nepalese guys in a foreigner tachinomiya where every now and again someone might produce an unmarked bottle and pour a few sharp ones for those assembled. It had that raw taste of fiercer liquors like rustic tequila or your lower grades of arrack. Definitely the sort of thing that leads to excited talk and nights that go far later than originally planned.
Plans are maturing around the ol’ TITLE HQ to see about expanding our brewing operations to chhaang. We’ll keep you posted.
Tags: beer, brewing, chaang, chang, chhaang, homebrewing, Nepal, osaka, rice, tachinomiya, yeast
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Boris Rose, King of the Bootleggers
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Sucker for buried treasure that I am, the story of Boris Rose, jazz bootlegger supreme caught my attention as I perused Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays [preview]
Around 1940, Boris began dubbing 78RPM records to 10-inch red vinyl disks with hand-written white labels. He would sell these dubs of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and other great early jazz musicians to anyone interested in buying them….
Over the years Boris captured thousands of hours of recordings that likely did not exist anywhere else — his was easily the largest private collection of its kind anywhere in the world. Eventually Boris began recording every sort of broadcast imaginable — he even recorded the soundtracks of entire movies as they were broadcast over television.
What Rose became known for is the bootleg LPs of these recordings from old 78s and live jazz radio broadcasts. He sold these records commercially, complete with liner notes and illustrated covers, under the names of invented “foreign” record labels like Alto and Radiex. Despite being fairly prolific for a unauthorized distributor, the vast majority of his recordings have never been released.
Boris Rose died on the last day of the 20th century, leaving his collection to his daughter Elaine. The recordings remain in storage, largely unheard by anyone other than Rose himself an presently unavailable anywhere else. That’s thousands of hours of unheard sounds sitting in a storage shed in the Bronx, an archive that’s hard to fathom.
r a n d o m g o o g l i n g p r o d u c e d l i t t l e m o r e i n f o on Mr. Rose.
illustration by Brendan Burford
Tags: bootleg, boris rose, Bronx, fake foreign, history, jazz, LPs, Music, piracy, radio, red vinyl
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Haiti: Humanitarian Invasion
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
A hotly debated aspect of the global response to the Port-au-Prince earthquake has been the role of military forces in providing aid and security. Several dominant narratives have emerged:
- The always popular ‘They’re looting! What savages!’ This can be used as either a justification for one’s indifference to the situation or as a call for an aggressive posture. Pretty standard media response after any disaster that affects a non-wealthy demographic. (Just once I’d like to see CNN helicopter footage of Tori Spelling looting in a burned over Malibu neighborhood.)
- The “How dare you say they’re looting!” The BBC’s Matthew Price assures us that no one in Haiti would dream of getting violent over food and water and instead are peacefully expiring in the streets from the fumes of Western paranoia, arrogance and stinginess.
- The U.S. hegemonic invasion line taken by Chavez, Cuba and the usual gang of disgruntled European political figures. This isn’t helped by the Heritage Foundation kinda sorta maybe y’know almost hinting that we ought to be doing exactly that.
It is apparent that in discussing global events, shades of grey are not popular. Bold strokes get pageviews but offer little in the way of constructive thinking. Unfortunately this overshadows discussion of the practical matters of the relief effort. Like the seemingly incongruous fit of military forces to a rescue and repair operation.
To most, “military” calls to mind a destructive force projected against a country’s enemies. True, but the ability to project force requires a massive portable infrastructure that can sustain troops, allies and civilians in dangerous and deprived circumstances. The upshot of the U.S.’s massive spending on defense is that their portable infrastructure is far more extensive than that of NGOs dedicated to disaster relief. Airdrops, water purification, clearing port facilities and building and operating airstrips are all functions that the military excels at beyond the capabilities of NGOs or the private sector. Haiti’s crumbling infrastructure was inadequate to accommodate a massive influx of aid, personnel and equipment even before the earthquake. When the quake crippled the primary airport and clogged port facilities with crane wreckage, the U.S. military (and the F.A.A.) was pretty much the only game in town for getting things running again.
What particularly interests me is how this sort of relief work has become more and more integrated with the core mission of the U.S. military. Think of projecting “soft power” and giving targeted aid to developing areas as the equivalent of preventative care, hopefully preventing the need down the road for the chemotherapy of military intervention when societal breakdown foments violence and desperation. The example foremost in my mind is the lack of large-scale, competent reconstruction and restoration/extension of basic services like electricity and running water in the wake of U.S. military “victories” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ability to provide these, along with a basic measure of security, are a primary battlefield between an insurgency and a government, as shown in Iraqi insurgent attacks on the power grid and the present Maoist Naxalite uprising in India. When the controlling power in a region cannot provide the basics of life, they lose their support. Using the mobile infrastructure building capacity of the U.S. armed forces is an important way to boost support for friendly governments and bolster the rule of law.
