If this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay.  The upshot of it for an end user is that the page is way more user-friendly, has some sizzling-hot visual effects (yes, Mr. Spinning-Gear-Progress-Indicator, and Ms. Snazzy-Awesome-Slide-Up-and-Slide-Down-to-Respectively-Hide-and-Show-Content, I’m talking about you), tracks when a poem was begun, not just when it was ended, and is just generally slicker.  Enjoy!

I’ve tested the page pretty thoroughly, and I don’t anticipate any problems.  However, if you do run across something, please let me know using the contact form.

Keep up the good work!  This project has been pretty incredible, and I hope that people will continue to contribute to it.

Activity on the page has been pretty steady recently, which is great.  I’m really pleased with how that project is going.  Please share it with your friends – it’s really becoming something pretty awesome.  Keep up the good work!

The concert was amazing.  The orchestra itself was really cool; a blend of people from all different countries.  The conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, was incredibly fun to watch.  He had more expression than almost anyone I’ve ever seen before.

Four ten-thousand-watt (I think) projectors covered the entire ceiling and back wall of the stage of Carnegie Hall.  Before each piece, they would show maps of where the composer lived, as well as periodically showing videos about select performers from the orchestra, compilations of audition videos during intermission, and some really cool multimedia stuff during a few pieces.  During John Cage’s Renga and Aria, for instance, they projected the shapes and syllables he used to notate the piece, which is pretty cool sounding.  Will and I got a look at the control room for all of the video, and it was intense.  There were racks and racks of complicated audio-video and computer equipment, and all sorts of things we didn’t understand at all.

The orchestra also played Ride of the Valkyries, which is pretty much the most epic piece of music ever.

For me, the two highlights of the performance were the Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica, composed and guest-conducted by Tan Dun in its world premier, and a piece they did with Mason Bates, a really awesome electronic DJ.  He played with the full orchestra.  Dun’s piece had a part for car rims which were played with ball-peen hammers.

The irony of wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt in a concert hall named after Andrew Carnegie did not escape me, and I think it was responsible for my being rejected by an interviewer from the BBC, who I guess was looking for people more well-dressed than us.  We were a rather odd-looking group.

We hung out in Times Square for a while beforehand, got some excellent food from a street vendor, bought some hip-hop (which we listened to on the way home), and almost purchased some Obama condoms (“Michelle approved, ladies and gentlemen”, and “Create your very own stimulus package”), but they were $5, which was not practical.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a historic event, but not for the reasons I had originally been thinking of.  In terms of the formation of musical groups, the real democratizer was the recording process.  In that respect, this is really no different.  But it does really represent the way that classical music, and, indeed, the idea of collaborative music in general, is changing in response to this type of technology.  It opens up new ground for the way music can be composed, put together, and performed.  I am excited to see where it goes from here, and I am proud to have witnessed this event.

Also, this post has more categories than any I have ever written before, I think.  It is just that awesome.

There are all sorts of weird things in it.  Diagrams of geometric logic operators:

Strange electrical doodads:

Exhibits about string games:

A tea room, with a samovar:

Mice on toast, as part of the room full of physical models or dioramas of old folk remedies

An entire room dedicated to Napoleon. Pictured here is what I think is an oud, and what I know is a painting, although I’m not sure of whom:

There were many additional things that I couldn’t even begin to list. One of them was an entire room of letters that people had written to the Mount Wilson astronomical observatory when it first opened in the 1930s. Some of them were commendations, some were asking for money, some were total crackpot theories. I got a shirt that says “No one may ever have the same knowledge again – Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory – The Museum of Jurassic Technology”.

What I think sums up the place pretty nicely, though, wasn’t even an exhibit. In the lobby, I observed that the display on the cash register at the check-in desk, which was below the counter, and could thus only be seen by the cashier, had the following text scrolling across it:

From the familiar to the unfamiliar
Like a chain of flowers

To me, this is sort of symbolic of the whole place. Rather than have a “message” or something, the museum forces viewers to find their own. It is almost as if someone said, “I have a brilliant idea that I don’t want to tell anyone. I will build a strange museum to make people try to decide what it could be.”  This, I suppose, implies that there is a central idea to the museum that you have to “figure out”, which I don’t really think is the case, but there is a level of concealment present.

After the museum, we went to dinner with my relatives at a rather loud and packed open-air mall. I obtained what may be the largest pickle known to mankind:

Note the relative size of the pickle compared to my hand. Or should I say the relative size of the MANPICKLE?!

While at dinner, I articulated what it is that makes that type of place (the mall, not the Museum) rather overwhelming and unattractive to me. It is the feeling that the place was designed to make people do a certain thing, and that you are doing it. Make no mistake, I don’t have a problem with functionality. My favorite places are those that serve their purposes well; they are comfortable, efficient, and pleasant to exist in. But there is a difference between this type of efficiency and the feeling that a space is designed to create needs rather than address them.

I did have a very good time, though; I met my aunt’s soon-to-be-husband (fianceé, although that implies an indeterminate time [they are getting married the day after tomorrow (hence my being here)]), who is very interesting and I like very much, and I saw some relatives I haven’t seen in a while.

Also, I am still enjoying the weather.  It is still unfair that some people get to have this weather all the time.