Further, distributing aid in a damaged area is a rough business. Even before the earthquake, the U.N. has been having a tough time fighting armed gangs, defusing food riots and adequately distributing aid in a country ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt. In desperate situations, there’s a sharper sense of survival of the fittest. With the Haitian police force largely overwhelmed, some men with guns riding along with the rice and tents might not be a bad idea.
The trouble with doing this in Haiti is that the U.S. military has a long history of invading and occupying small, weak nations in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. has serious work to do to repair the its image. An efficient, dedicated response to Haiti’s infrastructural challenges would go a long way towards that work.
Tags: aid, haiti, intervention, military, soft power
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What Haiti Looks Like From Far Away
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
Now, finally, the world looks at Haiti. The typical disaster storylines are served up, readymade from the bin previously marked “Hurricane Katrina” or “Kashmir Earthquake” or ‘Tsunami ‘04″. There’s the first wave of shock and speculation, an awe of the tragedy’s magnitude and not a little voyeuristic jolt of seeing such a terror from a safe remove. The actuaries run the numbers and give ranges of deaths and tallies of expense while satellite photos are shot for before and afters. Then, come the survivor stories and amateur footage from the apocalypse’s dress rehearsal, bookended by grimacing news anchors and wrapped in the networks’ scrolling ribbons of text.
As I write this, we’re wading into the judgment stage where the horrors are put into context and the axes that have been grinding all along are revealed. Survivors become ‘looters’, the victims are ‘impatient’ and the powers who gather with gifts begin to elbow each other as they jockey for position. This is the part of the narrative arc of disaster where Haiti becomes a Rorschach test.
Pat Robertson says the earthquake was called up by God to punish Haiti’s Satanic origins. Hugo Chavez and the French cooperation minister call U.S. aid an occupation. The Heritage Foundation notes that Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S. In the hermetically sealed bubble of politics, the usual cartoons debate what a serious effort would mean for Obama’s re-election chances. And the usual cries rise up to name-call about who is a racist and who is unrealistic and who is cruel and who is kidding themselves, none of which I consider useful enough to link.
The sickness of our times is that we cannot separate all this noise, this mediated hologram from the actual fact of what is taking place in Haiti. There’s a massive, sudden, depopulation and a breakdown of all support systems in a country with far less than adequate resources to deal with such a crisis. This country is close to the U.S. with a large population in the U.S. and a long history of being manipulated, corrupted and drained of resources by larger foreign powers. Such a long term poverty trap has driven a large amount of the population, especially the urban population hardest hit by the earthquake, to the brink, even before this present crisis. Anyone else recall the last bout of poverty voyeurism where we recoiled from Haitians eating the earth itself for lack of food in a speculation-driven food crisis?
The poverty, violence and despair in Haiti have always been as real as it is today. We’ve just never had to confront roadblocks made of bodies on CNN before. A year’s worth of misery was unleashed in one spasm as the earth shook and collapsed the presidential palace in a media-ready symbol of the country’s fracture.
To those who say we can’t afford to help amid our economic woes and those who claim that this isn’t our crisis, I say: this has always been our crisis, we’ve just never been called to account for it. First enslaved, then enslaved by debt, invaded at every turn and long crushed under a kleptocratic and cruel regime, Haiti’s been the vision of broken promises lurking just offshore of the American Dream. It’s time we did more than just trickle foreign aid into the hands of whoever in Haiti can grab it first and then invade every twenty-five years.
Rather than try to swallow the ocean and cram it all into this post, I’ll be writing over the coming days about the future of Haiti, a fit of speculation about what could or should or might be done. Provoked by the horrors and the bile flowing out of all media channels, I want to write about hope.
Tags: analysis, disaster, earthquake, haiti, media, Rorschach
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“Nuts to War!” Disney’s Dinosaurs Show the Horrors of War
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Remember that big rubber suit sitcom Dinosaurs? Remember how it was the most incisive social commentary on television? No? OK, so you just remember wearing a t-shirt from K-Mart that said “Not the Mamma!” Fair enough. But the show had its moments. And apparently the whole run is on YouTube, including the 1992 two-part parable about the Gulf War where the dinos go to war over pistachios.
Of course, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Iran is the world’s largest producer of pistachios, giving the whole deal a bit more modern resonance.
Tags: dinosaurs, iran, parable, pistachios, video, war
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Tasmanian Devils in Hamster Balls
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
You’ve heard what’s happening to the Tasmanian devils, right? Really freaky face cancer, spread like it’s oral herpes at a kino mutai junior prom.
Wait, what?
OK, Tasmanian devils, like their more famous cartoon counterpart, really like biting things. Things like kangaroos and wombats and, hell, each other, all in the course of saying “hello” or “fuck off” or “let’s have sex”. Along comes a cancer spread by gnawing on your neighbors face and all hell breaks loose. Add that to the low genetic diversity of the species (apparently the stereotype of human Tasmanians also applies to the massively inbred population of devils) and the poor little monsters are dropping like flies. Horribly disfigured flies.
Efforts have lately focused on quarantining healthy individuals and setting up captive breeding programs to preserve the species. This won’t do any favors for the cause of genetic diversity, though. The clear answer is to prevent infection at the point of contact with some manner of prophylactic. In this case, may I suggest the humble hamster ball?
Hamster ball technology has been around for years so it’s got to be safe and effective. With specially hardened plastics, an off-road model that would suit the rough-and-tumble lifestyle of the Tasmanian Devil could be developed. A miniature version of a golfball retriever could be integrated in the taz-ball design to allow chunks of tasty carrion to be introduced into the ball. And what better tourist attraction than promising a miniature version of American Gladiators combat in the picturesque forests of Australia’s rugged, vagina-shaped island neighbor?
Wrangling these noble beasts into their protective shells could provide “green jobs” to the locals. And what enterprising future scientist wouldn’t jump at the chance to spend a summer opening urine-dyed plastic balls to jerk off sedated Tasmanian Devils to continue the species via artificial insemination? Listen people, IT BEATS WORKING RETAIL.
Tags: australia, cancer, ecology, kino mutai, schemes, tasmania, tasmanian devil
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[Noise Interlude]
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
I spent the weekend trying to catch up on what’s new but really, it all kind of sounds like there’s nothing coming out that’s not on a continuum marked “Surf-Fuzz” on one end and “Neo-Harry Chapin” on the other. Putting canned orchestration behind one or the other doesn’t count. I guess it’s just back to thrash metal for me…
Tags: Bear in Heaven, Boards of Canada, British Sea Power, Bukowski, Califone, Clem Snide, Joy Division, Music, Of Montreal, Peter Bjorn and John, Scotty, streaming, The Robot Ate Me
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Structure Synth is the DNA of the Machine That Will Consume All of Our Tomorrows
Monday, January 11th, 2010
I woke from a dream of a 3-D printer that had gained sentience, hooking itself to a digester unit to feed its ravenous hunger for the raw materials of creativity. Its mind was stuck in a loop, printing boxes that gained in size then shrunk, ebbing and flowing like a sine wave was at its center, guiding the flailings of its insane electric mind. Buildings were struck down like a hand moving through water, then fed into its maw and spun out into these new, terribly precise shapes that soon filled the land from horizon to horizon.
I’ve been playing around in the software genre of Things That Make Shapes, with little straightforward success but a pleasant amount of brain fermentation. There’s the old stand-by Processing, of course, with its familiar code structure and broad scope to mess with 2-D, 3-D and audio. And Terragen is a fun way to blow time on Amtrak and feel real Old Testament, making the mountains and plains then flying by them, frame by frame. I also admit to ogling City Engine. (Anyone got a few grand lying around?)
But the one that seems to have some potential as the homicidally rational core of some sort of grey goo scenario-style compulsively transforming AI fabricator gone awry is Structure Synth. I don’t have much new to say about it, as that I am presently at the “poke and see if it breaks” stage of exploring its potential. Still, it gives me visions of a force that is compelled to build and build, tearing at the land like a wild beast to assemble nonsensical arrangements of concrete, rebar and glass, continents full of empty halls built for little reason beyond the process of building them.
Or is that just the human race? Build, fray, bulldoze, repeat. When’s that next real estate bubble getting here?
Tags: ai, architecture, dystopia, grey goo, software
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Title Manifesto 2010
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Yeah, like that.
Before I get into things, I just want to say that we here at TITLE continue to be awed and flattered that you people are actually reading this, subscribing to it and following us on Twitter. A big thanks to the friends we’ve made along the way, all the folks who dig what we do, and every little thing that makes the little stat bar creep up, thus giving us a handy numerical value for our self-worth.
But on to some talk about what’s coming down the pipe…
What’s in a name?
Yeah, it’s weird that we’re called Title of Magazine and there’s no magazine. Got it. The aim always was to find something that managed to not only be a magazine but also not to be a time-sucking, cash destroyer, puking ads and compromises all over the pavement. A tricky thing, it turns out. But that’s just the kind of challenge the engages sprightly young lads like ourselves. Expect something touchable/foldable/disposable to manifest sometime this year… possibly even made out of paper.
Sooner than that, watch for something a little more meaty, content-wise. I’ve never believed that the 300 word blog post was the ceiling for compelling web delivered content and the field is still wide open for finding a way to make things not only less painful, but a joy to read off a screen or several screens. Expect some longer pieces later this month dealing with boobs, balloons and Bono.
Turning on the Art Pipe
Additionally, we’ve been remiss in the half of our mandate that promised the half-formed, the unfinished, the raw materials of the creative process. Beginning in February, we’ll begin showcasing short fiction, video shorts and audio experiments. Potentially, we’ll also be adding some new voices to the site.
Expect more in the way of words, pictures and sounds free for the taking and breaking with a renewed focus on resources for you creative types. At the very least, we’ll have a few more woodcuts up next week.
Nerd Patrol
Last but not least, we’re going to HTML 5. Bad news for the one guy who’s still reading us with IE 6, good news for everybody else, here in the brave new future.
And what does 2009 look like in the rearview? Here:
Yeah, we’re into whales. Dig it.
Tags: art, bono, harpoon, magazine, manifesto, meta, photoshop abonimations, print, title, whale
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Paint By Number Culture
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Walking in any shop by the magazine aisle now feels like a Philip K Dick novel. I see magazines featuring people with mentions of going-ons in their life: a new baby, an argument with a spouse, a disruption of lifestyle. While these events are important to the person experiencing them, they matter little to a stranger. All these people on the magazines are strangers– I have no idea who they are, what they do and why I should care. Sometimes I feel as if I have slipped into an alternate universe where things are a bit different, such as Dewey defeated Truman or Buddy Holly is alive. I feel like a character in a Philip K Dick novel wondering how I ended up here and if I’ll need a canister of Ubik.
I wonder who these people are and why they are famous or important. No one– even adoring fans– can tell me why.
Ultimately it seems they are famous for being famous.
In the BBC documentary Synth Britannia, part covered the rise of Gary Numan and his first breakaway hits. Gary Numan is as pop as they come, albeit a bit odd sometimes but still pop. Other electronic pop musicians were astounded as even in the same scene and location they had never heard of Numan. His music striked a few people, who told a few others, and soon he was on Top of the Pops in the UK performing. This is not the process today. I have no illusions that culture was driven by much more than sales in the past, but things are different. Rather than an artist’s ‘work’ attracting the attention of people, its just the artist. The son or daughter of a pop star, wrestler, or whatever is the commodity, not the work. The ‘work’ is added later– dubbed in, greenscreened, and composited as an afterthought. The usual formula for fame today consists of staring on a reality TV show such as American Idol or The Bachelor. From there it is up to the producers, investors, and executives to mold the person into whatever they think can bring a profit. Perhaps they consider themselves artists, crafting the pale facades dubbed the celebrity.
I believe the celebrity is not art, its rudimentary mimicry or “Paint by Number.” Paint by Number, a once popular activity but by no means obscure, provided a canvas with predefined areas labeled by number. The owner of the kit could then fill in the shapes by following the directions. Few Paint by Number enthusiasts would call themselves artists as they were simply following a predefined set of metrics. Something similar happens with marketing and ad sales people: there is a set of definitions which are then executed. Like any system of finite input there will be only finite output: much like paint by number or computer programming. Garbage in, garbage out.
The reduction of creativity seemingly spans across all forms of culture: music, movies, books– everything. As Jason Kottke noted, only one of the top twenty highest grossing movies in the 2000’s was an original screenplay not adapted from elsewhere: Finding Nemo.
The rest were made by combing attributes geared towards profit. Take the Transformers franchise for example: take a popular toy, add a dash of explosionporn from Michael Bay, toss in a healthy portion of a sexy actress stir and taste the blockbuster. Oh, and a plot, well, that can just be kinda fudged in later. If I made soup like Hollywood makes movies I would simply add some of my favorite foods (say gin martini, salmon, curry, green tea ice cream, spicy brown mustard, and jalapenos) in a large pot and expect it to taste delicious. Somehow I don’t think gin, ice cream, spicy brown mustard and jalapenos go well.
The result is culture products with carefully chosen content (Vampires, LOLcats, superheros, Twitter, ’80s retro) commodified into a package then distributed by a chosen ‘famous’ person who meets a similar set of trending buzzword statistical attributes. This is how a stock broker works, not an artist. We all know how successful those stock brokers are these days.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to finish something for Simon Cowell where he’s a vampire LOLcat superhero that uses Twitter in the ’80s.
Tags: celebrity detrius, culture, editorial
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